He took another step closer, and she could smell his desire rising, sapping his bloodlust. It was a sour, ammoniac emotion, the naked inner core of a thing that had never, ever known the tender side of the physical act of love. Pleasure was to be taken in another's pain. Pleasure was the power of life and death, the despoiling of innocence. The act of love was revenge for the sin of birth. He wanted to ravage every womb for want of the one that had spat him out.
She mastered her fear, bottled it up and buried it inside herself. Its absence baffled him, but her other secretions drew him nearer, despite himself.
The dome had sealed itself, but the trees still writhed as if to tear themselves out of the ground. The whisper of their needles was like the aroused breath of the earth itself, the night the sky raped the earth and begat the gods.
"Come on," she whispered huskily, "before I change my mind again."
"Crazy squaw bitch," he growled, and lay down on top of her.
His penetrations were legion. Bone-daggers gored her everywhere, deflowering bloody vaginas wherever he touched her. His talons caressed her, ripped her open and dripped vitriol, scalding anti-semen. Something like a snake, scaly and dry and cold, lapped at her exposed throat. The head of his penis, a throbbing moray eel ringed with collars of gnarled drill-teeth, ground itself against her groin.
She lay bare and shivering beneath him, fighting her body's mounting reflexive overdrive. Back, back inside her mind she went, and built a place for herself where the grunting and pain and violation were only a rumor of war from a distant land, and when the walls came crashing down around her, she burrowed into the floor of her consciousness and pulled the hole in after her. She could wound him badly, she might even kill him, but not yet…
"I ain't never—" he whispered, losing himself in bliss. Eyes opened and closed all over his face like bubbles in boiling oil, the better to see her with. "Bitch, you ain't laughin' now, are ya? Gonna give it to you good, I tell you what. Gonna fuck you inside out—eat you up—"
She enfolded him. Her flesh reached out to his and softened its edges, drugging it with endorphins and serotonin to spike his ecstasy to unbearable new heights. Bone and muscle flowed like melting ice into structures the forest had taught her, flowed around him and into him, even as she reached down into the perfumed soil, into the labyrinth of questing roots that formed their bed.
His movements against her became frenzied. His cock forced itself into her. She gasped and yowled with mingled agony and delight as the ugly club battered her cervix and gouged bloody divots in the walls of her uterus. He let loose a red, wordless howl that shook the forest. He bored deeper into her, heedless of how deeply she was inside him. He paused for a moment, then thrust against her in the beginnings of a mechanical cadence. Bellowing in Comanche and Vietnamese, he scourged the softest, hottest parts of her like a jackhammer. Her walls secreted acid that burned him, but only seemed to quicken his arousal.
He stopped. "WHORE!" His face split in a grimace, all eyes and teeth and twitching sinews. "You're already knocked up!"
She blinked. Her eyes turned inward. Her body was in upheaval, messages of pain and grievous damage bouncing off each other and piling up like rejected mail at the door to her brain. She braved it, fought shock at the enormity of what he'd already done to her, through it all and down into the root cellar of her womanhood, where she saw—
Oh God,
he was right
.
She sprang the trap.
Avery came awake to what was happening around him. Everywhere they touched, everywhere his bony armor dug into her, she also had penetrated him with millions of whiplike roots. The tough, flexible cellulose grew into him through the joints of his exoskeleton, splitting into billions of monofilial taps and boring into his very bones through their microscopic pores. Inside him, they proliferated and swelled into knots, feasting on his supercharged marrow and blood cell factories. She drained him. His penis retracted out of her, noisily tearing free as he attempted to extricate himself. She let him go, but the roots of the forest had him now, thousands of them rearing up out of the ground and digging into his back and winding round his ribs, greedily extending into the softer meats within.
"YOU FUCKING CUNT!"
The roots in his back lifted him off her. She lay still before him, just out of his reach, as the roots bored deeper, drank and ate him and pulled him apart.
Her roots grew out of her back and down into the soil, merged with the network of tree roots for anchorage, then reached back up out of the soil to rape him as he had raped her.
