Early Sunrise
Allen Blake Corbett moved as silently as possible through the empty, quiet hall and the depths of a nightmare he had written a thousand times before but never considered to be remotely related to possibility. He was the last hope and the last risk.
There had been four of them when they arrived at the Institute, and while they had each been convinced of the menace that Cummings represented, none had thought that the people in charge of the accused mass murderer would ever allow him the slightest opportunity to escape and add to his grisly list of victims. So they had expected to depart in the morning, vindicated by an undeniable display of the “unnatural” affliction of the subject and physically well. Now, however, at three-thirty in the morning and facing another three and a half hours of the beast’s fury, Nick Grundel was sinking ever closer to death (if he weren’t already dead), Meg Talley was somewhat better off but also in danger of deteriorating to the point of death, and flinty Douglas Morgan was suffering from cracked ribs, deep gashes over most of his body, and a severely fractured ankle.
Corbett knew that if Cummings weren’t stopped soon, his three friends and the rest of the trapped people inside this building would never live to see the sun coming up again.
For that reason, he had helped Ferguson escort Morgan to an unlocked lab where the two could wait out the remainder of the ordeal. (Naturally, Doug had strenuously objected to being left behind and had assured Blake that he was capable of forcing his battered body onward, but his ankle just would not support him any longer; Brad had been preparing to find his camera and shoot even more priceless film of the monster when he passed out from exhaustion and loss of blood). Now Blake was alone in the corridor, pursuing the four people who had escaped Cummings to search for a telephone connection to the world outside. He had to find out if they had been successful, and, if they had not, he had to finish the job himself.
Still, he had at least a couple of good reasons to believe that Audrey, Gurren, and the other two had reached a place from which they could control some of the building’s functions. To begin with, the sprinklers that had been activated when the werewolf had been driven off by Ferguson’s blazing jacket had been shut off (though, granted, that could have been an automatic procedure); and secondly, the lights in the hallway had come on again (not so easily dismissed as an automatic function). Axton had shut off the long, cool, fluorescent bulbs so long ago from the central office in an effort to aid the ‘capture’ of Cummings (and what a ridiculous idea that appeared to be now), that it had become difficult to remember when they were working. Blake had been unable to locate an operating control in the central office when he and Audrey had visited there.
Just after the battle between Cummings and that incredibly brave kid, however, while he and the other two men were unsuccessfully trying to convince the girl to leave her brother’s body in the auditorium, the lights had flickered a couple of times in the corridor and then flashed on to more fully illuminate the passage and the pathetic remains of those who had not escaped the terrible creature.
Corbett hoped that the lights had been switched on by Audrey, who was now recounting the whole insane episode to those on the other side of the walls.
He couldn’t actually say that the brightness in the hall was a reassurance to him, though. As he moved carefully in the direction of the front exit, he no longer had the shadows to hide in, and while this meant that the burned, undoubtedly enraged thing that he had first met as Gerald Cummings could not use the darkness as a weapon, either, the corridor was so curved that he could walk to within ten feet of the monster before laying eyes on him.
Corbett could feel the beast everywhere that he wasn’t looking, like a silent ghost slipping just out of range of his vision as he turned his head. The thrill of the danger was now complimented by a dread certainty that his luck with Cummings would soon run out. By “luck”, he meant that in four encounters that practically had been hand to hand matches with the monster, he had escaped with little more than scratches, all of which hurt like hell but were comparatively minor injuries. He’d seen others that night killed by single swipes from the awful claws while trying to run away from the confrontations. One tempted fate only so many times without paying; he’d learned that from more than one movie.
Thinking about what could happen set up an involuntary shivering, which in turn caused his head to throb, so he tried to wash the thoughts from his mind. But it was so quiet in the hall, with no radio, no people, nothing to let him know he was not the last living human in the world …
A hand fell on his right shoulder.
