Chapter 20 #2
All the flesh that had grown through the wires and hung beneath, filled with the dangling bodies of the botflies, was suddenly yanked back against the mesh.
Much of his back simply tore away. In other places, mostly around the edges, pale rags of skin came up, still attached, to dangle in long skeins from his ribs.
Warbles swung like grotesque beads, or were forced open and their contents disgorged onto the floor.
The sound was indescribable.
Saul did not scream, but he made a hard, awful sound and sat forward, his breath hissing through his teeth.
The room tilted and darkened around me. I dug my fingers into the wooden tabletop and told myself that I wasn’t the one who had just flayed my own back and I didn’t get to faint. It was a much harder sell this time, but after a moment it worked.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” I croaked, pulling my apron off to staunch the bleeding.
Except there wasn’t any. Or not much, anyhow. Saul’s back was a landscape of pink and yellow meat shot with red, oozing more clear fluid but little else. I could see the white islands of his spine protruding from a skinless sea.
I draped my apron over his back. I can’t swear that it wasn’t just so that I wouldn’t see it any longer.
“Thank you,” Saul rasped, plucking the nails from his legs and tossing them aside. The manacles sheared away from the wood. I looked away before he pulled his thighs loose from the rest of the mesh, but the sound followed me anyway.
Saul stood up, took a staggering step forward, and leaned against the wall. His chest heaved like a bellows. “That was much worse than I expected,” he said, to no one in particular.
I rushed to him, trying to figure out how to support him before he fell over, without touching the horrific ruin of his back. I ended up pulling his arm over my shoulders, trying to take as much of his weight as I could. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”
He nodded. Violent tremors wracked through him. How long did it take for something like this to heal? Would it be five minutes or five days or five months?
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Yes.” Leaning against me, he managed to take a heavy, leaden step toward the stairs.
(This was, incidentally, the first time I’d ever been in a naked man’s embrace. As far as I was concerned, you could keep it.) I cast around desperately for something to distract us both. “Tell me about how you met Louisa.”
“Louisa,” he muttered. “Yes.” Another dragging step. Something lightweight was knocking against my ribs, and I was pretty sure that it was a botfly warble. I deliberately didn’t look, because if I saw it, I would have to scream and Saul needed me to be calm right now.
(wolf worm wolf worm wolf worm)
“You met Louisa,” I prompted him.
“Yes. I’d come here … come here … I was looking for the children.
Rumor. I said that, didn’t I? A man told me about ‘blood thieves in the woods,’ but he was drunk.
Wasn’t sure if it was one of us or not. When I got here, people told me Halder had been there when they were killed.
” I steered him past the wooden table. Water sloshed around his bare feet.
My own feet had been cold and wet for so long that I had stopped feeling them at all.
“So you met with Halder?” I asked.
“Yes.” He put out his other hand and touched the wall, leaning against it. “Sorry. Need a minute.”
“Yes, of course.” I made certain that he was stable, slid out from under his arm, and picked the lantern up off the stairs. A botfly finished its struggle to emerge from one of the rags of skin and fell into the water with a plop!
“Met her in the house. She came into the room.” He swallowed, and a little of the strain on his face eased.
“Like she brought all the light with her. She was alive and she made you feel more alive just by being there.” He shook his head.
“Halder … stupid bastard … didn’t see it. Such a goddamn waste.”
I relocated the lantern and straightened, rubbing my aching shoulder. “Can you handle the stairs?”
“I think so.” He leaned down and broke off a few toenails. “Phelps did me that much good, at least.”
I decided not to comment on that.
Half carrying Saul up the stairs wasn’t easy. They were broad, thankfully, but I slipped at least once and would have gone to my knees if Saul hadn’t been there to pull me back.
“We’re almost there,” I told him. “You’re doing good.”
“So are you,” said Saul dryly. “Am I helping you up the stairs or are you helping me?”
“Let’s not get hung up on the details.” I pulled the door open.
Judging by the color of the sky, it was early evening, but it seemed extraordinarily bright after my day spent underground.
The sound of cicadas droning in the trees made me want to weep with relief.
I stepped outside and turned back to make certain that Saul didn’t trip over the lip on the threshold.
That’s when I heard the gun cocking behind me.
