Coven

“I don’t care if he won the Popsicle stick cross with cock rings at Fire Island. He was a Nazi coward. He sucked Himmler’s balls, and your mama fucked Russians for free.”

That was all it took. Some guys just couldn’t take a joke. Wilhelm fired a volley of shots. The 9mm bullets stitched a line across Jervis’ chest, punching smoking holes.

Jervis fell down and calmly got back up. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, pal.”

Seeing sheer terror congeal on the face of this Aryan pillar of muscle brought delight to Jervis’ heart. Wilhelm fled to the bedroom to a closet. Jervis followed him in.

In the closet hung SS banners, regimental standards, and a Nazi state flag. There was also a glass case full of iron crosses and NSDAP pins. Wilhelm unwrapped a ceremonial SS dagger.

“That’s what I call a closet Nazi,” Jervis quipped. He smiled at his opponent’s antics. “What are you doing?”

Wilhelm gripped the dagger, shouted, “Aufgeben? Nein!” and lunged. The blade sunk hilt deep into Jervis’ stomach.

“Take zat!”

Jervis tsked, standing tall. He withdrew the dagger and opened his shirt. Wilhelm stared at the bloodless slit and bullet holes.

“Gott int Himmel,” he muttered.

A fast backhand sent the German flying across the room. His robe had come apart, showing a limp Teutonic penis. Jervis noted with some despair that Wilhelm’s member was bigger soft than Jervis’ was hard. He seriously considered cutting it off with the dagger, but that seemed petty. Even an asshole like Wilhelm didn’t deserve to have his dick cut off.

Jervis shrugged. He cut it off anyway. Wilhelm’s deep shuddering scream sounded like a truck motor in high gear.

Jervis held it up for his foe to see.

“Arrrgh!” Wilhelm bellowed, convulsing. “Mein schlong!”

Jervis smiled brighter than a thousand suns. The act was a symbol; he’d evened the score for all the guys in the world who had lost their loves to a bigger penis. “See how many girlfriends you steal now, buddy boy.”

Wilhelm kicked away, his screams downshifting to wavering groans. He managed to get up, which Jervis found admirable. It took a man of some resilience to stand up so quickly after having his penis removed with an SS dagger.

“Run,” Jervis advised.

Hand to bloody crotch, Wilhelm staggered out. Jervis lit a Carlton and took a deep, satisfying drag. Smoke eddied up through the holes in his chest. He heard the German stumble out.

Then, as predicted, came the long descending “Woooooeeee!”

Thump!

Jervis meandered to the hall and looked down the elevator shaft. Sure enough, there lay Wilhelm at the bottom, broken, twisted, but—thankfully—still alive.

“Now we’re going to play a game,” Jervis called down. “And the name of the game is America Bombs the Fatherland.”

Wilhelm whined, pleading up the shaft for mercy. Jervis released the first manhole cover. It banged to the bottom but missed.

“Damn, I guess I better adjust my Norden bombsight, huh?” Jervis let the second manhole cover go. Its edge caught Wilhelm across the knees. Wilhelm roared.

“Good,” Jervis approved, “but not good enough.” The third cover floated down almost dreamily. Wilhelm’s bulged eyes watched it descend. “Nein, nein, nein,” he moaned.

The eighty pound manhole cover landed square across Wilhelm’s stomach. Wilhelm’s entire GI tract exploded out his mouth.

“Direct hit!” Jervis celebrated. For posterity, he dropped a fourth cover, which flattened Wilhelm’s head.

««—»»

Wade slunk into his dorm room, locked the door. Finding Lydia was his priority, but he couldn’t very well search for her on an eighth of a tank of gas. His wallet was empty, and his only remaining cash was at the dorm. But now…

What was it?

He set Lydia’s .357 on the bed. He scratched his head, looked absently out the window. Normal out there, everything’s normal. He got an Adams out of the fridge. It tasted good, it tasted normal But still…

Then he realized what it was. He had that proverbial feeling that he was being watched.

“You’re probably wondering why you feel like you’re being watched,” came the voice of Tom McGuire.

Wade dropped his beer.

Tom’s severed head had been placed atop Wade’s stereo. The gray face grinned. “What’s up, buddy?”

“Give me a fucking break!” Wade appreciably exclaimed. He asked the first logical question. “How did you get here? You obviously didn’t walk!”

“Jervis left me,” Tom’s head answered, “to pass on a message.”

Wade sat down on the bed. I’m having a conversation with a severed head, he realized. How much further could this go? “Why did you and Jervis go over to the Supremate?”

Tom mistakenly tried to shrug. “We didn’t have much of a choice, we were chosen. Besides, the Supremate offers immortality for service.” Tom’s head paused. “I guess that part’s out for me now. What’s he gonna do, make my head immortal?” Tom chuckled. “You’re not cooperating, Wade. The Supremate’s got a deal for you.”

“Tell the Supremate he can kiss my ass,” Wade said.

Tom’s eyes flicked to the fridge. “Pop me open a Spaten, will you? It’s not like I can get it myself.”

“I don’t pour beer for heads,” Wade told him.

Sudden anger tinted Tom’s expression. “I’m trying real hard to keep my cool. I lost my job because of you, ya know.”

Wade sulked. “Yeah, I guess you’re pretty pissed.”

“If your best friend wrecked your car and got your head cut off, wouldn’t you be pissed?”

“It was an accident, Tom. I’m sorry.”

“If you’re sorry, make it up to me. Join the Supremate.”

“Join this,” Wade replied, indicating his crotch.

Tom’s chuckle came off as a blend of amusement and sullenness. “I already told you, Jervis left me here to pass on a message—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Wade said. “I don’t give a fuck.”

“The message is this: We have Lydia.”

Silent turmoil landed on Wade like a dropped net.

“Jerv snatched her at the student shop. We’ve got her locked up at the labyrinth. Look, Wade, we don’t give a shit about her; she’s useless to us, and we’re not going to be around long enough for her to hurt us if we let her go. So that’s the deal. Join the Supremate, and we let her go. No bullshit.”

Wade’s thoughts echoed like drips in a cavern—

—and Tom’s head went on, “But if you refuse, the girl is shit out of luck. They’ll turn her into ground round, nice and slow, and they’ll let the holotypes have her first. You gonna sit back and let a bunch of aliens fuck your girlfriend? Don’t you love her, Wade? What are you gonna do?”

“What I’m going to do,” Wade answered, “is put you into the trash compactor. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Super, Wade. Avoid the issue. Chicken out.”

“Shut up,” Wade said. “I’m no chicken.”

“Buk, buk, buk. You’re gonna let the girl you love die slow because you don’t have the balls to accept change.”

“Piss off.”

“I’m leveling with you, Wade. Not as a vassal, as a friend.”

“Hey,” Wade said. “Tom McGuire was my friend. But you’re not him anymore. You’re just an evil…head.”

“Thanks a lot, pal.”

But Tom—or Tom’s head—was right about one thing. Wade was putting off the inevitable choice. He could take the coward’s way out, or the man’s way. Do I really love her that much?

“It’s decision time,” Tom announced. “In a second that phone’s going to ring. It’ll be Besser, and he’ll want an answer.”

“Besser doesn’t even know I’m here,” Wade scoffed.

“Sure he does” —Tom’s dead lips drew up in pride— “I just told him through my transceptionrod.”

Wade didn’t even bother frowning when the phone rang. He simply picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Wade, my boy. I’m glad you got our little message.”

“Clever,” Wade said. “Next time leave a note on my refrigerator with a fruit magnet.”

“Time is short. Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” Wade said.

“A wise decision. Your lovely paramour goes free, and you get to live forever…with us.”

“How are we going to do this?”

“Meet me at my office,” Besser instructed. “In twenty minutes. We’ll be waiting. And, Wade, no tricks, please. Or else—”

Wade hung up. I’m neck deep in it now, he thought. “Why me?” he asked of Tom’s head. “Why does the Supremate want me?”

“Because you’re the healthiest able bodied male on campus. We couldn’t take just anyone, not for something this important. That’s why Besser had me swipe the medical records from the clinic. He wanted to check the medical histories of as many students as possible within the time frame, and that’s what he and Winnie did. They selected the healthiest candidates of the bunch. The Supremate needs five girls and one guy. You’re the lucky guy.”

Wade got another beer. He sat glumly on the bed and drank.

“Don’t look so bummed,” Tom offered. “You get to live forever, man. We’re talking eternal fucking life.”

“Thanks for the input.” Wade checked his watch. Twenty minutes to eternity. Shit.

“Destiny is calling, Wade. It’s time for you to go.”

“It’s time for you to go too,” Wade said. “Into the trash compactor.”

Tom sighed a commendable resignation. “I understand.”

Wade honestly found it difficult to hold Tom’s head over the open Kenmore compactor. If only in part, this gray smiling severed head was still his friend.

“Good luck, dude,” Tom’s head bid.

“‘Bye, Tom.”

“Wait, wait! Before I go, here’s an old one.”

Wade rolled his eyes. “I’m about to drop you into a trash compactor and you want to tell jokes?”

“Just one more, for old times’ sake.”

“All right.”

“What did Lincoln say after his five day drunk?”

“What?” Wade groaned.

“‘I freed WHO?’”

Wade dropped the head in the compactor and hit the power button. Tom’s laughter could be heard over the machine’s descending hum. The motor whined. Tom’s skull folded up, crunching. Then the motor cut off.

What did you do today, son? he could almost hear his father asking. Well, Dad, I got chased by a dead man, I found Dean Saltenstall’s body in a closet, I watched three police officers get killed, I drove a Buick LeSabre over several dozen women, and last but not least, I put Tom McGuire’s head into a trash compactor. Pretty interesting day, don’t you think?

But not nearly interesting enough, not yet. He stuck Lydia’s .357 in his pants and rechecked his watch.

Indeed, destiny was calling. It was time to go.

—

CHAPTER 32

Tom’s black pendant, which Lydia had found on the Route, lay in the console. Wade didn’t know what it was, so he left it, and he left the thing that looked like a portable tensor lamp, not knowing what that was either. There was very little he did know just then, except that his life was either about to end or take a dramatic change. He drove the Vette in stoic grace.

His mind seemed to float, vacant as space, as he entered the sciences center and went up the steps. We’ll be waiting, Besser had told him, yet no one waited in the dim, lamplit office. Preparations had been made, though: Blackout curtains hung over the windows. The only sunlight came in through the open door behind him.

Then: “Close the door, please, Wade.”

Wade closed the door. When he turned, Professor Besser stood by the wall, fat as ever and all smiles.

“Our central extromitter is here, a marvelous invention. You wouldn’t believe the time they save.”

Wade saw the black dot on the wall, like the one at the shop. Not a dot, he reminded himself. A hole.

“Say hello to my birds of prey.”

A suboctave hum filled Wade’s head. The black dot ran down the wall, like a bead of ink, forming a line to the floor…

…and through that line, one by one, four sisters emerged. The line was a doorway, he realized, to the place he’d seen through the hole in the shop wall. A doorway to the labyrinth.

The sisters had squeezed through the line, like cutouts pushed through a slit. Yet an instant later they stood in the flesh, black cloaked, hooded. Fresh white faces grinned at him, eight lenses of four pairs of sunglasses reflecting the tiny dot that was Wade’s face.

The four sisters stood identically, grinning identical grins.

“We’re taking you home now, Wade,” Besser informed him.

“You’re not taking shit till you let Lydia go. That’s the deal.”

“Yes, but one that I’m not prepared to honor. The sisters would catch you before you reached the door.”

Wade drew the .357 from behind his back. He pointed it at the biggest sister.

Besser laughed. “You already know that’s futile.”

Wade fired one bullet. The sister batted it down with her palm.

“So you see, you can’t shoot them, Wade.”

Wade turned the gun on Besser. “But I can shoot your fat ass.”

“If you like.”

“I like,” Wade said, and fired another.

The sister beside Besser plucked the 900 feet per second slug out of the air, like catching a thrown pea. She looked at it curiously, then ate it.

“You can’t hurt them and they won’t let you hurt me.”

But Wade had one more trick. “You need me, right? For some reason, I’m important to you?”

“Yes, very,” Besser said.

The sisters advanced, reaching out with white hands. But then Besser, in a flash of panic, shouted, “Stop!”

Wade now held the gun to his head, hammer cocked. “Get Lydia out here, or I blow my own head off.”

Besser jittered, dread in his face. “Wade, please. You can’t—”

“Sure I can. I don’t give a shit.” It felt good to be the one with the power for a change: “I got a hunch that this Supremate dude wouldn’t be too happy if you brought me in dead.”

“No,” Besser croaked. “He wouldn’t.’

“Then bring Lydia out here right now, or you get to watch my brains take a one way flight across the room.”

Besser backed the women off. Their eager heads listed. “Be calm, Wade,” Besser said. Again, the black dot ran down the wall.

Lydia unfolded from the line.

“Wade! You came to rescue me! I don’t believe it!”

“Neither do I,” he said. “And don’t bother asking me why I’ve got a gun to my head. Are you all right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then get out of here.”

“But—”

“Just shut up and get out!” he shouted. There could be no dramatic goodbyes, no final professions of love, none of that corny shit. “The Vette’s outside. Fill it with gas and don’t stop driving till you get to Alaska.”

“But what about you?”

Wade’s mouth twisted. “I have to go with them.” He didn’t want to see her anymore; that just made it worse. “It’s the only way, so just…leave.”

This would be her goodbye: silent acknowledgment. She looked at him, blinked, then walked out of the office.

“There,” Besser said. “So what’s it going to be?”

Wade knew what he meant. There was still one ultimate decision to be made. He heard the Vette start up outside and drive away.

Somehow, Wade smiled. “I could screw you bad, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, but what a waste,” Besser said with emphasis. “Why not come and see what we have to offer?”

The sisters’ faces seemed radiant. They looked like angels.

Wade dropped the gun.

Besser opened the extromitter with his pendant. Two sisters took Wade by the hand and led him into the wall, into infinity.

««—»»

“Are you okay?” asked the 7 Eleven cashier.

Lydia realized how she must look. Uniform in tatters, hair in her face, no gun in her holster. She’d look a lot worse, though, if the holotype in the next hold had had its way with her. Wade had sacrificed himself, for her.

