Pandemonium (15 page)

I could see nothing but black, feel nothing but cold. Terror was a white noise, a static roar. I tried to drown it out with inner shouts, chants of
Oh fuck Oh fuck
and then
The Shug will save me The Shug will save me…
I touched bottom, ass first, and then the bottom gave way. I sank into mud, silky and unknowably deep. Fresh panic coursed through me. I twisted, trying to bring my feet up, and then slid onto my chest. My face pressed into the mud, and I recoiled in horror. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t die suffocating in mud.
I convulsed like a fish, finally ended on my side, in mud as deep as my breastbone. I lifted my helmeted head, shook it to clear the mud from my eyes.
I opened my eyes but there was nothing, black in all directions. And silence.
No splash in the water above me, no cloud of white as Toby came for me through the silty water. Toby wasn’t coming. The Shug wasn’t going to save me.
The Shug is a monster. That’s its job. Terrorize people, kill them, enforce the rituals. It doesn’t rescue people. It doesn’t retrieve cats from trees, fight fires, show up for potlucks. That’s not part of the bargain, no matter how many fish you nail to the door. The deal is, if you make the sign, the angel of death passes by your house. The angel of death doesn’t pull you out of the pool, or cut through the steel of your car door and carry you out of the ravine. It’s the fucking angel of
death.
My chest burned; my ears pounded. It took all my strength to keep my lips clamped shut. I searched the water for some sign of movement—if not the Shug, then Lew, somehow escaped from the Human Leaguers. Come on, Lew. You’re running through the forest, you’re at the pier, you’re diving…
There. Floating in the middle distance, a quavering circle of deeper black.
The black well.
As I watched, it blossomed, rushed toward me, filled my vision. The hole was bottomless, a twisting tunnel that branched and split into an infinite number of side shafts, but there was something waiting at the end of each of them. The mouth hovered above me, or I hovered over it, ready to fall, the gravity sucking at me like a whirlpool. It was a door, a gate—to something. Death, or the Hellion’s cage inside my head, or some false paradise generated by my oxygen-starved brain. I didn’t care, as long as it was somewhere else.
I let go, and fell.

10

Oh my God, did you shoot him? The commander didn’t say to—
Shut the fuck up, Bertram, I didn’t fucking touch him!
For God’s sake just get him up, pull the chair up—
I don’t understand. Del never said his brother was epileptic…
Everyone shut up! It’s a trick, dammit. Don’t fucking go near him!
It’s not a seizure.
—please, at least hold his head so he won’t—
What’d she say, “say-zure?”
I could feel him. There, in the dark, I reached for him. I reached and I
grabbed—

Light.
An expanse of braided carpet, stretching like a plain. Voices: O’Connell, Louise, Bertram, other men.
I’m telling you, don’t go near him!
Black boots appear, large as houses. A giant’s hand.
Another male voice, closer: If this is a trick, we’re going to Taser you, do you understand? Can you talk?
I—
Lew’s voice. Resonating oddly, a microphone turned too loud in a small room.
I’m drowning, the voice said.

