“You’ve already promised that, Rasalom. What have I got to lose?”
“I won’t kill you, Glaeken! I’ll let you live on, just barely. I’ll make you witness, see, feel everything that happens in my new world.”
Glaeken said nothing. He had almost cut through the first arch. With a final thrust, the blade angled through the underside and came free.
The central portion suddenly sagged a half a foot under him. Glaeken hurried to his left, toward the next support.
“Glaeken, NO! That island I promised you—you and the woman and your friends—”
Glaeken shut his mind to Rasalom’s rantings and drove the blade into the second arch. More flashes and oily smoke. He worked the blade ferociously, gasping with the stench and the exertion, and eventually it worked its way through.
The center sagged again, its free edge lurching downward almost two feet this time. The supports he had cut wept dark fluid from their truncated ends as they remained suspended above the void like severed arms reaching for something they would never again possess.
Supported now by only two arches, the center tilted at an angle. Glaeken’s feet slipped on the smooth surface as he hurried toward the nearer of the remaining arches.
And again he drove the blade deep into the substance. But as he worked it through, he felt an impact on his right leg. Searing pain flashed up to his hip. He caught a blur of movement and rolled away.
A huge hand had reared up from the underside of the center, but it resembled a hand in only the vaguest sense—black as the night above, with three fingers as thick around as Glaeken’s waist, each terminating in a sharp yellow talon. Crimson fluid stained one of those—his blood.
Rasalom—in his new form. Glaeken could not see the rest of him, most of which was no doubt still in the sac below. Had his new form finally matured, or was he breaking free before the process was completed in order to stop Glaeken?
It made another swipe, blindly, in his direction. Glaeken ducked under the talons. The sudden move sent a fresh surge of agony through his wounded leg. As it came for him again, he slashed with the weapon and felt the blade dig deep into the inky flesh.
Light exploded around him, a flash of brilliance that dwarfed all those before it. In his mind he heard Rasalom cry out in shock and pain. When his vision cleared he saw the taloned hand waving above him, one of its thick fingers swinging madly back and forth as it dangled from a smoking stump by a few remaining intact tendons.
Glaeken straightened and limped to the other support. He had been able to cut only partway through the third and was unlikely to get a chance to finish the job within Rasalom’s reach. He’d attack the fourth—but not near the center.
His move must have surprised Rasalom because Glaeken was halfway along the arch before the voice sounded in his brain.
“Don’t run off, Glaeken. We’ve only begun to play.”
Glaeken didn’t look back. He continued his torturous trek toward the far end of the arch. Within a dozen feet of its origin he stopped and turned.
Rasalom’s amniotic sac still hung from its lopsided platform like a gargantuan punching bag, but now a sinewed arm with a wounded hand protruded from the rent made by the weapon. It raked the air above it with its two remaining talons. And the eye … that malevolent eye still pressed against the membrane, glaring at him.
“I’m not running far.”
With another burst of light and bloom of oily smoke, he drove the weapon deep into the arch beneath him and began to work it back and forth. The support was thicker here near its base, but he could afford the extra time it would take because he was out of Rasalom’s reach.
“Glaeken,” Rasalom said to his mind, “you’ll never learn. You are forcing me to…”
Ahead, over the center of the pit, another arm clawed free of the membrane, then ripped a talon down the surface of the sac, opening it like a zipper. Tons of ebony fluid poured from the rent, spilling into the bottomless glow of the depths below. The rent parted, widened, and then …
Something emerged from the membrane.
Glaeken knew who it was, but could not be certain what it was. It had arms, that he knew. And a huge eye at its upper end. But in the dim glow leaking up from the pit below he could be sure of little else as it crawled from the sac and hoisted itself onto the sagging central platform. Legs … now he could see legs, four bristling, segmented stalks like a tarantula’s, but the rest was encased in an oozing gelatinous mass that dripped off the platform in amorphous globs and tumbled into infinity. A larger shape lurked within the mass, something with a head and a torso, but Glaeken could make out no details. And now a pair of thick, sucker-studded tentacles wriggled free of the gelatin below the arms to twist and coil in the air.
