Wetbones

13

The Hills near Malibu

"He's out there, talkin' to nothin' again," Lonny said.

"He do that a lot? Prentice asked, wearily. He was pressing an old towel soaked in cold water against his battered head. "I did some of that myself, lately."

He and Lonny were sitting in the best-lit corner of the old shack. Prentice propped up on the bed, Lonny sitting on the rocking chair next to it. The dog paced restively near the closed wooden door, growling softly to itself.

"It's almost dawn, too," Lonny went on. "Fuckin Drax's been out there since midnight. Smokin' weed and chewing those cactus buttons and talking to those dolls on their posts out there. It's trippin' me out. Like he might geek out and come in here and smoke us with that shotgun. You sure you can't sleep? You oughta."

"Sure, like I can sleep when you talk about how this fuckin' crazy old hippy is going to come in and waste me while I'm sawing logs. Shit! Anyway, I think I remember something about how you're not supposed to sleep for a while if you get a concussion. If that's what this is."

"So let's get you to a doctor, dude."

''No. Drax says he's got a way to beat them. Let's check him out."

"If he's not just, like, hallucinatin' it."

Wincing, Prentice got up and walked to the window, and peered out at Drax. He was squatting between two of his kerosene lamps. Small white insects flung themselves at the lamp, drew back, and flung themselves again. The dawn was just adding aluminium filings to the blue steel of the sky. Drax said something inaudible, then cocked his head to listen. He rocked back on his heels, laughing, reacting to something that was said. By no one visible. Then he stood up, and stretched. Looked at the horizon. He stared into the white crescent of sun that showed over the hills. Then he turned, picked up a kerosene lamp in one hand and the shotgun in the other, and strode back to the shack.

Drax shouldered through the door, hands laden with gun and lamp – and paused to glare at Prentice as if he'd never seen him before. Then he seemed to remember, and grinned. "Yore wife got a great sense of humour. Says some damn funny things." He stalked past Prentice to the woodstove in the corner, hung the lamp on a nail, and dumped water from a bucket into a coffee pot sitting on the stove's white upper shelf. Some of the water spilled onto the stove griddle, and it sizzled into steam.

Prentice stared at him. After a moment, not caring much about the shotgun that Drax had leaned against the wall near the stove, said, "You're full of shit."

Drax nodded, his beard wagging. "Her name's Amy, am I right?"

Prentice shivered. "You found that out from someone else."

Lonny snorted. "You never told me her name. He be talking to Orphy, too, and he came back with some shit only Orphy know about."

It wasn't that Prentice disbelieved in the supernatural. Not after what he'd seen in the car. But he didn't want to believe Amy was… so close.

Drax took a brown sack of coffee from one of six stacked crates, all of them containing coffee, and dumped an unconscionable amount in the coffee pot. "Fuck you if you don't believe it, pal," he said cheerfully. "But how you think you found your way here? Luck? No more'n this boy did. I've been working on these here friendships for a while…"

They drank coffee and Prentice ate a plate of stale Oreo cookies, which Drax also bought by the crate. He declined marijuana. After drinking a cup of acrid coffee with a thoughtful look on his face, Drax hurried to the door, ran outside, and vomited explosively. Then he came back in, wiping his beard with the back of his hand, muttering, "Damn peyote do it to me most every time, when I drink coffee." And to Prentice's amazement poured himself another cup of coffee.

After they'd eaten, they went outside to pee. Prentice was feeling better. He pissed toward Denver's house, though it was hidden by the swell of a hill and trees and distance, and pissed toward Lissa's wrecked car, and spat once in that direction too. It did him good.

Then Drax said, "I want to show you what I got to kill them things with. If we got time to do it."

"What's this about 'time to do it'?" Prentice asked, walking with Drax and Lonny through the blue light of early morning, around the side of the shack.

"They going to reproduce like a motherfucker, so to speak," Drax said, "and if they get too far along we're dead meat. A wright. Here we go. What do you think?"

He flapped a hand in the general direction of the battered red '59 Ford pick-up. It was scored with rusty dents. Its front window had been knocked out. Its crooked hood was wired down. It had oversized tyres with big, stand-out tread. Some sort of old tractor tyres, never meant for a pick-up.

