Dan Simmons - Summer of Night

Cordie was pulling herself backward by her elbows and heels on dark pavement, kicking at the thrashing thing that still twisted to find her, its mouth expanding to twice the size of the body.

Kevin slammed the truck in gear and roared down the gravel drive, rolling right over the body of the thing, feeling the vibration coming up through the truck frame as if he had hit a massive telephone cable or something. Then he was out the door and pulling Cordie in while the lamprey began to unwind back into its hole like a hose on a tension reel, spraying fluid as it backed off the pavement.

Kevin stood in the open doorway, lighter in his hand, watching the thing slide past four feet away but knowing that the lighter flame would never last long enough in the wind to ignite the lamprey.

Cordie tore a three-foot swatch of her dress off and handed it to Kevin.

He crouched, wadding the old fabric into a ball, using the truck door as a windbreak. The dress had been half-soaked in gasoline itself and flared on the second strike of the lighter.

Stepping quickly away from the tanker, Kevin threw the mass of flaming material at the lamprey just as the maw of the thing slid off the asphalt.

It somehow sensed the wadded dress coming at it and made the mistake of catching it in its multi-flapped jaws. The front of the lamprey ignited with a geyser of flame, the gasoline catching in the folds of its ridges, blue flame running back along its segmented body seemingly at the speed of light.

Gasoline spilled on the street ignited with a whoosh, creating a long fuse that curled around toward the back of the tanker truck.

Cordie hadn't waited for it to catch up. She had scooted over behind the steering wheel as soon as Kevin was out the door and now she floored it, driving north along Depot and getting the rear of the truck out of the circle of spilled gasoline a second before it ignited.

Kevin shouted and ran alongside, pulling himself up onto the passenger side, finding the door bashed in and stuck there, and pulling himself in through the window, headfirst, legs flailing.

"Turn left," he gasped.

Cordie was just barely tall enough to reach the pedals and steer at the same time; as it was, she was half-standing behind the wheel, stretching her toe to the accelerator, elbows bobbing up and down as she managed the large steering wheel. The truck was roaring and surging in first gear.

The walkie-talkie squawked on the seat between them. The voice was Mike O'Rourke's.

"Mike," gasped Kevin, lifting the thing, "what are you doing with the ..."

"Kev!" came the urgent voice of Mike O'Rourke. The sounds of screams and shots could be heard above the static crackling from the speaker. "Blow it! Now! Blow the goddamned place!"

"You have to get out!" Kevin shouted into the walkie-talkie as Cordie manhauled the wheel left, sending them screeching down the long sidewalk toward the north door of Old Central. They bounced over stones and tilted sidewalk slabs. Fifty feet out, the second lamprey broke the surface and rushed to intercept them.

"Blow it, Kev!" screamed Mike over the walkie-talkie. His voice was wilder than Kevin had ever heard it. "Blow it now!"

The radio went dead, as if the other walkie-talkie had been destroyed.

Cordie looked at him, glanced left at the thing in the ground arching ahead of them, nodded once, showed gray teeth in a grin, and floored the accelerator.

Dr. Roon dragged Dale and Harlen up stairs that looked like a waterfall of melted wax, beneath the stained-glass window, which seemed to have grown a tapestry of fungus, under huge webs apparently made of sinew, past stalagmites of bone, below stalactites of what appeared to be fingernail material, up past the library mezzanine, onto the second-floor landing and into their regular classroom. The door was half its regular size and almost concealed by thin filaments of black hair that spouted from nodes in the walls. Roon shoved the boys through just before they would have blacked out from the terrible pressure of his grip.

The rows of old-fashioned desks were in the same place. The teacher's desk was where Mrs. Doubbet had left it. The portrait of George Washington was just as Dale remembered it.

Nothing else was the same.

A thick Carpet of fungus had grown up from the bare-board floor and covered the desks in undulating folds of blue-green. There were bumps rising from most of the desks -soft curves like the heads of children hiding under blankets, the sharp angles of shoulders, the gleam of bare bones where fingers emerged from the carpet of algae and mold. Dale choked as the foul air filled his lungs; he tried not to breathe, but finally he had to gasp in the miasma of decay or pass out.

He could barely see across the room for the hanging webs of tissue that covered the windows, filled most of the space between the desks and the twelve-foot-high ceiling, and clung to the walls in great, bulbous clusters. It looked like living muscle tissue; Dale could see veins and arteries through the moist, translucent surface. Occasionally something soft and fibrous shifted in the broader strips of tendon-web and eyes seemed to blink at the visitors.

Mrs. Doubbet and Mrs. Duggan sat behind the teachers' desk in front of the room. Both were erect, alert, and dead. Mrs. Duggan showed the effects of months in the grave. Something small and furtive moved in the socket of her left eye. Mrs. Doubbet looked as if she had entered the room alive quite recently, but her eyes were now filmed over with the thin cataracts of death, and the ligamentlike material grew from her body at a dozen places, connecting her to the chair and desk and walls and web. Her fingers twitched as Dale and Harlen stumbled in.

The class was assembled.

Harlen made a sound in his throat and turned as if to throw himself out the door.

Karl Van Syke came through the strands of hairlike filament where the door had been. For a second Dale thought that the Negro from Mrs. Moon's story had returned: Van Syke was totally black except for the pure white marbles of his eyes, but the blackness was from skin and flesh charred to a scaly caricature of a man. His chin and lower jaw were gone, most of the muscle of the arms and legs burned away, the fingers transformed to curled claws of bone that looked like some semiabstract sculpture of a man made from carbon. Pale liquids oozed from the interior of the thing. It turned its head toward the two boys and seemed to sniff the air like a hunting dog on a scent.

Dale grabbed Harlen and backed away until they were touching the first row of desks. Something shifted in the mound of fungus at their backs.

Tubby Cooke rose from a desk at the back of the room and stood standing there. The bloated fingers on his remaining hand were twitching like white worms.

Dr. Roon came through the door. "Take your seats, children."

Staring, consciousness skidding like a car on unseen ice, Dale moved to his regular seat and lowered himself into it. Harlen took his desk near the front . . . where the teachers could watch him.

"You see," whispered Dr. Roon, "the Master rewards those who do His bidding." He opened a pale hand toward the figure of Karl Van Syke. The thing appeared still to be sniffing, feeling the air with bent fingers. "There is no death for those who serve the Master," said Dr. Roon, moving to stand next to the teachers' desk.

The Soldier and what once might have been Mink Harper came into the room, carrying the chair in which Lawrence sat still enmeshed in fleshy strands. His head was back and his eyelids were fluttering.

Dale started forward but stopped when the Van Syke thing circled in his direction, sniffing, feeling the air like a blind man. The white form that had been Tubby moved through the shadows behind Dale.

"Now, we're all ready to commence," said Dr. Roon, glancing at a gold watch he pulled from his vest. He looked up at Dale and Harlen and smiled one last time. "I suppose I could explain . . . tell you all about the wonderful Age which now begins . . . talk to you about what small inconvenience your little escapades have caused us ... go into great detail of how you shall serve the Master in your new forms. . . ."He clicked the watch shut and set it back in his vest. "But why bother? The game is over and it is time for your part in it to end. Good-bye."