Boring roots erupted out of his legs and back and dug ever deeper into his body, up through his legs and torso, out his mouth and eye-sockets. Avery tried to rip himself free, but only shook the roots out of the dirt. He couldn't rip free without bringing down the forest.
Avery tried every trick his body knew to get free. He grew claws, but the roots were too pliable and armored to be easily cut, and her sap so acidic it seared holes in his bones. They injected spores into his wounds, which exploded in fungi and molds and lichens, all the parasites the forest had ever faced and defeated, running riot in his body.
Biting the roots burned his lips off and broke his teeth. He tried to climb off them, flapping madly in an insane attempt to fly, but the impaling root clusters shot up through him to the roof and wrapped around the dome's support girders. Infinitely bifurcating roots shredded his bowels and made his heart race so hard he squirted blood from his eyes and ears even after he lost the capacity to scream. His body tore itself apart trying to transform into something that could survive this.
The roots tore themselves free, now, taking most of Tucker Avery with them. What was left was little more than a skeleton, luxuriant puffball fungi and shelves of mushrooms blooming in place of meat. Yet still, incredibly, he stood. Shuddering and quaking with the last beats of his root-shot heart, the mutant took a step towards her. Another.
She ripped herself out of her web of roots and leapt out of his reach. The ground beneath her squirmed, severed Stella-roots still seeking nourishment. She was weak, starved, burning up with fever. She had sapped huge volumes of Avery's vitality, of his very body, out of him, but it went back into him in the form of roots. Not a single erg of energy, not a molecule of him had she taken into herself, for fear of tainting herself, of turning into him. Livid, foaming welts rose up wherever he'd touched her and sluiced out the dregs of his presence. Her vagina drizzled sizzling acid discharge on the ground between her quivering legs. She threw up, coughing up brittle shards and slivers and specks of him that had broken off inside her.
But there was something else inside her that she could not dislodge. It wasn't of Avery, but neither was it of her, and what frightened her most was that she hadn't noticed it growing down there until now. He brought her here and left her. He forced himself on her, then left, and now—
Avery tried to speak. His jaw was horribly distended, his mouth choked with a blooming brain coral fungus, his eye-sockets home to thrusting phallic toadstools that wriggled and swelled like a snail's eye stalks. He wriggled and danced so hard that compound fractures shattered his arms and legs. Lichens and greedy molds took root in his spine, burrowing through his hollow exoskeleton, reducing it, micron by micron, into nutrients to grow, to spread.
Clouds of spores burst from his face, touched her skin and set off a million microscopic wars. She ran for the trees, then turned back to look at Avery.
A man in a baggy, ill-fitting rubber space suit entered the glade with a lysing agent flamethrower. He turned it on Avery.
Unbearably green tongues of crystalline vapor swept over the dying mutant. He didn't foam up and melt the way Keoghs did, but he still collapsed under the onslaught. Drained by the roots, feasted on by the fungi, he was too weak to resist the chemicals eating the walls of his cells. Still, he was a long time dying.
The man in the suit stood over him for several minutes, spraying until the canister on his back gave only spurts of air. He shrugged out of the pack and dropped the flamethrower on the ground, turned and approached her.
He tore off his hood. It was Dr. Barrow.
His eyes were red, his face streaked with tears. Inside the suit, his whole body trembled. His arms lifted and waved at the glade. "Look what you did."
"Fuck you," she snapped. "I killed him. I protected your fucking forest."
But then she looked. The roots in the ground ripped free of the soil, thrashed and battled, retreating from the spreading pool of lysing agent. The trees around the edge of the grove were changing color. They were moving. And speaking.
"The trees are absorbing him. He's like Keogh, only wilder. They're alive in every strand of DNA, maybe in every atom. In a few hours, this forest will be him."
"You burned him up. Nothing can survive that shit, isn't that what you eggheads were saying?"
"It's too late." He took a gun out of a Velcro-sealed pouch on his thigh. He pointed it at her.
She didn't move. His hand shook. "Get out of here," he finally said.
"What happened upstairs?" she asked.
"All dead. He's mopping up. Get out of here!"