"What do I think of what?" Prentice asked, his headache beginning to pound again.

"The truck!" Drax said, impatiently, eyes wild. "That's how I'm gonna git 'em! What do you think?"

A Highway near Malibu

Garner was tired. He thought he could feel his bones bending with each wrenching turn the Cabriolet made as it shot along the freeway. Now and then the rising sun strobed in the hollows between hills and caught him a blinding flash in the eyes. He turned toward the west. His eyes were tired. His ribs ached. He was a mess.

But he was psyched, too. He might be close to Constance. Jeff Teitelbaum, at the wheel, was fresher than Garner. But Garner was less afraid. Garner was afraid of nothing but his addict.

"You know, Jeff," Garner said, "they might not be there. Your Mitch. My Constance. You could be wrong. Blume could be wrong. We could get trigger happy and kill some people who have nothing to do with this."

"Who killed Kenson?" Jeff demanded. "He mentioned the More Man. Denver is the More Man. Blume connected the More Man to Wetbones. It's that simple."

"I hope it is simple," Garner said. "But I doubt it will be. I really do doubt it."

If they were wrong, Garner thought, someone innocent could get killed. But he had a feeling – and it was something he hadn't felt so assuredly in years. A sense of guidance. Even the return to using cocaine had been guided, he suspected. He had to hit bottom again and see the true horror of it again. He had to come face to face with his own shrivelled faith, side by side with his bloating addict. He had been guided through that particular circle of Hades, through the Projects, through its punishment, and brought out again, and when he'd nearly stumbled back into the pit, he'd been saved first by a rip-off artist, who'd done him the favour of selling him bunk crack, and then the presence of another pastor out doing street work. And hearing the phone message at Blume's.

You should know, Brick had said, God's the only one who can arrange coincidences…

He was being guided here. He was sure of it. But he knew that being guided here was no guarantee of success, or safety.

The sad truth was, God was not all powerful. Not in Garner's estimation. God just did the best He could. And lots of the time it wasn't enough.

The Doublekey Ranch, near Malibu

It was neither day nor night, here. It was dark, but not dark as true night. It was dark as the dirty fog…

A thick, oily fog had gathered around the Ranch. Constance hadn't noticed it coming. Now, she watched it thicken as she sat on the wooden lawn chair, near the brick barbecue. Near the pool. The black girl, Eurydice, sat on the terrace beside her, nude and shivering, hugging her knees. Constance hadn't been able to get her to say much except her name. That was okay, too.

She wondered at the fog. She knew it was no natural fog. She could feel it on her skin, sliding over her with exquisite subtlety. A slithering feeling. And it was so thick and so dark overhead.

She saw, now, where it came from. It seeped upward from the pool. The glossy surface of the pool, so green it was black. Something seethed just beneath that surface. It was getting impatient. It was getting near time. It was nearly there…

There were others. Two women and three men, standing around near the door. They were just gray-black silhouettes in the fog. One of the men was playing with the buttocks of the shorter of the two women; another man was playing with himself. She thought they were looking her way, but she wasn't sure.

Music started up behind her, making her jump a little. She turned and saw the More Man and the Handy Man standing by Ephram's old ghetto blaster. Thudding, foreign sounding music. The two men had been standing there for awhile, she decided. Staring at her from behind.

What were they planning to do with her?

She had been thinking about killing herself, off and on, in the hours since Ephram's death. She was free of him. Denver had certain psychic powers, but nothing to compare with Ephram. He didn't have Ephram's power to paralyze her with a look. She could find something, something sharp perhaps, and kill herself before they began to use her. The More Man frowned, looking at her, as if he guessed her thinking. She spoke quickly, to distract him, said the first thing that came into her head. "This… this fog. What is it?"

"It's to keep the daylight from irritating the incubation," he said, nodding toward the pool. "Not that daylight would hurt them. It just irritates them, might spoil the timing a little."

She tried to remember what Ephram had said about the Akishra. "How come… how come they're, um, incubating here? I mean – they're not exactly from… from this world. Are they?"