She bought cigarettes and a six pack of Coke. She sat in the Vette, thinking. During her stay in the labyrinth, she’d overheard enough to know what was going on. She knew what they were, yes, and what they were doing.

She also knew that they were leaving at midnight tonight, and they were taking Wade with them.

The UV spotter was still in the Vette, and thank God so was the black pendant she’d found where Wade had wrecked Tom’s car. Winnifred had called it a key, and the extromitters—the dots—were the doors they unlocked.

A piece of paper was stuck in the visor, a note in Wade’s yuppie scrawl.

Lydia,

White, Peerce, and Porker are dead. So is the dean. I still don’t know what any of this is about. Don’t go back to the grove—it’s getting worse by the minute. Leave town right away, Jervis is planting a bomb, but I don’t know where. Just leave town and forget about me. Doesn’t that sound corny?

Wade

P.S. —Take good care of the Vette!

The dolt could’ve at least signed off saying he loved her. Men could be such assholes. So what else was new?

She didn’t know what to make of this business with the bomb, or all the people Wade said were dead. But none of that mattered. For now she had to work on her plan, and she only had half a day to do it.

««—»»

—WE HAVE WADE NOW. WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED.

“Great!” Jervis exclaimed, shovel in midstroke. “We did it!”

—YES, the Supremate said. —AND SOON YOU WILL JOIN ME IN ETERNAL GRACE. BUT TAKE CARE IN YOUR FINAL TASKS, JERVIS. SIGNS AND WONDERS, MY SON. YOU ARE MY SCRIBE.

Jervis fell to his knees in the dirt. Dead face turned to the sun, he raised his hands in obeisance to his invisible lord.

—THINK NOT OF THE LIVES OF CATTLE. THEY SERVE AS SACRIFICE TO MY HOLY WILL, A PORTENT TO THIS WORLD THAT I WILL ONE DAY RETURN AS DELIVERER. TODAY SHALL BE A GREAT AND HOLY REMEMBRANCE. I MUST BE REMEMBERED. LIKE A PROMISE IN THE WIND.

“Yes, my lord!” Jervis cried up.

—SIGNS AND WONDERS, JERVIS. THE GHOST OF FUTURE TIDINGS.

“You are my life! My redeemer!”

—LIKE A PROMISE IN THE WIND.

The Supremate left his head, and left Jervis shuddering in the graveyard. His lord’s commandment was clear; this old life was fading, racing toward a new wondrous eternal life. Jervis drank Kirins and smoked as he buried the remaining bodies. It was refreshing work, burying the dead. The corpses were part of the promise too, and Jervis the very arm of the ghost of future tidings. He was nearly done now, like an apostle nearing heaven.

“You lurp lurpfffeeeevii prick ick ick!”

Jervis looked down. Here was poor Penelope again, clambering out of her hole. She churned upward, flesh the color of spoiled milk, almost out of the grave to the waist. Blessed are the boneless? Jervis thought. He should write his own testament, for hadn’t he, too, returned from the dead? Yeah! Sermon on the Mounds!

“Gll ff gliv gliv give me back my bah bah bones!” Penelope blubbered. Her face looked curdled. “Glive me black my baby!”

“Your baby’s dead, funky,” Jervis said.

“Mlup mlup mlutherfucker ler ler!”

Jervis flicked ashes on her, impressed. It wasn’t easy being buried alive, and probably harder still to continuously unearth yourself to face your conquerors. Boneless or not, she had guts.

“Pluh pluh pleeze helup helup help me!”

“Sure,” Jervis said, and planted his foot in the middle of her amorphous face. He shoved her squealing back into the hole, flabby hands dragging at his pants cuffs. “Down you go,” he said.

“I’ll lyle lyle kah kah kah—”

“Shut up and have a drink.” Jervis unzipped and sent a stream of dark dead man’s beer piss into Penelope’s mouth. Soon all she could do was gargle in protest. “There. That should wet your whistle,” he remarked. He refilled the hole again, then packed the mound down flat and hard as a sod pounder with his foot.

The hot sun drew a haze of death up into the clearing. He glorified in its humid stench and walked back to the Dodge Colt. Everything is beautiful, he mused. Like a promise in the wind.

—YOU ARE MY SCRIBE, the Supremate fleeted back.

Jervis swam in the heavenly caress. Yes, he was an apostle nearing the pillars of heaven. An existential proselyte.

—TODAY SHALL BE A GREAT AND HOLY REMEMBRANCE.

The black cube grew warm in Jervis’ palm.

—

CHAPTER 33

Wade’s gaze drew ahead of him like an endless ribbon unreeling into a bottomless pit. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

“Welcome to the labyrinth.”

The sisters dispersed, leaving Wade alone with Besser in the recepetioncove of pointaccessmain#1. A single black corridor stretched before them. Its end could not be discerned.

“This place is the box in the grove?”

“Yes,” Besser replied. “Our master’s sanctuary.”

“But the box in the grove is no bigger than a coffin.”

“On the outside, yes. But inside, its verges are more vast than any building on earth. Its actual proximities are incalculable.”

“That’s impossible,” Wade scoffed.

“No, it’s physics. An applied system of the manipulation of physical dimension. All things are malleable, Wade.” Besser loped ahead. “Come along. I’ll show you what destiny looks like.”

Wade followed him through corridors, through blackness.

Besser inserted his pendant into one of the dots, above which a sign seemed to glow SUSTENANCEPROCESSING. Wade saw it, yet he didn’t.

“We call them mindsigns. A servopathic transponder identifies the designation to the reader. A Russian person, for instance, would see it in Russian.”

Besser opened the extromitter. Dark, pulsing green light extended through a channelwork of odd machinery, chutes and lifters, and something like a conveyor belt. Wade saw the backs of several naked sisters bent over in their tasks. Intermittently the silence was ruptured by a sudden screech which reminded Wade of tree branches being tossed into a wood pulper. Each screech sent a shiver up his spine. He peered deeper into the channel and saw that the conveyor was carrying white, naked bodies.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

Besser seemed dismayed. “It’s waste processing. The Supremate is merely recycling material that’s outlasted its usefulness.”

“Material!” Wade objected. “Those are people!”

“Well, they’re sisters, yes. But no longer serviceable.”

Wade squinted closer through the gaps. Twisted, crushed, squashed—these were the sisters Wade had run over in White’s cruiser. They lay alive on the conveyor, bespattered with black blood. The belt fed them one at a time into a gaping bin—then came the screech—and from a chute at the other end, out poured big spews of black meat, like hash. This was how they dealt with damaged goods. They ground them up for food.

“We eat well around here, Wade. And you will too.”

Mobile sisters shoveled the meat into hoppers that automatically rolled off. Wade felt himself grow faint.

Besser led on. Subinlets led to more servicepasses which led to more warrens. SUPPLYIMPLEMENT, ACCLIMATIONPOST, CHARGESTABILIZATIONMOMENTOR. Sisters moved about like grinning idiot slaves.

“The sisters are examples of the Supremate’s technologies.”

“This is no cult,” Wade realized. “It’s a fucking spaceship, and those women are…aliens.”

“They’re crossmultibredintegratedhybrids, but ‘aliens’ will suffice, as I suppose ‘spaceship’ will suffice for the labyrinth. Actually it’s a valencecorehypervelocityorbitalmagneficpulse- momentyrayquadrupoularcoulombMeVspontaneousbosomwavelengthdecay/accelerationendodiermicmassenergydefractingpi-mesicphotofissionalfieldeffeettransistingvan denhulmaxirnalentryreentrypointphasemobilekeneticmotionvessel.”

Wade stared at him. “Oh, is that all.”

Besser took him along and extromitted into a sloped, threadwalled warren whose mindsign read EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT.

“Do you know what electromagnetic energy is?” Besser asked.

“Light, sound, radiation—shit like that, right?”

“Yes, Wade, shit…like that, stretched over an infinite wavelength, and those wavelengths exist everywhere.” Besser took a moment’s silence, for effect. “They’re a power source.”

“You mean you don’t fill this thing up with gas?”

“Picture the entire universe as a lake, Wade. The surface of the lake is electromagnetic energy, and the labyrinth is, in a sense, a boat. The apparatus in this room countercycles electromagnetic waves, allowing the labyrinth to float, so to speak, on the lake, while conduction devices harness the active properties of the same EM waves, creating a kinetic energy pulse that propels the labyrinth at phenomenal speeds.”

“Then how does it sustain itself when it isn’t moving?”

Impressed, Besser turned. “Excellent question, Wade. When not in motion, the labyrinth of course cannot utilize active EM motility. So it creates its own static EM field by releasing stored molecular activity previously processed during propulsion transitions. We call it the stasisfield.”

“A battery,” Wade concluded. “And that’s why you have to leave soon. Because your batteries are draining.”

“Exactly. Your perceptiveness is noteworthy.” Besser took him into another service pass. “Before full depletion is experienced, we recharge the stasisfield in a single spontaneous pulse with the remaining stored potential electron activity. That will occur tonight at five minutes before midnight. Then—”

“Blast off,” Wade said.

“More like a magnetic repulsion, but, yes, the labyrinth will project itself back into the active EM flux of space.”

“To where?”

“The next acquisition assignment. We go from world to world, Wade. From galaxy to galaxy.”

Wade was boggled. “What the fuck for?” he shouted. “To bury coeds? To pull people’s heads off? Why?”

Besser chuckled deeply. “I’ll show you why. Follow me.”

Strange light hummed around Wade’s head. There were no light fixtures, yet somehow he could see through the solid blackness. A mindsign hovered by: SUBINLET#4. And the very next: SUBINLET#5; and next: SUBINLET#999. The labyrinth was an endless maze.

But the next sign glowed GERMINATIONWARREN.

Dark, orange light pulsed in a long, narrow chamber. Large canisters sat in racks along one wall. The other side was a half wall, which looked down.

Besser pointed. “A thousand kingdoms, whose end is perfection.”

Wade lost his breath peering over the edge. From layers of orange light, production stratas descended ever downward. It was like looking down the slope of a mountain miles high. Each level bore movement, white bodies busying back and forth in arcane passages, pushing things about in some nameless onus.

“What the fuck is this?” Wade whispered, more to himself.

“A womb for whole civilizations,” Besser symbolized. “A processing plant where genetic structures are isolated for their most useful features, bred into one another, regressive genes removed, vital genes amplified. We distill life, combine it, and re create it—all to the Supremate’s specifications.”

Wade’s eyes locked down into the glowing chasm.

“Nature is base, but we’re making it serve a higher purpose. The labyrinth is only one of many; from world to world they go, processing dominant life forms for what will one day effect a flawless realm. We take the best of everything and make it better.”

“For the Supremate?”

“For the master plan. Our world is damned by its own error. War, hate, crime, etcetera. And all the other worlds in this universe, I’m sorry to say, are the same. All except one. The Supremate’s.”

Wade couldn’t look anymore, not into this Grand Canyon of flesh. He backed up, reeling, sick.

“Productivity versus waste,” Besser glorified on. “Mankind is wasteful, here and everywhere else. But the master plan culls the good from the bad, from all worlds, to a single, objective end. What better definition can there be for perfection?”

Wade turned, spied the canisters in the racks.

“And this room is where it all begins. The activeports.”

At first Wade thought they must be fuel cells of some kind, but Besser had said the labyrinth needed no fuel. Wade rolled one of the transparent canisters out. There was a bubble, and he saw something that looked suspiciously similar to a belly button. Whatever mass filled the canister twitched once, quivered. Part of the mass was a human face. Wade put it back in the rack.

“Prototypes are made here. A computer calculates the most useful possibilities, then the best prototypes are removed for further genetic embellishment. We breed females from one world with males from other worlds. Females are fissionizationvessels; males are holotypes—”

That word rang a bell, and Wade didn’t like the sound of it.

“Each target sector is indexed into the Supremate’s intelligence: natural resources, industrial potential, and environmental characteristics. Also indexed are the anatomical characteristics of each species. Then the Supremate calculates which combinations of which species would effect a superior interspecies. Initial prototypes, which we call interspecielmetisunits, are produced very quickly. The entire process involves a complex system of biological acclimations and growth acceleration sciences.”

Wade was leaning against the warm wall, wiping his mouth. “The girl in that thing—she’s from the college, isn’t she?”

“It’s not a thing. It’s an incubreedcatalyzationcapsule, with an expansionbolus to allow for natal growth. And, yes, she’s one of the five surrogate procurements from this planet.”

“What the hell did you do to her?”

“We removed her bones, of course. Antirejectorybifertilization demands some rather drastic acclimations. You don’t just impregnate one life form with the reproductive genes of another and expect to produce an interspeciel. The two physiologies aren’t compatible. So we make them compatible. One thing we do is modify the reproductive systems of the surrogates, but in this forced compatibility they wouldn’t survive the physical stress of intercourse and birth.”

“Like trying to drive a bus through a rabbit hole.”

“Crude, but correct. We remove their bone structures.” Besser picked up a big syringe. “Calciumdecimationliquefactor agents dissolve all bone material in the body, which is then drained off in a suspended state and disposed of.”

Besser pointed to one of the jugs. It was full to the top. Wade remembered seeing Jervis milking white sludge out of the girl in the harness, and how she stretched like putty afterward.

“We can produce primary interspeciels in a matter of hours, and the surrogates can be used repeatedly for future bifertilizations. It’s marvelous.”

Wade was not inclined to agree.

In the next warren, rows of glowing compartments throbbed with feeble movement. The noise was relentless, a raucous rise of squalls and whines.

Wade looked hard. The plump, misshapen things he saw lying there sent him back in an impact of vision. Tiny pudenda wriggled. Chubby arms and legs rowed the moist air. Some seemed to grow even as he watched.

“This is the biomaintenancecarbonsourcehypersaturationvault,” Besser proudly stated.

“It’s a fucking baby ward!” Wade yelled.

“Newborn interspeciels under hyperincubation. In mere days they’ll have sufficiently matured, hosting successfully bifertilized reproductive genes, which will then be transfected again and again until the target species has been produced. Then the desired gene groups will be stored in the cryowarrens until colonization time.”

“When’s that?”

Besser shrugged casually. “Only the Supremate knows. A year from now, or a thousand years. The labyrinth stores interspeciel gene groups for every annexation target.”

“You mean every planet.”

