Oelefse halted sharply. Shambling toward them in the pale moonlight were more than a dozen human figures as diverse in shape and substance as could be imagined. A baker’s wife advanced alongside an off-duty airline pilot, who in turn was flanked by a taxi driver. An old woman in traditional Tyrolean garb was escorted by a pair of extensively pierced teens a quarter her age. There were construction workers and a second-form teacher, an assistant brewmaster and a tour guide. Other than their presence there together in the venerable fortress in the middle of the night, they had only silence in common. That, and the fact that they carried rocks. Some bore only one rock, others two or more. The rocks had something in common, too.
They were tenanted.
“Away!” Clutching at the immobilized archaeologist’s arm, Oelefse was pulling him backward, back the way they had come. “They are armed!”
The gaping archaeologist could see that. If truth be told, the eccentric grouping they were confronting was heavily, if unnaturally armed. Because every stone they carried was home and vector to a sojourning Interloper. Tendrils writhed, tentacles clutched, multiple mouths snapped, and eyes variously rolled, bulged, blinked, and gaped. In the self of each of the dull-visaged, shambling, stumbling Austrians dwelled one or more controlling Interlopers. Exerting themselves to the maximum of which they were capable, they had assumed control of their respective hosts.
Equipping themselves with weapons in the form of vectored others of their hostless, hungry kind, they had come looking for the healthy humans who had dared to make the passage between planes of existence. It had been decided that immediate infection would be the reward of the trespassers, ceaseless melancholy their destiny. In this judgment, Cody and Oelefse were determined not to concur.
Their assailants advanced slowly, almost ponderously, like marionettes being operated by inexperienced, clumsy puppeteers. But not so slowly that evading them would be easy. Once more, Cody and his elderly companion would have to stand and fight. He readied himself. They were not defenseless. They still had the pistol and the tuning fork.
Oelefse had something more substantial in mind. Opening his briefcase, he withdrew not one but two tuning forks, placing the one he had been carrying carefully back into its waiting strap. Like their smaller predecessor, the new pair he removed had been drop-forged of gleaming, highly polished steel. Each was as long as the briefcase was wide, nearly the length of the older man’s forearm.
“Have you ever used a sword, my friend?”
Cody responded with a short laugh that was not forced. “Sure. Every day, during my lectures. And also when I’m in the field, to remind the local help who’s in charge and to keep them from getting too cocky.”
Oelefse muttered to himself. “The old arts die by the wayside and are replaced by the new. I suppose if I offered you a video-game joystick you would be able to handle it blindfolded. Here.” He handed Cody one of the two gleaming devices. The archaeologist hefted his experimentally. It was solid, and gratifyingly heavy.
“Surely you have at least seen some movies?” Assuming the stance of a trained fencer wielding saber instead of foil or epee, Oelefse speedily demonstrated a few basic moves. “Like this, see? Do not try to get fancy. Cut and slash, cut and slash, keep your distance.” Their assailants became visible again, advancing around a precipitous wall of solid stone. Mute and focused, they hefted their adulterated stones in expectation.
“At all costs you must avoid contact with one of the contaminated rocks.”
“I know that much,” Cody snapped irritably. He was not a child. “How long can we just keep retreating?”
Oelefse glanced skyward. “Not long enough. They know that. I do not think even the presence of curious tourists would be sufficient to forestall an assault by this group. Their abiding Interlopers seem very determined. Our presence here has upset them even more than I presumed.” When he grinned, he looked twenty years younger. “That alone is justification enough for our visit.” Halting, he reached for something and passed it to his younger companion. “Here, this will be very useful.”
Cody looked down at the lid from a plastic garbage can that his companion had handed him. “We throw this?”
“No.” Oelefse held up a lid of his own. “They will serve as shields against flying stones and their inimical inhabitants.” He lowered the triple tip of his tuning fork. “Those Who Abide can do nothing with plastic. Now come: before they think to try and encircle us. They will not be expecting an attack.”
