Smith blinked.
“But you’re wrong,” he said. “We know how to kill you.”
“Only the four of you,” the creature said. “And there’s plenty you don’t know.”
“We’ll learn,” Smith said grimly.
“You can try,” the thing said, “but I doubt you’ll live that long.”
“Is that a threat?”
The thing just grinned at him.
Smith pushed the knife a little deeper, and the grin vanished.
“So when we let you go,” he asked, “What are you going to do?”
The creature shrugged.
“Are you going to go on pretending to be Sandy Niklasen? Living a mockery of his life, the way those things over at Bedford Mills are going through the motions, pretending to be the people they ate?”
“Probably not,” it said. “You’ve torn up this skin some, after all. It’s not going to heal up.”
Khalil’s grip on the thing tightened suddenly. Smith’s eyes narrowed.
“You mean you’ll kill somebody else, and wear his skin? Or hers?”
“Hey!” it said, and suddenly the voice wasn’t Sandy’s at all any more, it was Bill Goodwin’s. “Lighten up!”
“Is that what you meant?” Smith demanded through clenched teeth, and the knife cut down more deeply, pulling down through the grey flesh, opening a slit in the shirt and the skin beneath. Behind him, Annie gasped.
“Yes, it’s what I meant!” the creature snarled, still in Goodwin’s voice. “Of course it’s what I meant! I can’t go out in the sun without a human skin to protect me – it burns, it’s like needles, like acid. And I can’t even go out at night unless I hide every time a human happens along – you know what I really look like! Bad enough that this skin doesn’t fit, it binds and itches, but it’s better than nothing, and now you’ve gone and cut it open, so of course I’ll get another. Idiot!”
“You mean if we let you go, you’ll murder some other innocent person, just so you won’t have to worry about sunburn.”
“If? We had a deal, Smith!”
“Fuck our deal, monster!” Smith replied. “I’m not going to let you go out and kill someone for his skin!” The knife drove in clear to the hilt, and everyone in the room heard upholstery tear as the blade came out the nightmare thing’s back and cut into the cushions beneath.
The thing surged upward, pulling Khalil forward, and its arms swung forward around Smith’s neck. Gleaming black fingernails, inches long, thrust out through the tips of the fingers, shredding Sandy’s skin and digging into Smith’s back as Smith dove down into the thing’s chest.
Smith worked the knife with both hands, ignoring the pain in his back, ignoring the stink that rose up around him, ignoring the squirming, sawing it through the stubborn gray flesh until he found what he was looking for, the black slug-shaped heart.
He cut around it and pulled it free, and the thing gasped.
He put it to his mouth and set his teeth on it.
The thing let out a low, keening wail. Its claws stopped digging into him.
“Wait, Smith,” it said, “Wait, please, I’ll do anything.”
Smith looked at its face.
Smith looked at Sandy’s stolen face.
It still looked exactly like Sandy, and its features were twisted in an expression of abject terror – an expression that Smith was sure the real Sandy never wore in his life. Its eyes, still falsely brown, were pleading.
The heart he held was pulsing faintly, and a thin, clear slime was oozing from it, making it slippery and hard to hold. He set his teeth in more firmly.
“Please, Smith!” it said.
He opened his mouth, still holding the heart in both hands. He looked down at the thing’s chest.
The opening had healed over, but a concavity revealed the heart’s absence. Sandy’s shirt and the skin of Sandy’s chest were ripped back, torn open like the foil and skin on a baked potato.
“You killed Sandy,” Smith said.
The thing nodded.
“And Bill Goodwin?” Smith asked.
It nodded again.
“And Elias’s mother?”
Another nod.
“And if I let you go, you’ll kill someone else, won’t you?”
“No!” it said, pleading, “No, I swear, I won’t! I’ll stay inside, I’ll let the others take care of me, please!”
“You were the one we burned?” Smith asked.
It nodded again. Its fingers twitched, as if it wanted to grab its heart but didn’t dare.
“There are a hundred and forty-three of you? That’s all? Or are there others, in other towns?”
“Just us. A hundred and forty-three. That’s all so far.”
“So far?”
It nodded.
“You mean there might be more someday?” Smith asked. “More are going to just appear?”
It shook its head. “No, there’s only one first appearance, but we’ll breed, of course.”
“You will?”
It nodded.
“How? Like people? Like vampires?”
It shook its head. “Neither,” it said. “We have our own way.”
The depression in its chest seemed to be growing, deepening.
“Give it back!” it wailed, looking down at itself.
Smith lifted the heart higher, further from the thing’s body. “How do you breed?” he asked.
“Give it back!”
“How do you breed?”
“Larvae,” it said, “Larvae that grow inside your people. Give it back!”
“Larvae?” Smith looked from the creature’s face to the black object he held. He had thought of it as the thing’s heart, but now he reconsidered. “Like this?”
The nightmare creature nodded. “Sort of like that,” it said, “It splits, and half of it stays with the parent, and the other half goes down someone’s throat and then eats its way out to the skin as it grows.”
Smith looked at what he held with sudden revulsion, and almost dropped it. Khalil’s face twisted with disgust, and they could hear Annie retch.
“You mean if I swallowed this, it could eat me?”
“No,” the thing said, “Not… I mean, yeah, it could, you’d better give it back…”
Khalil jerked the thing’s head back.
“You’re a lousy liar,” Smith said. He lifted the black lump to his mouth.
“No, no, don’t!” the creature begged. “It… I’ll tell you!”
“Talk,” Smith said.
“At the full moon,” it said. “And the larvae has to be intact. It’s vulnerable, it’s not like an adult. But every full moon, we can spawn, and it takes two weeks, until the new moon, for the new person to grow into its skin.”
Smith lowered the thing again. “You mean that in a few weeks, there will be more of you?”
It nodded. “Yes,” it said.
“How many?” Smith asked.
“We can all reproduce each month, if we… if we’ve eaten someone, and of course all of us, we each got someone when we first appeared, all but the one who was supposed to get you, and he got someone later…”
“Who?” Smith interrupted. “Who’d he get?”
“Joe Samaan – Elias’s father.”
Smith and Khalil glanced at each other.
“So that’s why he stopped bothering me,” Smith muttered. Then he looked back at the nightmare person. “Go on,” he said, “You were going to tell me how many of you there will be.”
“Well, we can all reproduce, so we’ll double – from one forty-three to two eighty-six.”
Smith shook his head.
“No,” he said, “Not two eighty-six.” He lifted the black mass, trying to ignore the increasing flow of slime. “Two eighty-four, at most.”
He took a bite.
The thing screamed.
Smith had trouble choking the stuff down, but he eventually managed it all, despite the slime and the stink.
The screaming lasted for twenty minutes.
Chapter Ten:
Wednesday, August 9th;
Thursday, August 10th