"Oh but they are," Denver said. "They live in two worlds at once. Till now, though, they've been more physical in the Astral plane." He looked down at her maimed hand. Stared directly at the stump of her missing finger as he said, distractedly, "That's changing, little Constance. The Akishra's rootedness in the farther world. After this, they'll be quite physical here.'' He said it with wistful resignation. "And they'll be everywhere…" Adding softly, to himself, "Just everywhere…"

She supposed that ought to frighten her, but she couldn't see how anything mattered, except getting away for a little while. She tried to think of something else to say. And wished that Ephram had showed her something. Taught her something. But there just hadn't been time.

Now and then, she could see the worms. She saw them now, around Denver and the Handy Man, a wriggling corona picked out against the fog.

She grimaced and turned from them, to Eurydice. Said to Denver over her shoulder, "Can Eurydice have a blanket or something?"

"No," Denver said. "I think not."

"Oh, don't be stupid," someone else said, strolling up to them. "Give the plaything a blanket."

Constance turned to look, and didn't recognize the man.

"Constance," Denver said, "This is our friend Mr. Arthwright. Mr. Zack Arthwright."

"Such thorough introductions are really not necessary," Arthwright said, looking annoyed.

"She's not going anywhere. Where's Lissa?"

"I was hoping you knew."

Denver shook his head. "Haven't heard from her. And the others?"

"They're in the front house. Getting fucked up. Dilettantes! They'll be here, in a few minutes."

"Good," Denver said. He looked at Constance. "It's almost time."

The ladder was made of roughly-sawn, irregular tree-branches. Trying to climb it, Prentice felt like one of the silent movie comedians he'd seen in the book about Hollywood parties. He slipped and tumbled his way up the ladder, at last achieving its top, and the top of the fence, as Lonny trudged up pulling the cable. " I got it all worked out, " Drax had said. Prentice snorted. If he'd thought this thing through the way he'd put this ladder together, badly lashed, of twine and pine branches and two by fours, they were in deep shit.

"We're in deep shit no matter how you look at it," Prentice muttered.

He thought he heard Amy say, You're doing the right thing.

He'd imagined her at his elbow for an hour now, urging him to do as Drax said…

Now, looking over the fence into the mist around the Doublekey Ranch, listening to the eerie, wailing, alien music from beyond the trees, Prentice thought: Maybe, after all, he ought to get down the road to a phone. Call Jeff. Call the cops…

But, no. Not after what Lonny had told him. There was no time to talk the cops into getting a search warrant.

And Lonny hadn't been making any of it up, Prentice knew. Kenson had told him. Lissa had shown him. And Amy whispered to him. There was no turning back.

Prentice paused a moment at the top, balancing precariously on a crooked branch, peering into the foggy underbrush. "There's… some kind of smoke around the house…" He whispered down to Lonny. "Maybe it's on fire. But… actually it doesn't look like smoke."

"The sick fuckers are probably barbecuing some poor asshole," Lonny said, a little too loud. "Yo, go on over and take this fucking cable, I can't hold it no more. It's heavy."

Prentice winced. Go over? He wasn't looking forward to it. "Maybe they hired a new security guard."

"I don't think they got it that much together. They're too caught up in their own weird shit, man. Let's get it over with."

Prentice sighed and took a moment to bend the wire ends at the top of the fence downward, so he wouldn't snag on them. Then he slung a leg over, braced, slung the other leg over, cursing under his breath. He was using muscles he'd forgotten about.

He lowered himself to the end of his arms and then dropped to the dirt, half expecting to be shot in the back or to feel a dog's jaws close over his throat. But nothing happened, and there was no sound, except the distant, dissonant music. He turned and looked at Lonny; he was hoping Lonny wasn't as scared as he was. The kid's expression was controlled, but his fear was there, in the tension of his hunched shoulders. He wanted to bolt, too.

Instead, Lonny pushed the cable through. It was an old, rusty cable four inches in diameter, thickly coated in rubber insulation, its nearer end covered with a homemade cap of rubber and black electrical tape. Touching the cable, Prentice could sense the electrical field around it; the suppressed power coursing through it. It ran twenty yards back behind Lonny to a spindle that Drax had set up, an hour earlier, that acted as a roller; there was another one in the brush, and from there it stretched to the electrical tower Drax had patched into.