“I suggest you keep your hands where I can see them, Miss Wilson,” said Dr. Halder. His gun was smaller than the one Phelps had carried, which I had foolishly left on the table below, but his hand was also a great deal steadier. “Step away from my test subject, if you please.”
“Test subject?”
“He’s a parasite, Miss Wilson.” Halder’s lip curled. “No different than any of the others that I study. Step away, please. I don’t want to tell you again.”
Unlike Phelps, I was pretty sure that Halder wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me. I stepped away. Saul stood framed in the doorway, swaying slightly on his feet. “Halder,” he said.
“You’re looking better, Saul. Been feeding, then? Perhaps on Miss Wilson, here?”
“I haven’t touched Miss Wilson.”
“Doctor,” I said, thinking that it was just my luck that I would have to negotiate with two men with guns in the same day, and that I hadn’t learned nearly enough the first time.
“Doctor, we don’t have to do any of this.
Just let us walk away, and we won’t tell anyone. No one would believe us anyway.”
And, God willing, we’ll be out of range when you discover Phelps’s body.
“Don’t be fooled, Miss Wilson,” Halder said. “He may look human, but that’s simply mimicry at work.”
“Mimicry?” I said. Comprehension worked slowly through my brain. “Like those caterpillars that look like bird droppings?”
“Caterpillars again?” murmured Saul. I shot him a sharp look. Was he not taking this seriously? Of course, if he gets shot, he’ll heal up fine. Some of us aren’t so lucky.
“More like the fireflies that pretend to be females of a different species. Then they devour the males who respond to their flashes. Saul, don’t even think about it. You know that I’ll shoot your knees out if I must.”
Whatever Saul had been thinking, he must have stopped. I tried again. “Doctor, Phelps believed in devils, but I know you’re a man of science. Surely you can’t believe—”
“It is because I am a man of science that I believe, Miss Wilson. I have observed, I have tested, and I know that my logic is sound. This is not a human being. He—it—is a member of a species that evolved to prey upon ours. Darwin himself could not deny it.”
“It doesn’t follow that—”
“Do you know how they reproduce?” asked Halder pleasantly, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Just like wasps, as it happens. They deposit their children inside a woman, and those children devour their host. Just like the wasp, they save the vital organs for last, so that they can grow as large as possible. I suspect the females have ovipositors for just that purpose, but sadly those fools burned the single female specimen we encountered before I could dissect it.”
“I tracked their father down, if that makes you feel any better,” said Saul, never taking his eyes off the gun. “He won’t do it again. Or anything else either.”
“Which hardly changes the fact that your species requires us as hosts,” said Halder.
“You are parasites upon us, in every sense. Without us, you would die out in a single generation.” He gestured with the gun, and both Saul and I twitched.
“With the information that I have gathered, I think it likely that they can be eradicated.” He paused, eyes flicking briefly to my face. “You could help me, Miss Wilson.”
“What?”
Saul’s hand pressed briefly against my back. A message of some sort, I thought, though I wasn’t sure what. “Help you?” I asked.
“Indeed. Phelps assumed that you’d go to the authorities. I think he was wrong. You understand the importance of my work, don’t you?”
I took another half step away from Saul, moving slowly. “It’s very important, yes. Just as you said, if we know enough about screwworms, we can find a way to stop them.”
“Exactly!” The lantern light flashed off his spectacles. “And this, Miss Wilson, is far worse than screwworms. Imagine how many of them there may be, living among us, devouring us…”
“There aren’t that many,” said Saul.
Halder’s gaze swung back to him. “So you say. But I can hardly trust you, can I?”
I took another step forward and tried to compose my face.
It wasn’t easy. Dealing with Mistress Silverton had been one thing, but she had never held a gun on me.
Fortunately, Halder expected me to look horrified.
“Are you saying that there are more of them out there? Killing women to … to reproduce?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Miss Wilson. Did you see him feed on Phelps?”
So he suspected Phelps was dead. I didn’t have to fake my shudder. “I did. It was horrible.”
“That bastard deserved it,” growled Saul.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let this be what he wanted me to do. “Would you have done that to me too, if you were hungry enough?”
Saul’s laugh was an ugly thing. “I did tell you not to get too close to me, sweetheart.”
“There,” said Halder. “You see? We can only ever be prey to a thing like him.”
I licked dry lips. “Have you found a reliable way to recognize them yet?”