The Slab (46 page)

If it’s alive, Ken thought, it can be killed. He raised his weapon and unloaded it, one shot after another booming in the enclosed space, deafening. Bullets tore through the gray man and pinged from stone walls behind him, tearing off chunks but not seeming to injure him. When the gun was empty, Ken threw it aside.

“Ken, don’t,” Hal said, grabbing his arm. Ken shook off the older man’s grip and charged the gray man. He swung a fist at the thing’s head and connected. It felt solid enough under his hand, but there was no response, no flinch, no indication that it felt any pain. Its eyes were blank, just more gray tissue in its monochromatic self. Ken hit it again, two shots to the gut. Finally—not as if it was hurt, but as if swatting an annoying insect—the gray man swung an arm at Ken that hit with the force of a falling tree, sweeping him back across the little chamber.

“You tried,” Hal told him, helping him back to his feet.

“And I’m not done,” Ken said. But before he could take another step toward his opponent, the tendrils of mushrooms that grew from the pit reached for Ken and Hal, snaking around their legs, up their torsos, and more of the mushrooms sprouted from the hole itself, following the gray man like ducklings after their mother. The gray man stalked the chamber, stretching and enjoying newfound freedom of mobility, and the mushrooms reached for the ceiling, filling nearly every square inch of space in the room except where the gray man paced. Shoots twined around Ken and Hal, twisting up in front of their faces, tendrils worming into their noses and mouths, cutting off air. Ken gagged on the pulpy mass of it as it filled his mouth, tried to bite but couldn’t even bring his teeth together. It snaked obscenely down his throat.

Ken felt the world start to go black, feeling like the gray man must have when he’d been forced into the hole in the first place. His head swam, he felt dizzy and weak-kneed. The sad realization came to him that if the gray man got out today, he’d find a very different world—one in which the planet’s population had multiplied to a barely sustainable level, a world that was on the edge of insanity to begin with, with powerful weapons and equally powerful hatreds. A world, in other words, ideally suited to the gray man’s nature. He—or whatever it was he represented—would flourish in a world like this one.

And there was nothing he could do to stop it. He couldn’t fill his lungs, his limbs weighed a thousand pounds each, his vision was going. At least, he thought, if I have to go now, I’m going at the side of a good man. A man who’s done bad things but made himself stop, who had done everything in his power to atone.

But Hal gripped his right hand. Ken felt the other man’s skin, warm against his own, and some of Hal’s power and positive mental focus seeped into him.

We have to try, Hal thought.

Ken was at a loss. If Hal wanted to try something, he was game, but he sure didn’t know what it might be. He couldn’t speak but he thought a response back to Hal. Yeah.

Mushrooms and evil are the same in one way, Hal sent.

What’s that?

They hate the light.

Chapter Thirty-One

Penny gave Mick, or the thing that looked like him, his three minutes. And like Mick would, it used them talking. About nothing in particular, as far as she was concerned—betrayal and disappointment, mostly. Enough to make Penny believe it really was Mick, dead but not dead, in some way, because anyone else would have shut up and tried something, or at least engaged in conversation instead of monologue.

She didn’t care. She spent the time looking at the second hand sweep the face of her watch. At three minutes, she said, “Time’s up.”

“You can’t go down there, Penny,” it said. “I can’t let you.”

“You’ve never been able to stop me from doing what I needed to do,” Penny replied. “You think being dead’s going to change that?”

“I can stop you—”

“You can’t stop dick.”

She started past it, and it grabbed her. But Mick-shaped or not, magically animated as it was, it was still mushroom-stuff. She took its arms and yanked, shredding them in her grip. They began to grow back and she swung an arm as hard as she could, knocking its head flying. Blinded, it crashed into the wall. Its head started to grow back, too, but by then Penny was running, pushing as fast through the mushroom jungle as she was able.

And the Mick-thing was rooted.

She didn’t stop, didn’t slow. Eventually the mushrooms were no longer a factor and she raced through the dark, the cave just tall enough and wide enough to let her reach something approximating a reasonable speed. She didn’t seem to need the flashlight any more; she could see in the dark almost as well as if she’d had it anyway, and her vision became more and more clear as she got deeper and deeper into the cave.

