Nightworld

THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE

By nightfall Hank was utterly exhausted, but he would allow himself no sleep.

How could he? With darkness the drain pipe had come alive. First the sibilant stirrings, echoing softly around him, ballooning to a cacophony of hard-pointed mandibles clicking a hungry counterpoint to countless chitonous feet scraping against the concrete; then the sinuous shapes, faint and vague in the light of the rising moon slanting through the grate, undulating toward him from left and right, sloshing through the water below, crawling along the ceiling of the pipe directly above him, the thinnest of them as thick as his upper arm, the largest as big around as his thigh, ignoring him as they slid by, weaving over, under, and around each other with a hideous languid grace that seemed to defy gravity, blackening the pale gray of the concrete with Gordian masses of twisting bodies, blotting out the moon as they nosed against the closed grate.

He heard a metallic scrape, a screech, then a clank as the grate fell back onto the pavement above. A sudden change came over the millipedes. Their languor evaporated, replaced by a hungry urgency as they thrashed and clawed at each other in a mad frenzy to join the night-hunt on the surface.

Moments later, the last of them had squeezed through. Once again there was moonlight and Hank was alone.

No…not alone. Something was coming. Something big. He knew without looking what it was. And a few minutes later he saw her huge pincered head rise and hover above him, swaying.

Not again! Oh, no, Lord, not again!

He'd worked since dawn on regaining control of his limbs, and for most of the day it had seemed a hopeless task. No matter how he concentrated, how he strained, his body simply would not respond. But he'd kept at it, and as the light had started to fail, he'd begun to achieve some results. He'd noticed muscle twitches in his arms and legs, in his abdominal muscles. Either the toxin was wearing off or he was overcoming it. It didn't matter which. He was regaining control—that was what mattered.

But all his efforts would be for naught if the queen dosed him again with her neurotoxin.

She made no move, simply hovered there with her head hanging over him. Did she suspect anything?

Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord!

He'd spent the entire day willing his muscles to move, now he was begging them to be still. One twitch, one tremor, one tiny tic, and she'd ram her proboscis into his gut again and put him back where he started.

She watched him for what seemed like forever, then she began to move—

No!

—her head lowering toward his belly—

NO!

—and past him. She arched over him, her hard little feet brushing across the skin of his abdomen. He could feel nothing but he saw his abdominal muscles twitch and roll with revulsion and he prayed she wouldn't notice.

She didn't. Her near-endless length finally cleared him and she wound her way up through the drain opening and into the night.

Now he was alone! And now was the time for action.

He strained his arms and legs upward as if fighting against steel manacles. To his delight he saw the muscles bulge with the effort. His fingers didn't move, didn't close into the rebellious fists he willed for them, but he watched the veins in the undersides of his forearms swell as blood coursed into the resistant muscles, watched his abdominals ripple and swell around the wound as he tried to sit up.

But nothing was happening. His veins and arteries continued to swell, stretching against the envelope of skin, his abdomen rippled like the Atlantic in a hurricane, but there was no sign of voluntary movement, only chaos.

And then his eyes snapped to the wound below his navel. Something moved there. Something wriggled within it. This morning's scream built again in his unresponsive throat as two slim black pincers, each no more than an inch long, poked into the air. A multi-eyed head, deep brown and gleaming, followed. It paused, glanced around, fixed Hank with its cold black gaze, then dragged its long, many-legged length from the wound with a crinkling slurp. Another identical creature quickly followed. Then another.

Hank's once quiescent and unresponsive body was moving now with a will of its own, writhing, bucking, convulsing, rocking up and down, back and forth in its webbed hammock as his veins and arteries bulged past the limits of their tensile strength and ruptured, freeing more wriggling, pincered, millipedic forms.

Something snapped within Hank's mind then. He could almost hear the foundations of his sanity begin to crack and give way. And that was good. He welcomed the collapse.

Yes. Welcomed it. A whole new perspective. Everyone above ground was dying. Dying and decomposing. Not Hank. No way. Hank was alive and would stay alive through these, his children.

Parenthood at last.

If only I could cry!

He'd wanted it so long, now it had happened. His children. They'd grown within him. Fed off him. Made him part of them. He'd go on living through them while everybody else—including the cop lieutenant and his two renegade underlings—died.

If only I could laugh!

He watched with pride as dozens more of his children broke free of the cramped confines of his body to swarm and crawl with wild abandon over his skin. So good to see them free and moving about, stretching their slender, foot-long bodies, gaining strength before heading to the surface and joining the great hunt. Some of them tangled and began to rake and spear each other with their pincers.

No fighting, children. Save it for topside.

Just then two more broke free from the sides of his throat, trailing remnants of the arteries through which they'd been traveling. They reared up and faced him, swaying back and forth like cobras before a snake charmer.

Yes, my children, he wanted to tell them, I am your Daddy and I'm terribly proud of you. I want you to—

They darted forward without warning, each burying a pincered head hungrily into one of his eyes.

No! he wanted to say. I'm your Daddy! Don't blind Daddy! How can he watch you grow if you eat his eyes?

But they were naughty children and didn't listen. They kept burrowing inward, deeper and deeper.

If only I could scream!