Dave came over to see. “Yes!” He was aware he hadn’t sounded excited in a very long time, and this note in his voice surprised him. “Okay, then. Good! It’s a start, at least.” He rolled the atlas up and stuck it into the waistband of his jeans. “I don’t know what we’ll be looking for, but—”
The floor cracked. Just a quiet noise, but an ominous one.
“I think we should—” get out of here, Olivia was going to say, but she didn’t have the chance.
Something was crawling up from the hole in the library floor.
It came up, swaying like a cobra. It was thin and gray-fleshed and had been a woman at one time, for the sagging exposed breasts and the scraggly patches of long, white hair. The sunken eyes in the skull-like face darted here and there, seeking either the sources of the human voices or where the smell of the fresh meat was coming from. The claw-like hands scrabbled to pull the body completely free but something seemed to be obstructing it, and the thing’s mouth twisted with frustration and a little rattling noise came from the dry throat. Olivia started to cry out but checked herself. No time for that. Grim-lipped, she swung her rifle up to fire instead.
The library’s floor rippled and heaved like a dirty ocean wave. The wet tiles burst open as clawed hands pushed their way free. Dave thought at first that he and Olivia had stumbled across a sleeping nest of Gray Men, and this was partly true…but in the next few seconds, as the floor continued to split apart and the glistening gray flesh slid out he realized with another start of horror that something very different had been incubating in the basement of the Ethan Gaines High School.
Dave had worked as a teenager on a crew demolishing old houses and hauling the timbers and bricks away. Hey, hey! the foreman had called one hot August afternoon. Looky over here!
And so Dave had seen, caught within a wall that had just been broken open, the sight of a dozen or more rats squealing and scrambling in their attempt to escape, but they had been joined and nearly knotted tail-to-tail in a circle and could not go in any one direction, and a few had died and begun to rot while the living ones continued to thrash wildly, their teeth bared, eyes glittering and breath rasping in their desperation.
It’s a Rat King, the foreman had said. Seen only one of ’em before, my whole life. They got stuck in a little space, peed on each other, and their tails growed together. Nasty!
The foreman had lifted his shovel and gone to work smashing the Rat King, which died in a bloody and chittering mess. To Dave had gone the honor of throwing the remains into a garbage can.
Now, many years later in this nightmare world, Dave McKane was watching a Rat King made up of Gray Men crawling from the broken floor.
Their legs had grown together into something resembling long, thin tentacles not unlike rat tails. Some of the bodies had been engulfed by other bodies so that they had nearly disappeared one into the other, cannibalized or absorbed, and maybe there were twenty or more of them in this Rat King circle, what had been men, women, and children, and heads and arms were not always where they were supposed to be. What remained of their clothes were sodden, dark-stained rags. Scabrous gray flesh pulled itself up from the basement. The ruined faces and misshapen heads strained on their necks. In some of the gaping mouths glinted teeth like little razor blades, and in others showed rows of sharklike rippers.
Dave realized at once that there were two problems.
This Rat King circle shared a common purpose and a direction, and the writhing monster lay between him, Olivia, and the way out.
Her face a rictus of terror, Olivia had backed up and was pressed against him. The thing struggled to get free from the basement, with wet books and moldy pages plastered upon its flesh. The Rat King of Gray Men made no noise but a hissing and a slithering, and now it appeared to be gathering its tentacles beneath itself in an effort to stand. Dave thought that if they were going to get out of here they had to go now.
He opened fire with his Magnum, which was incredibly loud and bright with its bloom of flame. Two shots, and two of the nightmarish faces were blasted away. Then Olivia’s rifle spoke, drilling a hole through the white-haired head of the female creature that had first begun to climb out. Black fluid spurted from the wound. Dave grasped Olivia’s shoulder, shouted, “Let’s move!” in the strongest voice he could summon and pulled her with him around the counter. The mass of melded-together Gray Men moved faster; it reached for them with serpentine arms. A gray mallet of a hand with seven fingers grasped Olivia’s right ankle and she would’ve fallen into the midst of them had Dave not held onto her with all his strength. Olivia sent a bullet into what might have once been a human shoulder, and she pulled free with the resolve that if she didn’t, she was dead. Dave fired again into one of the faces. Gray flesh and dark matter spattered the library walls. A low moaning like a chorus of the damned rose from the creature. The thing was hauling itself forward on elbows and gray bellies, the broken heads lolling. The tentacled appendages pushed at the floor. The bared teeth of the remaining heads snapped at Olivia and Dave, and a gray forest of arms reached out for bloody sustenance. The two humans in the room opened fire once more at a range of no further than four or five feet. Dave’s revolver went empty and he drew the Uzi from its holster, spraying the thing’s body with 9mm bullets.
With a high, eerie cry that came from each mouth at the same time, the mutated horror suddenly began to retreat, pulling itself back to its cavern beneath the floor. There was room enough to get past. Dave shoved Olivia toward the door, mindful of her knee but mindful also of keeping them both alive. He fired his last bullet of the clip into the gray body and saw what looked to be a child’s distorted face in its depths, either grown into or consumed by the others. The eyes were open and the mouth, which had no lower jaw, gaped wide as if in perpetual hunger or torment. Then Dave was out the door. They ran for daylight, Olivia damning her hurt knee and moving as fast as she could. Dave stayed beside her, giving her a shoulder to lean on. He thought that if either one of them dared to look back, it would prove their sanity had been permanently checked out in the Ethan Gaines library.
Neither one looked back, but Olivia was sobbing when she untied her horse and swung herself up. Dave was too tough to cry, but his stomach betrayed him. His breakfast of a pair of biscuits and a few spoonfuls of Spam came up. His horse smelled the mutated flesh on him and tried to run before he could get himself firmly in the saddle.
No one had to say Ride or Go or Let’s get the hell out of here.
They rode. Behind them, as the horses galloped toward the uncertain safety of Panther Ridge, the vultures were disturbed by the commotion. Some flew up off the burned carcasses they were consuming, but after a few moments they settled down again over the dead monsters in the parking lot like a black shroud and fought for their places at the feast.
Nine.
Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart. Ethan was sitting in a chair in his apartment. The chair was made of scuffed brown leather and used to be a recliner but the mechanism was jammed. A candle lantern burned on a small table beside him. The table was crooked because the floor was crooked. The first sickly light of morning had begun to creep through the duct-taped windows. Ethan wore his dark green p.j. bottoms and a gray t-shirt. He had slept a little during the night, maybe a couple of hours straight. Even asleep, he’d been listening for the siren that meant the Gray Men were coming back, but it had been four nights since he’d found out he could make earthquakes. He felt like a raw nerve and a twisted muscle. When he’d gotten out of bed the first time he’d gone into the bathroom with the candle lantern, lifted his t-shirt and inspected his chest in the mirror. Then as much of his back as he could see.