Corbett whirled about, screaming with all of his lungs, and started to throw every ounce of strength he had left into a desperate head punch, but halfway into the motion he pulled up, stumbling backward to keep from hitting the man standing before him.
Darrow the state policeman stood there, as pale as snow and missing his left hand and forearm. In a terrible flash, Corbett saw the arm in Cummings’ hand as he left the bloody observation room after the initial attack of the evening.
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” whispered Darrow weakly.
“I’m a writer. I was … what are you doing out here?”
“I’ve got to stop that bastard before he kills anyone else; he must have killed fifty people already. Jesus, just look around us, in the floor!” He sounded as if he were about to cry.
Fifty was a conservative estimate, Blake decided. Reasoning that a couple of moving targets would be more difficult to Find than stationary ones, he tried to take the man’s right shoulder and direct him toward the lounge.
“You can’t fight him with a gun, Sergeant,” he said. “We both saw what four guns failed to do to him.”
Darrow refused to be helped, and anger caused a touch of color to rise in his white face. “I’ve got to kill him! When he tore my hand off, I could have laid there and bled to death, but I knew that someone had to kill him, so I used my belt to make this damned tourniquet, just so that I could kill him!”
Corbett shuddered at the thoughts that must have burned into the man’s mind as he performed that incredible act. “All right, but you can’t do it alone. We need help from the outside.”
“We can’t get out! Those idiots won’t open the doors!”
“There’re some people talking to them now, on a telephone. Come with me so we can find them and get out of this hallway.”
“Where?”
“The lounge, the employees’ lounge. Do you know where it is?”
“Uh, yeah, I do. It’s around this way.” Darrow staggered by him and began to lead the way to the room.
Blake started to wonder whether the policeman was rational enough to know where anything was after they passed the main entrance, the cafeteria, and a number of other sections on the opposite side of the building; when the point arrived that he had to half-carry the injured man for a dozen more yards, he was ready to turn back to find someone else who might know where the room was. But Darrow was still in possession of his faculties, and he waved limply at a long, glass-fronted office which was too uncomfortably reminiscent of the central control room for Blake’s taste. It had no irradiation chamber or steel doors to protect them from Cummings even temporarily, and the lights were off.
“Are you sure this is it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” grunted the cop.
Corbett peered through the window and noticed a tiny red glow coming from the area of the floor behind a desk. He carefully cracked the thin wooden door and whispered, “Audrey? Gurren?”
In reply there came a sharp intake of breath, and the young guide’s head appeared above the desk. “Mr. Corbett!” she said, though not very loudly. “We thought that you’d get here sooner.”
“There was trouble,” he answered and then added, needlessly, “with Cummings.” He pulled Darrow inside and closed the door.
Dr. Gurren’s voice began to speak from behind the desk, as if he had been momentarily interrupted, “Alderette, are you still there? Yes, it’s Gurren … you know me, man, you know that I’d never ask to have the quarantine lifted if there were any chance of contamination. No, I told you, Axton’s dead!” The red light had come from the face of the telephone.
Blake eased Darrow into a sitting position and tried to make him inconspicuous from the hall, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they all were just as exposed behind all of that glass as they had been in the corridor. Audrey told them that she, Druitt, and Gurren had been haggling with the cussedly conscientious guards for at least ten minutes, and that Dr. Vaughn had not stopped in the lounge with them but had continued instead to the infirmary.
“What the hell’s the problem?” Blake asked irritably. He directed the questions at Barry Druitt, who was crouched behind the furniture with the others. “You’re the governor of the whole damned state; don’t they have to obey your instructions?”
Druitt sighed, carefully. “Oh, it’s an unbelievable mess out there. They have local police, state police, the National Guard, and a dozen other groups who apparently flooded the compound when the alarm was raised, and no one’s in charge! You see, they think that some artificially created plague is loose in here, and since this is a federal institution, the alert is being treated as a matter of national security. From what I’ve been able to find out, a few of them actually have taken shots at one another over who has the right to be in the compound, and an Army company is on its way here right now.”