Glaeken flashed back to the q’qrs with their extra, tentacle-like upper limbs, but he had a feeling this shape, this avatar possessed far more appendages.
It began moving his way, crawling toward him along the slope of the fourth arch.
Glaeken redoubled his efforts with the weapon, widening, deepening the cut in the upper surface, thrusting the blade through to the underside. Rasalom’s incomplete new form was cumbersome, his progress slow, but he was sliding steadily closer. He soon would have Glaeken within reach of those talons.
Suddenly an explosive crack echoed through the cavern as the fourth arch shook beneath Glaeken’s feet and broke partway through like a green sapling. Its distal segment sagged. Glaeken paused and watched Rasalom claw frantically for purchase as he slipped back along the decline toward the central disk. He gave the monstrous form no time to recover, however; immediately he renewed his hacking assault at the remaining splinters holding the arch together.
“Give it up, Glaeken! This is an exercise in futility! You cannot win!”
Rasalom’s words were no longer in his mind. His new form was speaking in a startlingly powerful voice. Even muffled by the gelatinous coating, it shook the walls of the cavern.
Glaeken ignored it and forced his wearying arms to maintain the assault on the arch. The reflexes were still there, the arms knew what to do, but the unconditioned muscles were sagging with fatigue. Yet he couldn’t rest, couldn’t even slow his pace. He closed his eyes to blot out all distractions and kept hacking.
“GLAEKEN!”
The stark terror in the voice and the ripping sound that accompanied it jolted Glaeken. He looked up.
Rasalom was near, clinging to the arch with his tentacles, his outstretched talons only a few feet from Glaeken’s face, yet he was receding, falling away. And then he saw why. Glaeken had cut through the remnant of the fourth support and now Rasalom was dangling over the pit, clutching the swiftly tilting remnant with arms, legs, and tentacles.
The entire structure—the central disk, the new Rasalom, and the remnant of his saclike chrysalis—was now supported entirely by the third arch. And Glaeken had already damaged that near its union with the disk.
After all these ages, Rasalom’s end was at hand.
Or was it?
Rasalom was suspended head down over the pit, but he was scrabbling backward along the remnant of the newly severed arch, up toward the disk.
“You cannot win, Glaeken! Not this time! It cannot happen! I’m too close!”
His movements were shaking the entire structure, exerting enormous pressure on the lone arch. It began to bob like a fishing pole that had hooked an enormous great white. As Glaeken hobbled back to the rim of the cavern and made his way toward the final arch, he heard it begin to crack where he had started his cut.
Rasalom must have realized it too, because even in this dim light Glaeken could discern a frantic desperation in his movements. But too late. The end of the arch was splitting, angling down at its wounded tip. Breaking …
A cannon-shot crack signaled the end. The disk lurched downward to a vertical angle, twisted crazily. Rasalom remained, clutching the disk’s upper edge with his taloned fingers. Other appendages, spiny, rickety arms with clawed tips
had broken free of the gel along his flank and were blindly questing for purchase while his tentacles stretched toward the end of the arch, reaching.
And then the final threads of the final arch gave way and the disk, the sac, and Rasalom too, plunged into the abyss.
No—not Rasalom.
Glaeken groaned as he realized Rasalom was still there. The rest had fallen away but he was clinging to the remnant of the final support by one of his tentacles—and pulling himself up.
“What can I do?”
Glaeken whirled at the sound of the voice and saw a dirt- and dust-caked Jack silhouetted in the light from the tunnel. He must have crawled through.
“Nothing! Go back!”
“Not likely.”
“You’ve done more than enough. This is my fight!”
“Like hell!”
“YOU!”
Jack focused on Rasalom. “Jesus Christ, look at you! You spent thousands of years and put us through all this shit so you could look like that? You’ve gotta be the biggest asshole in the multiverse!”