Neither was Cody, but he rushed forward alongside his elderly guide, trying his best to imitate the other man’s movements. When Oelefse swung his long tuning fork downward to strike the ground and set it ringing, the archaeologist did the same. He felt utterly absurd, swinging the metal rod in front of him, holding the slightly aromatic plastic disk in his other hand like an extra at the rear of a battle scene in some cheap Italian sword-and-sandal flick. Somehow Oelefse managed to hang onto his briefcase as well as the garbage can lid he had appropriated for his own defense.
“Watch out!” Even as Oelefse shouted a warning, he was raising his improvised shield.
The first rocks came flying. Each sprouted various combinations of unearthly but deadly arms and limbs and teeth, anxious to sink themselves into the vulnerable essence of the two onrushing humans. One fist-sized chunk slammed into the plastic disk Cody was carrying, only to bounce harmlessly off to the side, the nebulous limbs of its resident Interloper flailing furiously. Without actual physical contact between stone and human flesh, it could not escape its granitic prison.
Confronted by a raver-rocker-student, the archaeologist swung the singing tuning fork in her direction. Not at the young woman, but at the stone she was carrying. The danger lay within that uneven rock, not in her vacant, disconcerted gaze.
Something with a mouth three sizes too large for its body and a quartet of bony arms reached toward Cody from the depths of the rock. Clutching fingers clawed briefly at his shoulders and chest with false damp, chilling him slightly. As the teen thrust the stone forward in an attempt to touch it to Cody’s ribs, the oversized tuning fork made contact with the softly moaning, clutching Interloper.
Light reminiscent of the pseudo-bioluminescence he had seen on the other side of the stairwell exploded in his face, a momentarily blinding burst of violent yellow and green. No sound accompanied the detonation, no concussion rocked his eardrums or rattled his nervous system. More disoriented than he, the student stumbled backward. Dazed but determined, he pursued and thrust the tuning fork at her exposed midriff, making light contact with the smooth skin just above her ring-bearing navel.
A second burst of light engulfed her, as if she had swallowed a flare. Insensate and silent, it spewed vertically into the night sky as her inhabiting Interloper vanished in a blast of cold crimson embers. After months of avoiding and dodging, he had finally slain one of Those Who Abide.
It felt good. Real good.
As the young woman fainted harmlessly to the ground, unconscious but cleansed, the others tried to surround the two men. Transparent tentacles only the imperiled could see thrashed and flailed in impotent rage. Mouths snapped and bit at flesh they were determined to feed upon from the inside out. Bodies dipped and thrust. But their movements were sluggish. It took time for them to respond to the commands and directives of those abiding within them. Though outnumbered, Cody and Oelefse reacted with a speed and sense of purpose their internally dominated antagonists could not match. Interlopers traditionally infected other humans through stealth and accident. The kind of frontal assault they were attempting to mount within the castle walls was proving clumsy in its execution.
That did not make it any less deadly, Cody knew. A single extended contact with an Interloper-bearing rock was all that would be necessary to render him as helpless as their hapless attackers, or as afflicted as his poor Kelli. Keeping a firm grip on his garbage can lid, which had long since ceased to be a source of dry amusement, he swung and stabbed with the tuning fork.
An Interloper-laden chunk of smooth-sided river rock was rammed in his direction. With growing confidence, he swung the tuning fork at the squat, particularly ugly Interloper that was frothing forth from its surface. The three-pronged device sliced through its midsection.
Nothing happened. There was no outburst of brilliant light, no despairing moan as the Interloper shriveled and died. It continued to claw at him, its grasping fingers passing repeatedly through the flesh and bone of his arm. Backing up, he brought his arm down, catching the hideous manifestation with a strong backswing. The second blow had no more effect that the first. Pushing forward, the middle-aged man holding the stone came within inches of touching it to Cody’s right thigh.
Steel flashed in the moonlight, slicing the mewling Interloper in half. It blew up and died in a satisfying shower of sparks and silent energetic discharges. Oelefse was at Cody’s side, shouting at him.