If the old man couldn't open the front gate, Prentice thought, all this is for nothing.

It was going to be a hot day. Some insect in the undergrowth made the sound of a monomaniacal marraca player; a lizard zig-zagged over a rock on the other side of the fence. Lonny's face was streaked with dust and sweat. He was angry and scared. Prentice found himself admiring the boy. "You're a pretty tough kid," he said. He had a need to say something sentimental to someone, now. Before going on with it. And probably getting his ass blown away.

Lonny glared toward the Doublekey Ranch. He put his hand on the old Colt. 36 six-shot revolver that Drax had given him, stuck now in his belt. "Mitch is dead. You should've seen the look on Orphy's face, too."

"How you know Mitch is dead?"

"Drax said so. After a while, you get to believe him."

"You've probably done enough here, Lonny," Prentice said dutifully. He hoped the kid wouldn't take his advice, as he went on, "You could split now. Make your way back to town."

Lonny turned the glare on Prentice. The look was one unceasing outpour, unwavering as a cop's flashlight. "Mitch…" He wasn't capable of saying the rest without breaking down – or bursting into a screaming rage.

Prentice nodded. "Yeah. Well. Come on over. It's almost time."

It was daytime, but it was night. Garner felt the hair rise on the back of his neck when they stepped into the fog. The stuff was almost as dark as smoke, but it wasn't smoke. You could breathe it, though you were sorry to; it left a faintly repugnant taste on the palate. Garner now carried the pistol that had been pointed at him a few hours before. Jeff Teitelbaum carried an Uzi – but not quite a real Uzi. It was a semi-automatic variety that gun-lovers could buy legally through the mail. Each trigger pull let go a round, but it didn't spray bullets. "I always knew they should ban these fackers," Teitelbaum had said, getting it out of the trunk of his car. "I'll vote for a ban. But I wanted to get mine before the ban came down. For once, I'm glad I'm that kind of sicko. It'll be useful, today, seems to me…"

They'd found the front gate unguarded – Teitelbaum had seemed surprised at this – and they'd popped it with a crowbar, then climbed over the black iron inner gate. Now, prowling through the brush not far inside the iron fence, inside the cloud of dirty fog, they could no longer see the main house. There was only a thirty-yard visibility here, in the shadow of the trees and brush, and the closer they got to the house the thicker the fog seemed, the darker it got.

"Maybe this fog shit is some kind of toxic leak from somewhere," Teitelbaum said, as they moved slowly along the brick path.

"It's not making us cough," Garner pointed out. "And if it is, we've had such a thorough dose by now…" He shrugged.

Was Constance here? Was she alive? It might be better not to find out…

Up ahead, to one side, was a sort of tunnel of roses. Climbing vines from rose bushes had crawled thickly over a trellis passageway. Through a gap in the roses, Garner glimpsed something moving.

Garner had used a gun, in his pre-pastoral years on the street, but mostly for bluff. Once, he'd shot a guy in the leg. He hadn't wanted to kill him. But this time…

Am I really going to be able to kill someone? Garner wondered. It was the last time he wondered that.

They'd walked up close beside the trellis. The smell of roses was cloying and mixed revoltingly with the fishy stink of the fog.

A hand darted through a gap in vines and closed around Teitelbaum's neck, jerked him against the trellis so that rose petals showered and his Uzi barked into the ground before he lost his grip on it. The gun fell clattering on the brick as Teitelbaum shouted a name – it sounded like " Lissa! " – and Garner rushed to his side.

He saw their attacker through the gap in the roses. It was a woman. Lissa, he assumed.

Her head had been smashed open, just above the left temple. The crack in the skull could be clearly seen, splintery and deeply gashed into the tissue beneath. There was nothing in her eyes. And as Garner struggled to pry her hand free of Teitelbaum's throat and struggled with his own rising terror, he was pretty sure that she was dead.

Teitelbaum had told Garner about the Akishra. Had repeated Kenson's story. Which Teitelbaum had come to half-believe himself. So Garner knew about the worms. And he believed – in some intuitive way he'd always known about them. And somehow Garner knew, without doubt, that the blow on her skull had killed this woman.

