Spiral (23 page)

“Which elevator did he tell us to avoid?” Mrs. Burrows asked as she stood in the middle of the lobby. Sergeant Finch had warned that one of the elevators was liable to break down, but she hadn’t been able to see which of them he’d been referring to.

“Here,” Elliott answered, leading Mrs. Burrows by the hand to the closed doors. “Just remember not to take the first on this side.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Burrows said.

Chester summoned an elevator, and one arrived almost immediately. “Going up,” he mumbled, and stepped to the side to allow Elliott and Mrs. Burrows to enter, then reluctantly followed them in.

The elevator picked up speed as it ascended, then abruptly shuddered to a halt. The main light above them went out, and another blinked on, bathing them in a dim yellow glow. A prerecorded man’s voice calmly announced, “
Emergency Lighting
.”

“Oh, bloody brilliant,” Chester complained as he repeatedly pressed the button with
H
on it to try to get them moving again. “Rather have taken the stairs . . . haven’t trusted elevators ever since that wonky contraption under Will’s house.”

But the moment he’d finished speaking, the elevator sprang back into life and continued on its way up.

“So Drake and Will . . . are they all OK? Nothing happened on the way here?” Elliott asked Mrs. Burrows. The girl was rubbing her shoulder as if it was painful.

There was no time for an answer as a bell tinged and the doors slid open. The three of them exited, passing down several passageways to reach the Hub. The illumination on the way was similar to the emergency lighting in the elevator.

“I wonder why it’s so dark,” Chester commented as they stepped into the Hub.

The first person they saw was Danforth, lit by the glow of not just his original laptop but another five of them arranged on trestle tables around him. He’d obviously continued to work on whatever he was doing as many more wall panels had been opened, and a bewildering number of cables spilled from them and around the legs of the tables. Noticing that Chester, Elliott, and Mrs. Burrows had entered the Hub, he peered up briefly. “Main power’s going to be off for a while,” he said, without any further explanation.

“Will! Drake!” Elliott shouted as she spotted them on the other side of the Hub, and hurried over.

“I don’t believe it!” Chester cried as he saw who was in his father’s arms. Mr. and Mrs. Rawls were standing at the mouth of the entrance tunnel.

“Chester!” Mrs. Rawls shouted, widening her embrace to include him as he dashed over to her. Chester clung to her, feeling her face wet with tears of happiness and relief.

“You found her! Thank you!” Chester said to Drake. “Thank you so much!”

Drake nodded, then turned to Elliott. “We need to talk,” he began, his voice serious.

Elliott noticed that Will had stepped a little closer to her, and also the way in which he was peering nervously at her back — at the long rifle slung over her shoulder, she assumed.

“What is it?” she asked, immediately aware that something was amiss. She took a couple of paces away from Will and Drake. “Why won’t you tell me?”

Then she happened to glance down the long entrance tunnel. Two figures were making their way toward the Hub along it. The larger of them — the hulking form — was unmistakable even at the distance. “Sweeney,” Elliott said, but she didn’t recognize the second, smaller figure. “Who’s that with him?”

“Elliott . . . ,” Will said, edging closer to her. “We’ve got —”

“Jiggs . . . is that Jiggs?” Elliott demanded, squinting down the tunnel. Although there had been the odd mention of him, nobody had actually laid eyes on him yet, although they assumed they would before long.

Elliott shook her head slowly.

“No,” she said.

She shot a glance at Drake.

“No! Not him!”

Will saw the way she’d set her jaw, and the look of deadly intent in her eyes.

“Elliott, give me the rifle,” Drake asked, trying to seize hold of her, but she was too fast.

She ran toward the figure.

Toward her father.

VANE PUSHED HERSELF
off the Colonist she’d just impregnated. With slow, reptilian precision, she extended her leg to the floor beside the bed, where she planted a foot. The tube-like ovipositor was retracting into her mouth as she slid her other leg across the limp body, then stood up.

The Colonist on the bed was a middle-aged woman who had only recently been brought up from the subterranean city. She’d been one of the unlucky inhabitants of the shantytown in the North Cavern, taken from there at gunpoint by the Limiters, and Darklit until nothing remained of the conscious centers of her mind.

And although effectively brain-dead, the Colonist’s chest now began to heave and she coughed soundlessly as the egg sac induced involuntary spasms in her air tract. In a few cases, the troublesome human host would actually bring up the egg sac, and that meant starting the process all over again. Vane watched the woman until she was satisfied that the implantation had been successful, then looked from one end of the warehouse to the other. The Styx women had been systematically working their way through the humans, and maybe as many as a hundred had already been impregnated.

