Embedded in the center of Napier's chest was a human hand, black and engorged with nearly luminous black-red blood. Like a piece of fruit suspended in Jell-O, it had almost sunken completely into Napier, and tendrils of violet radiated out from it like the first shoots of a virulent weed. The hand pulsated like a second heart, sending tremors shivering through Napier's dissolving body. He regarded Stella impassively for a moment, trembling, and started to climb off the bed.
Stella drew the gun and pointed it at him, the shredded remains of her purse still clinging to the barrel. "Stay back, Mr. Napier. I'm going to call for an ambulance."
Don't breathe
, she told herself.
Whatever it is, it's highly infectious. Whatever it is…
Napier's eyes regarded her as if he were sinking into himself, succumbing to an inexorable pull that was dragging him so deep into his body he'd never see out of his own eyes again.
His sad, sick old eyes studied her, as if to engulf her image and take her with him wherever he was going. And then Seth Napier's eyes seemed to fill with smoke. And when they cleared, they were not brown anymore, but green.
And Seth Napier's face slid off.
Tearing like the skin of a rotting fruit bursting with the gases of its own corruption, the gray jelly split open along the lines of Napier's jaw, splattering on the dirty tile floor in sizzling chunks. Cloudy pus spewed out of the opening, perversely reminding Stella of a pregnant mother's water breaking at the beginning of labor. Underneath, clean white flesh peered out, shiny and elastic like the new skin beneath a scab. Napier's hands came up and tugged at the clinging shreds and ripped them away. Stella backed against the far wall, still holding her breath, the gun shaking as she made out the new face beneath the one Napier tore off.
It was Stephen.
His benevolent, blissful grin took her in, approved. He settled back onto the bed and folded his arms across his chest, as if he'd arrived from a very long journey and wanted to rest a spell. The outer shell of rotting flesh slid away even faster, melting, pooling in the folds of the sheets. Stella could not scream, could not run, because the only conclusion that made sense froze her to the spot.
Stephen's cancer infected Seth Napier. Remade him…into another Stephen. Perhaps it had already infected her.
Then Stephen's face contorted and his back arched like a galvanic current was going through him. His eyes, when they opened again, were the same color they'd turned in the hospital, steely gray.
"The Moon-Ladder," Stephen murmured.
Outside, the sounds of the dogs barking gave way to a thunderous chorus of gunfire. Automatic weapons bratted, turning the barks to agonized whines and howls.
Stella dropped to the ground and belly-crawled towards the front window, peered out through the hairline crack out into the yard. There were at least a dozen men in the yard, standing up from the beds of two monster pickup trucks, spraying the attack dogs with assault rifles. In moments, every one lay dead, most cut in half.
Then they climbed down. Several of them shouldered ungainly metal tanks in shoulder-harnesses, ignited cobalt flames off the metal hoses that came off the bottoms of them. Then they turned and fanned out to surround the cabin.
Stella lay down against the baseboards and reloaded her gun. What are you doing? You're going to die here unless you surrender. These people want Napier, not you. Give yourself up.
And die like a dog. No way.
Stella looked around, studying the warped hardwood floor for signs of a trapdoor leading to a crawlspace. She yanked on a filthy throw rug in the middle of the room. One leg of a recliner held it tacked down. She leaned back and put her whole weight into pulling it free. The recliner tipped over backwards with a resounding crash, knocking over a TV tray littered with empty whiskey bottles.
Under the throwrug, she made out a rectangle of raised boards.
In the bedroom, she heard rustling, followed by the whining creak of old nails pried free from boards. Flashlight beams stabbed through the cracks of a rear window. Two boards were ripped away, and her face was washed in blinding white light. Frantically, she scrambled over to the trapdoor and clawed at it. There was no visible handle, she couldn't make out a recess or a handhold or anything to lift it up. Another board was ripped away from the window, and she saw a black-gloved hand reach in and grab at the next one, working it free.
Stella brought the gun up. "Stop where you are, I have a gun—" she said, unconvinced herself by her quavering tone, "—I'll shoot." Will you?