“Do not forget to strike your fork against the pavement from time to time, Cody Westcott! Not every useful device in this world is powered by batteries, you know.” Swinging his shield around, he caught a flung, Interloper-inhabited stone and bashed it aside as he returned to the fray.
Cody did not forget again. From then on he took every opportunity to bounce the tips of the tuning fork off the paving stones beneath his feet. As he and Oelefse battled on, a strange sort of exhilaration overtook him. It was more than a surge of endorphins. Hundreds of years ago, thousands of other men had done battle on these castle walls, with sword and spear and shield. They had been fighting one another, but how many had done so under the influence of unseen, unsuspected Interlopers? How many of Those Who Abide had been present at such times of carnage, fattening themselves on the ultimate human misery that was war?
Now he was doing the same, fighting to save himself and his wife alongside an old man whose store of knowledge was exceeded only by his uncommon energy and determination. Only, they were not fighting with their own kind, but with the unseen instigators of a vast proportion of human woe. Instead of watching while Oelefse chanted and played, he was finally striking back himself, and in a fashion that was visually as well as physically inspiring.
Somewhere in a far distant grave, he felt, a long-dead Chachapoyan shaman or two might be looking on with pride as he carried on the fight that the Chachapoyans had waged and eventually lost.
“Oh look, honey!” The well-dressed woman clutched at her husband’s arm and pointed. Raising his glance, her husband followed the direction of her stare.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Clinging to his arm, she hugged him tight.
Equally well-attired, and sated from a fine late-night supper, her spouse frowned as he contemplated the flurry of colored lights that were flaring forth from the ramparts of Hohensalzburg Castle. With a gesture and some weak German, he intercepted a pedestrian heading the other way.
“Excuse me, sir.” When the man stopped, the husband gestured castleward. “What does this show signify?”
“Show, show?” His stroll interrupted, the Salzburger turned to look in the same direction as the two visiting Britons. When he saw the intermittent glare, his face creased into a frown beneath his hat. “That is strange. I had not heard of a show being scheduled for the fortress tonight.”
“They do put on such light and sound shows, though,” the woman ventured hesitantly.
“Oh ja, ja, many times during the year. Light and sound, sometimes telling the history of the fortress, sometimes recalling the many wars of the past.” His frown did not go away. “My wife and I and our friends come sometimes to see them ourselves. Though, living here, one grows used to such events.” He squinted upward, at the towering bulwark of ancient stone. “Odd for the city to have one on a Thursday night.” With a shrug, he turned away. “Perhaps it is a special, unscheduled presentation for some visiting dignitary. Who can say? I wish you a good night.”
Long after the citizen had vanished down the narrow street, the two tourists stood watching until at last the spray of light and color on high came to an end. Pleased by their unexpected good fortune, they turned and resumed the stroll that would take them back to their hotel. They had another story, another detail to add to the history of their vacation with which to regale their friends when they returned to Birmingham. Concerning the true nature of what they had just witnessed, a battle for the minds and bodies of two of their fellow humans that was unprecedented in recent European history, they had not an inkling. It was no historical pageant, nor a compilation of preprogrammed recordings and strobe-light effects. They had been spectators instead at one battle in an invisible but incessant war. Of this they knew nothing: only that they regretted the absence of their camera, left in a drawer back at their hotel.
• • •
Unaware that their fight to preserve their independence and humanity had been viewed from below as a charming entertainment, a visual bagatelle, a casual diversion for the meandering curious, Cody and Oelefse put aside their shields as they went from body to body, consoling a cluster of fellow humans as diverse as they were presently bewildered. All had survived the excision of their resident Interlopers, struck from their selves as cleanly as one infestation after another had been blasted from their vectoring rocks. As near as the two perceiving men could tell, not a single one of Those Who Abide had survived the brawl, not those inhabiting dominated human bodies nor those residing hopefully in stone. Their respective humans now stood free and uncontaminated, unaware as ever that they had only moments ago been grievously infected by something they could not see, hear, or feel. To the last man and woman, however, they now suffered from a severe but not serious collective headache.