And he knew that only the worms were keeping her going.

They were moving through her easily, through this once beautiful woman, like snakes through water, weaving in and out of her. Leaving her skin bruised but unbroken where they'd gone. Others waved around her head like the ring of slippery stingers bristling from a sea anemone. Somehow, in taking her over, becoming more corporeal. Operating her. Moving her about. It was something you could see in her unnaturally sinuous movements; the animalistic suddenness of her attack.

Garner, trying to yank the flailing, bubbling Teitelbaum free now, felt something wet winding itself around his wrist. He let out a childish yell of revulsion and jerked away, slapping the thing off him, then jerking the gun from his waist band. He thrust it through the gap at the woman, and pulled the trigger. It was harder to pull than he expected. The gun boomed and recoiled, knocking Garner's hands up to impale on inch-long rosebush thorns. He hissed between clenched teeth in pain and pulled his hands off the thorns, drew back from the bush. The woman had fallen back; Teitelbaum was kneeling, clutching his gun to him, making hacksaw sounds as he gasped for air.

Garner forced himself to move toward the entrance to the rose tunnel. Just at the edge, he saw the woman woven into the vines. The dark fog slithered past her in wisps that were like the ghosts of the vines that held her. She spoke hoarsely, barely audible, "Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me and fuck you fuck you forever"

Garner acted instinctively. Whispering, "Go with God," as he pointed the gun at the woman's head, and blew her brains out.

She slumped in the vines. Then the worms started to show themselves… She began to wriggle free…

He heard Jeff Teitelbaum calling hoarsely to him but he moved on, around the corner…

Someone was running up the alley of roses, with a gun in his hand. Nearer, the woman was getting to her feet. No: The worms were raising her body to stand. Using the meat of her, collectively driving her remains. Beyond her, a man was coming toward them; he wore a yellow shirt and yellow pants and a gold chain.

And spun around, smashed by bullets, when Teitelbaum fired three rounds at him in two seconds, firing through the bushes. "Dammit!" Garner shouted. 'You don't know who -"

"It's fucking Sam Denver!" Teitelbaum shouted. "He's -"

He didn't finish saying it, maybe seeing Denver get up – though the top of his head was shot away. Walking toward them with a side to side swish that might have been funny except for the blood masking Denver's face and the worms emerging from him, far more than in Lissa, coming out like a carnation blossoming in fast-action, the thin petals writhing with urgency. The fog – looking gray green, now, as if moving into some new stage – patterning itself in the air around Denver, responding to the changes in him, creating an etheric, vermiform aureole around him like the mandala behind some tusked Hindu deathgod.

Five more licks of fire and five cracks from the faux Uzi, and Denver danced backwards and fell flat. Then began to get up once more, springy and eager.

Lissa was missing most of her face, but she was reaching, now, for Garner. He fired once more into her neck, hoping that if he snapped the spine…

She went down. And immediately began to get up

God – had they done this to Constance?

Garner turned and ran after Teitelbaum, who was trotting toward the main house, crying like a child – and waving the gun around like a small boy playing Army.

Garner tried to remember a prayer from the Bible. And couldn't.

Somewhere behind them, he heard the rumble of an old vehicle, a big engine that coughed and missed and sounded as if its engine would give out at any moment.

The gunshots had come from the West, Prentice thought, near the front of the place. He and Lonny were off to the South. "Probably just playing with guns and whoever they got now," Lonny said calmly. 'It's too soon for it to be Drax."

They were dragging the cable like a firehose, Lonny taking the head of it, working their way through the brush to the inner fence. They'd moved deep into the fog, though the stuff reeked wrongness, and they could make out the bulk of the main house beyond the fence and the screen of trees…

"Oh God," Lonny said, pausing with the cable hitched up on his hip, pointing at something to one side.

Dogs. Parts of the dead guard dogs he'd told Prentice about.

"You do that to their bodies?" Prentice asked, without thinking.

"Dude, you think I'd mess with them like that?" Lonny replied, disgusted by the suggestion.