“We could use the Army against Cummings,” Blake said.
“Unless they’re coming to wipe us out,” added Darrow.
“What?”
“This is a new situation for them. If they think that we have an incurable disease raging inside here, it might be the expedient thing to raze the building and everyone in it.”
“They wouldn’t do that, would they?” Audrey asked carefully.
Corbett spoke up, “Only if they could be certain that the virus or whatever wouldn’t escape, so I doubt it. Have you told them about Cummings?”
“Of course,” Druitt answered, “but would you believe it? Alderette, the man in charge of security at the Institute, seems to be on our side, but I don’t know how much longer he can remain in a key position before the federal authorities overrule him. Everyone else seems to consider the story just a hysterical manifestation of the disease.”
Darrow painfully stood and moved past them to the telephone. “Let me have it, doctor; I know him,” he told Gurren. When the other surrendered the instrument, he began talking in something higher than a whisper, describing their circumstances in cold, precise official terms and warning that if no action were taken to save them, as many as a hundred more lives could be forfeited in the greatest one-man massacre in the history of the human race. The approach appeared to work, and he soon placed the receiver on its cradle. “He’s a stubborn son of a bitch, but it seems that there are a lot of people out there who want to know what really is going on in here, so he’s agreed to allow one person into the decontamination chamber to be examined by a team of specialists and tell the whole story. I’ll go.”
“Sergeant Darrow, I doubt that you would be able to make it out this door,” Gurren observed. “That young man virtually had to carry you in his arms this far. It should be one of us.”
“Wait a minute,” Druitt said quickly, all of his resolve having vanished following the last, disastrous meeting with the roaming creature. “It is his job, after all, and he knows these people—”
“Please shut up, Governor,” Gurren said calmly. “No one will force you to leave the room, I promise. In any case, I’m the most qualified to make the explanations concerning our dilemma and describe what has happened to Cummings.”
“You weren’t walking very well when we got here, doctor,” Audrey pointed out. She glanced at the deadly hallway, and even in the darkness of the room, her eyes could be seen wide and glistening. “I could go.”
Go ahead, Corbett thought, as if trying to convince himself. Run out the door before I have a chance to stop you.
Gurren, you go, too, and use your education to negotiate on their terms; Druitt, it’s your elected duty to take care of your citizens; Darrow, you’re a trained professional and we’re only civilians. Just don’t make me face that damned thing again. Once more and he’ll kill me.
Then he heard his own voice speaking, and the words came as no real surprise to him at all, “I’ll go. I have the best chance of making it.” All of those dead faces revealed by the lights they had switched on from this room were behind him, pressing him into the job.
“But you’re hurt and I’m the only one who isn’t,” Audrey said with a courage that Blake didn’t know if he would have possessed had their situations been reversed.
“I’m faster than you or Gurren, and I’m not as badly injured as Darrow.” He made no reference to Druitt. “Besides, I’ve faced him before—several times—and I think … I know how to handle him.”
“You’re a brave man,” Gurren told him. “I should protest, but, objectively speaking, my chances of reaching the decontamination chamber are not very encouraging, even if the beast doesn’t return. Yours seem to be the best of all us all. Good luck.”
“Okay, volunteer,” Darrow said in a tone that was nearly too weak to understand, “you know where the entrance is, don’t you? Go directly to it, and on the wall there’s an intercom system just like the ones in the labs. Announce yourself, and they’ll open the door from the other side to let you through.”
“Got it,” Corbett said.
“And here, take this with you.” Darrow held out a dark object to him.
Blake took it and found himself holding a heavy service revolver. “But this can’t hurt him,” he said.
“It’ll make me feel better,” the policeman replied. “It’s got six shells left, and, who knows, if you get a chance to pump four or five into his brain, maybe it’ll slow him down some.”