A rifle barrel peeked in through the crack and sprayed the room. The sound was deafening. Stella leapt sideways, taking shelter behind the overturned recliner. She raised the gun over the chair and fired twice in the general direction of the window.
"Ow! Goddamit!" Someone shouted. "Gas!"
From behind her, a whoomp and a crash, and something burst through the front window-boards and clattered to the floor beside her.
Stella held her breath, pinching her nose shut and lying low. Clouds enveloped her, folding over her and taking her away from the awful place in which she'd just been getting used to the idea that she was going to die. It wasn't just tear gas either, oh no, Stella knew the distinctive flavor of teargas from the baddest of the bad old days down on the farm. Sure her eyes streamed like they were melting, and her stomach wrung itself out on the spot, hot salmon vomit splattering her knees and her trail boots, but she was also fading away and the sensation of her body was fast becoming a vicious rumor she'd rather not have heard about, and she was falling fast into sleep, or into death, and didn't care which.
Don't let this happen.
Like it matters, whether it happens now or in six months. Least this'll be quick. But still she held her breath, still she told herself,
I'm supposed to die of cancer—
Her head was too heavy to keep off the floor, so she just let it go, followed it down. Down to the floor and she dropped like dead weight, and a floorboard cracked beneath her, it was rotted and her hand went right through the crack and waved in empty space. The crawlspace under the cabin.
Stella watched her body drag itself over the hole and press her face against it. The dank, moldy air of the crawlspace woke her up instantly. Furiously, she pistoned her fists against the surrounding boards. She couldn't see, but she felt the pulpy chips against her arms and shoulders as she broke through both boards. She lunged into the gap, and with barely enough time to throw out an arm, she hit the dirt beneath the cabin so hard it knocked the wind back out of her. But she was out. Her arm was numb from the elbow down and she tasted blood from something she'd bitten through in her mouth, but she was out.
Thank you, God, I'm going to die of cancer after all
, she thought and tried to laugh.
After she gave up on that, she let sounds come in, and blinked the tears from her eyes. The first thing she noticed was the sound of a waterfall, it was roaring all around the cabin.
The crawlspace was open and empty, as far as she could tell. A few lines of lesser blackness from missing siding boards crisscrossed the dirt, but the light from the side directly before her was almost hurtful. It came from the truck parked out front. She peered out through a crack in the porch just beside the stairs, and saw she was only half-right.
The roaring was not water or wind, but fire. A man with a flamethrower stood in the front yard, hosing down the front of the house with flaming gasoline. The man wore a gasmask and dark brown combat fatigues, but Stella couldn't make out anything like a badge or other insignia of authority. They knew somehow about Stephen and Seth Napier, or why else just burn the house down, without even searching it? She wasn't part of this, she hadn't touched anything, but she was there, and they hadn't seemed too interested in checking for innocent bystanders. They were treating this like an epidemic, and if it was, then she knew, as any nurse would, that she'd probably been infected.
Then I'll turn myself in at the fucking hospital,
she thought.
Stella got up on all fours and crabwalked backwards towards the rear of the house. Even as she backed away, the porch collapsed with a cheery puff of flame. The fire spread through the rotten, termite-riddled wood in seconds, and the crawlspace began to fill with smoke. Her right hand stomped in something that was once a cat or an opossum and skidded through it so she lay down in it. She rolled over and retched bile and dog hair. Through her tears, she saw too-bright firelight through the slats on both faces of the house, and spreading. They were circling around it.
She scrambled the rest of the way across the crawlspace in three bounds and seized two slats, yanked as hard as she could and they came loose with a whining protest of rusty nails. She threw herself into the crack, her head sticking out into the clear, clean night, the darkness and safety of the woods just beyond her arm's reach. She wrenched her body sideways, the jagged corners of the neighboring slats tearing at her back and breasts. She dug her feet into the moldy dirt and kicked and the slats snapped and she spilled out onto a carpet of pine needles and fresh forest air that was only beginning to reek of burning. She staggered to her feet and took a step towards the forest, one step, and she was pinned to the spot by cold white flashlight beams and the roiling orange glow of idling flamethrowers. There were four men, two on each flank, and the flashlights were taped to the barrels of stubby submachine guns.