“Yes, and there are thousands, Wade—multiple thousands. Each interspecies, regardless of classification, is genetically created with identical sensor and transception cells. Born in total allegiance to the Supremate’s objectives. Whole worlds, Wade, which will live to serve his will. When the time comes, the stored gene groups will be exogenically mass produced…and dispersed.”

Wade’s brain felt like it was broiling. “Why?” was all he could groan. “Why, why, why?”

“Mass recolonization.” Besser held a finger up. “One day, a new social system will reign over all worlds, myriad populations under one guiding light. No war, Wade, no crime, no aggression. Imagine a world like that, then imagine a thousand worlds just the same. The second phase is merely implementation, and function is the third phase. Perfectly adapted beings will join hands in a new order and live forever.”

“You want to turn the universe into an anthill.”

“No, Wade. We want to make the universe more efficient,” Besser said. “What’s wrong with that?”

A group of sisters came down the warren, their clone smiles sharp in unthinking bliss. Efficiency, Wade thought. They were carrying buckets of defected fetuses to the meat shredder.

“The sisters are just lower order interspeciels. The Supremate activated them for this annexation target because they were best suited for earth’s atmospheric specifications. The actual metisunits that we’ll use for recolonization exist in a multitude of varieties and are much more genetically advanced.”

Wade slumped, looking away. “What’s in it for you?”

“Immortality and governorship, the reward granted to any loyal nativeemissarial.”

“I don’t get it,” Wade said.

“All social orders, even perfect ones, need a chain of command.”

“So for betraying your entire planet, the Supremate’s going to let you and Winnie be his sergeants,” Wade concluded.

“Something like that. But not Winnie, I’m afraid. She’s out of the picture. After recolonization, the earth will need an overseer.” Besser’s eyes shined in glory. “Me.”

But Wade sensed a deeper picture. Didn’t power corrupt, even at the highest levels? “What about Winnie?”

“She outlived her serviceability, so I disposed of her. The Supremate didn’t need her anymore.”

“And when you’re finished with the first phase of your ‘master plan,’ you won’t need Jervis anymore either.”

“Of course not. Jervis will be disposed of too.”

“But you promised him immortality,” Wade reminded.

“We lied. Sometimes deception is necessary for a greater cause.”

“So it’s just you, huh, Prof? You get to rule the world.”

“Yes,” Besser said. “As a disciple of the Supremate, the world will be mine.”

Wade had trouble containing the urge to laugh. He knew a Brooklyn Bridge deal when he saw one. The Supremate had Besser, in his mad delusions, duped. Hook, line, and sinker.

They extromitted down. The transposition from one place to another felt like passing through a wall of sand. The bizarre light in these lower warrens seemed darker, yet more intense. In an unfitting contrast, Wade actually felt aroused.

“It’s the psilight,” Besser explained, “and it serves many purposes. One effect is the obvious excitation. The Supremate likes to maintain an ambience of fecundity. We’re not rapists, Wade. The progenitors of destiny should be willing. Another effect is simple communication.”

“How does simple communication explain my boner?”

“Think of the psilight as the Supremate’s influence. It’s actually a conduction flux, like static electricity.”

“And I guess you have some ridiculous thirty letter name for it.”

“Exordipathicsignaltrancination. The Supremate feels us with it.” He held up the sensor ring which girded his fat pinky. “It connects us to him telepathically. It’s like the labyrinth’s blood, consolidating all components, be they living, dead, or inanimate. It also transfers power from the stasisfield to the labyrinth’s processing systems. In fact, it was focused wavelengths of the psilight which originally allowed the Supremate to communicate with Winnie and me before the labyrinth arrived.”

So the psilight was like a power line. What would happen to it during the labyrinth’s recharge period?

“Psilight?” Wade said. “Stasisfield. What does this have to do with the agro site?”

“On landing,” Besser explained, “which we call termination of annexation transfer, the labyrinth must retard its reentry by means of electromagnetic counterpulses. Regrettably this activity generates a momentary wavelength aberration which causes irreversible physiological damage in any life form within a limited perimeter. The agro animals were too close to the pulse upon termination. This proximity resulted in instant degeneration of the complex organ systems. They died at once, as did any wildlife within the perimeter. It also caused our first transfection failure. Apparently Penelope was near the site during the labyrinth’s descent. The counterpulse damaged her reproductive faculties. Tom buried her just past the clearing.”

“I’ve seen the cozy little graveyard,” Wade confirmed.

“Then we decided on a more scientific approach. From the campus medical records, we identified the healthiest candidates available for transfection. Can you imagine the catastrophe of inducting a surrogate or holotype that wound up with some inherent biological defect or genetic disorder?”

“No,” Wade said. “I can’t imagine it.” But there was one more explanation he wanted. “The grove. What did you do to the grove?”

“The green fog isn’t really fog,” Besser told him. “It’s a waste by product of the psilight generators. We simply vent the conduction and element cores on occasion. The gasses happen to possess some amusing metamorphic effects on any plant and wildlife that’s exposed to it for a sustained period.”

Yeah, amusing, Wade thought. He remembered the faced mushrooms, the flesh covered trees, and the hideous gilled fog snakes.

Now they stood in a short black warren before a pair of blank door sized rectangles. A small plate hovered between them. Besser touched a button of some sort, and the left rectangle filled with dark kaleidoscopic light. This shifting effect, Wade realized, was something vast beyond the rectangle, something scrolling at incredible speed.

“This is the hold egress,” Besser said, “the access to the main holotype hold. As you can see, we’ve an abundant supply.”

“Access?” Access to what? Wade wondered.

“Meet your new brothers,” Besser bid.

The rectangle pulsed blurred images, like flitting a deck of cards. Wade saw things—living things—in the port, the physical likes of which beggared sane description. Besser slowed the scrollmode’s speed to afford Wade a more detailed inspection. One per second, the cramped, glowing holds switched by. Intent, otherworldly figures crouched close to the repulsion screens. All were different yet exclusively abominable, and most seemed to possess overly prominent genitals.

“Monsters,” Wade uttered, staring.

“Not monsters, Wade. Men. Just like you.”

“Pardon my prejudice, but I don’t have three balls and a forked dick, and I have two eyes in my head, not two dozen. Those things are not just like me.”

“They’re men,” Besser repeated. “They’re just different because they come from different places. I assure you, Wade, you’re as grotesque to them as they are to you.”

Besser halted the scroll to an empty hold. Its stockcode read, in almost epitaphic letters: #1003WADEST.JOHN.

“Beginning to get the picture yet?” Besser asked.

Wade was incapable of response.

“And now that you’ve met the men, it’s time to meet the women.” Besser activated the adjoining port. He flashed the female holds by much more slowly.

Wade looked but wished he hadn’t. The flashing grotesquorium locked his gaze. These were the female counterparts of what he’d just seen, only most had been decalcified. They sat slack in corners like limp sacks, eyes peering out from settled, skull less heads. Gorged breasts hung from collapsed shoulders, and boneless legs lay splayed (many had more than two), joined hiplessly by flaccid pink grooves that could only be vaginas.

Then the scroll stopped. Besser said, “Ah, here she is. Your first date, Wade. Take a good look.”

The hold’s occupant resembled a conical mound of gray, spotted blubber. It seemed collapsing in on itself around a pudgy yellow tongue that emerged to lick a wanton smile. Not one but several vaginas enclustered at its groin. It winked, and raised a sagging loop of an arm and waved.

“Really, Wade,” Besser resumed, “a ladies’ man such as yourself should be delighted by this unique opportunity.” Besser’s sarcastic chuckle sounded like footsteps in muck. “Now, Wade, you’re the ultimate ladies’ man.”

“You’re going to make me have sex with alien piles of blubber!” Wade gasped, spitting bile. “Bimbos from space!”

“Exactly. Didn’t we tell you what an honor this would be? Your sons and daughters will repopulate worlds.”

Besser shoved Wade into the empty hold, then keyed closed the repulsion screen. He tittered, grinning in. “I’ll be back shortly, Wade, with some sisters. We’ll be taking you for your final acclimation regimen. And after that…it’s passion for eternity.”

“You evil fat piece of shit!” Wade yelled into the screen.

“And I’d learn to be more respectful of your superiors. Please don’t call me fat. Remember, I’m your new lord now, forever. If you’re not nice to me, I might decide to have you reassigned to one of the communal holds. The holotypes there aren’t particularly given to gender when it comes to pastime activities, if you get my meaning.”

“Aw, Jesus,” Wade groaned low in his gut.

“So behave yourself. And until we meet again…welcome.”

—YES, WADE, another voice announced. —WELCOME TO MY FAMILY.

—

CHAPTER 34

Symbols, he thought.

Jervis reminded himself to be creative. More and more, he viewed his new life as a progression of symbols. He was not so much doing things as he was wielding the hand of destiny. Everything meant something else, something deeper. But what else could the warm, black cube symbolize but death?

Besser had called it an s classtacticlepyrotechnicserviceordnance—its yield was equivalent to about five hundred kilotons. Jervis understood the importance of the Supremate leaving it behind, but…

Was he actually having doubts, after all he had done, after all the people he’d murdered?

No, it wasn’t doubt. It was despair.

Paragons don’t despair, he thought.

It was Sarah.

Jervis forced the thought shut. It was one or the other. It was destiny or sucking up to the bitch who’d dumped him. Could love be so focused as to divert him from immortality?

“No!” he shouted aloud. “No!”

I will not despair.

The pyrotechnic would kill thousands. It would kill Sarah too.

“I will kill them all,” Jervis said. “But I’ll kill her first, and I’ll do it myself.”

««—»»

Lydia retrieved her Colt Trooper Mark III from Besser’s office, where Wade had dropped it. Even though she knew it was useless, she felt she had to bring it. It was the only good luck charm for a girl who didn’t believe in luck. The office was silent. There was no sign of the exchange that had taken place earlier in the day.

Next she drove back to her apartment. Absurdly she took a shower, brushed her teeth, and put on a new uniform.

Am I really going to do this? she thought. It was still not too late to get on the interstate and blow. Something was giving her a dozen last chances to balk.

She drove the Vette to the student shop. She had the UV spotter, but she didn’t even know if it would work. When she entered the shop, she felt more asinine than scared. “Goddamn you, Wade,” she said to herself. “You better be worth this.”

Tom’s pendant hung around her neck; the extromission key felt warm in her cleavage. Her eyes scanned the wall and found the dot. One last luxurious image lodged in her mind: the Vette cruising swiftly into the next state, the top off, and Lydia behind the wheel, her hair a blond tumult in the breeze. I’m walking to my death, she thought giddily. “Oh, what the fuck,” she said.

She inserted the key into the dot and entered the labyrinth.

—

CHAPTER 35

Wade sat drenched in sweat in the hold. A lot of sisters seemed to be filing by. He knew now, they were just bred to order slaves, like drones in a bee colony. That’s all the Supremate wanted. Unifying the galaxies under one peaceful order was bullshit—he wanted brainless, obedient laborers to harvest the resources off all the planets for the material benefit of his own race, whatever and wherever that was. The Supremate was as diabolical as anyone in a position of power.

Sisters kept peeping in as they filed by. Hundreds must’ve done so thus far—where were they all going to? This was the first opportunity he’d had to see them up close without their sunglasses. Their eyes were huge silver orbs—the size of cue balls—each with a black point for a pupil. The black, he guessed, was just an inbred variation of the same material in Besser’s sensor ring, and the rods in Tom’s and Jervis’ heads, a genetic conduction relay that linked all of their minds to the Supremate. Instant blind allegiance built right in. What more could tyranny ask for?

And what of him?

Yesterday I was a college student. Today I’m an intergalactic stud. What a deal.

“What are you looking at!” he yelled at the screen. Another sister was grinning in. “How about a little privacy, huh!”

—We wish we could be you.

“Yeah? Why?”

Black veins traced faintly beneath her white chiffon skin. Her large breasts were nippleless. —We want to make babies too.

“Make tracks instead. Leave me alone. Bubblehead.”

But why did she seem so sad? She was a clone. —We’re going now. The Supremate is done with us. She smiled a last time, showing rows of glassine teeth. —Goodbye, Wade.

“Good riddance. And see a dentist. Soon.”

Then she was gone. Her strange laments surprised him; perhaps they weren’t as mindless as he thought. It wasn’t Wade they envied—it was life itself. It was love, joy, passion, creativity, all the things that their warped existence had left them without. Wade almost felt sorry for her.

We’re going now, she’d said. But going where? The labyrinth wasn’t set to leave until midnight. When Wade looked up at the screen again, the melancholy procession of sisters had ended.

Then a shadow loomed. Besser. “It’s time, Wade.”

“Time for what? Tea?”

Behind the screen’s electrostatic fog, Besser’s goateed face looked like a cross between Henry VIII and Lucifer. Two sisters stood at his side. “It’s time for immortality,” Besser said. “The Supremate wants to give you his gift now.”

“Tell him to wait till my birthday. I hate to feel obliged.”

Besser dropped the screen. The sisters’ huge eyes blinked above their grins. They grabbed Wade and pulled him out. They followed Besser down the servicepass and extromitted several times. The sisters exchanged grins as their hands roamed Wade’s body. I’m being felt up by aliens! he thought, outraged. Their curiosity grew incessant; their fingers worked into his shirt. More envy: the sexless exploring the fertile, touching that which it wasn’t. “Hey, careful with the merchandise!” Wade complained when one of the hands slid over his crotch.

Wade sensed he was higher in the labyrinth now. The servicepasses were darker, the psilight had grown dull. Warrens he’d seen glowing earlier were black now; others blinked off before his eyes. It was obvious: They were conserving their stored energy, shutting down their production areas. Wade presumed that just about everything here sapped power in some way—power they no longer had. The psilight seemed to waver, soon in time with a familiar screech.

The hash room, Wade realized. That’s where the sisters had been filing to. He gazed into the channelwork and saw them.

There were hundreds.

“Power conservation,” Besser said. “Transception cells consume power, so we’re disposing of most of the sisters. Now that the initial bifertilizations are done, only a skeleton crew is required to maintain the replication systems.”

“You’re turning them into food? All of them?”

“Of course. It’s a perfect cycle, Wade. When things are no longer needed, we turn them into something else.”

Food, Wade thought. He watched the conveyor feed living sisters into the shredder one by one. Each shriek of the blades was followed by a soft splat. Gobs of black meat poured into hoppers, which then rolled to dropchutes and emptied.