Only when he was certain not one Interloper had survived the desperate conflict did Oelefse retrieve the long tuning fork from his young companion and slip it back into its holding straps inside the briefcase. Following Cody’s with his own, he snapped the case shut and prepared to resume the planned nocturnal departure from the fortress that had been so contentiously interrupted.
Ambling downhill alongside the older man, the winded archaeologist wiped perspiration from his face and neck. Glancing backward in the direction of their dazed former assailants, he wondered aloud at their immediate fate.
“For them, it will be like waking from a dream.” Oelefse gestured and they turned to the right, off the main avenue and down a narrower side path. “They will look at one another and begin to question what happened to them, why they are here. None will have a proper explanation. When morning comes and the castle reopens to tourists, they will stumble back down to their jobs and homes. The ache now pummeling their heads will last no more than a day. By nightfall there will not be one among them who does not feel better, healthier, and happier.” He visited a hearty slap on the archaeologist’s back. “It is a good thing we have done here tonight, my young friend! In the course of saving ourselves, we have also helped others.”
Cody nodded pensively. Already a faint suggestion of light had appeared in the eastern sky, foreshadowing the dawn. “Now if we can only help Kelli.”
“We shall, we shall, my friend.” The older man tapped his briefcase. “We have gone on such an excursion as few men ever dream of, and returned alive, and with the blue leaves of the ilecc safely in our possession.” In the strengthening light, his wink was easy to make out. “We will go back to America, to your dry and well-paved desert, and by Heaven, we will make some tea.”
“Tea,” Cody murmured. “I wondered how you were going to use the leaves. And by the way: Do you know where I can get a briefcase like that one?” He indicated the still immaculate, unscratched case Oelefse cradled beneath his left arm.
“Like this?” His guide shrugged. “It is only a briefcase. Surely in your home city there are establishments that sell similar attachés?”
“Similar, maybe, but not the same.” Cody was eyeing the old man closely. “It seems to hold a lot more than it should.”
“On the contrary, my young friend, it holds no more than it should. But if you really want one, well, I will see what I can do. Our supplier is somewhat exclusive.” He smiled encouragingly.
“Exclusive, or elusive?” Cody smiled back. Not all the wonders he had encountered in Oelefse’s company were overwhelming. The smaller ones had their own unique attractions.
Oelefse was stating the obvious when he remarked that their activities seemed to have drawn a good deal of unwanted attention. Consequently, he put in a much greater effort and spent a good deal more time in planning their return to America than he had their departure. Instead of flying directly home, and despite Cody’s desire to not spend a moment more than was necessary in travel, the old man insisted on taking a roundabout route with multiple stops. So it was that they drove, not back to Vienna, but to Zurich, keeping a wary eye on the stone ramparts of the Alps through which they cruised. From Zurich they boarded a plane going to Madrid, from there flew to Miami, and only then did Cody find himself on a flight heading homeward.
Exhausted by his European ordeal, but elated at the prospect of having his wife restored to him, the archaeologist made a conscious effort to relax on the plane. He expected Oelefse to do the same, but his elderly companion was a composed, controlled, ceaselessly active ball of white-haired energy. Most notably, the first thing Oelefse did subsequent to boarding was put in a request to look at the cockpit. This was a treat usually reserved for youngsters, but so charming and persuasive was the genteel German that the flight crew acceded to his request. Cody was not surprised. Oelefse had made the same petition at the beginning of every flight they’d made. Not to view the cockpit and learn about its controls, but to ensure to his own satisfaction that no member of the flight crew was contaminated by something that might compromise their safe journey.
When the archaeologist had questioned him about this particular interest, Oelefse had been quick to explain. “Occasionally, commercial aircraft are lost for no apparent reason, my young friend. They report some minor problem, say they are dealing with it, and the next thing you know, you are watching the appalling details on the evening news. It has happened to planes from every major international airline. Except one, and there is a specific reason for that.”
“Interlopers.” Cody had responded without prompting. And Oelefse had nodded. It made all too much sense. In the course of an airplane crash, the food of despair would be present in plenty. Only the fact that it was of short, if intense, duration kept a greater number of such catastrophes from taking place.