Stella threw herself down on her knees and laced her hands over her head. "I surrender, goddamit I didn't touch a fucking thing in there don't you dare fucking burn me you Nazi
puto
motherfuckers I'm not dying like this—"
The soldiers closed in on her with their weapons leveled. "Bravo Charlie, Bravo one-three," one of them said in flat headset monotone, "have possible second subject, please advise." No one spoke for a moment, then the same man said, "roger that," and he shouldered his own rifle, painted a laser dot on her forehead.
Stella threw her arms wide to show them she was unarmed, but that only seemed to make them more nervous. One of the flamethrowers splashed hot death across the forest floor just inches short of her, and she leapt back. Her face seared and eyebrows turned to ash. Incredibly, no one else fired just then. They seemed to be trying to do it, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to shoot, like they were waiting for her to give them a reason. Like they were maybe a little bit afraid of
her
.
She was about to cry now, and that made her angry, and wasn't that stupid? After all this, getting mad because she was going to cry in front of all these macho asshole soldiers who were about to cremate her?
"Lock me up," she growled, "Quarantine me for a year if you want to, but don't shoot me. I'm not infected. Is this an airborne virus?"
The soldier with the headset exchanged looks with the others, shrugged and asked "How long were you inside?"
"A few minutes. I saw—"
you didn't see a goddamned thing!
"—a man on the bed inside, and I—and then you showed up."
They didn't seem any less likely to kill her, but they were at least listening to her. She tried to keep talking, tried not to scream. "I am asking you. Not to kill me. I'm a trauma nurse. I work in the ER up in Bishop. I know about infectious disease. We took in a man two summers back who came down with bubonic plague from a squirrel bite up at Twin Lakes. He recovered in three days on antibiotics. If I'm sick, I want to be quarantined, but I don't want to die out here in the woods because of something I don't even fucking understand! Will somebody please fucking talk to me?!"
"Stand down!" someone shouted, and a fifth soldier stepped into the circle. He was black, as dark a man as Stella'd ever seen, and bigger than any of the others. His gait and the forceful way his hands grabbed and subdued the air made any signs of rank he might've chosen to wear seem unnecessary. "The lady said she'd go into quarantine, Lonny. I ordered you to contain. Contain and collect."
Lonny, the soldier with the headset, raised his gun to port arms. "
You
were ordered not to risk men,
Major.
"
"I don't know about you, but I'm sick as shit of killing the wrong people," the Major said, and turned and walked back towards the truck.
Another soldier grumbled at the retreating commander. "Not like we could've killed her if we had to, with the shit gear we got. If she's—"
"I'm not infected with anything, goddamit!" Stella shouted.
"We'll see about that, ma'am," the Major called out over his shoulder. "Secure her, bagged and tagged, and keep up the perimeter. The primary's still in there."
The roof caved in. A hail of brilliant sparks danced up into the night sky. Over the roaring of the blaze, Stella heard screaming. From inside.
The house had been burning for several minutes. The crawlspace was working like a carburetor, sucking the night air in under the house so the whole structure collapsed moments later. The soldiers fell back, widening the circle to enclose the whole back half of the cabin. "Bravo one-two, Bravo-Charlie, get your shit together, he's coming out!"
The soldiers were all pointing their guns at the fire, now. She drew herself into a crouch. Their eyes off her, waiting for something to come out. She could get away.
Seth Napier/Stephen burst through the toppled back wall of the cabin, wreathed in flames and flailing limbs that no longer seemed to have any bones in them. He hit the ground hard and flopped like a freshly caught catfish, a burning worm hurling itself blindly eight feet into the air. The flamethrowers converged on him, spewing gas until the burning was too bright to look at, until the man inside was lost to view. Stella huddled in a ball on the ground, any thought of running away far beyond her.