“How many sisters will be left?”

“Just a few, to monitor the systems once we’ve departed. And when we need more” —Besser smiled— “we’ll make more.”

If this was perfection, perfection sucked. “You’ve got your holotype and surrogates now. What are you waiting for? Why doesn’t the labyrinth leave right now?”

“Wade, haven’t you learned anything in college? I’ve already explained, the labyrinth assimilates electromagnetic energy as a propulsion mode. The earth attracts EM waves to the contour of its physical shape. But the sun’s constant radioactivity, and its equally constant release of neutrons, exert force against any lateral EM plane. Thus, the field surrounding the planet is depressed on one side.”

“The side facing the sun,” Wade realized.

“Yes, and that’s why recharge must occur at night, when there’s more electromagnetic energy at our disposal.”

“The Supremate,” Wade remarked. “He’s one smart dude.”

“He’s part of the greatest intelligence that’s ever existed.”

“How about letting me meet him?”

Besser turned. “You want to meet the Supremate?”

Wade knew he was beaten. He wanted at least to see the face of the force that had beaten him. “It would be an honor to meet the guy responsible for unifying all collective life in the universe. It would be a trip.”

Besser pondered the request. “I’m glad you’re coming around.”

“Look, I’ve seen it all now and I know it’s all for the best,” Wade lied through his teeth. “So I might as well go with the flow.”

“A sound conclusion.” Besser’s face was a smiling nod. “Very well, Wade. You shall meet the Supremate.”

They extromitted through several subinlets. Again, Wade sensed they were rising. More signs floated by: SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#730, SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#525, SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#419. With each extromission they covered a great distance in no time.

“The extromitters are programmed by thought,” Besser mentioned. “Without that function, it would take weeks or even months to cross merely from one level to the next.”

“How long would it take to walk the entire labyrinth?”

“Years,” Besser said.

This impressive statistic deepened Wade’s despair. The further up they went, the more bizarre he felt, the more abandoned.

Was this how slaves felt before they met their lords?

Next sign: SYSTEMSJUNCTURE#1.

Wade felt light headed. Besser inserted his key and extromitted them into the Supremate’s shrine.

They stood tiny in vast, black space. Wade thought of an auditorium the size of a football field, with black walls, a black floor, and a black ceiling. Wade was about to meet the brains behind this entire business. What could something like that look like?

Set into the corner was a kind of inverted sconce. Wade could easily picture something grotesque sitting in it, an abominable, fleshy overlord with giant eyes and fish lips. Yet all that seemed to be resting in the sconce was a black box about the size of a VCR. The Supremate must be farther back in the nave, having not yet emerged.

The two sisters fell immediately to their knees.

“Okay,” Wade said. “I’m ready. Where is he?”

“Right there,” Besser said.

Wade squinted. All he saw was the black box in the empty sconce. “You mean the box?”

Besser nodded, his face uplit in a triumphant, twisted smile. “Say hello to your new master.”

Wade looked at the box and frowned deeply. “You’ve got to be shitting me. That box is the Supremate?”

“Yes.”

Wade was mortified. “That thing looks like my fucking CD player.” He glared disgusted at the meager black box. “I was expecting some big toad faced thing sitting on a throne.”

“It’s a logic circuit, Wade, an integrated processing terminal. It’s as conscious as you or I—only that consciousness is too complex for a physical body.”

The Supremate’s a machine, Wade thought. A bunch of transistors and solder. No, it was impossible. It must be a joke. “I cannot believe that the brains behind this entire operation is a ridiculous black box!”

—GREETINGS, WADE, the black box said.

Besser chuckled.

—HOW DOES IT FEEL TO MEET GOD?

««—»»

Her extromission seemed to turn her inside out and back again. Lydia stood in the mouth of a subinlet. The production warrens were in total darkness. The psilight was much dimmer now. And where were the sisters?

She spent a half hour extromitting from one random place to another. The mindsigns numbered in the hundreds, but each extromission progressed her only one number at a time. POINTACCESSMAIN#16, the next sign read. She examined the keyplate. It was just a black plate with a hole in it, nothing more. There weren’t even any buttons on it, just a keyhole. There had to be some trick to this, some way to program extromission to a specific location.

When she inserted the key, she was inadvertently remembering her brief stay in the temphold, and the absolutely disgusting thing that awaited her in the next cell. When she came out the next access, she expected to find herself at pointaccessmain#17. Instead, the mindsign glowed TEMPHOLDS.

Thought, she thought. Maybe that’s the trick. The idea had some definite possibilities, but before she could contemplate them, footsteps stopped behind her.

Lydia whirled.

—Lydia! You’re back!

One of the bigger sisters faced her, naked and grinning. Lydia gaped at the sight. The sister’s eyes were huge spheres. Her stretching grin showed a mouth crammed with teeth. And worse was what stood directly behind her: the same holotype that had been reserved for Lydia earlier. When it recognized her, it flexed up on its stout legs and howled.

Lydia was shaking, stepping back. The sister and her escort stepped forward. The holotype’s meaty face pinched up in lust.

—I can’t wait to watch, the sister said.

Lydia didn’t need to be told what she meant. The holotype’s preposterous genitals were already swelling in arousal.

They backed her into a dead end. The holotype fondled itself to full erection, chuckling deep from its slatted throat.

Now or never, Lydia thought. She raised the ultraviolet spotter, aimed its purple bulb at the sister’s face, and flicked the switch.

The sister giggled.

Nothing happened.

—

CHAPTER 36

The sisters hustled Wade out of the Supremate’s nave. Besser seemed amused by Wade’s colossal disappointment.

“In a sense, Wade, the Supremate is God. He’s omnipotent, omnipresent, and forethoughtful to a higher goal.”

“God, my ass,” Wade complained. “If that fucker’s God, my favorite beer is Bud. God is not a black box.”

Besser stopped a moment. His voice hung in the air like an incantation. “My god is here, Wade. Where’s yours?”

Good question, Wade concluded. He could not contemplate an answer. In a fraction of a second, Wade thought about his whole life, and how he’d blown every chance at being a decent person. God, whoever or whatever He was, had abandoned him. Even Wade could admit that it was fitting.

“Here we are,” Besser said. “Your last stop as a human being.”

Wade nearly wailed. The sign read IMPLANTATIONSURGERY.

The sisters dragged him into a small hold and slammed him down on a levslat, beside which hung a tray of instruments: pincers, retractors, and a good old Planet Earth type scalpel.

“Before you can join the Supremate’s family, you must first undergo a few changes.” Besser picked up a tiny black needle with wires coming out of it. “This is a ganglionicstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenode. It will integrate you with the labyrinth’s sensor systems, and it will teach you obedience very quickly. Any thought contrary to the Supremate will trigger an instantaneous release of static electrical current into your central nervous system and, of course, your gonads.”

“How charming,” Wade remarked.

“Additional acclimations will embellish your immune system so that, barring any physical accident, you’ll be impervious to all disease, and you won’t age.”

Wade indicated the black needle. “What exactly are you going to do with that?”

“Exactly? We’re going to implant it into your brain.”

Wade struggled against the two sisters, who giggled at his horror. “My health plan doesn’t cover this kind of procedure. You better find yourself another guy.”

One sister approached the instrument tray. The other held Wade down on the table. He jerked, and punched her in the eye with all his might, then howled. It felt like he’d just punched a steel ball.

“Be brave, Wade,” Besser consoled. “The sisters know exactly what to do. They’re trained brain surgeons.”

“Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better!” Wade yelled.

The first sister vised his neck down with her hand like an iron brace. The second sister picked up the scalpel.

“The pain will be excruciating,” Besser added, grinning. “But don’t worry. It will go away in a couple of months.”

Wade wasn’t listening anymore. He was screaming.

««—»»

Nothing happened when Lydia turned on the ultraviolet spotter. Either the battery was dead or the bulb was burned out. If the battery was dead, so was she. If it was the bulb, she could replace it with the spare stored in the receptacle, if she had time—

—which, of course, she didn’t. The holotype was all over her at once, jamming her into the corner, while the orb eyed sister stood as spectator. One moist padded hand pawed Lydia’s breasts; the other hand squeezed her buttocks. Lydia knew the .357 wouldn’t work against the sisters, but what about the holotype?

Her gun hand, however, was pinned behind her back.

The beast’s sweat soaked into her clothes; its breath blasted, foul as gas from a corpse pile. Its left hand popped open her pants and dragged them halfway down. The sister giggled softly as the hot mitten of meat plied Lydia’s sex.

Next she was slammed to her knees. Oh, no, she had time to think. Men all wanted the same thing apparently—even men from other planets. The holotype’s hand positioned the huge glans before her lips. There could be no misinterpretation: Lydia had two choices—she could suck, or she could die.

—Stick it in! the sister urged, a cheerleader from space. —Stick it all the way down her throat!

Lydia’s entire face felt squeezed shut. The snoutlike foreskin was retracted; the glans nudged her sealed lips…

—Lydia! Open wide!

I am not going to give head to an alien, she informed herself. No way in hell, uh uh, forget it.

But wasn’t this her only chance?

Lydia Prentiss steeled herself then, as no woman in history had. The crotch stench alone stupefied her. Between the holotype’s backward jointed legs hung a creviced scrotum which encased two testicles the size of coconuts. With her left hand, Lydia took hold of the thing’s penis. She gave it a tender stroke. Then she opened her mouth, began to lean forward—

With her right hand she drew her Colt Trooper and fired one round into the holotype’s scrotum.

The tight, hot bang! concussed in her ears. One of the testes exploded. The howl of agony which burst from the holotype’s throat sounded like demolition in a deep canyon. It teetered back and fell over, pad hands agrope at the encased mash that was once half its malehood. Pale yellow blood spurtled out, like paint.

During its throes, Lydia changed the UV bulb in the portable spotter. The sister remained where she’d stood, her bright white face having lost some its perverted gleam.

—You shouldn’t have done that, she said.

“Your mom wears boxer shorts,” Lydia replied. How she knew beforehand that it would work was a mystery. The sister bared her teeth. —I’m going to eat you now, she promised.

“Eat this instead.” When Lydia turned on the spotter, the sister went rigid and shrieked. It was an annoying sound, like a coronet played by a drunk. A sizzling could be heard, like meat frying—the sister’s face turned black, then her arms, breasts, and abdomen. The spotter’s invisible light was literally cooking the sister’s flesh, drawing rents to expose bone. The spheric eyes ruptured; she staggered in a circle while Lydia followed, cooking her back and buttocks. Then the sister flopped to the floor, vomited up some milky organs, and died.

The smoking pile sizzled. That was the end of her, but there was still the holotype. It lay cringing, the once proudly erect penis now shriveled. Fingerless hands clutched vainly at the loss between its sinuous legs.

“Hey, buster,” Lydia said.

The face, like a plop of raw meat, glanced up. Blood-red eyes fixed wide on her, this arrogant woman victor.

She put four shots from the Trooper into its convoluted head. The skull cracked, blowing hanks of brains and pale yellow blood in a fan across the black carbonized wall.

Lydia reloaded and got back her breath. No sense in wasting time. Thought, she thought. She plugged her key into the extromitter and thought about Wade.

««—»»

The scalpel flashed, lowering. All Wade could see were the two sisters’ intent faces and point filled grins. He felt the scalpel tip touch his temple…

Then the first sister’s eyes…exploded.

Suddenly he was released. Shrieks spun like mad banners about his head. Besser was bummeling forward, shouting “Noooo!” His shout was answered by a very loud bang!

Wade sat up. At the rear of the warren, he saw the two sisters…cooking. Their petite bodies blackened. Their faces bubbling. Soon their shrieks sputtered out, as their crisped mouths erped up white slop. They congealed in the corner, a blackened, smoking mass.

“Are you gonna sit there all day?” Lydia inquired.

“Lydia!” Wade shouted, and jumped off the table. She smirked as he giddily planted kisses all over her face.

“Save it for later. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Besser, curled on the floor, wheezed out blubbers. Pain bloated his face like a balloon. Lydia had blown his kneecap off.

“What about him?” Wade asked.

“Fuck him,” Lydia answered. She cocked the Trooper and pointed it at Besser’s head.

“Yes!” Besser begged. “Please!”

Lydia looked baffled. “You want me to kill you?”

“For God’s sake, yes! Don’t leave me for the Supremate!”

Wade remembered the hash room, Besser’s inheritance, no doubt, for failure. “Leave the fat fucker,” he said.

“Noooooo!” Besser wailed. “Pleeeeeeease, nooooooo!”

Lydia reholstered the Trooper. She and Wade left the warren as Besser’s pleas faded behind them.

She led him toward the next extromitter, explaining how she’d killed the sisters with the ultraviolet spotter. It wasn’t sunlight that killed them, it was the UV rays of the sun’s spectrum. Wade was impressed by her ingenuity, and also her faith. She’d come into this horrid place for him.

Then suddenly, she stopped. “Wade, before we go on, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What’s that. babe?”

“I love you.”

“Uh.” Wade hemmed. “Yeah.”

Lydia looked the way a girl always looks when she’s pissed. “Well?” she said, hands on hips.

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to say you love me too?”

Jesus, Wade thought. Sure, he loved her, but he couldn’t tell her that. It wasn’t his style, not this soon. When a guy said that, he’d lose the upper hand. Instead, he said, “Ditto.”

Now she really looked pissed. “I knew it. No balls.”

“Hey!”

“I almost got buggered by a monster for you. The least you—”

“I seem to recall doing a little rescuing today myself.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about—”

“And this is not the time or place for a romantic spat,” he added. “We’re in a fucking spaceship.”

“Just shut up and come on,” she said, disgusted.

Wade dredged up some nifty terms from his Sociology 202 class. “We can isolate and identify the spatial parameters of our relationship later.”

“Isolate and identify this,” she said, and gave him the finger. “Besides, there might not even be a later.”

“What are you talking about? We’re home free.”

Lydia laughed. “Don’t you know how the extromitters work?”

“Yeah, you stick the key in the hole and we’re out of here.”

“Not quite. They’re programmed by thought, level to level. But the only way we can leave is through the main point access.”

“So? Let’s go there and split.”

