Wade was screaming.
Peerce’s severed head expectorated tobacco juice into her face. Thanks a lot, she thought. She raised the head to her mouth, grasped the rod flange with her teeth, and yanked.
Amid an awful, dry grinding sound, the rod began to come loose. Now it was Peerce’s head that was screaming. The rod jerked out of the skull in half inch stops. Peerce’s standing, headless corpse was shuddering in place.
When the transceptionrod came out all the way, the knife-wielding cadaver collapsed.
Lydia threw the head as hard as she could against the passwall. It cracked like heavy porcelain. Wade staggered as if drunk down the pass. “You like to keep a guy in suspense, don’t you?”
“Are you all right?”
“I think so. At least I don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. What time is it?”
Lydia consulted her watch. “Eleven fifty four.”
“We’ve got six minutes.”
They ran like slapstick idiots down the pass. Wade held onto her as they extromitted down to the next level. “What did you bring that for?” he asked, noticing the UV spotter on her belt.
“In case the sisters are around.”
“They’re all either dead or hibernating,” he informed her. “At least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”
They weren’t two steps into the next servicepass when, at once, their surroundings went from dark to light. Suddenly they were standing in brilliant radiance; the labyrinth’s ice cold changed to stunning heat. Myriad sensorposts glowed in shimmering black, and all around them the labyrinth hummed like high tension power lines.
Lydia checked her watch. “Eleven fifty five,” she said.
“Recharge,” Wade realized.
“Does that mean—”
“It means the Supremate knows we’re here.”
««—»»
Nina McCulloch woke up alone in a hospital bed. What was she doing here? The room’s only light came from the window.
She’d had a terrible dream.
Elizabeth and her two friends. The hooded girl in the black cloak. And Jervis Phillips, dead but walking.
It wasn’t a dream, she realized. It was the devil.
But God had saved her from that, hadn’t He?
Some police had brought her to the hospital. Nina prayed thanks to God. She wondered, though, if the devil had been vanquished. Show me a sign, Lord, she prayed.
The room filled with light.
It came from the window. Nina got up to look. At first she thought it must be a fire of some kind, it was miles distant. Forest fire? she thought. Plane crash?
She saw a gaseous yellow aura rising in the sky. It seemed to be coming from past the campus, the forest near the agro site. It wasn’t a fire, though. It was an emanation.
No, Nina thought. A sign!
««—»»
The Supremate’s pre recharge sleep was over. Fleeing the labyrinth’s hot and glowing bowels made Wade think of Jonah and the whale. He and Lydia came out on the last level. The fully energized sign beamed at the end of the pass: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.
They stopped in their tracks. A hum vibrated in their heads. When they turned around, they saw six sisters emerge from the extromitter behind them.
“Pardon me while I shit my pants,” Wade muttered. These sisters were the biggest he’d seen. They were beautiful in their immense, alien hybridized perfection. The last one to emerge stood over eight feet tall.
“I’m going to burn these bitches down,” Lydia said. She pushed Wade toward the last extromitter. Cloaked, the sisters advanced, showing fang crammed grins. They moved slowly at first, then began to run so fast they seemed aflight. Lydia set the UV spotter on the floor.
“Turn it on!” Wade shouted.
But Lydia was waiting for them to get close. When the first two were only yards away, she flicked the spotter on. Shrieks whistled. The sisters leading the pack began to smolder, then their white faces exploded. Wade and Lydia were splattered.
“Run!” Lydia yelled. They tore for the extromitter. Lydia was plugging in her key. Wade glanced back. Fangs glittered from flashes of wailing faces. Smoke poured out of frantic black cloaks as the phalanx of sisters hulled into the field of ultraviolet light. Flesh sizzled amid the onslaught of shrieks. Spheric eyes ruptured, torrents of fresh, black blood fell like rain as crisped hands reached out from the billow of oily smoke. Then the rank of corpses fell atop the spotter and died. But the spotter was under them, its deadly invisible light buried by their sizzling bodies.
“Oh, shit,” Wade muttered.
The last and largest sister remained. Spots of flesh cooked on her face, yet she had survived. Her fangs protracted, and she lunged over the corpses.
Lydia grabbed Wade’s hand and pulled him through the humming slit.
On the other side, Wade again caught only glimpses of things, unstable fragments: the rocking backdrop of Besser’s office, paneled walls, furniture, the carpeted floor, and Lydia tugging on him trying to drag him through. The desk clock read 11:59. Wade had oozed through the extromitter by everything but his right ankle. Lydia pulled and pulled but he wasn’t moving—
The sister’s hand had his ankle, pulling him back. Lydia yanked from one side while the sister yanked from the other. This was a tug of war, and Wade was the rope. He was being pulled between the threshold of two worlds.
Lydia gave a final heave, and Wade’s ankle came through the wall, along with the sister’s arm.
The desk clock’s lighted digits read 12:00.
A sound like an air raid siren whistled into the room, and a terrifying, vibrating drone. The extromission egress turned bright red, then snapped closed. Wade’s release came as suddenly as a knife to a climber’s rope. He was thrown into the middle of the office, tumbling into Lydia’s lap.
The sister’s arm had detached at the elbow and lay severed on the carpeted floor.
Wade and Lydia looked up at the wall.
The extromitter dot was gone, which could only mean that the labyrinth was gone too.
—
CHAPTER 43
Nobody ever knew what happened, except, of course, for Lydia and Wade. The newspapers did their best to speculate as to Exham College’s spate of disappearances and murder. One paper blamed a clandestine drug ring. Another blamed the Dixie Mafia, while still another blamed, of all things, a satanic cult. Wade was tempted to write an article himself, about aliens abducting humans for genetic hybridization experiments, but he doubted that even the lowest of tabloids would go for anything so farfetched.
As after any great calamity, things eventually returned to normal. Dean Saltenstall’s murder had been blamed on a burglar. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White had fallen in the line of duty to drug merchants. Within days, the campus had appointed a new dean, and the town counsel had elected a new chief of police.
««—»»
“Hi, Dad. This is Wade!”
“I would never have guessed,” came Dad’s stolid reply over the phone line. “What did you do this week, son?”
Wade contemplated the full weight of the answer. I saved the world, he wished he could say. “Oh, the usual,” he said instead. “Worked, studied, that sort of thing. Just another week in the life of a diligent student.”
“Sounds like the usual bullshit to me,” Dad commented.
Wade lay back in bed, eyeing Lydia. She stood at the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth. Wade nearly swooned: All she wore was a pair of devil red frilled panties.