Pulling isn’t touching, she’d murmur. Pulling isn’t touching, or sucking, or anything much at all.
…skritch…
Clayton’s amputated hand. It was on the floor at his feet. Its pointer finger curled in a come-hither gesture. Every time it curled, it brushed Luke’s overalls.
It’s just the nerves, Luke thought. Nothing but nerve endings firing one last futile salvo. I saw a decapitated corn snake bite its own tail; I watched venom spurt from its neck stump as it bit and chewed…
But this was slow and deliberate. Worst of all, there was something sexual to the gesture, that finger flirting lovingly along his ankle.
Hey big boy… pulling isn’t touching, right?
Luke lunged away. His arm swung, sending bandages and vials across the floor.
The hand flapped once more—a fey, mocking wave—and went limp.
Luke bit back his disgust and reached down for Mr. Hand—that’s how he suddenly thought of it; not Clayton’s torn-off hand, but Mr. Hand—although it really resembled a huge and horrible spider.
Go ahead, Luke, Mr. Hand seemed to say. Touch me. Grab me.
Jaw clenched, nerves jangling, Luke vised his fingers around Mr. Hand, gripping it by the mangled remains of its wrist. He held it at the end of his arm as though it was a poisonous snake. He realized that those long, crablike fingers could easily wrap around his own wrist—hell, they could reach halfway up his forearm.
“Go ahead,” he seethed. “Go ahead and try. See where it gets you.”
The hand remained limp. Luke threw open the cooler lid. A sad puff of mist billowed out—with the power cut, it wasn’t that cool anymore.
The small guinea pig rested in a thawing mantle of frost. The thing beneath it, the one wrapped in trash bags and duct tape, remained motionless.
Luke heaved Mr. Hand inside. It bounced off the cooler lid. Mr. Hand skidded down the side—then came alive, spidering about with nimble movements.
It finger-walked over to the frozen guinea pig and tightened into a fist.
The guinea pig… compacted. Its half-thawed flesh squished between Mr. Hand’s fingers. Rags of flesh splattered the cooler’s insides.
Mr. Hand unclenched again. Lay there covered in gore.
One finger twitched. Coyly beckoning.
No hard feelings, right, Luke? We can be friends. Heck, let’s shake on it.
Luke slammed the cooler shut, gagging on his fear. He set a heavy box of lab equipment on the lid.
Clayton was still passed out. Luke wanted to check on Al—it was critical to keep an eye on everything, but he couldn’t possibly be two places at once.
Luke pushed up Clayton’s eyelid. His pupil was a piss hole in the snow. He’d be out awhile—and when he awoke, he’d be groggy and safely trussed up on the lab bench. Luke could risk leaving him for a few minutes, couldn’t he?
“Come on, LB. Let’s go see Al.”
11.
LUKE SENSED IT right away. An emptiness in the storage tunnel.
His footsteps faltered as he rounded the gooseneck and made his way to the Challenger. He could dimly make out the generator and the cables snaking out of it.
“Al?”
He picked up the flashlight Al had left behind. He trained it down the tunnel. He walked past the genny to the far end of the tunnel. The hatch was locked. He walked back. LB padded obediently behind.
“Hey, Al?”
Was she inside the Challenger? Luke rapped the hatch with his knuckles. Long minutes went by. The hatch didn’t open. Was the sub still there? It had to be. Alice would never…
He sat, knees tucked to his chest, arms wrapped around his kneecaps. He wanted to cry but was too tired. LB rested her head on his crossed arms and peered soulfully into his bloodshot eyes.
The flashlight cut out. Luke slapped it with his palm a few times, flicked the switch on and off. Nothing. Christly fuck. At least the emergency lights were still on.
“Where could she be, girl?”
LB gave a noncommittal chuff. Al couldn’t have returned to the lab; Luke would have spotted her. She might have headed down one of the other tunnels, but why? They had two goals: get the sub working and get home. Neither of those goals could be met by wandering aimlessly down empty tunnels.
What if Al had fallen asleep again? She could’ve wandered anyplace…
Maybe she left, Lucas.
His mother’s cold voice, back once more. The bitch always came back.
She could be halfway to the surface by now, she said reasonably. Maybe she discovered there was only enough power to take one person. Maybe she said to herself: I’ll go and come back with a fully powered vessel. Or maybe, Lucas—and you have to consider this as a very strong possibility—she just left because she could. Because she was shit-scared. People do that, you know. Given their druthers, people do the nastiest, most weak-willed and insensitive things imaginable.
No. Luke didn’t believe that. He wouldn’t let his mother—his dead mother, dead nearly three decades now, her bones moldering in a Celestial Sleeper casket under six feet of Iowa clay—poison his thoughts.
No more, Ma. You don’t have that hold over me anymore.
The emergency lights flickered, then died. Darkness fell like a guillotine blade.
12.
THE SENSATION was not unlike being doused with a bucket of freezing water. Luke’s body went stiff as the fear shot through his veins. His chest convulsed with hiccupy inhales but he couldn’t let them go.
The most profound darkness he’d ever known swept over him. The absolute absence of light, fueled by a fearsome pressure. Workers in a caved-in mine shaft might have an inkling of this sensation, but how far down was the deepest mine shaft? A mile? At eight miles, the blackness was some new kind of scientific thing, a darkness nobody had experienced before… except this wasn’t new, was it? It was the opposite. This darkness was ageless. And it had been waiting a very long time for Luke to inherit it.
A reddish tinge painted the backsides of his eyes; his final sight—the tunnel, the generator, LB’s face—lingered in the afterglow before dissolving. The darkness pushed against his eyes and flitted against his shut lips, seeking entrance; it was so thick that he could feel its weight in his lungs. It was a different, horrible breed of darkness: brooding, knowing, full of all those things that as a child you were certain it must hold. But beyond that there was the sheer terror of that dark itself—its immensity, its incalculable isolation. And that’s what Luke felt most keenly: his abrupt and total isolation, as if he’d opened his eyes to find himself floating in deepest space, beyond the light of a single guiding star.
He staggered sideways, striking his knee on the generator; pain needled to his crotch. He shuffled forward in halting baby steps. His fingers grazed the wall; he flinched. The metal was as clammy as the rocks in a sea cave.