He struggled, trying to throw me off, and I clamped down tighter, tighter still, like the bear hugs he always used against me to end our wrestling matches.
His arms were stretched backward, wrists touching, bound in hard plastic.
Flex.
Lew’s arms flexed.
“You’re not drowning,” the guard said. “You fell over.”
Pull.
The arms yanked away from each other. Plastic snapped. The pain speared up the arms.
Ignore the pain. Grab him.
The hand seized the guard’s ankle, pulled. Small bones popped. The man screamed, hit the ground.
Get up.
The perspective lurched. A Human Leaguer in midnight camo, firing. The Taser dart embedded somewhere out of sight. The leaguer pulled the trigger, pulled it again. His expression changed from anger to confusion.
Punch.
The fist knocked the gunman back into a wall. The framed photographs clattered to the floor, coughing glass.
Bertram, still in helmet and pack, seemed to be in shock, his eyes on the man who’d collapsed against the wall. Louise pressed far back into the couch. O’Connell, beside her, wore a tight-lipped expression that could have masked anything: fear, shock, anger.
“And who are
you?
” O’Connell asked.
Lew’s hands pulled the dart-tipped wire from his chest, tossed it aside.
“I’m dying,” Lew’s voice said.
Run.
The body knew what to do. It crossed the room in three long strides, pushed through the door, leaped over the steps, and landed in the gravel. Something popped in its right leg. It turned, ran toward Cabin 5.
Faster.
The body obeyed, though it ran jerkily now, its gait thrown off balance by the malfunctioning knee. Lungs heaved oxygen into the bloodstream; the heart forced it down, through clogged arteries, flooding large muscles with oxygen and chemicals. Pain signals traveled up the spine and went unanswered.
The body knew what to do, even though it had never done it so completely, so forcefully.
Trees whipped past. The yellow light of the washhouse illuminated a crumpled body in the middle of the road, one arm missing, the shoulder ending in a pool of blood like a rain puddle.
It leaped over the dead man, clearing it by ten feet. Ten more seconds and it reached the last cabin, three more and it was through the trees, onto the wooden pier, and charging toward the water.
The Shu’garath squatted at the end of the pier, pulling apart pieces of meat strung together with copper wire, as if deboning a fish. It looked up, white chest slicked with blood. It opened its mouth, and roared a challenge.
Out of my way.
“Out of my way,” Lew’s voice said.
The Shug threw down the loglike chunk it had been worrying and stood to face the running man. A moment before the two big men struck, the Shug melted aside and slipped into the water without a ripple. The running man didn’t break stride.
Dive.
The icy water slapped the skin. Lew’s body was buoyant with fat and trapped air, but the big legs kicked and forced it into the dark. Ten feet down, then fifteen feet, the arms plowed into mud.
The hands pushed through the silt, overturning rocks, waterlogged sticks, sharp-edged bits of ancient garbage. Eyes opened wide, gathering as much light as possible, but the water was too dim, too silted, to see more than a few inches. The body, already depleted of oxygen from the sprint, had to keep kicking to stay close to the bottom. The hands kept moving, fanning through the mud.
The pier. Closer to the pier.
Legs kicked toward the shore. Hands touched the first pylon, then the body swung back, moving low over the lake floor like a manatee. It worked on, commanded to ignore the burning in its chest, the blood trickling from its nose.
Fingers brushed a rubber-covered cable. The hand closed on the cable, traced it to the helmet and backpack, then to the body of the drowned man still attached to them. Both hands grabbed the body under the arms and heaved it out of the muck.
The shore.
Lew’s body held on to the man with one arm and beat upward, angling toward land. A few moments more and its head broke the surface, gulped automatically for air. It ducked again and lifted Del’s body out of the water. It strode out of the lake, carrying the drowned man like a bride.
O’Connell was there at the shoreline, and Bertram appeared a moment later, breathing heavily. He’d removed the helmet and pack, and his bald head was damp with sweat.
“Set him down,” O’Connell said.
Its head tilted down, looked down at the ground. Blood spattered onto the drowned man’s chest. It was Lew’s blood, gushing from his nose. A moment’s concentration stopped the flow.
“Listen to me!”
she shouted.
Its head rose again.
O’Connell jumped down a short ledge, her eyes on Lew’s, and began to pull off her jacket. “Set him down. Set the body down. He’s not breathing. Let me help.”
Set it down.
Arms and legs and back muscles coordinated to lay the man on the jacket O’Connell had stretched out. The drowned man’s face
—my face—
was white and translucent as rice paper, tinged with blue: blue eyelids, blue lips. He wasn’t breathing.
O’Connell bent over him, delicately pulled the helmet from his head. She pushed up the soaked sweatshirt and T-shirt to his armpits—his arms were still bound behind him—and laid her cheek on his chest. She stayed in that position for a very long time. “I can’t hear anything,” she said, almost to herself. She tilted his head and ran a finger deep inside his mouth, spooned out a wad of oily black that might have been mud, mucous, blood, or a mix of all those things. She adjusted his head, breathed into him, one hand pinching his nose. Moments later she switched and compressed his chest, three times quickly, then moved back to his face.
“He’s too cold,” she said without pausing. “We’ve got to strip him.” She gestured at Bertram. “
You.
Give me that sweater.”
Bertram obeyed. O’Connell paused in her CPR to unbelt the drowned man and yank down his pants. “We need blankets, lots of them. Find Louise. Go!”
Bertram turned to go just as one of the Human League guards—the one who had been thrown back into the wall by Lew’s punch—came through the bushes at the shoreline. His beefy face was sweaty and flushed. He stared at the big man at the edge of the water, then down at O’Connell busy on the ground over the naked man. “They’re all dead,” he said to Bertram. “Harp, Torrence, Parrish. We’ve got to find the commander. We’ve got to get—”
Bertram nodded toward the pier, at the mass of cloth and flesh and wire. The Leaguer took a step forward before registering what he was seeing. He made a whining, despairing sound, then turned to Bertram in confusion.
“Go!” O’Connell ordered.
Bertram hustled toward the woods. The Leaguer hesitated, then bolted after him.
O’Connell resumed CPR, alternating breaths with compressions. In a few minutes she was panting with the effort.
She sat up. “This isn’t working,” she said, trying to catch her breath. She looked at Lew’s body. It listed to the right because of the damaged leg but remained standing. It was shivering, but otherwise unmoving. Awaiting commands.
“Del, you’ve got to go back in.”
Lew’s body didn’t respond.
“You’ve done this before. The pool, Del. You saved yourself before. You have to go back in.”
How?
“I don’t know how,” Lew’s voice said.
“Dammit, you got out, you can get back in.” She got to her feet. “You can’t stay—” She made a slashing gesture, aimed at Lew’s chest. “
In there.
In someone else. Get back in your body, Del.”
My body.
A rumble of big engines. The rumble grew louder, then was joined by a rising whine. The helicopter lifted over the treetops in a ring of lights. It turned on its axis, tilted toward the lake, and zoomed away.
In Lew’s vision, where the vehicle had disappeared was an absence, a dot of deeper black.
The mouth of the well opened, edges fitfully expanding, eating the sky. The twisting shaft like a gullet, dropping, or rising, until it exploded into an infinity of tributaries that divided and divided again: black fireworks.
The well tugged at me, but less forcefully than it had under the water. I could resist it, or I could fall into it. All that was required was that I be willing to die, again.

