F. Paul Wilson - All the Rage

He moved close enough to touch the bars but didn't. The thing was a damn good dummy. He could almost swear it was breathing.

Jack whistled and said, "Hey, you in there!"

The thing didn't budge, so he rapped on one of the iron bars.

"Hey—!"

Suddenly it moved, the eyes snapping open as the head came up, deep yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the shadows.

Imagine the offspring from mating a giant hairless gorilla with a mako shark. Cobalt skin, hugely muscled, no neck worth mentioning, no external ears, narrow slits for a nose.

Spikelike talons, curved for tearing, emerged from the tips of the three huge fingers on each hand as the yellow eyes fixed on Jack. The lower half of its huge sharklike head seemed to split as the jaw opened to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. It uncoiled its legs and slithered across the metal flooring toward the front of the cage.

Along with instinctive revulsion, memories surged back: the cargo hold full of their dark shapes and glowing eyes, the unearthly chant, the disappearances, the deaths…

Jack backed up a step. Two. Behind him he heard the crowd oooh! and aaah! as it pressed forward for a better look. He took still another step back until he could feel their excited breath on his neck. These people didn't know what one of these things could do, didn't know their power, their near-indestructibility. Otherwise they'd be running the other way.

Jack felt his heart kick up its already rising tempo when he noticed how the creature's lower lip was distorted by a wide scar. He knew this particular rakosh. Scar-lip. The one that had kidnapped Vicky, the one that had escaped the ship and almost got to Vicky on the shore. The one that had damn near killed Jack.

He ran a hand across his chest. Even through the fabric of his shirt he could feel the three long ridges that ran across his chest, souvenir scars from the creature's talons.

His mouth felt like straw. Scar-lip… alive.

But how? How had it survived the blaze on the water? How had it wound up on Long Island in a traveling freak show?

"Ooh, look at it, Fred!" said a woman behind Jack.

"Just a guy in a rubber suit," replied a supremely confident male voice.

"But those claws—did you see the way they came out?"

"Simple hydraulics. Nothing to it."

You go on believing that, Fred, Jack thought as he watched the creature where it crouched on its knees, its talons encircling the iron bars, its yellow eyes burning into Jack.

You know me too, don't you.

It appeared to be trying to stand but its legs wouldn't support it. Was it chained, or possibly maimed?

The ticket seller came by then, sans boater, revealing a shaven head. Up close like this Jack was struck by his cold eyes. He was carrying a blunt elephant gaff that he rapped against the bars.

"So you're up, aye?" he said to the rakosh in a harsh voice. "Maybe you've finally learned your lesson."

Jack noticed that for the first time since it had opened its eyes, the rakosh turned its glare from him; it refocused on the newcomer.

"Here he is, ladies and gentleman," the ticket man cried, turning to the crowd. "Yessir, the one and only Sharkman! The only one of his kind! He's exclusively on display here at Ozymandias Oddities. Tell your friends; tell your enemies. Yessir, you've never seen anything like him and never will anywhere else. Guaranteed."

You've got that right, Jack thought.

The ticket man spotted Jack standing on the wrong side of the rope. "Here, you. Get back there. This thing's dangerous! See those claws? One swipe and you'd be sliced up like a tomato by a Ginsu knife! We don't want to see our customers get sliced up." His eyes said otherwise as he none too gently prodded Jack with the pole. "Back now."

Jack slipped back under the rope, never taking his eyes off Scar-lip. Now that it was up front in the light, he saw that the rakosh didn't look well. Its skin was dull and relatively pale, nothing like the shiny deep cobalt he remembered from their last meeting. It looked thin, wasted.

The rakosh turned its attention from the ticket man and stared at Jack a moment longer, then dropped its gaze. Its talons retracted, slipping back inside the fingertips, the arms dropped to its sides, the shoulders drooped, then it turned and crawled back to the rear of the cage where it slumped again in the corner and hung its head.

Drugged. That had to be the answer. They had to tranquillize the rakosh to keep it manageable. Even so, it didn't look too healthy. Maybe the iron bars were doing it—fire and iron, the only things that could hurt a rakosh.

But drugged or not, healthy or not, Scar-lip had recognized Jack, remembered him. Which meant it could remember Vicky. And if it ever got free, it might come after Vicky again, to complete the task its dead master had set for it last summer.

The ticket man had begun banging on the rakosh's cage in a fury, screaming at it to get up and face the crowd. But the creature ignored him, and the crowd began to wander off in search of more active attractions.

Jack turned and headed for the exit. He'd come here hoping to explain Monnet's interest in a freak show, but that was all but forgotten now. A cold resolve had overtaken his initial shock. He knew what had to be done.

4

Luc had promised himself not to hover over Nadia while she was working—he knew how distracting that could be. She never would be able to give her scientific inventiveness and creativity full rein if she felt someone was looking over her shoulder every minute. But curiosity and just plain need to know had overcome him.

He'd been disappointed to find her signed out, but he'd come down to the dry lab to see what she'd entered into the computer. He tapped on the keyboard to retrieve the last image she'd been working on.

He sighed as a hologram of the too-familiar inert Loki molecule materialized in the air. He'd seen too much of that. He was reaching for the escape button but stopped when something on the monitor caught his eye. He stared in disbelief at the date on the screen, indicating that the image had been created at 9:20 this morning. Not recalled— created.

Impossible. Nadia could not have generated a fresh image without a sample, and he hadn't supplied her with any inert Loki. This had to be a mistake.

Luc checked the sample chamber and felt his chest constrict when he found a residue of yellow powder. How could this be? She must have used some inert Loki he'd left here—that was the only explanation.

But why couldn't he remember leaving it?

Stress. That had to be it. It sapped focus, the ability to concentrate. And he'd certainly had more than his share of stress lately.

And yet… Luc wished he could be sure. Was it possible she'd heard about a street drug that decomposed every month and had picked up a sample? Not Nadia. She wasn't the type to take drugs or have any interest in them.

Still, he couldn't mention this to Kent or Brad. They'd panic and want to do something rash on the chance that Nadia might link GEM to Berzerk. They'd become positively bloodthirsty.

No, he'd wait. Nadia was too valuable an asset.

But she'd bear watching. Close watching.

5

"Damn!" Nadia said as she hung up the phone, none too gently.

"Something is wrong?" her mother said from the kitchen.

Nadia stood in the front room. The little apartment was redolent of the stuffed cabbage Mom was simmering in a big pot on the stove. Since she knew how Doug loved the dish, she'd suggested that Nadia invite him over for dinner.

But how could she when his line was always busy?

"It's Doug," Nadia told her. "He must be on-line with that computer of his."

She'd left the lab early and had been trying to contact Doug all day—and not just to invite him for dinner—but his line had been busy every time she called. He wasn't answering his cell phone either, which meant he probably hadn't turned it on. He often didn't on weekends.