It did not make for reassurances as they boarded one plane after another.
As Oelefse assessed the flight crew on the pretense of examining the cockpit, Cody’s thoughts were only of his wife. There had been no contact with the hospital in Scottsdale since he had left for Europe. What was her current status? Had her condition changed for the better? For the worse? But for his guide’s admonition, he would have called to find out.
“You never know who is on the other end of the line, my friend,” the old man had warned him. “You never know what abides within them, waiting and ready to partake of whatever information as well as whatever unhappiness may come its way. Better that you should wait, difficult as I know it must be for you to do, until you are once more at your wife’s bedside. Then you can make your inquiries with a better assurance of receiving truthful answers.”
So the agitated archaeologist let only his eyes make contact with one public phone after another, both in Europe and on their return to the States. His car was waiting, dusty but undisturbed, where it had been left in the covered parking facility. He ought to go home first, he knew. There would be bills to pay to ensure that vital utilities were not shut off, and phone messages to answer. None of them meant anything anymore. Only Kelli was important. Only Kelli mattered.
It was not necessary for Oelefse to be able to read thoughts. He could read the intentions of the younger men in his eyes, his attitude, and his gestures. Leaving the airport, they rushed along the freeways until the time came to exit, not for the Westcotts’ neighborhood, but for the broad commercial plain that boasted among its many large, wholly air-conditioned buildings the hospital to which Kelli Westcott had been committed.
They were pulling into the parking lot when Cody shouted an oath and slammed on the brakes. The hospital loomed directly ahead, a shining fortress of pink and white concrete, glass, and steel girded by half-filled parking lots. Overhead, the late summer sun burned mercilessly, heedless of man’s efforts to tame the desert by unrolling across it his pathetic little strips of asphalt and schools, strip malls and cookie-cutter housing developments.
Blocking the entrance to the hospital was a veritable company of Interlopers.
Three thousand tendrils flailed in the direction of the car carrying the two men. A thousand unearthly mouths of every imaginable size, shape, and dentition probed and pulsed in their direction. Unclean protuberances puckered and drooled from the midst of the virulent mass while coarse antennae traced twitching, jerking patterns in the air. The writhing mass of otherworldly foulness exuded the stink of sorrow.
“Why me?” Clinging grimly to the wheel, Cody gritted his teeth as he stared through the windshield and tried to decide what to do next. “Why pick on Kelli and me?”
“You delved into mysteries that Those Who Abide would prefer to keep hidden.” Oelefse’s tone was gently avuncular. “The more success you have, the more attention you draw to yourself. You are a prize to be taken, you and your wife. If knowledge is happiness, then the Interlopers have a great many reasons to hate you.”
“How can we get past that?” Keeping both hands on the wheel in unconscious parody of the older man’s driving style, Cody considered the mass of psychical spoliation that loomed before them.
“All hospitals have multiple entrances,” Oelefse murmured.
“Around back!” Throwing the car into reverse, Cody burned rubber as he sent them screeching around to the north side of the medical complex. His was not the only brain to recognize the possibility of an alternate ingress, however. No matter how fast the car moved, or how skillfully it was maneuvered by the furious archaeologist, the company of Interlopers kept pace. Whenever Cody slowed, that seething mass of tentacles and suckers and bulbous eyes was there to block any approach to the building.
“How come there’s no panic?” Breathing hard, the car idling in the suffocating heat of afternoon, Cody regarded their rapacious multilimbed adversary. Were they facing dozens of Interlopers all crammed tightly together to form a barrier, he wondered, or a single organism monstrous beyond anything they had yet encountered? Without the kind of close inspection that was required to tell, it was a question whose resolution remained out of reach.
“Those who cannot perceive must see something else. When they choose to really exert themselves, the Interlopers can twist reality in distressing ways. Usually, it is a device employed to cause accidents and thereby generate fresh misery. But this time—here, try these.”
From a coat pocket Oelefse removed a tiny plastic bottle with a small nipple on one end. Squeezing a drop of the contents into each eye, he blinked reflexively as he passed the container to his companion.