So he accepted the weapon. The other four would remain in the lounge until they learned that he had made it into the decontamination chamber by way of the telephone, and then they would carefully explore the surrounding area for a more secure room in which to hide. Even if Corbett made it out, a general release might be an hour or more away.
“Please be careful,” Audrey said as he opened the door.
The corridor looked empty in either direction, and Blake carefully edged a few yards to his right while peering ahead for any sign of Cummings. Exit from this festering horror hole was within his grasp now and he certainly didn’t want to have that final encounter this close to his escape. Getting out with his life was all of the victory he needed.
The writer had put less than thirty feet behind him when he heard a sound that hit him like a burst of hard Arctic air and turned the warm blood in his veins to thin streams of ice. It was low, almost beyond his hearing, and it was blatantly carnivorous. Though it didn’t come from immediately behind him, it was close enough to mean that he would be facing that hideous mouth that emitted the sound again within seconds. He pasted himself against the wall and tried to bring the gun to his chest.
Cummings didn’t appear, but another growl spidered through the air and assured him that the monster was within seconds of launching himself upon another helpless victim. Sucking up all of the courage that he could find within his body, Corbett slipped back the short distance that he had covered already and peered at the door to the lounge.
Cummings was there, as he had to be, poised in barely controlled fury and showing absolutely no sign of the searing flames that had enveloped him only minutes earlier. Could anything kill him? A new kind of terror gripped Corbett when he saw the werewolf’s nostrils wrinkling, animal-like, and catching at the new human odors that still lingered in the air around the recently opened door. But he didn’t move toward Corbett; instead, he turned deliberately to the door and placed one deadly hand against it. With that flimsy barrier and the glass that made up most of the rest of the front of the room, the four people inside were as vulnerable as if they had been lying meekly on a butcher’s block. Something had to be done! Now!
“Cummings!” Blake suddenly yelled.
The beast’s head snapped around, and Corbett fired the gun. He had little experience with guns of any kind, and his hands were thrown back and upward by the powerful recoil, in spite of the two-handed grip that he had employed. But the bullet still held to the trajectory he had chosen by his aim and smashed into the top of Cummings’ head with enough force to slam him backwards into the wall next to the lounge door. A fountain of mixed-color pulp splashed from the back of the monster’s skull onto the wall, and his eyes rolled upward to leave blank sheets of sclera below. His head dropped forward while his lifeless form slid to the floor.
He’s dead! Blake mentally screamed in triumph.
But it was not to be. The howl that had died with the bullet’s impact remained deep in the back of his throat and gained in strength until it was a startling whine that paralyzed Corbett’s thoughts in the midst of his elation. The stunned man watched in total astonishment as the sickening, fist-sized hole in the rear of Cummings’ head moved, visibly formed white bone and pink flesh to close the opening and cover the newly-created material with brown hair. It seemed like a clip from an animated film, but the awesome energy of the microbial life inside the infected man was operating with incredible swiftness and efficiency to repair the host body before his eyes.
“No!” Corbett shouted.
Cummings looked up with an expression of pure hatred and began to claw at the slippery floor in an effort to gain his feet again. Forgotten were the people inside the lounge and their brothers and sisters huddled throughout the facility; the only unthinking emotion remaining in Cummings’ brain was savage animosity directed at Blake Corbett, who had come against him time after time and escaped with his life. The conviction to rip the flesh and internal organs from the man’s throat was the motivation for his entire existence.
“Oh my god, no!” Corbett screamed again. The reality of the danger was there to see, however, and when the monster lunged forward, Blake’s instinctive reaction was to fire the gun a second time.
This bullet hit Cummings in the chest rather than the head, but it still carried enough power to flip him to the floor and give Blake a split second to spin around to run from the roaring apparition.
This began the chase. Only a fraction of Corbett’s mind remained rational enough to direct him toward the main exit; the rest of Allen Blake Corbett was lost in the panic created by the terrible thing behind him. Images rather than ideas flashed through his mind, and a most surrealistic one projected minutes into the future when he would meet and join with Max Coslo to become a partner in that mad flight which would carry the two of them racing through the halls forever, screaming, brainless twins.
