Sara lay on a bed in the Guests’ quarters when she heard an alarm and pushed herself up from the bed. It was the next day and she thought of her mother and jumped to the conclusion more men were coming after her to kill her like they did her mother. She ran out of the room and was met by Lisa and others who were on their way to the troubled area. “What is it, Lisa, what is happening?”
“There is movement in the south tunnel. We won’t know what it is until we get there.” Lisa picked up her pace and Sara followed.
Arriving, Lisa cautiously opened the door. “There is a man in there.” She and Sara stepped inside.
Paul had not moved since he was brought into the room. Sara went over and rolled him over and looked at his face. Lisa rarely went outside or associated with the townspeople, so she had no idea who it was.
Sara, on the other hand, did know. “It’s Paul Tobias,” she said, clenching her fists. “He must have been on a hunting team with others. Where are the rest of them?”
Lisa opened the outer door and was met with a wall of concrete. She went back to the monitors and pressed a group of buttons to work the recorded tape machine. After rewinding, she and Sara watched on the monitor as Sheriff Monroe opened the door and tossed the man in like a ragdoll before closing it up again. They saw an explosion and the monitor went black.
“They are going to find a way to get down here; I will find Bethany and see what she wants to do about this. Stay here and watch him.”
Lisa left the room and Sara was alone with the man. She wished he had been one of the men who had shot her mother so she could kill him herself, but he wasn’t. She went to the desk in the room and pulled out a chair, brought it over to the man, and sat down in front of him, mind silently on her mother as she tried not to cry.
The man was still unconscious when Lisa returned with Bethany. Bethany stood over him for a minute and made her decision. “We have to prepare the children for leaving. I will need him as storage. I will call the others.” Bethany left.
“Do I get Marianna or Kelly?” Sara asked Lisa after Bethany left, knowing full well what would happen next.
“They are both able to carry him; you choose.”
They both left out the room together, each to attend to different tasks. After a short time, Sara came back into the room and gave the man a shot from a syringe. She checked his pulse before she sat back in the chair. As she watched, he began to stir. He opened his eyes and started moaning, holding the back of his head. He felt wetness; blood.
Wiping his hand on his pants, Paul tried to stand but couldn’t. In fact, his body was only becoming heavier and heavier.
Just as he lost the ability to hold up his arms, he spotted Sara. “Who are you? Why can’t I move?”
“It’s a paralyzer to keep you still,” Sara said without passion. “Your friends killed my mother.”
“Who are you and where am I?”
“How many of you were in the tunnel?”
“Where am I? Where am I?” Paul tried to struggle but couldn’t: all he could move now was his neck and head.
Sara asked again, “How many of you were in the tunnel?”
More frantically now: “I can’t move! Where am I? What are you doing to me?”
Sara got out of her chair and slapped him. “How... many… of you...were in the tunnel?”
Paul trembled with fear. “There were four of us: Sheriff Monroe, me, Mike Chambers, and John Henry.”
“Which of them killed my mother?”
“What?”
She slapped him again. “One of them shot my mother in the back! Like a dog! Which one of them was it?”
“I don’t know, I was hit from behind and woke up here. It was probably the sheriff; he would shoot a defenseless woman, not me or the others.”
“Who killed my mother?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
Sara stepped away from the man. “Do you want to know what you were looking for?”
“What?”
Sara stepped to the side and showed him an incubator. She opened it up and held up the baby. Sara turned the baby around: it was Kelly. Aiming her to face him, Sara lowered the baby onto his chest. Then she sat back down in the chair and watched the events unfold.
Paul, confused and frightened, began to breathe fast. From Sara’s position, she could hear his heart pounding. Kelly, too, heard it: her green eyes grew darker and darker. She looked at the bulging vein in the man’s neck and instead of concentrating on the heartbeat in the man’s chest, the baby became attracted to the throbbing vein.
Kelly started crawling toward Paul Tobias’s neck, stretching her neck out as far as it could go. Pulling the rest of her to rejoin the head before it dashed forward again. The pulses became intoxicating and the baby crawled instinctively forward. Her pitch-black eyes were completely fixed upon it.
Paul was overcome by sheer terror. The way the baby’s neck stretched was unreal, the thing of nightmares. And the face, the black eyes. “No! No! No, stop it, stop it!” Paul skreiked – but Sara never moved from her chair. She simply watched the baby advance.
Kelly’s tiny arms went around the man’s neck and her fingers stretched and interlocked with each other. Arms tightening, her eyes grew wider. Kelly lifted her head and opened her mouth wide, showing the suckers in her mouth. Her mouth unhinged from its jaw and stretched even more – and then from the ends of her suckers protruded small fangs. With one quick movement, she clamped down on the man’s neck to sedate him.
Throughout this ordeal, Paul shrieked, but moments later stopped struggling and began to relax: already he was euphoric and without pain. He lay on the floor with a smile on his face, reliving his glory days as a quarterback on the high school football team. He was a young blond god of the arena, playing in his all-time favorite game, scoring the winning touchdown for his team as the crowd roared and chanted his name. Paul felt like he was in heaven. The crowd cheered, “Paul! Paul! Paul!”
Baby Kelly’s stomach pulsated with a steady rhythm as she fed. At first her stomach grew larger as if pregnant, carrying triplets or even quadruplets, veins crisscrossing its translucent surface.
Sara watched with a look of satisfaction and fascination on her face. Paul Tobias began to shrivel like a grape being transformed into a raisin. She wondered what he was thinking as his whole body began to collapse in on itself.
When the time was right, Sara stood and went to the far corner of the room. Earlier she had placed here a syringe and sprayer. She sat them both down beside Paul’s collapsing body. Sara pressed down extremely hard to break Kelly’s grip from his neck and then injected her with a syringe. Kelly stopped moving, unwrapping her arms from his neck and falling to the side.
Sara placed her on the floor and watched a cocoon envelop her. After finishing, she picked up the cocoon and placed it by the door. Next she covered Paul’s body in a thick black coating from the spray canister. His body began smoking and then disintegrated, leaving behind black dust. Sara took a vacuum cleaner from a closet and vacuumed up the mess. When she was done the tiled floor was sparkling white again.
Lisa returned; bringing with her a syringe that she injected into the cocoon, causing it to shrink until it was the size of a baby again. Lisa, with sharper vision than Sara, pointed to a speck the young girl missed. It was promptly cleaned up before they existed with the cocoon, getting ready for their next task.