MirrorWorld

60.

He stands above me, even taller than before, the microwave bomb just behind him. He’s shed most of his clothing, revealing tight colls of muscle stretching across his chest, twitching veins that look like worms under the skin, and sinister grin. The two blades I stabbed into his chest are still there, twin needles in a pin cushion. There’s no blood.

His skin is thin, crisscrossed with severe stretch marks. He’s growing faster than his human skin can handle. The thin white fabric of his flesh is nearly translucent, revealing the thick red veins just beneath the surface, twitching like ravenous, burrowing leeches.

I realize that Lyons’s hungry glare and ongoing transformation should horrify me, but I’m just curious. What has he done to himself? How can he claim to be fighting for humanity when he is no longer human himself? Then again, the look in his eyes says he’s operating on instinct now. The human intellect and all its machinations and misguided planning are either gone or sitting in the backseat.

Beep, beep, beep. A high-pitched digital chime cuts through the air. It’s coming from my watch. The president’s deadline has passed. “I need more time!” I shout, looking past Lyons to the slowly undulating matriarch tendrils.

The reply comes as a whisper. “We will wait—on you.”

The message is clear. The Dread will stand down until the outcome of this battle is clear, meaning the president will stand down as well. But if I fail… if the matriarch and this colony fall, freeing Lyons to wipe out the Dread… the world will burn. All of us together, united at last, in the end.

Lyons reaches out for me, and I see his hands for what they’ve become—long, hooked claws pressed together to form one large curved blade, like a Dread mole’s. There are no knuckles remaining, and the red-vein-covered black flesh of a Dread has burst out of the limb, his old skin dangling like that of a molting snake.

I’m about to dive out of the way when he stops short, arcs his back, and screams in pain. A sound like tearing paper fills the air. His chest splits open. Stretch marks give way. The monster inside is emerging.

“What have you done?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.

“To defeat the enemy,” Lyons growls, “you must first become them.”

It’s a butchery of a Sun Tzu quote but reveals that this was, in fact, part of his plan all along. That’s how he intended to turn the Dread against themselves. The DNA coursing through his body must have come from a Dread mole. And his plan could work. The Dread crocs aren’t attacking him. Whether it’s because they see him as one of their own or because he’s radiating fear like a melting-down nuclear reactor emits radiation, I don’t know. But if he can bend the Dread to his will… Fear or not, I know that’s a scary idea.

But then there’s the bomb. He’s going to kill himself, too, unless… I glance at the two archways leading out of the chamber. With the countdown surely moving below nine minutes, he might be able to escape. The circular trip back to the surface would take me far too long, but Lyons, with a Dread body, might just make it, especially if he can climb straight out the way I came in.

“I need help,” I think, willing the matriarch to hear the words.

But it’s Lyons who replies. “I’ll be… with you… in a moment.”

I don’t know if the matriarch has heard me or not, but it remains silent. Could he already be controlling it, too?

Lyons lets out a roar, turning his head to the ceiling.

Skin explodes away from his body, bursting balloonlike. Gore splatters at his feet. Limbs thicken, claws extend, bright red light pulses hard. The remains of his body splits and falls away, his shed chest carrying away the two trench knives. But the cherry on top of this juicy hemoglobin sundae is what happens to his head.

His roar becomes garbled, and then muffled.

For a moment, I think he’s choking, but then small, jointless fingers reach out of his mouth. Tendrils. Ten of them. The digits wrap around his face, clinging to his cheeks, digging into the meat. His head bulges. The skull cracks. The tendrils pull. What remains of his voice turns high-pitched as the last of his humanity is torn away and dropped to the floor like yesterday’s slop.

When he turns his gaze back toward me, he’s transformed. His body is like a bull’s: dark, armored, and covered in veins but upright. His face resembles a matriarch’s with an arc of five black eyes rising up and over two more and a mass of tendrils, but there is also a mouth beneath all those squirming digits, wide and toothed like a croc’s. And that’s when I notice the tail now sliding back and forth behind him, a line of short tendrils wriggling over the top of the tail and tracing a line up his back. He didn’t just take DNA from one Dread, he took bits and pieces of them all.

He tries to speak, but it’s just a garbled mess.

While he attempts to figure out whether or not he’s still got vocal cords, I weigh my two choices. One, stand and fight, maybe win, but get cooked like a bug in a microwave along with the rest of the Dread. Two, snatch and grab the bomb, which is resting atop the unzipped pack Katzman carried it in; run like hell; and see if I can’t get it far enough away to spare the colony, knowing that part of New Orleans is still going to cook. Either way, I die. While I would really like to kill Lyons, or die trying, that’s not really a viable choice.

