“I’m fine.” She covered his hand with hers. An impulse, not something she really thought about, but which, once done, felt entirely right. “Thank you for coming, for not letting that thing g-get …”
“Would never l-let that happen.” His eyes fastened on hers, and she could feel a slow flush working its way up her neck. He turned his hand over, palm up, and gave her fingers a squeeze. “Tania?”
“Who?” Eric asked.
“Oh God.” She felt a pang of guilt. In all the commotion, she’d forgotten. Hurriedly pushing to her feet, she edged past the thing, sparing it a swift sidelong glance, then stopped dead and gave a much longer stare.
“What?” Eric was there in an instant. “What is … oh shit.”
“Yeah,” she breathed against a clutch of dawning dread. A moist mesh of fresh connective tissue had already formed; a toothy cage of remodeled bone arced over a gray sponge of new lung. Whips of thickening muscle waggled, and she swore she saw that thing’s left hand convulse in a sudden spasm.
“I think we’re out of here, now,” Eric said, and moved to help Casey make his feet. “What about your friend? Is she …?”
“Just a second.” Dead ahead, the pudding that remained of Father Preston was still SMEE-smeeing over the windscreen. She wondered what they could possibly be rebuilding themselves into. The snowcat’s auger had chopped the priest to hamburger. Could all those pieces be finding their way back together again? How could you kill something that kept regrowing like those nematodes Rima had sliced and diced in eighth-grade science?
Betcha fire would do it. Steeling herself, she worked her way around the driver’s side transmission box. Cook those suckers.
Then she forgot all that, pushed it away as irrelevant, when she got a good look at Tania’s face. The girl’s skin was the color of cottage cheese, and her lids drooped, the whites showing in half-moons. Her ruined right arm was dusky, and her lips were purple. She wasn’t breathing. Blood saturated her clothing and had gathered in a crimson lake on Tania’s seat, spilling over into the foot well.
“Rima?” Casey called.
“Just … just give me a second.” She closed her eyes against the prick of tears. Come on; do what you have to. Steeling herself, she opened her eyes, blew out a hard breath, then touched her fingers to the angle of Tania’s jaw below her left ear.
A second later, over the sudden slam of her heart, she heard Casey: “Rima?” When she didn’t answer, Eric said, more sharply, “Rima, what’s wrong?”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Look at her face.”
RIMA
Doomsday Sky
1
RIMA! RIMA! SOMEONE … Casey … was shouting, and now another voice, Eric’s, joined his, both boys screaming from the back of the passenger cab and a million miles away: Rima, get down, get down, get out of the way!
But she couldn’t move. She was beyond shock, into deepfreeze. Her body was icy, numb, like that little kid with the splinters of an evil mirror in his heart and eyes; a child fit only for the world of the Snow Queen. Rooted in place, she could only stare at Tania, her face, her neck, and if she thought at all in those first few seconds, it wasn’t in words so much as sensations: the skip of her heart, the slickness of new alien blood on her fingers, the hard scent of iron and blasted flesh and spent gunpowder, the airless dead space in her lungs as they emptied.
And the boys, of course, still screaming from so far away: Rima, Rima, get down!
Tania’s throat and face were moving, not twitching but undulating and worming as something eeled just beneath the surface, the suddenly elastic skin puffing and then deflating, over and over again, as if Tania were growing gills. Trickles of black leaked from the dead girl’s nose and dribbled out of both ears. Fat, ebony pearls swelled from the half-moons of her eyes. A deep ripple worked its way across Tania’s face from right to left, from one cheek to the opposite, skimming under and lifting Tania’s lips as if the girl were dragging a thick, fleshy tongue over and around her teeth.
Tania’s mouth suddenly sagged, the jaws unlocking—and at that, Rima’s brain eked a single, small oh. Then she blanked, her mind blinkering white with terror as a nightmare of legs, jointed and bristled as a tarantula’s, unfurled from Tania’s lips like the spiky petals of an alien rose. Deep in the heart of this bizarre flower, two sets of long, pointed fangs clashed, working from side to side like a spider’s mandibles, grating together with a coarse rasp, like the grind of metal files.
Rima felt a crack of horror, like a jag of lightning, scorch through her mind to burn from her mouth in a high, terrified scream as Tania’s eyes snapped open. The whites were a jet-black sea of hemorrhage. The pupils belonged to a lizard, a snake, the vertical slits narrowing as Tania let go of a shrill, chittering squeal.
“Rima!” There came a hard jolt as someone crashed into her from behind, a solid body blow that knocked her to one side. Panicked, taken by surprise, she flailed, but Casey grabbed her arms and then he was bullying her back, slamming her flat against a far wall, covering her up, using his weight to hold her in place, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot it, Eric, shoot it!”
The cab flooded with bright yellow light, and the roar from the shotgun was so huge Rima thought her eardrums would explode. The blast punched whatever Tania had become in the chest, but it wasn’t like the movies. Instead of flying back, Tania, who also had a new gaping hole where her heart used to be, blundered back to crash against the cat’s transmission box. But she didn’t go down, not the way the man-thing had. Still pinned, Rima watched as Tania made a left-handed grab, steadied herself against a seat, and pulled upright. Another roar from the shotgun, and all of a sudden a spool of guts boiled in wet spaghetti tangles. This time, Tania lost her feet, coming down hard and with a sodden splash. Almost at once, she rolled onto hands and knees and then clawed her way upright again.
“Jesus,” she heard Casey say, his voice catching with pain, and she realized just how much wrestling her out of the line of fire had cost him. Slick with sweat, he was panting, his breaths shallow, his stormy eyes wide with shock. “Look at how fast.”
She saw. The damage to Tania’s chest and abdomen was already repairing itself, the tissues knitting together at a ferocious rate, so fast the skin seemed to boil. The entire interior of the cabin was now alive with squirming tissue, creeping blood. On the deck, she saw the man-thing shudder with a fresh convulsion and thought they had only a few seconds left.
“Case! Rima! Now!” Eric was suddenly there, expression taut. He hooked a hand under Casey’s arm. “Shotgun’s dry. You’re out, too, Case. Come on, we go to go.”
Of course, the guns are out of ammunition. She darted a look at Tania, who was setting her feet. The hole in her chest was gone, and as Rima watched, the last loop of intestine, not pink or white or blue but smoky gray, was sucked back in the way a kid slurped up that last juicy noodle. Even Tania’s nearly severed arm was stitching back into place. Eric and Case could pump out shots all day, maybe even make oatmeal out of Tania’s head and brains, and the end result would be the same. As she crowded after Eric and Casey, she half-expected the jittering man-thing to grab her by the ankle, but she swept past and then she was out, bolting from the cabin, hopping to the snow, running from the nightmare. Wondering if the fog would let them go.