“Wade, every warren and hall, every extromitter, every everything in this place has a sensor in it. Eyes and ears. The Supremate knows where we are and what we’re trying to do.”

Wade’s enthusiasm plummeted.

“And you can bet your Corvette,” she went on, “right now the Supremate is ordering every sister in the place to the main point access, to keep us from leaving.”

“Besser said most of the sisters were terminated.”

“Most, or all?”

Wade gulped. “Most,” he remembered. This was getting too complicated, like the trig and literature courses he’d gotten untold D’s in. He didn’t want to be confused with facts—he wanted out. “So the sisters are waiting for us at the exit?”

“Yes,” Lydia clarified.

“Use the spotter.”

“The spotter’s battery powered, and it’s already getting low.”

Fanfuckingtastic, he thought as she plugged her key into the next extromission dot and pulled him through.

Wade didn’t care to have the molecular mass of his body turned inside out as a means of transportation. Elevators were more to his liking, or ladders, stairs, dumbwaiters—anything. They extromitted down several levels until they made it to what Wade presumed was the bottom of the labyrinth. At the end of the warren, the sign glowed like a mirage: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

But the main was empty. No sisters stood in wait.

“This can’t be right,” Lydia murmured.

“Stick the key in the hole!” Wade shouted.

She did so, almost fatally. She couldn’t believe it was going to be this easy. Nevertheless, this final extromission left them standing dumbfounded by the wall of the student shop.

“You did it!” Wade celebrated.

They ran their asses off, to the door, to the parking lot, to the waiting Vette. The twin turbos roared. The Vette’s plushness embraced them, and in a moment they were smoking out of the lot, through the turn, away, away…

Wade’s mind, as he drove, fielded countless abstractions. He thought of birds flying lazily across the heavens. He thought of cathedral ceilings, long open pastures, endless seas. Never again would he take the becalmed night or the beauty of the world for granted. Indeed, the air smelled of freedom—

—and maybe even absolution.

—

CHAPTER 37

Jervis, as with everything now, took the radio to have a special meaning, symbols like shadows of his new, mysterious life. The campus station played “Head Cut,” by the Banshees, “The Cutter,” by Echo and the Bunnymen, and “Delicate Cutters,” by Throwing Muses. “Lots of cutters tonight, folks,” the D.J. said. Jervis agreed. Lots of cutters. He looked fondly at the wrapped bouquet of roses. For you, Sarah. With love, from the Cutter.

He dressed with care—to kill, you might say. He put on the same jeans he’d worn when they first met, the same shoes, the same belt. He plugged his bullet holes with tissue and put on the black shirt she’d given him their first Christmas together. This was symbology. This was the past coming to the future. For such an important event, he had to look just right. He had to look perfect.

The last song on the radio was by Bauhaus: “Exquisite Corpse.” Jervis combed his hair a final time. He slicked it back off his brow, not with Vitalis, but with Wilhelm’s blood.

He lit a Carlton, grabbed the bouquet, and left. He walked cheerily out into the night. Across the quadrangle, Sarah’s window was lit. No doubt she was waiting for Wilhelm, and that thought made Jervis smile. Wilhelm won’t be coming over tonight, Sarah. He’s a little bogged down right now. The bouquet felt heavy, its wrapping moist. When he knocked on room 202, the door opened at once. Sarah squealed, “Willy! You’re so late! I was worried!”

“You better be worried,” Jervis said.

A gasp froze in Sarah’s chest. She stared. She wore canary-yellow pants, canary yellow shoes, and a Ram’s Head Tavern T shirt.

Uninvited, Jervis stepped in. He closed the door.

“Jervis, I…” she started. Then her eyes narrowed. “You look…terrible.”

“But I feel great,” he said. “How are you, Sarah?”

She was shivering already, on the verge of making those canary yellow pants a bit more yellow. After a long, gauging pause, she answered, “I I’m fine.”

“That’s good. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

This query seemed to puzzle her. She did not blink at all. “All right Jervis. How are you?”

“How am I!” he exploded. “I’ll tell you how I am! I’m fuckin’ dead!”

He marched a mad circle about her, while she didn’t move at all. His footfalls made the entire room vibrate, probably the entire building too. Frid, the cat, fled to the top of the refrigerator, while Sarah remained stock still. When Jervis pulled the Webley revolver out of his belt, a wet spot did indeed appear on the front of Sarah’s canary yellow pants. It was a big spot.

“Oh, I’m not going to shoot you,” he apologized. He set the gun down. “I came here…to give you this.”

He gave her the bouquet. She took it, surprisingly, with no reluctance. “They’re lovely, Jervis. Thank you,” she said. She was faking it, of course, because she was scared. She sniffed the roses, paused. She looked into the bouquet.

Then she screamed.

Jervis laughed like a Titan. The bouquet hit the floor and spilled open. Amid the beautiful fresh cut roses, there it lay, once grand, but now shriveled, parodic.

“What did—!” she hitched. “What did—what did—”

“Guess,” Jervis offered, “and I’ll even give you a hint. It ain’t a ballpark frank in there.”

“What did you do?” she shrieked.

“I cut off his dick,” Jervis said.

She screamed very unbecomingly and without abatement. Now she was stepping back, and Jervis was stepping forward.

“But that’s nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”

Frid watched placidly from its high perch. Like all cats, it seemed to care only for itself. Sarah continued to scream, throwing things as she backtracked in a circle. People are always throwing things at me, Jervis observed.

A Brother typewriter bounced off his head. A stereo receiver hit him in the face. Jervis shrugged it all off, maintaining a measured smile. Life had bestowed only weakness on him. Death, though, gave him power, physical and spiritual. He was the Seer, the Knower, the Destroyer.

“Enough,” he said. “You’re the last loose end of my old life. It’s time for me to tie it up.”

He threw her to the floor and straddled her. How should he do it? Break her neck? Crush her throat? No, he thought. Be creative. He must execute this last symbol with diversity, with style. His brain seemed to tick as he deliberated.

She squirmed under him, her tiny fists beating his chest.

“Why wasn’t I good enough?” he asked.

She gave no reply, only continued to squirm.

“You dumped me like garbage. Why? Tell me.”

She raked his arm with her nails, drawing bloodless fissures.

Was he actually starting to choke up? Myrmidons don’t cry, he commanded. What was wrong with him? This was his moment of true existential triumph. Nevertheless, his grip slackened. A tear came to his dead eye. “How could you do that to me?”

She tried to claw his face, punch out his eyes.

I know.

“You took my heart,” he said. “Now I’m going to take yours.”

It was perfect. He would tear her heart out, just as she had done to him. Tear it out and eat it, feast upon it…

He pulled the Ram’s Head shirt up, cast off the pink lace bra. Her breasts were much more beautiful than he remembered. When he touched them, the warm contact rifled back images of love. Soon, his hands were shaking…

Do it! Take the bitch’s heart out! Eat her guts and puke them back up into her face! Just DO IT!

His fingers stiffened, lowering…

“No!” she whined. “You can’t!”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you love me!”

He expected any reply but this. It silenced his thoughts like wind blowing out candles. Beneath him, her squirmings ceased; her heat flowed up into his dead groin. What could urge her to say such a thing? Suddenly her voice was quiet, soft as silk.

“You still love me,” she whispered.

Jervis jittered now. It was truth—the real truth—that summoned these words to her lips. At once, he was as helpless as he’d ever been. There was one thing that wielded even more power than him. She was right. He still loved her.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered. He hauled her up, put her car keys in her hand, and shoved her out the door. “Get in your car and drive!” he yelled. “Drive far away, because at midnight, I’ll be gone, and everyone on this campus will be dead!”

Sarah didn’t question this inexplicable revelation. She scampered away, into the elevator, and down.

Jervis watched from the window. He saw her frantic form jump into her car and drive away.

A marshmallow even in death, he thought. Some myrmidon I turned out to be. Yeah, some killing machine. “But, goddamn,” he griped aloud, “I’ve got to kill something.”

He realized the sacrifice even before he turned. From atop the refrigerator, Frid hissed at him, showing little feline teeth. Jervis’ smile almost cracked his head. He raised the Webley to Frid’s whiskered cat face and squeezed off one round. The report blew the wicked animal clear across the kitchen, where it splattered grandly against the wall.

««—»»

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Wade said. “What time is it?”

Wade paid the attendant at DeHenzel’s Texaco, grateful for the full serve option. He wasn’t up to pumping it himself, not so soon after nearly receiving non-anesthetic brain surgery. Small favors were rare these days. But Lydia had made a pertinent inquiry. Where would they go now?

“That note you left me,” Lydia recalled. “Didn’t you mention something about a bomb?”

The bomb! he thought. He floored it out of the station, burning rubber. “Jervis has a bomb, and it’s supposed to go off at one minute after midnight.”

“What do they want to blow up?”

“I don’t know,” Wade said, but he did know one thing…

He pulled onto the Route and pushed the gas to the floor.

“What are you doing?” Lydia complained, her hair a flurry.

“Just be quiet.”

“Don’t tell me to be quiet!”

“All right, then. Shut up.”

The speedometer rose from 60 to 120 rather quickly. Then 130, 140. “Where are we going?” Lydia screamed over the wind drag.

“As far away as possible,” Wade said. “Who knows how powerful that bomb is? When it goes, I want to be as far away from the campus as possible.”

“You’re chickening out? We have to do something! Call the state bomb disposal unit, call the National Guard—”

“Right, and tell them what? That aliens are here?”

Wade shut out her complaints. In twenty minutes he covered about fifty miles of Route 13, which was easy when he owned a twin turbo 455. Then he pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped.

Lydia was wearing her pissed off look again.

“Get out of the car,” Wade said.

“What the—”

“Just get out of the car. There’s something I’ve gotta do.”

“What?”

“Find the bomb, disarm it. Jervis is the only one who knows where it is, so I’m going to track him down.”

Lydia laughed. “If you go anywhere near him, he’ll drag your dumb ass straight back to the labyrinth.”

“No, he won’t. I’ll be crafty.”

“Crafty! He’s a homicidal walking corpse!”

“Would you please just get out of the car,” Wade implored.

“No,” Lydia said.

“Get out of the car!” he yelled.

“Make me.”

Wade punched her in the face. It was a hard thing to do, but he had no choice. The blow knocked her silly. He dragged her half conscious from the Vette and set her down on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Lydia.”

“Fucker,” she mumbled.

“Just head north. There’s nothing you can do. Even if you hitchhiked back to Exham, no one would believe you.”

Wade got back in the Vette. He pulled a perfect smoke raising 180 in the road. Lydia was up to her hands and knees, but that was about it.

“One more thing,” Wade called to her.

“What!”

“I love you.”

Lydia’s eye was already growing a shiner. She smirked in perfect female rage, “You better love me, you asshole!”

Wade laughed. What a woman, he thought. He floored the accelerator, burning rubber and heading south.

—

CHAPTER 38

Time to go home, Jervis thought. He drank Kirins and smoked, steering the Dodge Colt downtown. His last night on this world was a spacious and beautiful one. What would nights look like on other worlds?

—JERVIS.

His dead heart surged at his master’s beckoning. “I’m coming, lord. I’m coming home now.”

—NOT YET, MY SON. A CALAMITY HAS BEFALLEN US.

Jervis stopped in the middle of the road, closed his eyes to see his master more clearly. All he saw was fog.

—YOU ARE ALL I HAVE LEFT.

“What happened?”

—WADE HAS ESCAPED.

But how could that be? Wade had been locked up in the hold; escape from the labyrinth was impossible.

—TIME IS ALMOST GONE. YOU MUST FIND HIM, BRING HIM BACK.

Was it Jervis’ deterioration, or had the Supremate’s voice grown weak? The once glorious trumpet in his head was now little more than a wisp of static.

—WE MUST HAVE HIM BACK BY RECHARGE.

“We will, I promise. But—” The dash clock read 10:21 P.M. “I need help! There’s no time!”

—IN MY GRACE, JERVIS, I SHALL ASSIST YOU. I GIVE YOU MY BLOOD. USE IT WISELY AND WITH HASTE—TO FIND HIM.

“I will, my lord!”

The Supremate’s voice had all but faded out. The master was indeed bleeding, but Jervis made out his lord’s last ordination:

—MY SON. YOU ARE THE FINAL PRAYER OF DESTINY.

««—»»

Jervis was back on campus in minutes. It was the labyrinth, he knew, and its recharge preliminaries. At midnight, the labyrinth would leave, and that was one bus Jervis didn’t want to miss.

Blood, he thought. Yes, he could feel it, taste it, even hear it. The black pommel of his transceptionrod was turning warm with the Supremate’s blood.

Wade and the girl were probably hightailing it out of town. But that didn’t matter now, for didn’t they have some of the Supremate’s blood too? Blood leads to blood, like lovers in the dark.

His lord’s blood would lead him straight to them.

««—»»

Wade gunned the Vette back to campus. Lydia had left the UV spotter and Tom’s extromission key on the seat. The spotter would be useless against Jervis—any weapon would be. So even if he did find him, what would he do? And Wade knew nothing of the nature of the bomb. Lydia was right in her objections. Trying to ascertain the whereabouts of an alien bomb from a walking dead man was, at the least, pushing fate. At the most, it was fucking suicide.

But he needed something, for God’s sake, some means of defense before he could seriously expect to confront Jervis again. Guns were out—obviously. It had already been proven that shooting Jervis with bullets was as effective as shooting him with rubber bands. Knives and blunt objects were equally useless. But what about corrosives, sulfuric acid or something? Yeah, Wade thought. They had all kinds of stuff like that at the sciences center…

He drove quickly. Several passersby headed for a mixer on the Hill. Wade envied their obliviousness. You haven’t seen a dead guy walking around, have you? he felt tempted to ask. He parked at the sciences center. The building stood dark, and, to no surprise, locked. Wade’s lack of reluctance would’ve impressed any criminal. He shattered the front glass doors with his tire iron and stepped in.

The chemistry wing was just around the corner. Slats of moonlight spread across the shiny labtops. With his flashlight, he found the door to the storage closet. It was unlocked and… “Shit!” he shouted…empty.

Then a car door slammed outside.

Wade stood stunned, like a figure in a freeze frame. Footsteps tracked across the parking lot. They sounded frightfully casual. Wade peeked out the blinds and saw Jervis’ Dodge Colt parked right beside the Vette.