Somehow O’Connell got us to the hospital in Louise’s ’92 Taurus station wagon, the only car big enough for all of us.
Bertram rode with O’Connell up front. I lay diagonally in the back, covered with blankets. Lew rode in the middle seat, leaning against the window, Louise next to him holding towels to his nose. The muscles of Lew’s triceps were torn, and he couldn’t lift his arms.
I was conscious, my eyes open. I could hear everything that was said, but couldn’t make myself move or talk. Just as well.
The hospital was an underfunded, fifties-era county institution forty-five minutes from Harmonia Lake. When I arrived in the ER my core temperature was 83 degrees, my heart rate somewhere near twenty beats per minute. I was breathing slowly but regularly, which surprised them. At that temperature, my central nervous system should have shut down like a carnival in winter.
The staff was small, but they knew hypothermia; plenty of drunk fishermen falling out of their boats. They fastened a mask over me that hissed hot, humidified oxygen into my lungs, and set up an IV of warmed saline.
They didn’t know what to make of Lew’s injuries, though. O’Connell told them that he’d dived in to rescue me from drowning, but he looked as if he’d been in a car accident. He’d burst dozens of arteries in his nose and cheeks, creating a full-faucet nosebleed that was surprisingly hard to stop. His face had swelled with blood, turning his eyes into piggy slits. As well as the torn triceps, several muscles in his back were pulled. His right kneecap had popped loose from the tendons, floating under the skin, and would require orthopedic surgery. Worse, blood tests showed that he’d suffered a heart attack. Only the massive amounts of adrenaline in his system had kept him from dying on the spot.
My shiver reaction came back online after thirty minutes of oxygen and IVs, and my core temp started to rise. This seemed to make the ER doctor very relieved. By morning I was breathing without the mask, and the rectal thermometer pegged me at a toasty 94.2.