"How do I—?"
He shot at her. Incredibly, he hit her. The bullet entered her thigh and fragmented into powder. It burned so bad her body tried to cut the leg off at her hip, but she held on. The wound back-flushed itself, spitting out the fragments as it sealed them in momentarily impermeable lipid vesicles. Still, the leg shook and spasmed to its own garbled impulses, barely holding her up.
"Or stay," he said. "But it's going to rain—"
The sprinklers in the ceiling hissed, gurgled and spat emerald mist. The trees shrieked. Her skin boiled. Her pelt melted and sloughed away under the lysing rain. Barrow looked up to the deluge with his arms outstretched. His face ran like a watercolor.
She ran for the airlock. She ran so fast she went between the raindrops, every one a burning acid dagger that sliced away whatever it touched.
The airlock stood open. She dove through it and hit the emergency shower button inside. The airlock sprinklers doused her with blessedly pure distilled water. Washing away the last of the lysing agent, she wondered why her immunity was greater even than Avery's. The nasty green shit was derived from something Spike Team Texas had exposed Storch to back in the Gulf War. They gave him his immunity, an immunity not even Keogh had. The Mission had augmented the chemical weapon with Keogh's DNA signature, but it had put paid to Avery, if only to melt him into the forest.
No, you did that.
She looked out through the porthole in the sealed inner hatch. The forest was a swamp of green, towering pines sinking into the churning green mire even as they struggled to become something else—tentacles, arms, fanged, obscenity-screaming cocks. This was the worst. Somehow worse than even the massacre upstairs, because the trees were the innocents
she'd
perverted, raped as Avery had raped her. Used, turned into something abominable, like she was. She deserved to die with the forest, with Barrow. But she was not alone inside her skin. Yet again, she was driven by an invader that commanded her, against her will, to live.
She came out of the airlock and approached the bottom stairwell door. It was still sealed, but she could hear the sounds from the upper galleries. Sporadic gunfire, a dull whomp of a grenade or something every so often. There was still resistance, but Barrow was right. Going up meant going through them. There had to be a way down and out.
Someone came around a bend in the corridor. It was another FARC guerilla, taller and, if that was possible, uglier than the other one. He fired at something behind him, then did a double-take when he saw Stella standing there naked and burned halfway to the bone. He pointed his AK47 at her and shouted, "
Jefe Doctor, es una puta malo!"
Another man came around the bend, stooped under an arm-load of files. Wittrock. His eyes got big when he saw her, but he looked relieved. "Ms. Orozco, have you seen anyone else? Dr. Barrow?"
She shook her head.
"Then we're the only ones. Dyson's pursuing us, but we can get out, if we work together—"
He went past her, the FARC bodyguard circling her warily with his gun leveled at her face. Stella followed them, but she looked over her shoulder. Something was coming. She heard its footfalls and felt them shaking the floor like piledrivers. She heard it hollering. "Come on, Doctor, I ain't got all night—"
Wittrock turned down a blind corridor that branched off in storage rooms. At the end, he pressed his hand against a blank steel plate set into the concrete wall. The wall slid back to reveal a blast door with a ten-digit keypad beside it. "The code, the code is…damn it—" she heard Wittrock saying. "Sixto, you and Ms. Orozco guard our rear,
por favor
."
Sixto reached into his breast pocket and took out a glass vial the size of a smelling salt. He broke it under his nostrils and sucked up the sparkling dust that burst out. He howled and brandished his automatic rifle, charged back up the corridor.
"You too, Ms. Orozco," Wittrock said, quite reasonably, as if he were asking her to fetch his dinner. "This is going to take a minute."
She heard Sixto shooting, cursing in thickly accented Spanish, and an answering voice. "C'mere, wetback—"
Dyson came around the corner with half of Sixto under his arm. The other half dangled from his tyrannosaur jaws, still twitching and trying to shoot. "Another one! Goddamn, this place is rife with beaners!"
She backed away from him. Dyson was twice the killer Avery had been, with none of his weaknesses. He was a force of nature. "Open the door, Wittrock," she shouted.