Vane’s insect limbs twitched, then came together above her head. They oscillated against each other, faster and faster, until they were producing an unbroken sound similar to that of a cricket. Vane silenced the limbs, angling her head as she listened out. Barely a second later, a hollow rattle drifted back from somewhere else on the floor as Alex replied in kind.

Vane and Alex continued to communicate, homing in on each other as they headed toward the beds at the entrance to the warehouse.

Through the steam and subdued lighting, they spotted each other. They met around the bed of a young man, the very first human to be impregnated.

Although both Vane and Alex had been feeding on the raw meat and drinking regularly from the vats of viscid sugar solution provided for them at various points across the warehouse floor, the Phase had drastically changed their appearance. The relentless production of egg sacs had sent their metabolic rates soaring through the roof, so much so that nearly every ounce of their body fat had been burned off.

They barely resembled the strikingly beautiful women they’d been before the Phase began. Under their torn and bloodstained clothes, their physiques had been pared down to not much more than muscle and bone. Their faces were unnaturally angular, as if an artist had attempted to recreate them by using an assortment of hard planes.

“Time to check on our young,” Alex announced in the rasping Styx language. If Will and Chester had been there to see her appearance as she spoke, it would have explained why the Styx’s tongue had always sounded so inhuman to them. It was inhuman, and they were inhuman.

“Yes, it will be time,” Vane replied, eagerly rubbing her bony hands together. As she did so, the musculature and ligaments in her arms slid against each other under her taut skin like a mechanical model.

Alex moved closer to the young man and leaned over him. She paused to wipe her chin. The glands in her throat hadn’t yet stopped producing the lubricative fluids required for the multiple impregnations, and these were now overflowing from her mouth and dangling from her cracked lips in sticky necklaces.

Undoing the top button of the man’s shirt, she slid her hand inside it.

“Yes,” she sighed.

She gently took out a pulsing, ivory-colored larva some five inches long. It was similar in appearance to a giant maggot, although far stubbier. Holding the Styx Warrior larva in both hands, she lifted it up to her face to examine one end. “Who’s such a pretty little thing? Who’s just perfect?” she cooed.

The eyes hadn’t yet developed, but a small mouth opened and closed. As it did so, something caught in the illumination from one of the nearby overhead lights. The Warrior larva’s fangs shone with a pearly whiteness, like a baby’s milk teeth. They were snapping together as she held the grub against her chest, looking down at it lovingly.

Vane had also reached under the man’s shirt and into his pleural cavity, which had been exposed as the grubs burst from his body. She took out not one but two larvae, cradling them in her arms as they wriggled against her like lively puppies.

“Yes, they are perfect,” Vane said, her eyes flooding with tears of happiness and fulfillment. One of her larvae began to make a high keening sound. Almost immediately the other larva in her arms and Alex’s also joined in.

The man’s body on the bed started to move as though he’d miraculously been brought back to life. But he was well and truly dead. The movement was the other larvae as they tried to gnaw their way through his jeans and worm out from his shirtsleeves.

“The little ones are ravenous,” Alex said. “They’re our firstborn. They’re special. I think we should spoil them.”

Vane nodded in agreement. “They deserve a special treat.” She placed her larvae back on the bed and strode across to the very corner of the warehouse. There she peered into the shadows at the group of Colonists and New Germanians. Most of them were simply stretched out on the floor, but a few were sitting up. And although they’d had their minds wiped by Dark Lights, the Limiters had taken the precaution of erecting a pen around them in case any of them still had the ability to wander off, like bewildered cattle.

Vane opened the gate to the pen and heaved a thickset man to his feet. “Let’s be having you,” she said.

It was the Third Officer, still in his police uniform. “Good. Nice bit of flesh on you,” Vane said, yanking him toward her. He could barely walk, his feet landing on their sides or clumsily knocking against each other. But Vane half dragged, half carried him until she was back at the bed. Alex had ripped open the clothes on the corpse so that the other larvae — as many as thirty of them — no longer had to fight their way out.

Vane pushed the Third Officer down onto the mattress. The larvae’s teeth clicked like many pairs of castanets as they wriggled toward his living tissues. The two Styx women looked on, their hearts bursting with pride as their babies began to gorge themselves.

Eddie and Sweeney had both come to a standstill in the long entrance passageway, but Elliott was very much on the move. She was striding toward her father, and closing in fast.