The dogs had been gutted; their entrails hung like Christmas ornaments from the branches of the small pine standing close by; the purplish, dried-out guts dripped with maggots. The remaining corpses of the dogs, on the ground, had their backs broken, were twisted into

Oroborous circles of rotting flesh; still attached to the necks, their heads were shoved down under their ribs and back between the hind legs, snouts forced up and out through ripped rectums, the entire head crammed through to the ears. Through his disgust, Prentice marvelled. It had taken someone considerable time and effort and it seemed supremely pointless. The fog swarmed almost imperceptibly around the wrecked carcasses. The sight made Prentice's stomach feel as if it were turning inside out, too.

He turned away and they stumbled on, dragging the cable to the black iron fence. It was lower than the other; Lonny scrambled easily over it, dropped to the other side, and pulled the cable through. Prentice made the climb, with significantly more difficulty, and dropped to the other side just as the old Ford pick-up, its one working headlight making a tunnel of dull light through the fog, jounced through the brush, its tractor wheels finding purchase in the thick mesquite and grinding through. Old Drax grinned in the cab of the truck as he pulled up with the rear of the truck close by them. Looking closer Prentice saw that the grin was more a rictus of fear. The old hippie was as scared as they were. Wearing overalls now, Drax came huffing out of the idling truck, hands shaking, and ran to the back…

"I saw some of 'em, saw some of 'em, had to run one of 'em over," he chattered as he dropped the tailgate of the truck and reached for the cable. He and Lonny muscled it up to the spool fixed to the pick-up bed.

It was a wooden spool with another, similar length of cable attached to it. The spool was bolted down onto the bed of the truck. He ripped away the black tape on the cable end, glancing over his shoulder, obviously expecting someone to come after them at any moment. "You do that shooting?'' he asked Lonny, as he worked. He took hold of the cable on an insulated section and with the other hand unscrewed the cap. The exposed copper spat fine sparks into the fog.

Lonny said, "Uh uh. We thought it was you…"

There was a noise from under the truck. A very soft noise. Prentice thought maybe it was just Drax's foot scraping something.

Drax took the end of the cable on the truck's spool, and attached it to the cable coming through the fence, screwing an insulated clamp down onto it. "I hope to Mescalito that holds," Drax said. Shadows in the fog moved over his pale face as he dropped the cable -

Something jerked him off his feet. Prentice jumped back and looked at the ground. Lissa!

Oh God it was Lissa, just enough of her face left to recognize, and a deep tyre tread printed into her back, one arm tangled up with the axle like a piece of bloody rope. Her free hand clutching the fallen Drax's ankles as he scrabbled back from her his face twitchy with horror.

For a long moment Prentice felt a profound pity go through him – and then a veil of fog drifted away and he saw the worms fluttering around her head…

Lonny's gun banged and echoed and most of Lissa's head exploded. Drax was up, running back from the cab of the truck with a shotgun. "Get back! Ricochets!" He yelled. They scurried back as he fired, the shotgun smashing her tangled arm off at the shoulder, freeing the truck of her. Lissa's body tried to climb from under the truck but seemed to have difficulty organizing its few working parts…

Prentice looked away. As Drax ran to the cab of the truck and climbed in, threw it in gear, Prentice tried to tell Lonny he'd had enough, he was leaving. But he couldn't quite say it. His tongue seemed numb in his mouth. He felt as if he was going altogether numb inside. He wanted to go back but he was not at all sure he had the strength to climb over the fence. And then Lonny swung his gun around to kill Jeff, as Jeff loomed up in the fog, a bearded stranger at his heels.

Constance lay passively under Arthwright as he rammed into her, each thrust of his hips driving her a few inches farther along the terrace, to the edge of the pool. Now the top of her head thrust out over the vitreous, secretive surface. She heard things moving down there. She could sense them, all of them, and she sensed more: all the worms moving excitedly in the soil, under the surface of the earth. Nothing like the Akishra, but somehow communing with them; she sensed things hovering in the air around her, unseen; she sensed the huge psychic gravitation of the Magnus lowering itself over the pool. It hadn't gone far; it had only withdrawn to wait.

