The Nightmare People

3.

It was a very satisfactory blaze as far as it went, Smith thought. The blast had blown out solid concrete walls. Most of C Building had caved in, as he had hoped, and any nightmare people who had been in there were not going to be out roaming around tonight as if nothing had happened.

He supposed that they could slip out easily enough, but not with their disguises intact. By the time they tracked down new victims for their skins, would they have time to find new ones for their larvae, as well?

He frowned. Or might they plant the larvae first?

Not if anyone saw them coming, of course, and without their disguises that meant they could only attack sleeping victims.

And who, around here, would be asleep, with all this going on?

How far could they get, without intact skins, with cops and firemen and onlookers on all sides?

And the fire had spread quickly; D Building was ablaze from roof to basement.

Unfortunately, A and B buildings hadn’t caught. He had stashed open cans of gasoline around empty apartments in both of them, the apartments that had been occupied by the nightmare people he and his comrades had destroyed; he had hoped that a spark would carry, but he hadn’t managed to rig anything more definite.

Blinking against the heat and glare he crept across the parking lot, unnoticed by anything human – all eyes seemed to be on the burning buildings.

But of course, there were eyes present that weren’t human at all.

He tried to move casually, and stepped down onto the little patio of apartment B11 as if he were just trying to get a better view.

He had the crowbar under his shirt, Sandy Niklasen’s cigarette lighter in one pocket of his shorts, Khalil’s switchblade in another. He didn’t expect to need the crowbar or the knife; this apartment, occupied until three days before, was one he had broken into that morning and hidden gasoline in.

He reached the door and tugged at it.

It didn’t move.

Startled, he pulled harder.

It still didn’t move.

He looked in through the glass and saw that someone had wedged it shut with a piece of one-by-two.

“Shit,” he muttered. He pulled up his shirt and pulled the crowbar up out of the waistband of his shorts. Then he glanced around, to see if anyone was watching.

Someone was. A familiar face was hanging down over the edge of the balcony overhead.

“Howdy, Mr. Smith,” said the thing that had replaced Nora Hagarty.

He froze, and stood staring at it.

He didn’t have his carving knife. The switchblade was in his back pocket, on the right, and his right hand held the crowbar.

Besides, the chances were that the thing wasn’t alone.

He remembered that Nora Hagarty’s apartment was B22, but the one directly above him now would be B21 – that meant the creature was visiting.

It wouldn’t be alone.

And this was the night of the full moon. If the thing reached him now, and got its larva down his throat, it would take him two weeks to die.

What he had seen happen to Elias was hideous, but at least it was fairly quick; if this one got him now, on this one particular night, the same thing would happen in slow motion.

Two weeks, it would take.

Two weeks.

Another figure, man-shaped, leaned around the corner of the entryway; he couldn’t see its face, just a black outline against the roaring inferno that had been C Building, but when it smiled, a stray reflection from the glass door behind him showed him shining needle teeth gleaming orange in the firelight. And the thing that had Nora Hagarty’s face was doing something the real Nora Hagarty would never have attempted, swinging itself down over the balcony railing, ape-like, preparing to drop down to the patio below.

He turned back to the door and swung the crowbar with all his strength.

The glass snapped, and a spiderweb of cracks appeared, but it didn’t shatter.

“Fucking safety glass,” he muttered, and swung again.

A soft plop behind him told him that the Hagarty thing was down. He didn’t look back.

The glass shattered this time; he kicked his way through and into B11.

Red eyes gleamed at him from the hallway, and a smile reflected firelight from silver teeth.

“Oh, shit.” He ran for the doorway of the apartment; even as he did, it opened, and another figure stood there.

The gasoline. Where had he put the gas in this one?

In the bedroom; he had poured half a can on the bed, then closed the door, hoping that it wouldn’t all evaporate away. The other half-gallon he had stood in the closet with the cap loose.

In the bedroom – at the other end of the hallway.

There were two of them behind him, coming in through the shattered glass door, and one standing in the hallway smirking, and another in the door to the stairwell, and that just left the kitchen.

He ran for it, and made it – but so what?

The kitchen was just a walk-through, with counter and cabinets on one side and appliances on the other, and open at each end – one to the dining area, one to the hallway. And at the hallway end the nightmare creature was already waiting, smiling at him.

He snatched at the cabinets, pulling them open, and found what he wanted – a quart bottle of cooking oil. He pulled it out, opened it, and poured half of it on the floor.

The creature’s smile vanished, to be replaced by puzzlement.

Smith pulled out Sandy’s lighter, knelt, and flicked the wheel, then touched the flame to the pool of oil.

It took longer to catch than he had expected, but when it did it flared up quite satisfactorily; he lost most of the hair off one forearm, and tumbled over backwards, away from the flames.