He raised his automatic rifle and began firing at Rasalom’s tentacles. The bullets had no more effect than gnats. He quickly ran out his magazine.
Glaeken forced his wounded leg to move, to half run, half stagger along the ledge to the base of the third arch, climb upon it, and hobble along its wavering length. He didn’t have time to cut through this one. He had to meet Rasalom at its terminus and stop him there before he regained his footing.
“This is what it’s always come down to, hasn’t it, Rasalom. You and I. Just you and I.”
Rasalom’s reply was to snake his other tentacle upward and loop it around the shaft next to the first. He used them to hoist himself higher until his taloned hands could grip the arch. That done, new tentacles began to spring from the great gelatinous mass of his body to join the others.
He’s going to make it!
Glaeken clenched his teeth against the pain in his leg and increased his speed. He didn’t hesitate when he reached the shaft. He stepped out on its swaying, sloping surface and slashed the first tentacles with the weapon. The air filled with blinding flashes, greasy smoke, and thick, dark fluid spurting from the amputated ends. The world narrowed to Glaeken, Rasalom, the arch, and the weapon. Slitting his eyes against the flashes, choking on the smoke, he slipped into a fugue of pain and motion, moving in a fog, operating on reflexes as he severed coil after coil and kicked their writhing remnants aside, then moved on to the next group.
From below him came a thunderous roar as Rasalom kicked and thrashed in inarticulate pain and rage.
Spiny, spidery, pincer-tipped arms rose on both sides and snapped at him. Glaeken lashed out left and right, scything through them as he kept inching forward.
Something coiled about his ankle and pulled him off his feet. He fell and landed hard, almost losing his grip on the sword. Ahead of him, Rasalom’s yellow-taloned hands found purchase. He began to lever himself up onto the support. If he made it—
Something boomed in the cavern and the area of the support beneath the hand with the missing finger exploded, the flinty surface dissolving into a spray of fragments. The two talons slipped, leaving Rasalom dangling by one arm.
Glaeken glanced over his shoulder and saw Jack aiming a large-bore weapon like a grenade launcher his way. Only he hadn’t fired a grenade, more like a huge shotgun shell. The pellets couldn’t harm Rasalom, but the support was another matter.
Another boom and another explosion as the shot tore up the support beneath the remaining set of talons. They slipped but held.
Glaeken rolled, severed the tentacle holding him, then crawled to the end of the arch where Rasalom swung below, suspended by only three talons dug into its surface.
“Glaeken … no … please! Don’t—”
And in the instant of that plea Rasalom yanked his body upward and lashed at Glaeken with the two talons of his damaged hand. Glaeken ducked as they raked the air inches away, the breeze of their passing ruffling his hair. He swung the weapon upward, over his head. The impact with Rasalom’s wrist and the simultaneous detonation of brilliance as the blade sliced through skin and muscle and tendon and bone nearly knocked Glaeken off the arch. He threw himself flat and hung on as Rasalom thrashed and howled and waved his partially severed, black-spurting wrist in the air.
Up ahead, near the shattered tip of the arch, Glaeken saw that Rasalom’s only remaining hold on it was the three talons of his surviving hand.
“Kinda like déjà vu, huh?” said a voice close behind him.
Glaeken turned. Jack, his expression fierce, his eyes ablaze, had stepped onto the arch and was addressing Rasalom.
“You again!”
“Yeah, me again. Looks like you’ve lost another hand.” Jack edged past Glaeken, then held out his own hand. “I need a piece of this son of a bitch.”
Glaeken understood. He handed Jack the sword. Jack hefted it, then looked down at Rasalom.
“You really wanted to look like that? You think you’re scary? Seriously? What an asshole.”
His face changed, becoming a mask of rage as he raised the sword over the clutching talons.
“NO!”
A flash as Jack swung the blade and severed one of the fingers. Rasalom howled incoherently.
“That was for Eddie and Weezy!” Jack screamed in a raw voice Glaeken didn’t recognize. His throat worked as his tone softened. “Especially Weezy.”