Cody eyed the vial uncertainly. “What’s in this?”
“Eyedrops. For clarifying one’s vision.”
Without further hesitation or additional time-consuming questions, the archaeologist tilted his head back and applied the drops. As his vision cleared he heard Oelefse’s muted grunt of satisfaction.
“Perception,” the older man was muttering, “is everything.”
Squatting directly in front of them was not some gargantuan multilimbed monster, but rather a monster of a truck. The driver of the idling eighteen-wheeler wore an expression of thoroughgoing befuddlement, as though more than his sight had been clouded. The load on his open-bed vehicle consisted of dozens of bound-together slabs of heavy, earth-red flagstone hauled down from a quarry in the northern part of the state and destined for points eastward. These were secured vertically on the back of the flatbed like so many dull, ochre, irregularly shaped dinner plates, each the size of a dining room table.
And every one of them was home to a resident, hungry, agitated Interloper.
The tentacles had not gone away; the suckers and fanged mouths continued to snap at the air, but now Cody could see that they originated in natural stone and not in some ponderous otherworldly bulk. They could not move about of their own free will. No Interloper could do that without a host to convey it. But by masking the perception of the two men, the Interlopers whose movements were restricted to the flat rocks in which they dwelled had managed to give the impression of a highly mobile mob of deadly abiders. And by controlling the truck’s operator via the Interloper that occupied his thoughts, they were able to repeatedly block the approach to the hospital of Cody and his distinguished friend.
Now that the two men knew what they were dealing with, Oelefse proposed that they enter the multilevel parking facility and take the covered, third-level walkway across to the hospital, rising by many feet above the threatening load of truck-borne Interlopers.
“They can’t do anything to us in this world unless we make direct physical contact with the vectors, the rocks, in which they’re living.” Cody recited the mantra aloud even as he was backing the car slowly away from the haunted big rig. “Why don’t we just walk around the truck?”
“Because while Those Who Abide cannot hurt you emotionally, they still possess the means to injure you physically.” Oelefse gestured forward. “If that truck backs over you, it will not make much difference if you touch an Interloper-infected stone or not.”
So hard had Cody been concentrating on the potential psychic dangers posed by the Interlopers that he had forgotten about their ability to influence their physical surroundings by adversely motivating those humans who were thoroughly under their control. Leaving the car in the parking facility, the two men hurried to and across the covered catwalk that led to the hospital proper. Beneath them, dozens of enraged Interlopers fumed and flailed upward from their stone prisons on the truck bed. Tendrils and creepers pierced the concrete walkway to flutter madly in the faces of the two determined men. Several clutched at Oelefse’s briefcase, but none had the power to dislodge so much as a finger of his real-world grasp, or to impede either man’s stride.
Cody walked right through an ichorous maw the size of a cement mixer without hesitating. Fat, leprous lips contracted around him, passed through him, appeared behind him as he increased his pace. A brief chill flustered him for less than a few seconds. No matter how many times he passed through the substance of an Interloper without suffering any ill effects, it remained an unnerving, unnatural experience. Moments later, they were safely inside the hospital.
Used to entering through the main entrance, they were forced to pause for a minute to reorient themselves. Courteous hospital employees corrected their mistakes and offered helpful suggestions. Soon the expectant travelers were in a section of the facility Cody thought he recognized, hurrying through the pediatrics wing past anxious mothers and wide-eyed children. Had he paused a moment to consider where he was, warning signs would have been raised. But so close to the woman he had not seen in weeks, his thoughts were preoccupied.
He did not take time to reflect that any place packed with sobbing, ailing, unhappy children would constitute a natural feeding ground for gluttonous Interlopers.
A holdover from simpler times, Lincoln Logs were pre-cut sections of tree trunk and tree limb designed to fit together to form cabins, Western-style forts, and various other child-friendly structures. In addition to the standard line there were also mini-sets and oversized editions. It was one of the latter that two prepubescent boys and a girl were presently attempting to assemble into a small house. Scattered about the play area were a host of as yet unused logs, none longer than three feet, with shorter connecting pieces.