With the great strength he commanded, the werewolf was much faster than the writer, so the lead that Corbett held due to his head-start evaporated within yards. This was where Darrow’s gift of the revolver, which Blake had almost refused, became critical to his survival. Cummings ran bellowing his rage and keeping the man aware of where he was in the race for the exit, and this allowed the latter to realize when those razor-like claws were drawing near the back of his neck.
With a desperate agility, Blake would slide to a stop, turn, and fire another bullet into the charging body. The third shell left half of Cummings’ brain smeared on the wall, as had the first, but it didn’t stop him. The sheer impact of the high-caliber bullet was enough to hurl him from his feet, however, and that returned to Corbett the vital lead of a few seconds that he had to have to stay alive. He continued to sprint along the corridor. It was a weird and potentially deadly variation on the legend of Atalanta and Hippomenes, but it was the only chance available to him.
The tactic worked three times during the chase, with Corbett aiming his shots well at the trunk of the creature and thus minimizing his potential for wasting a bullet by missing the head or legs and Cummings appearing too possessed by his madness to even attempt evasion. The doors to either side of the hall blurred in passing, and Blake’s heart filled his ears, with the roars from behind receding during those brief moments following the shots. Finally, in an instant of almost religious impact on him, he saw the exit and the communications panel at its side.
“Alderette, it’s Corbett! For God’s sake, open the door!” he gasped while stabbing the call button.
“Where’s Darrow?” asked a voice from the other side.
“I’m Blake Corbett, and he sent me! Open up!”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, yes, hurry up!”
Cummings appeared around the corner no more than ten feet from Corbett, who faced the monster with the gun ready to release its last shell in the defense of his life. But the werewolf moved more swiftly than Blake had believed possible. In a single leap, the monster covered the space separating them and drove Corbett to the floor so roughly that the air in his lungs was forced out in a short burst.
Teeth flashed only inches from Blake’s eyes as Cummings tried to sink them into his neck, and the nauseating stench of the charnel breath practically overwhelmed him. He kept his senses, however, and brought up his left hand from beneath the thing’s chest to clutch a fistful of long facial hair covering one cheek and twist the deadly jaws aside, away from his throat. Cummings shrieked, but his pain and rage allowed Blake to slip his right hand and the gun that it held between them and into the gaping mouth.
The explosion almost deafened him, and a hot blast of air washed over his face when he fired the final bullet directly into the beast’s head. It worked again: Cummings was thrown from him, writhing, and he scrambled to his knees. The exit door slid open like the gates to Heaven.
“Close the door!” Blake screamed after falling into the decontamination chamber.
Instead, a blinding white gas sprayed down upon him from the overhead pipes and six men in sealed pressure suits surrounded him with additional liquid and gaseous disinfectants that choked the breath that he needed to explain to them what was there, just behind them. When his pleas went unheeded, he shoved through the clutter of busy men—who obviously didn’t expect such a response to the decontamination—and, knocking aside a suited figure at the exterior door switch, opened the second barrier to run into the reception room.
Before the startled men could recover, the werewolf appeared from the corridor and swept through them like a great wave. Earlier, he would have stopped to feast on these new bodies, but now only the disappearing form of the fleeing man who had so tortured him mattered. Corbett was there, fanning his rage, and these other men were but minor distractions.
There were a number of uniformed men in the outer room, and many of them turned the barrels of their weapons toward Corbett when he darted among them, but his frenzied strength carried him past them before any shots could be fired.
“Close the door!” he shouted hopelessly. Instead, these men scrambled after him.
Lieutenant Thomas Alderette had left his post at the communications booth to assist his men in subduing Corbett when he heard the sudden cries of the men in the decontamination chamber and whipped about to face the second arrival from the interior of the building. This one resembled a tall, slim ape, and its right hand flew through a short arc to collide with his temple and knock him unconscious.