Another flash, another scream as he swung and sliced through a second. The severed tip tumbled into oblivion.
“And that was for whatever you did or tried to do to three very important people.”
Rasalom howled as the talon of the last digit scraped along the surface of the arch, scratching a deep furrow as it slipped slowly toward eternity. Then it caught in a small pit near the edge.
Jack seemed to be blinking back tears as he handed the sword to Glaeken.
“The last one is yours. You must have one helluva list.”
Glaeken, still prone, nodded. “It would take me all day to recite it.”
“The Lady there?”
“She’s number one.”
“Glaeken!” came the muffled, agonized voice from below. “You can’t! This can’t be happening! Don’t!”
Glaeken pointed to the partially choked tunnel where Jack had entered.
“Back up.”
Jack nodded and retreated. Glaeken rose to his knees and lifted the weapon to sever that last digit.
“GLAEKEN! Surely after all these millennia we can find a tiny piece of common ground, come to some kind of accord!”
He lowered the blade.
“Never.”
Instead of using the weapon, he swiveled his body, flexing his good leg all the way to his abdomen.
His foot shot out and knocked the talon over the edge.
No final farewell to Rasalom, no verbal send-off. Nothing more than a contemptuous kick. Just what he deserved.
Rasalom’s scream was loud, almost painfully so. It echoed up from the glowing depths long after his tumbling, mutilated form had been swallowed by the mists.
But Glaeken did not wait and watch and listen as he dearly would have loved. Instead, as soon as the arch slowed its bobbing from the release of Rasalom’s enormous weight, he began crawling back toward the cavern rim as fast as his limbs would allow.
Rasalom was falling into eternity. When he passed the point where his presence no longer influenced this sphere, the old laws would begin to reassert themselves. Nature would awaken from its Rasalom-induced coma and begin its recovery, regain its control.
And this cavern had no place in nature.
As he reached the end of the arch, the walls began to shake. He saw Jack knocked off his feet to tumble back into the tunnel. Glaeken knew if he could reach that tunnel, he might survive.
He was almost there when the cavern rim gave way. He fought for purchase but his hands found only loose earth. He tried to raise his good leg, fin
d some sort of foothold, but no use. His upper torso angled back as he began to tumble after Rasalom. Eternity beckoned below …
And then a hand closed about his ankle.
The Bunker
Vicky screamed as the burrowers broke from their paralysis and lurched into motion again. But they ignored the humans as they moved … away.
Gia watched in awe as they wriggled back into the holes that Swiss-cheesed the walls—something frantic about their movements—and disappeared.
“What’s happening?”
Abe shook his head. “I don’t know, but I bet You-Know-Who has something to do with it.”
Vicky frowned. “Who’s You-Know-Who?”
Gia nudged her and gave her a look. “Who do you think?”
The little girl beamed. “Ohhhh yeaaaah.”
Manhattan
The crowd quieted as a new sound overwhelmed their chants and songs. Carol’s voice had given out a while ago, so she was already silent.
They’d spilled across the street and into the illuminated sections of the park, and were swelling farther. But the sound had frozen them all in their tracks; and now they stood half crouched, looking up, looking around, looking at each other. Carol hushed those near her.
A basso drone, a thunderous buzz, a monstrous flapping in the air all around the widening cone of light, growing louder, vibrating the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings.
“It’s the bugs!” someone cried. “They’re coming back! Coming to get us!”
“No!” Carol cried, her voice a ragged blare above the growing fearful murmur of those about her. “Don’t be afraid. They hate the light. As long as we stay in the light they won’t come near us.”
She, too, was afraid, but she hid it. What was happening? She glanced at Bill and he shrugged and held her close.
Then she saw them. Bugs. An immense horde of them, thickening the air and swarming along the ground around the cone of light. Some of them were forced to dip into the light by the crowding but their wings and bodies began to smoke where the light touched them and they darted back out.