She saw shapes unfold and fold and reshape again in the fog overhead; intricate geometrical designs, like Mayan carvings; ugly variations of mandalas; constellations forming and reforming: one shaped like a scorpion, another like a spider, a third like a hangman.

She watched all this only distantly – her hair dangling in the wet surface now, sucked slowly through the waxy ooze over the pool as Arthwright fucked her along the slippery ground. Now her shoulders were over the stuff and soon her torso would dip into it, her head upside down in the water, her eyes greeted by the swarm that waited down there…

They were neatly detached, these perceptions, capering beyond a druggy haze. She barely felt Arthwright's penis in her; she felt mostly the swelling boil, the pustulent buboe, of her own pleasure: the Reward they were jolting into her, using up the last of her ability to feel as they shot it into her in time with his triphammer thrusts.

If she just concentrated on the glow of Reward…

And didn't pay attention to the hallucinations, the signs. The tarantula with a body shining like a hairy lightbulb; the corkscrews of blue fire pursuing one another endlessly through the fog; the imploring faces of Ephram and Elma Stutgart Denver and the boy who'd died on the bed: these she could see scribbled in the air to one side, sketched in shadowy fog. In the background: the far away screaming of Eurydice where someone was raping her by the old fireplace, pushing her head into the fire as they raped her. The Madonna record they were playing at a speed freaked Minnie Mouse 78 RPM. The vagina lined with seeking worms that opened in the sky: inside it, a window into Hell that opened with the squeal of tortured glass…

Arthwright's detonating head.

It blew up, his head, she saw through slitted eyes. It shattered upward and outward, close in front of her, taking most of his face with it. Then she heard a familiar voice cursing and ending with a sob: "Oh shit I shouldn't have done it that way -" the voice said. The voice was very familiar but she couldn't quite make out who it was.

Then Arthwright's corpse was flipped summarily away from her and she was dragged back from the edge of the pool and a man was pulling her to her feet and she sagged down on knees weak from disorientation and the sudden, vicious cessation of Reward…

"No, no, no, don't," she told the man. A bearded man, who looked a little familiar. Who was he? It didn't matter who he was. 'No don't, you stopped it, you stopped the Reward I have to find it again…" She turned and ran to the edge of the pool.

He caught her by the wrist and dragged her back, just as a big ugly red machine roared around the corner of the main house, smashing through a corner of the cactus garden as it came toward the terrace, its one eye shining…

Something vast screamed with frustration.

A drain opened up inside Constance and she want down it.

Garner caught Constance as she fell. He tossed the gun onto the terrace next to the shaking body of the man who'd been raping her. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the way of the crazy old man with the truck. He had a three second sweeping vision of the scene on the terrace before the truck hit its objective.

He saw Jeff Teitelbaum shooting a gun at someone who was holding a girl's head over a fire at a stone barbecue, as the one they called the More Man glided around the corner of the house, moving in that oozy walk that meant the worms were guiding what was left of him; something flopped out the door of the back house and it was too late to warn Jeff as the thing moved onto his back – a shapeless wreckage of probably-human flesh that was furred with worm-heads, tendrils that flittered around its broken bone-ends and torn tissue, muscle and flesh mixed – Wetbones, Garner knew. Reanimated, guided by the tendrils… tendrils that reached up from it to the thing that manifested in the churning fog over the pool:

A vast thing, up there, at first looking like a partly-filled hot air balloon, then a tapering head, its nearer end bifurcated into a worm-edged mouth opening to show a terrified remnant of face – its tendrils reaching out to puppet the starfish of smashed human flesh that closed around Jeff Teitelbaum and broke his neck -

Reaching out with other tendrils to embrace the six men and two women who stood naked and blood-spattered around the body of a woman near the back of the main house -

Reaching out to Prentice – it must be Prentice – who was running open mouthed and glaze-eyed to pull the girl from the fire; stretching out to the boy Lonny who'd nearly shot Teitelbaum and Garner two minutes earlier. Lonny now reflexively shooting at the More Man who had one hand in his own guts and another on his purplish, exposed dick, as a worm grew arm-thick from his mouth, the worm reaching for Lonny…

As the thing over the pool reached for them all. Reached for Garner.

