Fear Me

26

It started right away.

With sirens moaning and hostage negotiators working the loudspeakers, nobody realized it until maybe it was too late. The SWAT teams were beginning the engagement, the spearhead of a larger force that would crush anything that stood in their way. By the time Romero and Aquintez got around the chapel, got a look at the administration building, they saw black forms running along the tops of the wall like scurrying spiders and the tear gas started dropping. Canisters were fired into the air, exploding on impact. There were bright flashes and popping, hollow explosions like the compound was under mortar attack and the gas detonated with rolling, noxious clouds. Not just outside the administration building, but out in the yard, on rooftops and walkways, just about everywhere.

And more canisters were dropping by the moment.

You could hear cons screaming and firing weapons, the reports of sniper rifles taking out prisoners at strategic points and the answering volleys of small arms fire from the convicts themselves. But in the darkness with only bonfires to see by and most of the cons drunk and stoned and confused, it was a turkey shoot. The SWAT teams had night-vision goggles and the cons had stick matches, some flashlights, and a variety of crude torches. Water cannons were hoisted atop the walls at the same time the snipers fired their first shots, many from silenced weapons. Before the enraged cons could even think of setting the hacks on fire, gouts of water hosed them down, wetting the hacks and knocking their abductors flat with high-pressure streams of water. Then tear gas. Stun grenades.

The troops moved in for the deathblow.

By that time, Romero and Aquintez had made the administration building, coughing and gagging and rubbing their eyes, steering themselves through the maze of corridors and climbing sets of steps with nothing more to see by than a penlight and the strobing flashes from outside.

“They’re tearing ’em up out there,” Aquintez said, panting.

And they were. You could hear screaming and shouting and cons begging for mercy. And the police were answering this with salvos of plastic bullets fired from automatic weapons and light machine guns.

But the screaming wasn’t only outside.

It was above them, too: on the fourth floor where the infirmary was.

They looked at each other in that churning darkness, the smell of death and teargas blowing in from outside and combining into a vile aroma with what was coming down from the fourth floor stairwell: a rancid, hot stench of blood and misery.

They started up.

More screams ringing out like church bells and just as high and low, as brassy and inhuman. They vaulted up the steps, hearing sounds and smelling things and feeling something like sheaths of needles unfolding in their bellies. In the corridor at the top, they could hear a wild, spiraling voice shattering like glass: “Help me! Help me! Get it off me! GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER OFFA ME OH CHRIST OH JESUS YAAAHHHH—”

But it wasn’t just that voice or the sound of something being squeezed out like a dishrag full of soapy water that stopped Romero and Aquintez, it was that screeching, strident noise that echoed out, seemed to make the windows shake and rattle in their frames. It wasn’t an animal sound or a human sound really, but maybe a little bit of both and neither. A raging, deranged shriek that faded into something like scratching black laughter, laughter filled with contempt and appetite and—Romero was thinking—a certain evil pleasure, a childish sound of glee.

Sure, that’s it, he thought, that’s it exactly. Damon’s on the loose and he’s having a good time just like some wicked little boy lighting cats’ tails on fire or pulling the wings off of flies.

Except it wasn’t cats or flies… but people.

Damon’s playthings.

With Aquintez behind him, they made for the infirmary door at the end of the passage. It was ripped from its hinges. And tossed like broken toy soldiers and gutted ragdolls were inmates and guards, some alive, but most dead. Some of them out of their minds, their eyes like shining ball bearings in the flashlight beam. They had seen something. Romero was sure of it and whatever it had been, it had sucked their minds dry, wrung out thought and memory and sanity in an oily slag that ran from their ears. They were mumbling and making empty sobbing sounds, staring blankly.

“Jesus,” Aquintez said. “It wasn’t like this before… it wasn’t this bad. Something… I guess something must have happened…”

Outside the entrance to the infirmary, they found the body of a con.

His head had been nearly twisted from his shoulders, both arms snapped off at the elbows, and as a humorous gesture from a bored child, his tongue and everything that held it in place had been yanked out of a chasm below his chin where it hung like a pink and bleeding necktie. They stepped over him and, oh Christ, it was even worse inside. The infirmary was a long, narrow room like a hospital ward in an old movie and this one predated even the silents by nearly a century. You could see the looted drug cabinets and supply closets.

But that had happened before Damon went on his tear.

Now the walls, the beds, the ceiling were red with splotches and streaks of blood. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere. It was a study in ghoulish creativity and the mind of a jaded, degenerate child knew no earthly bounds. Men had been dismembered. Men had been beheaded. Men had been skinned and plucked and disemboweled. Men had their bones pulled right through their skins and stacked in red, tidy heaps next to their boneless shells. Men were strung from light fixtures by ropes of their own viscera and their skins were tacked up over the windows with shards of bone driven into the plaster. A slaughterhouse and butcher shop and dissection room laid bare and ugly and stinking.