Reaching for a long log with which to complete a wall, one of the boys kicked it before he could reach it. Or perhaps his leg was impelled by a force he did not understand. The log rolled toward a covey of mothers seated behind a low table piled high with a tattered assortment of housekeeping, health, and beauty magazines. Striding single-mindedly between knees and kids, Cody barely noticed the toy log rolling toward him.
Oelefse slammed into him from behind, throwing him off-balance and knocking him forward. The startled archaeologist had to scramble to maintain his footing.
“What the hell was—?” As he caught sight of the log, he broke off, staring. Disapproving of his mild profanity, a couple of the mothers had glanced up from their magazines. When they saw him looking in their direction they promptly returned to their reading.
The oversized, umber-stained, notched wooden dowel had rolled to a stop against the foot of a young woman in her twenties. From within the log a sinuous, two-foot-long shape was oozing out of the wood and into her leg. It had stubby membranous wings and multiple eyes and a ration of gnarled transparent teeth that looked like a plateful of overcooked hash browns. Oblivious to the infection in progress, the woman shuddered slightly, as if from a sudden chill, and went back to her reading.
Approaching the log, the little girl who had been helping to build the house smiled and murmured something to her mother. This brought forth a retort so excessively sharp that the child immediately started crying. The other mothers looked up but said nothing. It was not their child who was being rebuked. Truth be told, it was not the mother who was doing the berating. No longer wholly her own self, she had absorbed the infestation that had been meant for Cody.
A small, strong hand was tugging at him, and a voice was whispering urgently. “Come, my friend. There is nothing we can do for her, and we have business elsewhere.”
Still staring at the woman, who now slammed her magazine down hard on an end table, Cody allowed himself to be drawn toward the next corridor. Behind him, the children continued to fumble innocently with the toy logs, including the quietly sobbing, unfortunate little girl whose mother had now become unwitting host to one of Those Who Abide.
“You must never let down your guard like that. Didn’t I warn you?” Oelefse’s words were reproving as they strode past a tall service cart laden with trays of styrene-covered, rapidly cooling food.
“I—I wasn’t thinking.” Cody was simultaneously relieved and embarrassed by his narrow escape. After all he had been through, both here and overseas, he had nearly been trapped by a child’s toy. “I thought it was probably plastic and so I didn’t take a good look at it.” His tone was defensive. “Isn’t every other kid’s toy these days made of plastic?”
“I suppose you cannot be blamed for that. Most everything in your country is. In Europe we still believe that children should grow up with some toys fashioned from natural materials. As you nearly found out, while aesthetically pleasing, that can be dangerous. A number of the Society’s members work in the toy industry solely to vet such materials before they can pass into the hands of our children.”
“It won’t happen again.” Cody wondered which of them he was trying to convince.
“Not until after we have treated your wife, anyway.” They were in the last hall, approaching the room where Kelli Westcott lay in stasis. Nothing could stop them now. The intern and nurse they warily passed were clean, and carried nothing that could be considered a threat.
A young woman, little more than a teenager, was standing outside the door of the private room next to Kelli’s. In her arms she held a softly squalling infant less than a year old. A glance in her direction assured the perceptive Cody that she was uncontaminated. So close to his wife now, he had to resist the urge to break into a run. But running would only have drawn attention, and they were nearly there anyway.
As he passed the teenage mother, he absently noted her drawn expression, the lost look in her eyes. That was not unexpected in a mother of sixteen or seventeen. What he did not, could not, anticipate were the actions of the baby. Reaching down in a most non-infantile manner, it brought something up from within its powder blue blanket and threw it in the archaeologist’s direction with more force than such tiny, undeveloped arms ought to possess. Instinctively, he flinched.
It was a rock the size of a silver dollar, smooth and shiny as if it had just been plucked from the bed of a sparkling mountain stream. From its reddish depths a pair of insectlike ovipositors extended outward. At the tip of each was an eye, and a small, piercing mouth.
He did not even have time to shout before it struck him on the neck.