Blake was released by the stunned men who had been grappling with him when Cummings arrived, and his terror carried him through the last door to explode from the hot prison into the cool freedom of the night. It was a crowded night, packed with floodlights, police cars, ambulances, and countless anxious observers. When he raced among them, they moved away in unison, like a single organism, quickly retreating from the danger of infection and unaware of the real peril following him. When Gerald Cummings appeared in the glare of the lights, their synchronized reactions continued with a collective cry of disbelief.
“Somebody help me!” Corbett shouted, still running. But no one moved, because no one could understand what was developing before their eyes.
Cummings was inundated with powerful stimuli from the entire range of his senses. The crisp, tingling joy of the night burst inside heart, the dozens upon dozens of fresh victims excited the starving masters of his body to heights of nearly irresistible hunger, and the agony of brilliant light knifed into his eyes in every direction that he turned. But he fought off these automatic responses triggered by the surroundings; he existed now for but a single reason, and that was to destroy Blake Corbett.
The writer ran toward a group of uniformed policemen, but they moved away with drawn guns. He yelled for their help, but the sight of Cummings seemed to work some disabling magic on them. Blake was forced to search for something to give him the edge that the revolver had provided while the shells lasted.
There were cars everywhere, so he sprinted among them, hoping to cut the monster’s speed of pursuit in the tightly parked vehicles. Cummings had the agility of an unnaturally powerful animal, however, and he leaped to the hood of the first car he reached as lightly as a gymnast. While Blake stumbled frantically on the ground, banging against the fenders, Cummings hopped quickly toward him from hood to roof to trunk.
Corbett tripped and did a hard nosedive into the pavement, but the endless energy of panic fed life into his legs and lifted him back into the race just before the creature was able to spring on him. Finally, when he seemed to be trapped among the very automobiles which he had run to for protection, he saw the car.
It was a cop car, with its driver’s door open, lightbar flashing, and motor idling, just the way many cop cars were left when the officers were on assignment. Cummings saw it as soon as Corbett, and his concentration on this single subject somehow gave him the ability to understand the danger of escape that it presented. The end of the chase became a desperate sprint for the same goal, with both men instinctively saving their strength, which had been wasted in cries and roars, for running, and nothing else.
Blake’s breath was flowing into his lungs like burning oil. When he was only three yards away from the car, he jumped. The open door engulfed him, but the steering wheel caught his left hip a numbing blow and he slid so far on the seat that he banged his head on the opposite door. But those things didn’t matter, because he was inside and only the open door remained a threat to his safety.
With a blundering grace, Corbett sat up and got the door shut, but he paid for the action when Cummings arrived at the car, clutched his left arm through the open window, and jerked downward until Blake felt that it was being torn away from his body, the way Darrow’s forearm had been ripped from him. Something sharp, claws or teeth, dug into his flesh, and he screamed out with all the agony in his soul. He sucked in air and screamed again and again.
The police finally came to his aid by aiming a number of shots at the monster, but two struck the car, one zinged off the paving, and a fourth hit Cummings only a glancing blow on the shoulder, not enough to knock him away from his savaging of Corbett’s arm.
Desperate and wild, Corbett grasped the gearshift of the running vehicle and pulled it into reverse while stamping on the gas pedal. Cummings was thrown beneath the front wheel, and the car reared momentarily as it rolled over his hips. Blake dragged his tortured arm into the auto and found it boiling with blood from a score of gashes. He didn’t have the time even to hug the arm to him, because the werewolf, freed from beneath the car’s wheel and recovering from the crushing as swiftly as ever, sprang up in front of it and charged him again.
Now the writer knew he could fight back. Using only his right hand, Corbett shifted the car into drive and gunned it directly ahead. The grill smashed into the oncoming monster almost squarely in the center and kicked him fifteen feet across the lot to slam into the sixteen-inch-high concrete buttress which protected the lot from the rain washdown from the hillside beyond it.