Shit shit shit! he thought. He leapt for the door but the footsteps could already be heard in the hall. He glanced around, frantic and quite stupid. Then he slipped into the storage closet and bolted the lock from inside.

He held his breath. Jervis walked right into the lab and turned on the lights. He was whistling as he searched the room. Grimly Wade recognized the tune as Eno’s “Here He Comes.”

“I can smell you, Wade,” announced the voice beyond the door. “I can smell your fear.”

Wade swallowed his breath, wide eyed in the closet’s murk.

“The closet? No, Wade, I’m sure you’re not stupid enough to hide in the most obvious place.”

Yes I am, Wade thought.

In a split, exploding instant, the closet door was shorn down the middle. Its halves blew out, and in their place stood Jervis, lowering the massive beam hewer.

Wade cracked Jervis in the head with the tire iron. It made an awful sound, yet Jervis barely flinched. He took the tire iron and snapped it in half. “You know, Wade, I’m really getting tired of people hitting me in the head with things.”

“Sorry,” Wade apologized. “How did you find me?”

Jervis leaned the hewer against the wall and lit a Carlton. “Tom’s extromission key is on your front seat,” he explained. “The Supremate put a direction finder on it. It led me right to you.”

Wade wilted. At least he didn’t have to worry about finding Jervis anymore. “I want to know about the bomb,” he demanded.

“What do you care? By the time the bomb goes off, you’ll be halfway across the Milky Way.”

“I’m not gonna be your goddamned holotype,” Wade informed him. “I’ll kill myself first.”

“With what? Your flashlight?” Jervis grinned smoke. “You’re going back, and this time there’ll be no last minute escapes. I’ll be locking you into the hold personally.”

Wade remembered the extromitter installed at Besser’s office, which was right here in this building. Jervis would have him in the labyrinth in minutes. I just can’t win, Wade considered.

Jervis grabbed Wade by a handful of shirt and calmly dragged him out of the closet. Wade, the antithesis of calm, fought back for all he was worth—not much in this particular scenario. His heart felt huge with adrenaline, his limbs kicking like recoiling cannons, yet his most savage efforts amounted to squat when compared to the physical power of Jervis the Myrmidon, the true haunter of the dark.

Wade churned wildly, and uselessly.

Then he thought: The hewer.

Jervis had left the hewer leaning against the wall. If Wade could get his hands on it…

His arms surged forward, fingers stretching. His hands, not that he could believe it, touched the hewer’s handle. Get it! he thought. Get it! Venting all his strength at once, he surged again. His fingers closed around the handle. Then the hewer was coming away from the wall with him as Jervis dragged on.

“You never give up, do you?” Now Jervis was glancing over his shoulder. A mesh of disapproval and amusement shone on his gray face. He gave Wade’s body a quick jerk—

The hewer fell from his fingers to the floor.

Wade twisted, still reaching out in vain. The hewer got smaller and smaller as he was dragged farther and farther out of the room, down the hall, toward Besser’s office and the inevitable extromitter, which would return him, once and for all, to the labyrinth.

««—»»

At least the jerk had said he loved her. But what good was that if she never saw him again? He’d either be killed by the bomb or reclaimed by Jervis. Nor did her black eye or aching head help her to feel more obligatory. Son of a bitch, she thought.

Lydia was walking north on Route 13. She was fifty miles from Exham, and no cars in sight. She thought about Wade and about the times they’d had sex. But getting off did not equate to love, especially in this day and age. No, orgasms did not equal love.

But she knew she loved him anyway.

The question was, did he really love her? He’d said so, but guys said shit like that all the time, didn’t they?

She didn’t want to die. She’d already taken enough chances with her life in the last few days. She wanted to live.

She kept walking north, away from the campus.

What am I supposed to do?

A mile ahead in darkness, headlights appeared. A car was coming.

It was heading south.

—

CHAPTER 39

Jervis pushed open Besser’s office door, heaved Wade into the corner. So close to recharge, the extromitter dot was actually glowing. Black, but glowing.

Wade’s head wobbled. “Jerv, we’ve been friends for years!”

“Years are split seconds where we’re going. Quit bellyaching and accept your destiny.”

“Like you’ve accepted yours?”

“Yeah,” Jervis said, and lit another Carlton.

“Let me tell you something about your destiny. I know a lot more about it than you do.”

“You don’t know shit, Wade.” Jervis grabbed Wade’s arm, and with his other hand, took the key about his neck. He approached he extromitter. “Say goodbye to the world, Wade.”

But as Jervis inserted the key, Wade said, “The Supremate’s going to dump you.”

Jervis halted. Had the comment kindled a repressed suspicion? His hand wavered. His dead eyes blinked.

“Supremate’s going to make me immortal,” he asserted.

“No, he’s not. He’s going to make you meat loaf. When he doesn’t need something anymore, he gets rid of it.”

“The sisters are just toys,” Jervis justified. “They’re soulless. The Supremate can make them anytime he wants.”

“That’s true. So why does he need you?”

Another dead ember seemed to rekindle.

“You’re treating this Supremate asshole like a god,” Wade went on. “He’s not a god!”

“What is he, then?”

“Just another power hungry shithead, no different from the people here. He’s like anyone in a position of power—politician, corporate lawyer, industry mogul—”

“Meaning?” Jervis inquired.

“He’s a fucking liar!”

Jervis stared and blinked.

Wade continued: “He’s a user, Jervis. Any idiot can see that. He promised you immortality in exchange for service only because he needed you to do his shit work. When the shit work’s over, he won’t need you anymore. What can you do in the labyrinth that the sisters can’t do better?”

“I can think,” Jervis answered.

Wade laughed. “Thinking is the last thing this fucker wants. How does any monarch maintain power? By suppressing individuality—by suppressing thinking.”

Was Jervis stupid, or were Wade’s suggestions going somewhere?

“There’s no room in the Supremate’s system for individuals,” Wade kept talking. “As far as the master plan is concerned, you’re just a jury rig in the big machine. The Supremate lied to all of you to get what he wanted. Besser told me they were going to dump you after recharge. He said you were expendable.”

Jervis sunk further into self rumination. Wade realized that two forces were at work here: the Supremate versus Wade—not exactly a match. If Wade was going to make a move, now was the time.

“Think about it. Does the Supremate really need you?”

Jervis’ thinning hair easily revealed the knob of his transceptionrod. It was a terminal of some sort, Wade guessed, an uplink to The Boss. Whatever it was, it must be pretty important, considering that Jervis was dead but still walking and talking. Wade had no choice but to give it a shot.

He lurched forward. “What are you—” Jervis yelled, and Wade grabbed the black knob and pulled up with all his might.

The transceptionrod didn’t come out, but it slid up an inch. Jervis shuddered like a man who’d just stuck a screwdriver into a fuse box. “Nooooooo!” his voice thundered, shattering the office windows and shaking the room. He let go of Wade’s wrist bringing both hands to the rod, feeling at it ineptly as if examining a sudden, deep wound.

While Jervis convulsed, Wade ran.

««—»»

God it hurt, oh God oh God. Pain blazed like white hot light. He thought of being skinned alive and dumped in salt, of bamboo shoots driven up the fingernails, a blowtorch flame to the testicles, an enema with lye. That’s the kind of pain that assailed him. Indeed, the whole of his brain felt like a molar’s soft pulp invaded by a dentist’s drill.

He shuddered in place, eyes and face turned up. Footsteps tramped away and out. Wade. Goddamn Wade did this. He’d nearly jerked the transceptionrod completely out of his head.

Jervis clod-hopped around in his lake of pain. He couldn’t see anything but white. His feet felt like cement loafers. He felt around Besser’s desk until his hands fell upon a stone paperweight of J. S. Bach. He grabbed it, raised it, and—

CLACK!

—banged the transceptionrod fully back into his head.

The white hot pain blew away, his vision snapped back. He could feel his nerves reconnect. Jervis was whole again. He knew what would happen if the rod had been completely removed.

The interruption had consumed only moments, but in those moments, Wade had escaped.

Jervis ran so hard his feet cracked the tile floor. When he trampled down the stairs, the stairs collapsed behind him. Down the hall, the front doors beckoned. He sprinted for them.

He assumed Wade had fled for the Vette. But then there was always that old saying about assumption. Something didn’t feel right. Halfway to the doors, Jervis stopped.

He sniffed the air.

Fear.

Again, he could smell its tang, its giveaway fragrance.

He turned and headed back to the lab.

Why would Wade return there? Jervis noticed the cut down door to the storage closet but ignored it. Wade would have to be brainless to go back in there. What he didn’t notice, however, was that the beam hewer was no longer on the floor.

“Say your prayers,” Jervis advised.

Wade leapt from the closet. Jervis turned. There was a silver flash, a swoosh—

Thump!

Suddenly Jervis lay flat on his back. Fuddled, he looked up. Standing in front of him was Wade, holding the hewer.

And standing beside Wade was…a pair of pants.

Wait a minute, Jervis realized. Those are MY pants.

Indeed, they were. And they were Jervis’ legs that filled them.

“How do you like those cookies?” Wade spat.

Then it came to him. Jervis had been cut in half at the waist. His lower body stood before him. His upper body lay on the floor.

Wade threw his head back and laughed in triumph.

Jervis frowned. Talk about minor inconveniences. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

“I understand that you’re in two pieces,” Wade replied.

Jervis hopped up on his hands. His legs remained standing. “All you’ve done,” he said, “is make two of me.”

Wade shrieked. Jervis’ legs began to chase him around the lab. “You’ve gotta be shitting me!” Wade yelled.

Jervis’ living torso lit yet another Carlton. He walked around the lab tables—walked, that is, on his hands, an ambulatory trunk. This wasn’t so bad; it gave him a different perspective, at least. Now he knew how it felt to be short.

Wade was running mad circles around the tables. He’d been chased by pissed off girlfriends, irate fathers, and police—but never by…legs. This was not an easy situation to assess. He grappled at the window. Jervis’ legs kicked him in the ass. Jervis laughed, hobbling up before a trail of innards.

“Two against one. I know it’s not fair, but that’s life.”

“You prick!” Wade shouted, kicking at the legs. “I cut you in half and you’re still fucking with me!”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

Wade was opposed by both sides. Jervis’ legs kicked at him from the front, while Jervis’ upper body grappled with him from behind, tried to drag him down. The hewer lay yards away.

Wade did what any man would do when being mauled by two halves of a resurrected corpse: He attacked the weaker twin. He tackled the legs. The legs kicked up. He crawled forward as Jervis’ torso held onto his belt, one hand slithering for his balls.

Wade grabbed the hewer and rolled. Suddenly Jervis was wrapped up in his own legs. This confusion gave Wade time to rise.

Jervis fumbled to untie himself. Finally his legs came untangled and stood back up.

The hewer blazed down. The first strike cut the legs in half. Without the foundation of unity, the legs now hopped about independent of each other, useless.

Jervis, the walking torso, looked up in horror. The hewer’s second strike took off Jervis’ right arm, the third his left.

“Now I’ve made five of you,” Wade pointed out. “What are you gonna do now? Roll after me?”

“Aw, shit, Wade. You’ve ruined everything,” Jervis complained, dismembered.

“Let’s get down to business.” Wade dropped to one knee. “Where’s the bomb?”

“Can’t tell you, man. That’s against the rules. At one minute after midnight, that bomb goes off, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“But the labyrinth leaves at midnight. One minute after?”

“In that one minute, Wade, the labyrinth will be a million miles away.” Jervis turned his head toward the wall clock. He smiled. “Twenty five minutes.”

“Tell me where it is!”

“No can do, buddy. It’s a doozie, though—the same yield as a Pershing II warhead. Everything—the campus, the town, and every single person in it—will be vaporized. We’re talking about a ten mile radius of scorched earth.”

Wade looked numb with despair.

“The Supremate likes to leave his mark,” Jervis continued. “Just a little memento, like a promise in the wind.”

“But thousands of people will die!” Wade shouted.

“Yeah, but someday the Supremate will return, for the repopulation phase. When that happens, he’ll kill everybody.”

Now Wade was on both knees, a beggar. “Jervis, please!”

“We’ll just have to make do without a holotype. I’m sure they’ll be able to find something suitable in the holds, it’s no big deal. So face it, Wade. You’re screwed.”

—

CHAPTER 40

In a bimagneticfieldeffectelectrostatic snap, the Supremate blinked. It blinked as might a tired old man. The blood of its hypervelotic heart and line hash veins ran cool and slow. So much power was flooding the reserves that there was little left for anything but the discreet switch systems. The Supremate needed nothing else at this point, however. It could sleep and dream as the labyrinth prepared itself for recharge and exitpulse.

It felt good to be sleepy, a welcome lull in an endless fury of high speed computer transactions. All life in the labyrinth lay in hibernation now, save for a few sisters in the emergencysensorcove. The Supremate, in other words, was quite alone. In this strange magnetic solitude, it felt peace.

Jervis was so far away, his transception signals could no longer be read—there was no power left, no blood. The Supremate guessed that Jervis had failed in securing the earth holotype. That was unfortunate, but it mattered little. The Supremate grew weary of this frivolous world. It looked forward to returning in some future eon and destroying it.

The one called Besser had been trying to escape when the sensorposts winked out. This, too, was of no significance. If the Supremate’s pets in the grove didn’t get him, the bomb most certainly would.

—THINGS COULD BE WORSE, the Supremate considered.

It smiled then—in a sense, at any rate.

Then it went back to sleep.

««—»»

“I’m going to report you,” the girl complained. She was driving a silver Saab, obviously an Exham student on her way to the summer sessions. Lydia had flagged her car down on the Route. The girl did not take kindly to being commandeered by police.

“Do whatever you want,” Lydia said.

“This is outrageous,” the girl replied. She wore a shirt that read “If pro is the opposite of con, what’s the opposite of progress?” A frosted, purple Mohawk ridged her head.

They’d been on the road a half hour now; a half hour more and they’d be there. Sid and Nancy stood awry on a sticker adhered to the dash. “I want your name and badge number,” the girl said.

Lydia gave them to her. “You want my shoe size too?”

“And you can bet my father won’t like this. He’ll sue you.”

“Clam up and drive,” Lydia said. “Jesus.”

The girl simmered. Her Mohawk looked like a scrub brush.