By the time she reached the end of the cave, Hal and Ken were almost completely engulfed in massive mushroom stalks. She couldn’t see through the thicket, but she felt the presence of the gray man within, growing stronger and more confident with each passing second, while Ken and Hal weakened. She was struck by a wave of gloom, a certainty that they’d all been too late to do any good, to keep the gray man down in his pit.

But then she noticed that Hal had begun to glow.

This wasn’t the blue glow they’d all manifested back at the Slab, to protect it from the bomb. It was a yellow glow, strengthening as she watched toward pure white light. Just looking at it gave her hope.

She hacked with her hands at the mushroom trees that were, even now, beginning to writhe toward her. They wanted to trap her, to hold her back, but Penny wouldn’t be trapped. She kicked and hit and forced her way through the growth, until she got close enough to the two men. A massive mushroom trunk, as big around as an oak tree, slammed into her and knocked her to her knees.

As she went down, she reached out and closed her hand around Ken’s left hand. And Ken, she saw, held Hal’s hand in his right.

They were together again.

She felt Hal’s words ring in her head like an echo, even though he’d thought them, she knew, several minutes before.

They hate the light.

She focused on the light, basked in it, felt it bathe her like pure, cleansing water.

And where Hal was, the light grew. More intense, more brilliant…as if the sun itself had come into this forsaken place.

Even as the realization struck her, a pillar of pure sunlight blasted through the rock, through the earth, through the sky above. As if Hal were its conduit, the pillar illuminated him and then obscured him, too bright to look at, too intense to see through, but it came from above and it enveloped Hal and it shot out through his right hand, which he extended through the forest of mushroom stalks and toward the gray man. And the light cut through the mushrooms, which withered as it touched them.

The gray man tried to hide from it. Panicking, he ducked behind the slab of stone he had shoved off his own place of internment.

But the pillar of sunlight would not be denied. It glowed through the slab as surely as it shone through the earth above them, as surely as it passed through the Slab, on the surface, where even now men and women died to feed the gray man’s terrible hunger.

Hal had grown too hot—Ken had to let go of him, and he and Penny backed off, their hands still clasped together. It was as if Hal channeled the sun itself into the chamber. Now he had both hands raised toward the gray man, directing the streaming sunlight through himself.

Where the light touched the gray man, he sizzled.

Where it burned him, he screamed.

Where it cleansed him, he shrank.

The magic worked through them, through Penny and Ken and Hal, and the magic was stronger than the gray man, because he lost shape, lost form, lost mass. As he did, so did the mushrooms, collapsing in on themselves, shrinking, finally vanishing altogether.

But not the gray man.

The gray man shrank and burned and popped, collapsing in a small heap on the chamber’s clean stone floor. But he retained some mass, some presence, even under the incredible onslaught Hal directed at him.

Penny watched Hal and realized that he was changing, too—dissipating, as though the effort of blasting sunlight at the gray man was using him up.

That’s just what was happening, she understood suddenly. Whatever Hal discharged at the gray man didn’t come just from some external source, but from within him. It
was
Hal, in a very real way—his own essence.

Finally, the stream of light dried up, like the trickle of the Colorado River as it, dammed and diverted and hoarded, tried to make its way to the Gulf of California. As it faded, so did Hal, burning more brightly than ever for a moment, then blinking out altogether.

She stood with Ken, hands clasped tightly as if they’d never let go. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if words could begin to describe how she felt about what had happened here. Awe, she thought, overused but apt nonetheless. She had witnessed something glorious, maybe miraculous, as selfless an act of sacrifice as she’d ever imagined.

But the price had been high. Hal was gone, used up. With the light gone, the room had been plunged back into darkness, only the light mounted onto Ken’s gun illuminating the cavern’s interior. But he played the light over the floor where Hal had been, where now there was only a faint scorch mark.

Finally, Ken broke the silence. “He’s just…gone,” he said. Sorrow was evident in his trembling voice.

“Yeah,” Penny agreed. “Whatever it was he did there, it took him with it.”