The nightmare people, two at each end of the kitchen, frowned at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” one of them asked.

“Trying to get a fire going,” Smith told it. “If I’m going to die, I don’t want to leave enough skin on the four of you to do you any good.”

Only when he said that did he realize that that really was his plan, that he didn’t know of any way he might survive.

He realized he was sprawled on the floor next to the burning oil, and he got to his feet.

The front of one of the floor cabinets seemed to be catching; he splashed more oil at it. Then he pulled down a canister and spilled flour onto the flames.

It roared up, and he backed away, almost into the hands of the two at the near end.

“Get some wet towels from the bathroom!” one of them called.

One of the two in the hallway vanished, presumably to fetch towels.

Inspired, Smith yanked out the end of the roll of paper towels from the wall beside the sink, feeding it into the flames; the fire raced up the streamer, leaving fluttering black cinders drifting in the air en route, and settled onto the roll itself.

Smith’s eyes stung, and he was beginning to have trouble breathing. He pulled open a drawer, looking for more flammables.

He found knives.

He pulled out a big carving knife and smiled at it.

“Maybe,” he said, “I can take one of you with me.” He spun, and flung himself at the two in the dining area.

They were concentrating on the fire more than on him, and the sudden attack caught them off-guard; one fell back, while the other staggered.

Smith landed atop the fallen one, and drove the knife into it.

“At least,” he said, as he dragged the blade through resisting fabric and flesh, “I’ll ruin that skin for you.”

The other one was pulling at him, and he pulled the knife free long enough to slash at it.

He took the tip off its nose, and the severed scrap flew back into the burning kitchen. It didn’t seem to notice.

The two at the other end of the kitchen were back, with dripping towels, and trying to beat out the flames. Smith ignored them; he was concentrating on hacking open the chest of the one beneath him, the one, he realized, that wore Nora Hagarty’s skin.

The other one was still trying to pry him loose; he twisted, and bit its hand.

It howled, and fell back, away from him.

“Hey,” someone called, “Give us a hand here!”

The false Nora Hagarty had its hands on his throat now, and that, combined with the smoke, made it almost impossible to breathe. His vision started to dim.

He pulled the knife free and to the side, and shoved his face down between the thing’s breasts. He began chewing.

It screamed, and scrabbled at him with its claws, but in doing so it released his throat. He lifted his head long enough to gulp air, then dove back down, ignoring the smell and the taste and the flailing claws.

Blood was running from somewhere and dripping from his chin, and the heat of the fire was like a furnace at his back. The other three creatures were no longer concerned with him at all; they were all concentrating solely on the fire, which was blazing up wildly, seemingly unstoppable.

The screaming continued, an eerie inhuman screeching that hurt his ears, but Smith was used to that now. He ignored it.

Some small part of Smith’s brain, somewhere beneath the unthinking berserk panic that drove him, was noting that nightmare people, as he had previously seen, were not much on empathy, even for their own kind. The three of them had apparently decided that the fire was a greater danger to them than Smith, or at least a more immediate one, and they were selfishly letting him kill their comrade, right in front of them, while they tried to stop the blaze from spreading.

Well, after all, weren’t they self-proclaimed evil incarnate? Loyalty to one’s kind would be foreign to them.

Something moved, close up against his face, something cool and damp that squirmed, and he remembered that this thing had been ready to breed.

He raised his head and looked down.

The creature’s hands slapped onto his cheeks, claws extended; he grabbed them and yanked them away and looked at the thing’s open chest.

Where before he had always found a black slug-like mass that throbbed gently, here he found two, one much as always, and nestled against it a smaller one, shining moistly, that writhed like a dying, fresh-caught fish.

The larva.

Smith picked it up with one hand and flung it into the fire behind him.

He hoped that, immature as it was, that would kill it; he wasn’t about to eat the thing.

Even if the fire didn’t kill it, just being without a host body might be enough. The nightmare he had interrogated the week before had said that the larvae were vulnerable until they found hosts.

Claws projecting through the skin of Nora’s fingertips raked down his face again, and he forgot the larva as he struggled to force his target’s hands and arms aside, to get back at its heart before the opening in its chest closed up again.

He bent his head down and pressed with his full weight, and the arms gave. His face sank into the oozing mess, his teeth closed on the black core; he held his breath, closed his eyes, and continued eating.

When it went limp he rolled off it, and realized that one of his shoelaces was on fire and both shoes were smoldering. One leg was obviously badly burned.

The other three nightmare people were gone. The fire was raging out of control.

He staggered to his feet, ignoring the pain of his burns, the pain of the dozens of places that the nightmare thing had clawed him, and made his way out through the shattered glass door into a night of fire and chaos.

There were still plenty of nightmare people around, and A building was still untouched by the conflagration, but Smith was too far gone to care about that. By now, he was unconcerned with anything but escape.