When they finally arrived back on campus, the girl stopped just past the gates. “You wanted a ride to the campus,” she said, “and here’s the campus. I refuse to drive you another inch. This is where you get out.”

“Wrong, brushhead. This is where you get out.”

“I—hey!”

Lydia shoved her out of the car. She landed on her rump.

“You can’t steal my car!” she wailed.

“Sure I can.” Lydia slid behind the wheel and slammed the door.

“Hey!”

“Shut up,” Lydia said. God, she hated girls who whined. “And fix your hair.” She jammed the gas and sped for Campus Drive.

««—»»

Professor Besser was a sight. Blubbering like a baby, he hopped down the servicepass. The .357 slug had exploded in his knee. Each time he fell down, he bellowed. But he had to get out. Any death was preferable to dying in the labyrinth. He would either be fed into the sustenanceprocessor or consigned to the communal holds where his rectum would prove a most welcome entertainment to the holotypes.

Mother! he thought.

Even the slightest weight on his bad leg sent bolts of pain up his spine. The shattered joint crunched like broken glass. He should have been wearing diapers, for all the crying and pants wetting. Oops. Here came a big number two now, to add to the disgrace. In truth, that’s all Besser was and ever would be: a three hundred pound pants pissing and shitting baby. Terror had a way of bringing out the best in a man.

“Mother!” he rejoiced. He could smell his own shit. But this was too good to be true!

The mindsign, though very weakly now, glowed its promise: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

Besser crawled forward, blubbering. He took a deep breath, raised his key, and plugged it into the extromitter.

When he was out of the labyrinth, he found himself not in the safety of his office, nor the student shop, but in the grove. His eyes bulged.

—

CHAPTER 41

Wade sat up on the table, looking down at the dismembered torso of his friend. Jervis inclined his head up and smiled.

Wade assessed the agenda as thus:

1) It was now 11:35 P.M.

2) At 11:55 P.M., recharge would occur, whatever that was.

3) At midnight, the labyrinth would take off.

4) At one minute after midnight, the bomb would detonate and wipe out the entire campus and town.

5) Wade didn’t know where the bomb was.

6) Jervis wasn’t going to tell him.

Beautiful, Wade thought.

Next he assessed the obvious yet elusive elements of evil involved. (1) The labyrinth was a spaceship/genetic engineering factory that would someday return to earth and repopulate it with mindless integrated slaves optimally hybridized from various life forms. (2) The Supremate ran the show. (3) The Supremate enlisted certain natives—i.e., Tom, Jervis, Winnie, Besser—to assist in specimen procurements. (4) The Supremate was evil.

But evil was relative, wasn’t it? Certain people gave their allegiance to evil for certain reasons. Some of these reasons were voluntary. Besser and Winnifred, for instance, had sided with evil through their own greed. But Tom and Jervis had gone over involuntarily, which meant that their loyalties must be maintained by control.

Evil, Wade thought. Control.

He glanced at Jervis. “You’re not evil. Neither was Tom.”

“There’s no such thing as evil,” replied the head affixed to Jervis’ limbless torso. “There’s only idealism and reality. What joins the two together isn’t evil, Wade. It’s perfection.”

Hadn’t countless presidential candidates made the same assertion, as well as countless monarchs?

“All I know,” Wade speculated, “is that a couple of days ago, you were a good person. Now you’re evil. I want to know why.”

Jervis gushed laughter. It had—yes—an evil ring to it.

Wade hopped off the table. “It’s that thing, isn’t it? That thing they put in your head.”

Jervis stopped laughing.

“What would happen,” Wade wondered, “if I pulled it out?”

“Get away from me!” Jervis shouted. His torso was suddenly shrugging, rocking, inching back. “Stay the fuck away!”

“That’s it, right? If I take it out, you won’t be evil anymore.”

“I’ll die!”

“You know what I think, Jerv? I think you want to tell me where the bomb is. You want to tell me how to defuse it. Except that thing in your head won’t let you.”

“Don’t, Wade! Please don’t!” the torso yelled.

Wade grabbed the small black knob in Jervis’s head. It was about the size of a marble, and it was warm.

As he pulled, Jervis screamed.

The torso went stiff. The head arched back, mouth locked open in an unbroken howl of pain. The transceptionrod didn’t come easy; it creaked out a little at a time, like twisting a nail out of old wood. Two inches, then three, four, five. Finally, at the sixth inch, the rod came out.

Jervis’ head and torso fell still.

Wade threw the wet transceptionrod into the hall.

The reaper worked quick, giving Jervis an instantaneous refund on the time he’d borrowed from death. The torso and face began to rot in short order, going from gray to brown to…mush.

“Damn it,” Wade muttered. It had been worth a try, at least. But instead of removing Jervis’ evil, he’d only succeeded in removing life. In seconds, it seemed, the torso began to bloat.

Then the sagging brown face said, “Time.”

“Jerv! You’re still with me!”

The order of nature reduced Jervis’ voice to a sluggish, phlegmy rattle. “How much…time?”

Wade glanced at the clock. “It’s twenty till midnight.”

Jervis made a facial gesture of approval. Putrefactive slime oozed from his stumps, his shit dark face melting. He spoke in a liquid wisp. “The bomb is in my car, right outside.”

“Great! Tell me how to disarm it! How do I turn it off?”

“Can’t,” Jervis bubbled. “Preprogrammed. Can’t disarm it.”

Wade was outraged. “What do I do with it, then? It’s got a ten mile kill zone! I can’t just throw it into the woods and stick my fingers in my fucking ears! Tell me what to do!”

Jervis smiled, if in fact his percolating lips were still capable of it. “Put it…” he wheezed, hacking up slop. “Put it in the labyrinth.”

“If I go back in the labyrinth, the Supremate will know. He’ll send the sisters to tear me up.”

“Supremate won’t know.” A sputter. Jervis was going fast. “How do you think you got out so easy earlier? This close to recharge…no power. Sensorposts are dead. Supremate has no way of knowing you’re there.”

Wade stared down. Jervis was losing his race against autolysis. His lips split. His eyes had liquefied and pooled in their sockets. “Use my key. Pointaccess to first subinlet. Look for sign…”

“What sign?”

“Guidance…tracking…pah pah point.”

“Okay, what then?”

“Put bomb there and…get…out.

Wade touched the corpse. It was hot with rot.

Yet Jervis’ mush face still smiled in final freedom. The gas fat torso began to smoke. “Stick it up the Supremate’s ass.” A titter, like a giggle. Then: “I—I…”

“Aw, no, Jerv!”

“I’m gone.”

And he was.

««—»»

The bomb was black, a six inch cube, but it seemed like magic to shift minutely in size. It felt warm as a hearth brick.

He’d found it on the front floor of Jerv’s Dodge Colt, which had been turned, over the last day or so, into a hatchback gorewagon. The Supremate had transformed his friend into a murderer. It was time for payback.

Better get a move on, Wade thought. He jogged back into the building, back to the lab. What remained of Jervis was just a clothed rib cage around which had settled a large puddle of dark slime. The only remnant of the real Jervis Phillips was a pack of Carlton 100s stuck in the shirt pocket.

Wade snapped the extromission key off the corpse’s neck, then ran up to Besser’s office.

The extromitter dot stared like a glazed eye. Wade’s watch read 11:42—eighteen minutes would be plenty of time to get in and out. He felt surprisingly fearless as he inserted the key and began to extromit. What did he have to worry about? Even if there were any sisters left, the Supremate wouldn’t be aware of his entrance. There would be no way that the Supremate could alert them. These were comforting thoughts.

They were also stupid ones.

—

CHAPTER 42

Lydia slammed the brakes and skidded. In front of the sciences center, she saw Wade’s Corvette and another car behind it. Lydia backed up and wheeled in.

The other car was a gold Dodge Colt, Jervis’ car.

The spotter and Tom’s key remained where she’d left them in the Vette. Lydia grabbed them and rushed into the building.

It wasn’t hard to find where the confrontation had taken place, nor was it hard to discern the victor. Somehow, Wade had done the job on Jervis—the dismembered, smoking carnage was proof. But the cadaver’s neck lacked the extromission key.

Oh, no, she thought. He didn’t—he couldn’t have—

She picked the hewer off the floor and ran upstairs.

The extromitter glowed weirdly in Besser’s dark office. When Lydia put two and two together, she didn’t come up with four, she came up with DUMB ASS. More than likely, and for some unknown reason, Wade had gone back into the labyrinth.

Besser’s desk clock read 11:44. She knew that the labyrinth was leaving at midnight. She also knew that five minutes before midnight, recharge would occur, and she had no idea what that entailed. One more thing she knew: Wade wouldn’t last a second in the labyrinth on his own. Goddamn imbecile, she thought. She saw no other choice but to go in after him. But as she reached for Tom’s extromission key, she heard…what?

What were they? Grunts?

She turned quickly, hefting the weight of the hewer. She thought it might be Wade, but when the shadow—and the sloppy, wet sound it brought—crossed the office door, she knew far too well who it was.

“Huh hi, Lydia. You’re sure lookin’ mighty pretty tonight.”

When she saw the state of the thing which stepped into the block of moonlight, all Lydia could say was, “Oh, fuck!”

“I always kind of had a crush on ya. Course, I never said nothin’, figured you’d laugh at me, you know?”

But Lydia was definitely not laughing. She was as revolted as she was terrified. The thing facing her was Porker.

Wade said he’d been killed in the grove by the sisters—disemboweled. But she needed no explanation when she saw the knob end of the transceptionrod in his head.

Porker was naked, huge, pale as turned cream. His completely eviscerated abdominal cavity hung open in plain view. No organs there, just empty space. The sisters had eaten his innards and brought him back for service, getting double their money’s worth of the poor obese slob.

“Where’s Wade?” Porker asked.

“How should I know?”

“Did he go back into the labyrinth?”

“He’d have to be crazy to do that.”

Porker’s boyish, chubby face turned up in a grin. “You didn’t answer the question.”

“All right, how about this: I don’t know where Wade is.”

“I think you do,” the young, insecure voice replied. Muddy bare feet trudged forward, thudding. “And you’re going to tell me.”

Porker had been gross enough in real life; dead, naked, and gutted, he was grosser still. Lydia swung the hewer, hoping the creature’s huge limbs would be too sluggish to respond. Instead the fat hands blurred, caught the hewer below the blade, and tossed it aside. The big boyish pumpkin grin blazed in the moonlight.

The clock read 11:45. Lydia shucked her Trooper, without much confidence. She remembered how effective bullets were against the dead. Nevertheless, she fired two Magnums into Porker’s plump face. His head jerked back, the face cracked. One more double tap from the Trooper widened the crack to a grinning fissure, but like a monster sleepwalker, Porker continued to lope for her. Flaps of white flab hung ragged around the opened belly, through which the obvious erection peeked. Porker grinned in spite of his divided face, and said, “You haven’t had it till you’ve had it from a dead man.”

Despair touched her frown. Lydia was sick to death of being a sex object to monsters and dead men. She shrieked, disgusted, as Porker’s body collided into her. Before she could even get off her last two shots, he dragged her down, straddled her, and began to open her pants.

««—»»

The labyrinth was cold now, like a meat locker. Wade’s breath condensed before his face. The psilight was so low he could see neither walls nor floor. Only the extromitter dot of each access guided him from place to place. Tracking guidance point, he forced steadily into memory, searching.

He shivered, yet the bomb in his hand seemed to be gaining temperature. Soon it would be too hot to hold. He glanced, almost casually, from the next subinlet. The sign hovered:

EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT.

“Eureka!” he whooped. He extromitted into the canted chamber of glowing red and yellow threads. The crisscrossing, intense light brightened even as he watched. Wade didn’t know this place from a hole in the ground, but there was one thing he felt sure of: something big was in the works, and it was going to happen soon.

Sweating, he dropped the bomb on the floor and extromitted back out.

Dead sensorposts extruded from the ceiling. Thank God they were inactive now. Getting in had been easy, and he saw no reason why getting out shouldn’t be just as easy. “Home, James,” he muttered. He plugged in his key, thinking down down down! and disappeared into the glowing black slit.

««—»»

Porker was drooling on her, fumbling with her pants. Lydia couldn’t even squirm against the tremendous, dead weight. The broken face and toothy grin twitched in lust.

Gagging, she poked the Trooper. The blue steel barrel entered the spreading crack and she squeezed off round number five. Gun smoke and bits of pulp gusted back into her own face. She heard something clink, and Porker stiffened.

She fired the last round, keeping the barrel deep in his face. Like a lid, the top of his skull blew off—the transceptionrod flew across the room. Porker made a deep, lowing sound, like an impaled cow, then sidled over, dead.

“Thank you, Colonel Colt,” she whispered, and glanced at the clock: 11:47. What bothered her most, as she grabbed the hewer and began to extromit, was this: If they’d seen fit to bring Porker back from the dead, what had they done with…

««—»»

Sergeant J. T. Peerce stepped out of the final subinlet before the main point access. “St. John! Over here!”

Wade froze. A reflex nearly caused him to use his jeans for a bathroom. Peerce waved from the servicepass, wearing a clean police uniform and the same redneck sneer he’d been born with. In other words, Peerce looked normal.

“I saw you die,” Wade stammered. “Last night, in the grove.”

“Do I look like I’m dead, you daddy rich nitwit?”

But how could this be? “I saw the sisters kill you!”

“You musta been seein’ things, then, ’cos I’m standin’ here, ain’t I? I got away from them bitches after you and Chief White split. Come on, will ya!”

Wade considered this. He’d been scared shitless last night, and come to think of it, he wasn’t really sure what he’d seen. Sometimes the trauma of horror played games with the mind.

“What are you doing here?” Wade asked, still unsure.

“Lookin’ for you, ya moe ron. Prentiss got half the force out searchin’ for ya. She said ya might’ve come back here when we found that punk Jervis’ body with no key ’round his neck.”

Wade took several cautious steps forward. The power of suggestion plus seeing Peerce alive and well left him no choice but to be convinced.

“Come on, goddamn it! We gotta hightail it outta here. Prentiss told me this place takes off in ten minutes. Move it!”

But seeing was believing, wasn’t it? Or at least seeing what you wanted to believe. Right now all Wade wanted to see was someone on his side.

He shed his reservations and approached Peerce.