“It wasn’t just him,” Ken replied. “It was all three of us. He started before you got here, but he couldn’t really get it going until you joined us. Then the power flowed through the three of us and he was able to…I don’t know, to pull down the sun’s own power, or whatever that was. If you hadn’t made it, Hal and I’d both be dead by now, I expect.” He spat onto the cave floor.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Anyway, it’s gone now.”

“What is?”

“The magic,” Ken clarified. “I’m pretty sure. I can’t feel it any more. Do you?”

She reached out and touched his hand. Warm flesh. A tingle, but not an electric shock. Something different. Maybe more real.

Human contact.

“You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing there. Well,” she amended with a smile. “Not ‘nothing.’”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just not the kind of magic we’re used to.”

As Penny’s eyes began to re-acclimate to the darkness, she remembered the gray man, or what little was left of him. He wasn’t much more than two feet long, now, curled on the floor, still smoldering at the edges. “What about that?” she asked. “Do we just leave it there?”

Ken shrugged. “Maybe back in the hole?”

Penny felt a chill run down her spine. “You want to touch it?” she asked him.

“Don’t reckon it’s going to make much difference now,” he said. “Not like we’ve never touched evil in our lives.” He went over to the ugly gray mass, picked it up with one hand, and tossed it without ceremony back into the hole it had come from. Then he beamed his light at the slab of rock that had covered the hole.

“That was over it,” he said. “That rock.”

“I’ve seen it before. It must weigh a ton,” Penny said. “No way we’ll be able to move it.”

Ken shrugged again. “Won’t know until we try, will we?” he asked.

Penny supposed he was right. She came around to the back of the pit, where the massive piece of rock leaned against the hole’s low wall, like a lid from a well. She squatted—lift with your knees, she remembered, not your back—and got a grip on the slab’s right side. Ken did the same on her left. But before they started straining to lift it, he touched her cheek. The gesture was somehow innocent and intimate at the same time, just a brush as if to move a stray hair. But there was a buzz just the same; she felt it to her toes.

And when they lifted the rock, it moved in their hands as easily as if it had been hollow, or made of wood instead of stone. They positioned it carefully over the top of the pit and let it rest there.

“Guess maybe it wasn’t a hundred percent gone after all,” Ken observed. “Maybe it never is. Or maybe we’ve been looking at it all wrong, thinking it comes from outside us. Maybe it’s been in us all along.”

“You could be right,” Penny said. “Good thing, either way, or we’d never have lifted that slab. But…if it was over him in the first place, then did we really do any good by putting it back?”

Ken rubbed at the stubble that had grown up over his chin and cheeks these last couple of days. “I don’t know what this place is,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s real, or some kind of symbolic construct, or maybe all in our own fevered brains. I know what we’ve agreed the gray man represents—Hal saw him as a kind of bloodless white cockroach, by the way—and if he is what we think he is, then there’s no getting rid of him altogether anyway. Best we can do is put him back in his hole and hope it’s a good long while before he gathers the strength to make another try.”

“Well, it’s done, then,” Penny said. “And I miss Hal like crazy already. I bet Virginia does too. Can we get the hell out of this place?”

“Sure,” Ken replied. “I’m kind of anxious to see the sun again myself.”

***

At the Slab, the gunfight petered out, almost as if those shooting had come to a gradual realization of their own actions. People put down their weapons and began to look about, instead, for first aid supplies, for bandages and disinfectants and tape. Fires still burned all around the Slab, but sirens were audible now in the distance, coming closer. Some began to believe that help was on the way, that they’d get through this night.

But across the Slab, with bizarre suddenness, others collapsed and died on the spot. Billy Cobb, Carter Haynes, Virginia Shipp, Nick Postak, Jorge and Diego Alvarez, Heather and Royal Justice, Gray Boonton, Darren Cook, Mikey Zee, Lettie Bosworth, almost a dozen more. Away from the Slab, the same thing happened to others, including one Colonel Franklin Wardlaw, USMC, who had left his office in Yuma and gone looking for a shovel. The life blew out of them with no warning and no apparent reason. Lucy Alvarez and Eddie Trujillo watched Lucy’s brothers stop digging and look up briefly, startled expressions flitting across their faces, and then their muscles went slack and they slumped onto the blood-soaked earth they’d been digging in.