I dive forward, straight for Lyons, which is apparently the last thing he expected me to do. And to be honest, I’d barely registered the idea by the time I put it into action. He’s tall enough now, perhaps fifteen feet in height, that I am able to duck down and roll between his legs. I come up in a kneeling position next to the bomb, fling the unzipped top over it, yank the zippers up, and leap into a sprint while reaching back for the handle like a relay racer grasping for a baton.

I grip the strap, jerking as the weight of it lifts off the ground. But it’s over my shoulder and then on my back by the time I’ve hit my fifth stride. That also happens to be the moment Lyons figures out where I went and what I’m doing.

I feel the impact of his feet hitting the chamber floor as he gives chase. He’s still pushing waves of fear, the energy quivering through me but having no effect. The Dread crocs, however, are scattering, whatever control the matriarch had over them now severed. Even the matriarch is retreating, the long tendrils snaking back, sliding into the earth.

A quick glance over my shoulder reveals that I’m not even going to make it out of the arena before Lyons has pounced on my back. His stride is clumsy as he adjusts to running on all fours, but he’s already faster than me, and if he manages to get coordinated… I’m not about to let him escape and destroy the colony, so I decide to turn and face him.

“Keep going,” says a whisper.

I nearly respond, but if Lyons can hear me now, any information is too much.

So, against my better judgment and my desire to fight, I run. I can feel him gaining faster now, the impacts of his large, clawed feet echoing through the chamber, now devoid of everything but the dead and dying.

I leap over the corpse of a Dread Squad soldier, plotting a course through the field of bodies lying ahead of me.

But my feet never reach the ground. Sharp talons pierce the armored padding over my shoulders and lift me up. I reach back for Faithful, my only remaining weapon, but quickly realize it’s not needed as I rise up far higher than Lyons could reach. I glance up, looking at the underside of a lone mothman, carrying me toward the ceiling, several hundred feet above.

A roar pursues us, but Lyons can’t fly.

I watch him turn and charge for the archway. Wherever the mothman takes me, I don’t think Lyons will be far behind.

We rise up toward the domed ceiling, which looks honeycombed. There are alcoves, like those belonging to the bulls, but these encircle the ceiling. Several of the alcoves lead outside. We rise up, our ascent slowing, until we’ve passed through an exit to the outside, near the top of the massive colony. Our descent begins smoothly, but the mothman is tiring—and now I see the wound, a bullet hole in its muscular chest. Two more in its gut. Glowing red plasma pumps steadily from the wounds. This mothman is dying. Pulling me from the colony will likely be its final act.

Twenty feet from the colony roof, the mothman breathes its last. We drop together, striking the roof and rolling down over the edge, landing in the thick sludgy earth separating the structure from the swamp.

I’m out, but Lyons is on his way, and—I unzip the backpack and look at the timer—I have six minutes to get this thing someplace where it won’t do any damage. And that’s not going to happen in the mirror dimension. Time to go home.

I slip through the world between and back to New Orleans in a blink. I’m in the middle of a road. Tires screech on the pavement as the bumper and grill of a pickup truck stop inches from my face.

“Get out of the road, asshole!” The truck speeds up, forcing me to dive to the side. A second car speeds past. Both are full of people, armed with baseball bats and fire pokers. I see at least two guns and am lucky one of them didn’t decide to shoot me or run me over. A third vehicle, one I recognize, speeds up and screeches to a halt.

The SUV’s door opens. Cobb runs around to the front of the vehicle, seeing that it’s me. “Crazy,” he says, using the name he first knew me by, “sorry I left my position, but I saw these people head into the park and—” That’s when he really sees me. “Damn, man, what happened? Are you okay?”

I get to my feet. “We only have a few minutes.”

“Until what?”

I show him the backpack. “This is a microwave bomb.”

Cobb’s skin goes pale so quickly that I think God must use Photoshop.

“But we have maybe a minute before Lyons shows up.”

“Lyons?” Cobb says. “But he’s old and—”

“Not anymore.”

A distant roar punctuates my statement. Lyons has already reached the top of the colony and is now searching for me, probably moving back and forth between frequencies. I hurry around Cobb. “We need to move!”

A second roar, closer this time. Lyons is closing in. A quick peek into the mirror world reveals as much. He’s spotted us in the real world and is charging through the Dread swamp, a quarter mile off, planning on taking us by surprise. We have thirty seconds until his gruesome arrival and another few minutes until the water molecules in our bodies are sped up so fast that we cook from the inside out.