Ghostlands

FORTY-FOUR

I’m a science geek, not an English major, Theo Siegel thought as he fled bearing Melissa Wade from the shattered ruin of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building, on the campus at Atherton. He knew he would never adequately be able to describe the shining, avaricious mass that oozed from the wrecked building and began its inexorable advance on the town. Its aurora glow of purple and blue and green was something like the night-washed waves pounding the shore along the Sea of Cortez, where his late father (a geek, too, from a long line of geeks) had taken him and his girl cousins back when he was a kid. But it was also like some sickly mold on a basement-damp orange, like something repulsive coming off a gone-to-liquid corpse.

However you described it, though, you sure as hell wouldn’t want to touch it, or have it touch you.

As he staggered away, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and that freakin’ portal (which he knew as surely as the waist size on his jockey shorts was continuing to pour fiendish energy like water from a gut-burst dam), he saw townies and college gits alike disgorge from buildings on all sides, gape at the shining crud coming off the physics quad, then take to their heels getting the hell away; clear out of town, if they knew what was good for them. Word was spreading, and fast, which was a damn good thing. ’Cause what didn’t get out got ate. Theo felt that one right on down to his Converse All-Stars.

The sky above him was dark, apart from fitful light reflected from a passing cloud; the moon was down. But the weird, expanding glow illuminated the streets and buildings, too. They didn’t need Jeff’s streetlights-dead as Mussolini now-to see which way the wind blew.

Melissa seemed to gain substance as he carried her farther from the portal and perhaps, therefore, from the Source. But substance wasn’t health. Although she felt heavier, less ethereal, she was clearly sick. He could see a pallid sheen like fevered moonlight on her face, her eyes swept closed. Unconscious, she spasmed in her sleep, and one particularly violent convulsion threatened to shake her out of his arms altogether.

Even in the pulsing, cold dimness he could observe that her hair was starting to blanch, her face grow thin, the cheeks more pronounced.

He knew what was happening to her; it didn’t take a rocket scientist (or even a physics grad) to figure that out.

Somehow, that eruption of bad news, of pure evil crud vomiting out from the Source, had rendered the stone in Melissa’s neck null and void; it was no longer stopping her transformation.

She was changing, transmuting into what Jeff Arcott had been able to defer only for a time, the gates of the portal swinging wide now serving to unleash it.

Melissa burned hot in his grasp. His arms were heavy with fatigue, they ached dreadfully. But then, so did his legs and neck and back; his entire musculature, in fact, and skeleton, too. It felt to him paradoxically as if he were both lengthening and compressing, and the dread that filled him made him want to tear open his chest with bloody fingers and let loose a scream beyond anything his voice could proclaim.

I’m changing, too.

He knew it for a certainty, in the shivers that cascaded along his flesh, the agony that drove like a railway spike through his skull.

But this time, there would be no reprieve. Because there in the physics lab, Theo had seen Jeff Arcott consumed by the result of what he himself had built.

Jeff, who had not previously transformed into anything, who had stayed completely human…

Jeff had fixed them once upon a time, he and Melissa, had cured them. That had been shortly after the Change, when Atherton was still dark and increasingly empty as the population drifted away in search of some better place or succumbed to personal transformation, became drifters and refugees, and grunters and flares and the occasional hulking dragon, and other nameless things.

It had been a breathless, perfect evening in late summer, Theo recalled. Jeff had just gotten his first great brainstorm, had begun feverishly working on the set of wonders that would restore the town. They had been picnicking, the three of them, when Melissa took a chill and grew wan. Theo recognized the signs; he had seen it happen to others.

She was turning into a flare.

It was he who had thrown a blanket over her, hustled her with Jeff to Medical Sciences and put her on a gurney. They’d wheeled her to a room where, by candlelight and without benefit of anesthetic, Jeff had opened a flap of skin at the back of her neck above her spine and inserted a ring of sterilized garnets and amethysts, then sewn the skin together again with a surgical needle and lengths of coarse black suture.

For Melissa, all this had passed as in a fever dream. But when she woke, the fever had broken, the pain was gone, and the curious lightness she felt had yielded to the familiar sumptuous draw of gravity.

Jeff would never explain how he had known what to do, how the gems had conserved her humanity (or Theo’s, when soon after it had seemed inevitable that he would become one more grunter).

It was only much later that Theo tracked Jeff along the shadows to the railroad siding outside of town, discovered the black train and its towering master, its crew of deformed curs who were what he himself would have become…and learned from just where Jeff got his inspiration.

At the time, however, Jeff had claimed he’d simply known. Just as he had known how to revive Atherton from its extinction, give it back some semblance of normalcy.

The normalcy that had been mockery, mere illusion, now shredded and cast away.

Theo found his breaths were coming in short gasps; he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He reached the periphery of the Sculpture Garden, stumbled onto its grassy rise and set Melissa on an iron bench.

Only for a minute, he told himself, to regroup, get a second wind. We can’t let that shit catch up to us.

He ran a hand over what had been his injured leg, felt wonderingly that it was completely healed. True, it might ache like a Tin Woodman left to rust a million years, but say what you like, this metamorphosis crap sure beat major medical.

Curled in on herself there on the bench, Melissa looked like a child in an iron casket. Theo shuddered, and chased the thought from his mind.

He gazed back toward the physics building. The radiance was brighter now, surging in all directions, picking up speed as it gained assurance. Time for us to be making tracks, Theo realized, no matter how crappy he felt.

But when he turned back, Melissa was gone.