Three seconds were up. The cable on the spool unfeeling behind it, the truck roared up to the pool. The crazy old hippie in the driver's seat, screaming triumphantly at the top of his lungs, drove the truck deliberately head-on into the water. The exposed strip of wire on the spool-attached end of the cable struck the water with all the voltage that could be stolen from a high power line as the truck broke through the waxy protective skin over the pool and nosed down, crackling with sparks. It sank into the surging, boiling, green-black waters. Watching, Garner understood. He could see the colony of tens of thousands of tiny astral worms outlined in violet fire, deep-frying in the pool, as electricity arced and crackled in small lightning bolts across its tortured surface. Like randomly aimed particle accelerators, the seething electrons shattered the plasmic; Astral skeins of the Akishra – and travelled along the circuits of etheric relationship, conducting up through the tendrils of the Lord of Akishra hovering over the pool, passing into the Magnus and through it into the others on the terrace and in the house.

Violent streams of electricity roared down from the Akishra Magnus and into the More Man; into the wreckage of Jeff and his murderer by the doorway to the back house; into the weave of rose bushes up the outer walls of the guest house. The rose bushes writhed like a nest of neon snakes, wailing in despair. The vast currents of electricity crackled into the eight Followers and Feasters standing back of the fireplace, and into two worm-driven corpses – the ragged remains of Lissa and Arthwright – crawling along the stone flags. Fingers of electricity dabbed like the fingers of a blind man at Garner, and seemed to find him not to their taste; they moved on to Constance, pausing over her so that she went momentarily rigid, and glowed faintly in his arms as a starburst of worms fled from her, disintegrating in the air. The charge left her, and passed over Lonny and Prentice and the black girl; and went on.

The electricity crackled more powerfully yet into the More Man, into the worm-haunted hamburger that had taken Jeff Teitelbaum, into the More Man's followers – and they shook and screamed, electrocuting physically and spiritually, each surrounded by a spark-spitting corona of brilliant blue-white discharge, human fireworks displays; they ran spasmodically to one another and, as if galvanized to act out the archetypes of their compulsions, they lunged at whoever was nearest. The Handy Man tearing into the body of the More Man with his bare hand – the rest crowding together, doing the same to each other, a crowd of about ten of them closely clumped, tearing one another to pieces with teeth and bare hands, so that rags and gobbets of flesh flew through the halos of sparks, each flying handful of bloody flesh itself flaring with electrical discharge and exploding in sparks; the More Man and companions bodily burrowing into one another, a woman thrusting her head into her partner's guts and emerging beside the shattered spine as someone else, electrified into superhuman strength, ripped her leg out of its socket and then thrust his hand into the wound to yank out her intestines, and someone else sank teeth into the side of the face of the one who'd torn the leg away and someone else popped out the eyes and then the brains of the one who bit the woman who…

It took five seconds, as the old red truck boiled like a lobster in the pool. The human hosts of the Akishra tore one another to pieces, faster and faster till it was too fast for the eye to follow and then they – and the worms that motivated them – were lost in a seething cloud of exploding flesh -

Garner turned away to see a raging ball of electricity double back from this hand-made Wetbones and up the connective tendrils into the Akishra Magnus, which detonated like a sobbing and suffering roman candle, expelling a hundred thousand trapped spirits that spiral-led away into void and…

The Akishra burned in the air, ten thousand thousand worms fluttered up and burned out. Or burned out of this world, Garner supposed. There was no exterminating them, not completely.

And then the fog dispersed. Sunlight expanded around the pool. The apparitions vanished from the sky. The Magnus was no more. The More Man and compan ions were steaming heaps of burnt flesh, without the Akishra to animate them. Lonny was helping Prentice carry the poor, charred, black girl away.

Garner was abruptly aware that he was dizzy, in danger of falling over with Constance in his arms. His heart was playing a drum roll, his mouth as dry and foul as a road kill. But he had to see one more thing. He turned to glance into the pool…

In the pool, Drax was, of course, quite dead. The pool had lost its colour, was now crystal clear, illuminated with an inner glow. The truck was glowing with violet fire; and inside it, like a filament in a bulb, Drax glowed with a psychedelic coruscation all his own, his shining corpse grinning in triumph.