There, that would kill him, that had to kill him. Not even his incredible body could withstand such punishment.
Corbett’s grip on his sanity was already weakened by the sights he had witnessed during that night, and it came close to breaking when he saw Cummings slowly roll away from the wall and sit up. “Goddamn it, you can’t do that!” he shouted. “That has to kill you!”
Cummings began to climb to his feet.
Corbett left burning rubber on the paving when he shot the car forward again and knocked the werewolf onto his back, and he left another set of marks when he skidded to a stop after running over the figure a second time. Working quickly in spite of the uselessness of his left arm, he reversed the auto and stopped only after having driven the large vehicle onto and over Cummings a total of five times. He braked with the right front wheel firmly atop the motionless body.
He wasn’t given the chance to raise any hopes that could fall crushingly back to earth this time, because even before the thought could form in his reeling mind, the front of the car began to tilt upward in the direction of the black, passionless sky.
Cummings was lifting the automobile off of his !
Words wouldn’t come to Corbett’s lips. He grunted incoherently and shifted again. He backed away and out of the creature’s hands; he stopped a few yards back to watch in mute disbelief while Cummings drew strength from an impossible well of life to push himself up once more. It was clear now that if the beast escaped the compound countless deaths—including his own—would soon follow, so Blake forced himself to use his only remaining weapon until there was nothing more that he could do to combat this godforsaken abomination. He pushed the powerful car forward.
The front bumper hit Cummings before he could stand and hurled him like a bag of wet sand against the short wall so that his upper back was pinned against it while his neck and snarling head were exposed above it. That image burned into Corbett’s mind with the brightness of a magnesium flash as he connected it with Walter Taylor’s futile attempt to twist the beast’s skull from his shoulders. Cummings himself had said—so long ago when he truly had been human—that he didn’t know if his symbiotic second life would allow him to die so long as the “directing portion” of his body (his brain) and its “engine” (his heart) were in effective contact. There was the answer and the end to the awful tragedy that evolved from one man’s pursuit of a legend.
Blake kept the car in drive, and, as Cummings wailed in pain and a fury too intense for mortal comprehension, the beast’s head was driven back by the advancing bumper across the top of the concrete rampart. The front of the car was just high enough to clear the wall.
In the chaos of emotions, Corbett kept the wheels moving forward until the tires hit the wall and he was thrown ahead into the windshield. The collision was hard enough to stun him, and his totally exhausted body slumped into the front seat, no longer involved or caring.
He was still lying nearly unconscious when the police officers reached the scene, and before he was pulled out of the vehicle by one, the incredulous cries from those gathered about the front bumper aroused him just enough to consider the unacceptable possibility that he had failed one final—and fatal—time to rid the world of that unspeakable evil. They shouted, cursed, and pointed to some object of amazement hidden from him by the body of the car.
As Blake was roughly jerked into the sharp night air (which served to focus his mind even more), he felt that he would be forced to look at the thing drawing their shouts or lapse into an endless catatonic retreat from all that he had so recently suffered. Stiffly pulling himself to the front of the car, Corbett stared at the roundish object trapped in the beams of the headlights.
Just beyond the wall lay the head of Gerald Cummings, torn from the body that was trembling beneath the car and still covered in thick brown fur. But the worst aspect of the ghastly sight was the undeniable fact that it yet lived. The werewolf’s wild eyes were open and darting about as if searching for one more escape; his lips were pulled back from the gleaming fangs to form soundless roars of challenge. The eyes turned upward and fixed on the writer as the eyes of the decapitated Languille must have accused his executioner.
“He can’t die!” Corbett cried, falling forward onto the car’s hood and pounding it with his right fist. “What is he? Oh God, he can’t be killed!”
“Paramedic!” shouted a policeman who was trying to lift the almost hysterical man from the car. “We need help over here!”
