37

In the penal colony, the prisoners reeled and collapsed. Henry, too, found himself clutching his head, waiting for whatever was happening to pass, and when he lifted his head again it was to see most of the prisoners confused and wandering, much in the same state as he.

But then a few of them became more focused. One man grabbed another and tugged him over to the hole Briden had dug and then both stared down into it. Henry turned on the audio feed, trying to hear what they were saying, but by now they weren’t saying anything, they were just staring into the hole. The corruption had spread, Henry realized, growing quickly and rapidly with the last burst, and had squirmed its way down the hole. Perhaps that was what they were looking at? He did hear other sounds, though: a few of the other men groaning, a few scraps of speech, and then also something else, something that he didn’t know quite how to interpret. A strange sound like the breaking and snapping of sticks. Wood? he thought. There was no wood out there, maybe no wood anywhere in the compound. But it definitely sounded like that. What could it be?

He turned up the volume a little, but no longer heard the snapping sounds. Instead there was a sort of damp, squelchy noise.

And then one of the men closest to the hole flinched and stepped back. He opened his mouth and began to scream.

*   *   *

It was a strong one, and different than what Callie had felt before. When she came to, it was to find that she had unconsciously been beating her head against the cell wall. Her forehead was sore and bloody. I could have really hurt myself, she thought. She stumbled back to the machine and observed how it had graphed the pulse, saw how it had shot off the range of the chart. Her cell, too, suddenly had a lot of those tendrils winding through it. They hadn’t been there before.

Something new is happening, she thought.

She stood and peered out the slot to see if she could see anything, but the hallway seemed empty. There, too, were more patches of corruption and tendrils, one of them big and long enough to almost seem like a cable.

She called for the guard but he didn’t come. She called again, louder, this time beating her hand on the metal door, and this time he came, walking slowly and ponderously, with a strange dragging sound. She heard him long before she saw him, and when she saw him, he was clutching his head, a strange frenzied look disrupting his features in such a way that it seemed like his face was made of parts of the faces of four very different men. He stared through the slot, one eye clenched tightly shut, the other eye darting nervously about in its orbit.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead he brought his face down hard against the door, splitting his forehead on the lip of the slot. Startled, Dr. Dexter stepped back. He raised his head and she saw, through the narrow opening of the slot, blood cascading down his forehead. He took a strange swooping step and struck his head again, even harder this time, and she was spattered with his blood, blood oozing down the inside of the slot as well. And then he fell out of sight.

She heard a scraping sound that she couldn’t place, then the sound of him pulling his way back up the door. Suddenly Callie was concerned he might try to unlock it and come in after her. She backed deeper into the cell, her hands feeling for the wall behind her. The guard’s face appeared, the flesh over his eye torn away to reveal a stretch of pinkish bone. He swayed, and then tilted his head back.

“No!” shouted Callie.

But it was already too late. He brought his head down hard and fast and this time she could see the lip of the slot break through his head with a crunch and when he fell away he left, along with the blood, shards of brain and bone. He fell as heavy as a sack and then did not move again. Callie still stayed pressed back against the wall, holding her breath, waiting for him to move again, wondering fleetingly what had been wrong with the man, what had driven him to do what he had.

Then her glance fell to the now blood-spattered monitor, the graph with the lines stretching off it and lost beyond the edge of the screen, and then she thought she knew.

*   *   *

In the interrogation room, they had left the body covered by a sheet and then had forgotten about it. It had started to smell and the body had grown sodden and had begun to change, parts of it clinging to the sheet and soaking it through with a grayish ichor. Here there were no flies or insects and little bacteria beyond that in the body itself, so the decay was strange and unusual; the one guard who had looked into the room, searching for somewhere to take a quick nap while he was on duty, had quickly gone back out again.

Underneath the sheet something was happening. A tendril of corruption had curled up the leg of the table and felt its way to the head. There was a snapping sound and the body seemed to sit up, the sheet still clinging to it. A leg snapped and slid out at a strange angle. And then the body contorted and fell off the table.

It lay there half-wrapped in its sheet, still changing. The head twisted and opened up. The jaw dropped downward and pushed deep into the body. The legs broke and the skin of the chest stretched and fused between them in a kind of sheet. Soon what had once looked human looked more like a flesh-colored bat.

And then the creature, groaning, no longer human, began to crawl. A moment later, it tested its wings.

*   *   *

The screaming brought some of the other prisoners over to the hole. Henry watched them peer in, his hand near the button to call the guards. One of the men had his friends hold his arms and then he leaned out over the hole and looked down from a different vantage.

And then suddenly something strange happened. An odd batlike creature flashed up out of the hole and wrapped itself around the man’s head. The men holding him let go in surprise and he fell into the hole, and everyone who had been close began running back and away, scattering all through the circle and moving toward the cells. Some were even, he could see on another of the screens, up against the large door leading out to the ring in which Henry and the guards were, screaming, pounding against the door, begging to get out.

What the hell is going on? wondered Henry. He summoned the guards and kept watching, zooming in close on the hole. What had it been? How had it gotten in? He kept the camera focused on the hole.

When the guards arrived at their station, he sounded the alarm for the prisoners to return to their cells. He let his eyes flick around to the other monitors. Some were already there; the others, though, made no move to do so. The number of prisoners pounding on the door leading out had increased. They weren’t moving.

His earpiece crackled. “All assembled, sir,” the leader of the guards said. “Open the door.”

“Just a moment,” said Henry, his attention back on the hole. He stared at it perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps slightly longer.

“This isn’t going to be another of those false alarms, is it?” the leader of the guards asked.

“No,” said Henry, half distracted. “I just have to figure out a way to get them away from the door.”

“How many of them are there?” asked the leader. “We can take control of the situation, I bet.”

“Kill them, you mean?” asked Henry.

“We don’t have to kill all of them,” said the guard. “We can stun some of them.”

Henry opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped. Something was happening on the monitor. Something was stirring in the hole.