But there was one bed untouched.

One form sleeping beneath a crisp white sheet that was wet with slime, but not so much as a drop of blood had stained it or the man who slept there.

Palmquist.

Romero got close to him, close enough to touch. He found a flashlight on the floor and put it on him. The kid did not stir. His head was bandaged and the bandages were dyed red. Using Aquintez’s penlight, Romero examined the kid’s eyes. One of them was dilated like a black marble and there was no response from the light. The other pupil was the size of a pinhole.

“He’s got a concussion and probably brain damage,” Romero said in a weak voice, the stink of blood and meat and voided bowels choking him. “He could be in a coma for a day or two weeks and every night—”

That’s when Aquintez screamed.

Romero felt something swing by him like a bell rope and then Aquintez was screaming. A pink tentacle covered with tumorous suckers pulled him right off his feet and into the air.

Romero put the light up there.

He’d brushed aside spiderwebs when he first got to the bed, but now he saw they weren’t spiderwebs but wire-thin gossamer filaments of something connecting the kid and what was above him, spread over the ceiling.

Damon.

Romero let out a tiny, involuntary cry.

Aquintez was dangling up there, looped by Damon.

Palmquist’s nocturnal brother was bigger than three bed sheets strung together. Just a roiling gray mass of tissue set with a coiling network of white, fibrous growths. Dozens of opaque tubes and feelers and bloated fleshy tentacles were writhing and snaking from that miasmic horror, roiling like flatworms and maggots and corkscrewing like the tails of hogs, searching along the ceiling and tapping the individual tiles like fingers.

It was obscene. It was positively obscene.

Romero just looked up at it, empty and numb and stiff, playing the light along that mass that reached out in every direction and seemed to be growing by the moment. Those tentacles were made of a gelid flesh that was transparent like the skin of deep-sea shrimp. You could see fluids flowing through veins and collecting in capillaries. Some of those tentacles ended in hooks and others in black depressions like mouths that dripped an acrid juice.

Romero wasn’t sure where he found the strength.

Outside, the war went on and on, but it was very distant like something heard playing from a neighbor’s TV on a summer night. Quite calmly and lucidly, Romero said, “Damon, put the man down. You know my voice, you know you can trust me…”

The thing up there surged and squirmed, its flesh broke open with blisters that weren’t blisters but flat yellow eyes set with red-slit pupils. At least two dozen of them and more opening all the time.

“Damon,” Romero said, droplets of that juice hitting him now and burning holes in his skin. He flinched, but did not waver. “Please, put the man down.”

And of all the crazy, unbelievable things, the creature did.

It set Aquintez back on his feet and Aquintez’s mouth was locked in a crooked, silent scream and his eyes were black as tidal pools. You could see where those hideous suckers had touched him, the red welts they had left, the bruising beneath the skin as blood vessels were burst from that awful suction.

Romero looked at the thing.

It looked back at him.

He tried to tell himself not to hate it, not to let his skin crawl and stomach boil with the absolute disgust and revulsion that it inspired. His aversion to it was more than physical, but spiritual. It made something in his soul wither and blight. This then was the hidden brother, the externalized other, the crawling, creeping monstrosity that swam in the scummy pools and dirty, polluted backwaters of Palmquist’s soul. A thing born of childhood terrors and nightmares, spawned in some invidious lagoon of primal human terror.

But Romero thought he maybe could control it.

Then something like a huge central mouth ringed with yellow curving fangs opened up and the beast that was Damon let go with a screeching howl of pure anger. It took Aquintez and pulled him apart, all those tentacles and tubers moving in him and through him, investigating and prodding and rending.

And that’s also when Romero moved.

He pulled a shank from inside the back of his pants and put it into Palmquist’s throat, sawed and cut until his hands were warm and wet with blood and tears ran from his eyes.

Oh, Danny, oh Jesus, kid, I’m sorry…

Damon dropped what was left of Aquintez.

He let out an echoing, bone-rattling roar: freight trains and tornadoes and cluster bombs and wailing sirens, an explosion of raw, shrill noise that put Romero to his knees, made his eardrums implode and his nose bleed and his heart seize up and filled him with a manic need to claw out his own eyes.

And then Damon fell.

Fell and blanketed Romero, wanting to crush and kill and squeeze and tear… but as Palmquist died, so did his brother. Damon came apart in a rain of filth and blood, scum and offal and squirming, squealing things and then was nothing but a slimy, gelatinous pool.

And then the lights came on.

What was left of Damon steamed and bubbled and evaporated.

Romero shielded his eyes as the SWAT team came through the door. Maybe they saw the carnage and maybe they saw the knife in his hand. Regardless, they did not hesitate.

Romero opened his mouth.

And about thirty bullets went through him, dropping him dead next to Palmquist’s bed. He let out a final, wracking breath and died. And with what he had seen, it was almost a blessing.

The riot was over.

And so was Damon.