Numerous hands gripped Blake’s shoulders and arms and pulled him away from the hood, but before they could direct him toward a waiting ambulance, new cries from the transfixed observers at the front of the car forced him to turn his face to that scene again. This time the effect was quite different, and it was long-missing relief rather than terror which flooded through the man; the twitching of the obscene head was lessening, the eyes and lips slowly surrendering to the inevitable victory of death. Even the disease could not sustain his existence when the two most important organs of the body were torn from contact with one another.
“Don’t touch that body!” ordered a late-arriving federal employee. “It’s not to be disturbed until a decontamination team gets here! Everybody back!”
Cummings didn’t magically shift back into Henry Hull or Lon Chaney or Oliver Reed; he remained a teratological nightmare in brown and rapidly-darkening red. By the time a stretcher arrived from one of the many ambulances and Blake Corbett was gently but firmly placed on it, he knew that Gerald Cummings had at last settled into the peace and liberation which had been denied him since the night that a half-mad Indian witch doctor placed a knife to his throat and compelled him to drink of a mixture created by Satan himself.
There was a limit.
Corbett lay in the back of the bus-like ambulance and tried to permanently sear the last images into his brain for use in the forthcoming book which would, in some small fashion, repay him for what he had gone through in the last four and a half hours.
“Presumably,” he said aloud, “fingerprinting will be used to positively identify the corpse.” He realized that he must sound like a raving maniac to the ambulance attendants, though not to his fellow victims, a number of whom were moaning in pain all about him in the vehicle. He had already received an injection of something which had largely deadened his own pain, though it had failed to knock his wildly-excited mind into unconsciousness. “They have to believe what we tell them—good lord, no one could deny the proof that’s scattered throughout the damned building—but Cummings will be the prime evidence, and when it’s decisively proven that thing is what he became, the argument will be ended before it starts. Then the world will know.”
The ambulance was speeding through the mountains with lights and siren at full blast, on its way to a government run hospital more than fifty miles away.
“This is a paradox for me,” he continued, as a shocked young man looked down at him. “It’s the greatest event of which I have ever been a part, maybe the greatest in human history. But it’s also the worst when I think of the dozens of lives that were lost. It’s almost equal to some terrible natural disaster.”
The man, clothed in a protective suit like all the attendants, nodded and moved on down the aisle.
Blake felt sleep trying to ambush him, so he drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and allowed the flowing observations and ideas to pour through his mind before he lost them to slumber:
A classic scene that has to be used in the book is the veteran, armed police officer standing before the open door of the Institute building with his partners, staring into the unsealed hell and repeating in quiet but unshakable sincerity, “I won’t go in there. You can’t make me go in there.”
Poor Ferguson: he filmed the entire saga from the moment of transformation through the chaos until the scene in the auditorium, when his exhaustion finally betrayed him. He didn’t see the creature’s death, and for that he’ll probably give up photography and become a monk.
God, I hope Meg and Doug and Nick are all right. Did I take too long to save them? Don’t let them die because of my delayed reactions.
The questions that are raised by this night are almost too many and too incredible to even consider. How much of the ancient, discredited mythology can now be safely dismissed as mere legend? Do we have to reexamine everything that has been handed down to us as folktales? Could Cummings’ “affliction” or any of the other wondrous conditions of the gods and monsters be used to actually help mankind? Can we ever safely realize invulnerability, perfect resistance to disease? Immortality?
If there are werewolves, are there also vampires, zombies, ghosts, or any of those other fantastic creatures of our nightmares?
Does the bite of the werewolf transmit his disease to the victim? If so, there are so many survivors of tonight’s tragedy who will have to be watched very closely on January 13th, the next night of the full moon.
A thought penetrated Corbett’s tired brain like a white-hot poker. He forced open his heavy eyes and craned his neck until he was able to see the mounds of white bandages that swathed his left hand and forearm. The air became very chilled in his lungs.
“Including me,” he said.