“By the way,” Peerce inquired. “Why’d you come back in here anyway? It don’t make no sense.”

“Before Jervis died, he told me to plant the b—” A quick shock hacked off the last word. Wade’s knees locked up.

A whorl of intestines had popped out of Peerce’s shirt.

“Aw, shee it,” Peerce griped, looking down. Then he looked at Wade with a dead grin. “Almost had ya goin’ for it, huh?”

Wade turned and ran, and Peerce ran after him. Peerce was faster, despite the inconvenience of dragging intestines. The iron hand snatched Wade by the neck and raised him off his feet.

“I wanna know what ya were doin’ in here, St. John.”

Wade, choking, noticed that Peerce was chewing tobacco. He also noticed the transceptionrod sunk deep in his head.

“I was looking for some cuff links I lost,” Wade wheezed.

Peerce spat brown juice. He opened a switchblade. “Punk rich boy piece a shit. Start talking by the time I count three. If ya don’t” —Peerce grinned— “then I start carving.”

The blade flashed in front of Wade’s left eye.

“One.”

Did I come all this way just to get snuffed by a dead redneck cop? Wade asked himself against a hail of incredulity.

“Two.”

His heels kicked high on the wall. He could feel his face turning blue.

“Maybe you’ll feel like talkin’ once I pop one of them rich boy eyeballs out,” Peerce said. Then he said, “Three.”

««—»»

As she’d guessed, Peerce had caught Wade. She swung the hewer low right to high left. The unimaginably heavy blade was suddenly aerodynamic; it glided through the air with the greatest of proverbial ease—swoooooooosh—and took Peerce’s head off in a perfect line.

Lydia laughed in spite of herself. The head bounced off one wall, then another, then rolled down the servicepass. But—

“Lydia!” Wade yelled.

Peerce’s headless body remained standing. The switchblade remained in his hand—

“Pull the rod out of his head!”

What? she thought. She dropped the hewer and turned. It was too dark to see where the head had rolled, but then she stumbled on something and fell on it, like a fumble drill. She felt the top of the head, found the transception knob, then grabbed it with her fingers and pulled.

“Hurry!” Wade yelled, still held aloft.

She pulled and pulled. The rod wouldn’t come out. It was like trying to unseat a masonry nail from cement.

Wade was screaming.

Peerce’s severed head expectorated tobacco juice into her face. Thanks a lot, she thought. She raised the head to her mouth, grasped the rod flange with her teeth, and yanked.

Amid an awful, dry grinding sound, the rod began to come loose. Now it was Peerce’s head that was screaming. The rod jerked out of the skull in half inch stops. Peerce’s standing, headless corpse was shuddering in place.

When the transceptionrod came out all the way, the knife-wielding cadaver collapsed.

Lydia threw the head as hard as she could against the passwall. It cracked like heavy porcelain. Wade staggered as if drunk down the pass. “You like to keep a guy in suspense, don’t you?”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so. At least I don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. What time is it?”

Lydia consulted her watch. “Eleven fifty four.”

“We’ve got six minutes.”

They ran like slapstick idiots down the pass. Wade held onto her as they extromitted down to the next level. “What did you bring that for?” he asked, noticing the UV spotter on her belt.

“In case the sisters are around.”

“They’re all either dead or hibernating,” he informed her. “At least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”

They weren’t two steps into the next servicepass when, at once, their surroundings went from dark to light. Suddenly they were standing in brilliant radiance; the labyrinth’s ice cold changed to stunning heat. Myriad sensorposts glowed in shimmering black, and all around them the labyrinth hummed like high tension power lines.

Lydia checked her watch. “Eleven fifty five,” she said.

“Recharge,” Wade realized.

“Does that mean—”

“It means the Supremate knows we’re here.”

««—»»

Nina McCulloch woke up alone in a hospital bed. What was she doing here? The room’s only light came from the window.

She’d had a terrible dream.

Elizabeth and her two friends. The hooded girl in the black cloak. And Jervis Phillips, dead but walking.

It wasn’t a dream, she realized. It was the devil.

But God had saved her from that, hadn’t He?

Some police had brought her to the hospital. Nina prayed thanks to God. She wondered, though, if the devil had been vanquished. Show me a sign, Lord, she prayed.

The room filled with light.

It came from the window. Nina got up to look. At first she thought it must be a fire of some kind, it was miles distant. Forest fire? she thought. Plane crash?

She saw a gaseous yellow aura rising in the sky. It seemed to be coming from past the campus, the forest near the agro site. It wasn’t a fire, though. It was an emanation.

No, Nina thought. A sign!

««—»»

The Supremate’s pre recharge sleep was over. Fleeing the labyrinth’s hot and glowing bowels made Wade think of Jonah and the whale. He and Lydia came out on the last level. The fully energized sign beamed at the end of the pass: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

They stopped in their tracks. A hum vibrated in their heads. When they turned around, they saw six sisters emerge from the extromitter behind them.

“Pardon me while I shit my pants,” Wade muttered. These sisters were the biggest he’d seen. They were beautiful in their immense, alien hybridized perfection. The last one to emerge stood over eight feet tall.

“I’m going to burn these bitches down,” Lydia said. She pushed Wade toward the last extromitter. Cloaked, the sisters advanced, showing fang crammed grins. They moved slowly at first, then began to run so fast they seemed aflight. Lydia set the UV spotter on the floor.

“Turn it on!” Wade shouted.

But Lydia was waiting for them to get close. When the first two were only yards away, she flicked the spotter on. Shrieks whistled. The sisters leading the pack began to smolder, then their white faces exploded. Wade and Lydia were splattered.

“Run!” Lydia yelled. They tore for the extromitter. Lydia was plugging in her key. Wade glanced back. Fangs glittered from flashes of wailing faces. Smoke poured out of frantic black cloaks as the phalanx of sisters hulled into the field of ultraviolet light. Flesh sizzled amid the onslaught of shrieks. Spheric eyes ruptured, torrents of fresh, black blood fell like rain as crisped hands reached out from the billow of oily smoke. Then the rank of corpses fell atop the spotter and died. But the spotter was under them, its deadly invisible light buried by their sizzling bodies.

“Oh, shit,” Wade muttered.

The last and largest sister remained. Spots of flesh cooked on her face, yet she had survived. Her fangs protracted, and she lunged over the corpses.

Lydia grabbed Wade’s hand and pulled him through the humming slit.

On the other side, Wade again caught only glimpses of things, unstable fragments: the rocking backdrop of Besser’s office, paneled walls, furniture, the carpeted floor, and Lydia tugging on him trying to drag him through. The desk clock read 11:59. Wade had oozed through the extromitter by everything but his right ankle. Lydia pulled and pulled but he wasn’t moving—

The sister’s hand had his ankle, pulling him back. Lydia yanked from one side while the sister yanked from the other. This was a tug of war, and Wade was the rope. He was being pulled between the threshold of two worlds.

Lydia gave a final heave, and Wade’s ankle came through the wall, along with the sister’s arm.

The desk clock’s lighted digits read 12:00.

A sound like an air raid siren whistled into the room, and a terrifying, vibrating drone. The extromission egress turned bright red, then snapped closed. Wade’s release came as suddenly as a knife to a climber’s rope. He was thrown into the middle of the office, tumbling into Lydia’s lap.

The sister’s arm had detached at the elbow and lay severed on the carpeted floor.

Wade and Lydia looked up at the wall.

The extromitter dot was gone, which could only mean that the labyrinth was gone too.

—

CHAPTER 43

Nobody ever knew what happened, except, of course, for Lydia and Wade. The newspapers did their best to speculate as to Exham College’s spate of disappearances and murder. One paper blamed a clandestine drug ring. Another blamed the Dixie Mafia, while still another blamed, of all things, a satanic cult. Wade was tempted to write an article himself, about aliens abducting humans for genetic hybridization experiments, but he doubted that even the lowest of tabloids would go for anything so farfetched.

As after any great calamity, things eventually returned to normal. Dean Saltenstall’s murder had been blamed on a burglar. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White had fallen in the line of duty to drug merchants. Within days, the campus had appointed a new dean, and the town counsel had elected a new chief of police.

««—»»

“Hi, Dad. This is Wade!”

“I would never have guessed,” came Dad’s stolid reply over the phone line. “What did you do this week, son?”

Wade contemplated the full weight of the answer. I saved the world, he wished he could say. “Oh, the usual,” he said instead. “Worked, studied, that sort of thing. Just another week in the life of a diligent student.”

“Sounds like the usual bullshit to me,” Dad commented.

Wade lay back in bed, eyeing Lydia. She stood at the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth. Wade nearly swooned: All she wore was a pair of devil red frilled panties.

“Wade, Wade? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m still here… Look, there’s something I have to tell you—”

“Goddamn it! Not another traffic ticket!”

“No, Dad. This is good news. I’m…engaged.”

“You’re what?”

“Engaged. You know, as in getting married.”

“I know what engaged means, Wade. Engaged to who?”

Wade smiled. “The chief of police.”

“You’re telling me that you’re engaged to Chief White?”

“No, Dad. The new chief of police. Her name’s Lydia. She’s a little bitchy sometimes, but boy has she got a great ass.”

A wet washrag flew from the bathroom and slapped Wade in the face. “You’re gonna love her, Dad. Guaranteed.”

“You never cease to amaze me, son.”

“Sure, but isn’t that how it’s, supposed to be?”

Wade left his father with the expected doubts. The old ballbuster would come around in time, like just about anyone’s dad. Wade saw it as the first smart decision of his life. And with any luck it would be the first of many.

“So I’ve got a great ass, huh?” Now Lydia was brushing her beautiful white blond hair. “That’s the son to father consensus?”

“Great legs too. And hooters…” Wade whistled.

“You’re a sexist pig, but I guess I can live with it.”

Wade lounged back in the pillows. Happy ever after? he wondered. Who knew? Who ever knew? But he just had a funny feeling that this was going to work.

“Sweetheart?”

Lydia glared. “Don’t call me sweetheart. It’s so domestic.”

“Okay…honeybunch. Something just occurred to me, just now when I was on the phone with Dad.”

“What?”

“We saved the world.”

Lydia’s expression widened in the mirror. The black bomb would’ve destroyed the vital tracking systems. Right now, the labyrinth was space junk floating lost across the galaxy. It would never return to where it had come from.

“And I just thought of something else,” Wade continued his muse. “I wonder what happened to Besser?”

««—»»

On that particular night, Besser had crawled brokenly across the grove. He’d escaped the labyrinth only to find himself trapped in this thing laden morass. He choked on green fog. Horned insects drilled into his flesh; hot gourds and carcasses plump with moist rot crumpled beneath his paddling hands and knees. His leg was numb now; it dragged along behind him like a ball and chain. Things like eyeless rats the size of groundhogs bit chunks out of it as he crawled farther into the grove. The leech mouthed fog snakes swam about him en masse, biting out a piece of flesh here, a collop of fat there. Even the vegetation attacked him as he crawled on. Bulbs dipped from sagging branches, spreading jaws full of crystal teeth. Grime caked vines threatened to entangle him. Some large shivering pod burst at its tip and vomited a gush of seeds and stinking black slop into his face. Oh, Mother, he thought beneath his sobs.

One of the fog snakes tore out the seat of his pants, then more—many more—converged to take bites out of his huge buttocks. Professor Besser screamed louder than the horn on his De Ville when something unseen sunk teeth like sewing needles into one of his testicles. The entire grove was conspiring to consume him bit by bit. Just as he concluded that he could go no farther, his face rose out of the fogtop. He trundled forward, at once delirious with excitement. Who said there were no miracles? Besser had managed to crawl clear across the horrid grove, and he’d survived!

Praise heaven! he thought.

He looked at his watch: 11:55. Recharge.

The entire forest moaned. The fog churned like a lake in heavy rain. Through the trees, Besser could see the unearthly oblong box that was the labyrinth. From its corners, spears of yellow light lanced into the sky, and then billows of luminous yellow gas began to rise. The labyrinth was recharging its electromagnetic launch systems. Besser had to shield his eyes—light as intense as the sun flooded the grove. The fog was boiling like a cauldron of green stew. Besser crawled for cover. Five minutes later came a brilliant yellow flash, then darkness.

And silence.

He peered out. The labyrinth had pulsed off, on its way to its next world. At once the grove and its unholy inhabitants began to blacken and die.

Besser limped into the outer clearing, using a sturdy branch as a crutch. He had time now to put his life back together, but the first thing he had to do was get to a hospital.

The second thing was to find Wade St. John and kill him.

He crutched clumsily toward the logging road which led to Route 13. That’s when he noticed the hole. When he bent over to take a closer look, two flabby hands reached up and grabbed onto his head.

««—»»

Penelope couldn’t have been more pleased. What a nice surprise to have a visitor! She pulled Besser down, down, down into her hole. She’d actually gotten to like it down here. So many days and nights of hard work—throwing out dirt and packing the walls smooth and tight—had enabled her to prepare quite an impressive little underground home. There was plenty of room for her to move around. She could lounge back, stretch, flop about—all at her leisure. What more could a boneless girl ask for? It was cozy and snug, and she was proud of it.

The appearance of her old biology professor couldn’t have been better timed. Slobbering, she shrieked her enthusiasm, wrapping boneless arms around his neck. She had a hard time squeezing him through—he was so fat—but her new and inspired strength eventually jerked him all the way into the earthen cavern.

Besser screamed and screamed and screamed while Penelope made blubbering giggles. Much like pulling tomatoes off a vine, she twisted his testicles off and crushed them to pulp in her hands. She reasoned that Besser was to blame for the death of her first baby—he’d allowed that awful sister to eat it—so she equally reasoned that it was his obligation to give her a new baby. She cooed as she scraped the sperm laden pulp off her hands into her amorphous sex.

Besser was still screaming, for reasons most would deem legitimate. Penelope used a broken Kirin bottle to open him up, parting shanks of flab as easily as new churned butter, and she cut very deep indeed. Deeper, deeper, and down, the sharp glass sliced into squirming fat to unveil the succulent organs of his great tremoring gut.

True, the sisters had removed her bones, but Penelope still had her teeth, thank God, and after all her labors down here, she had worked up a considerable appetite.

THE END

Edward Lee (seen here with his new electronic cigarette) has had more than 40 books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the hardcore novel HAUNTER OF THE THRESHOLD. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com