My first visitor was Bertram. He wouldn’t stop apologizing. “I swear to God, Del, that was never part of the plan! It’s—it’s—completely against the League philosophy! We use only humane, nonlethal weapons.”
“Humane? Have you ever been shot by a Taser?”
“But we’d never
hurt
you. ‘The use of force is a black crime.’ It’s one of our core beliefs. Killing you was never in the plan.”
“Bertram, you weren’t
in
on the plan, you were
part
of the plan.”
He was crushed, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A moment. I got him out of the room by telling him I was tired. If you’re in a hospital bed, you’re entitled to a range of efficient social tactics.
Later in the morning O’Connell appeared in my doorway looking like Super Exorcist. She was back in her voluminous black cassock, which served as a matte backdrop to the gigantic hunk of silver that hung from her neck on industrial-gauge chain. The crucifix was a nine-inch-long naturalist rendition of Jesus in maximum agony mode. It looked like it weighed five pounds.
I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. It was too late to pretend to be sleeping.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you feeling?” she said. This was probably a required question for clerical visits. The forms must apply even to dubiously ordained priests of schismatic sects.
“Not bad,” I lied. My mouth felt cottony, and I cleared my throat. “Warmer.” They’d put some kind of hot-water tube vest around my chest, and now that my temperature was above the danger zone, they let me heat up my extremities too. The nurses had piled four or five blankets onto me, covered them with a sheet, and tucked the edges tight, creating a perfectly smooth mound that hid any suggestion of legs or arms. I hadn’t moved enough to disturb their handiwork.
“Your doctor’s amazed at your progress.”
“This morning I impressed my nurses by sipping chicken broth. Very exciting.” I smiled, but I didn’t have the energy to sell it. I changed the subject. “Have you seen Lew?”
“I stopped in just now. He’s fairly medicated at the moment, not in any pain.” She walked to the end of the bed. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “He doesn’t remember rescuing you. That’s standard.”
Standard for possession, she meant.
I tried to change the subject again. “That’s good in a way,” I said. “The less he knows, the less he’ll get sucked into the investigation.”
“What investigation would that be?” O’Connell’s face was set into an expression of mild curiosity. There was no one else in the room, but she was performing just the same.
I didn’t know what to say. Commander Stoltz and at least three of his men were dead, killed by the Shug. The rest of the Human League, all except Bertram, had fled in the helicopter. True, they’d come to kill me, so they weren’t about to go to the police. But there were still four dead men. You couldn’t have people die in your town and just pretend it didn’t happen. You had to at least look into it, didn’t you?
But no. If they called in the cops, what could they do? Arrest Toby, kill him? And then the Shug would just move on to the next host.
This couldn’t have been the first time people had disappeared at the lake. It wouldn’t be the last.
O’Connell watched my face, saw me get it.
“It’s Harmonia Lake, Del,” she said.
Holy shit.
“You’ll still have to answer some questions, though,” she said. She paced to the window, leaned against it. “Lew wants to know what happened to him. He wasn’t happy with my answers.”
“What’d you tell him?” I said.
“Exactly what I saw,” she said. The morning light was behind her, and I couldn’t make out her face. “I saw him snap handcuffs like chop-sticks, shrug off a Taser, disable two armed men. I saw him save his brother from drowning.” She paused. “That’s what I saw. Now why don’t you tell me what
happened.
”
“I was at the bottom of the lake, remember? I was unconscious until—”
“Don’t lie, not to me,” she said quietly.
It was too hard to look into the sunlight. I stared down at the mound of bedclothes covering me from chest to toes like a white casket.
“How’d you do it, Del?”
“What the
fuck
are you talking about?”
“You might want to keep your voice down.” She stood up, but her face was still in shadow. “You jumped. You possessed your brother, you controlled him, and then you jumped back into your own body. You can try to pretend it didn’t happen, you can pretend it was some near-death hallucination. But you did it.”
“Look, I’m not saying that…” I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Something happened. But I don’t know how—it just
did,
okay?” I bought myself time to think by closing my eyes and opening them slowly, as if dealing with some internal perturbation. Hospital Bed Tactic 12.
“I told you about the black well,” I said. “I saw it again. And this time I went into it. I…rode it. And at the end of it was…Lew.”
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that you just clicked your heels and wished real hard.”
“I don’t know how it works,”
I said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
She stepped away from my window, circled my bed. I could see her face again, and it was sealed tight, the same mask I’d seen her use too many times now.
“So what now, then?” she said icily. She crossed her arms under her breasts; the crucified Jesus tilted up, his eyes on mine. “You’re all cured?”
“No,” I said. “It’s still here.” I sat up in bed, felt a wave of dizziness, and shut my eyes. “The Hellion’s still inside. I can feel it.”
“Now, that’s interesting.” She went to the door, looked over her shoulder at me. “So why didn’t it jump when you left it? You weren’t holding it back anymore. That’s what you’ve been doing all this time, isn’t it, holding it back?”