F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

"When were you ever hungry?"

"Hungry?" he said, his eyes focusing on her. "I didn't say anything about hungry."

"Yes, you did. You said you knew about hunger."

"Did I?" He sat on a stack of cases of Campbell's pork and beans and stared at the floor. "I didn't even hear myself."

Carol stepped to his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. The manic look had faded from his eyes. He was more like himself again. She wanted to keep him that way.

"I heard you. What did you mean? When were you ever hungry?"

He sighed. "As a kid. When I was about seven. My father was a precision machinist. He lost his job after the war when the weapons industry ground to a halt. A lot of machinists were out of work but they were picking up other jobs in other fields, doing anything to make ends meet. Not my father. He was a machinist and that was the only kind of work he would accept. Before too long we ran out of money. All I remember about those times was being hungry. Hungry all the time."

"But there were agencies, charities, welfare—"

"I didn't know about any of that. I was only seven. I found out later that my father wouldn't hear of taking a hand-out, as he called it. All I knew was that I was hungry and there was never enough food on the table for a good meal. I woke up hungry and went to bed hungry and was hungry every minute in between. I'd steal food from other kids' lunches in school. The only other thing I remember from that time besides hunger was fear. I was afraid we'd all starve to death. Finally he got a job and we could eat again." He shook his head slowly. "But, boy, that was a scary time."

Carol rubbed his shoulder and smoothed his thinning hair as she tried to picture Hank as a hungry, frightened little boy She realized how little she really knew about this man she had married.

"You never told me."

"Frankly, I'd forgotten about it. I guess I've buried those days. And why not? They were the worst times of my life. I can't remember the last time I gave them a thought."

"Maybe they weren't buried as deeply as you thought. Look around you, Hank."

He glanced about at the stacked cases of food, then stood up.

"This is different, Carol. This isn't just survival. This is an investment in our future."

"Hank—"

"You know what I ought to do? I ought to take inventory. Right. Organize a list of what we have. That way we can spend tomorrow filling in any gaps."

"Hank…why don't we have dinner?"

He looked at her. "Good idea. I'm kind of hungry, come to think of it. But use the most perishable stuff we have. We'll finish that off first. We don't want to dip into our canned goods yet."

Carol watched in dismay as Hank picked up a pad and pencil and began going about the apartment making lists of their supplies. What was happening to her safe, sane Hank? Even though her husband was only a few feet away, she felt alone. Alone with a manic stranger.

4 • Nightwings

"There they are!"

Bill Ryan focused the binoculars on the hole in the Sheep meadow. An excellent set of field glasses—they brought the people below into sharp focus, seemingly within reach. But the people weren't what interested him.

"Right on time," Glaeken said from behind his right shoulder.

Bill watched the fluttering things begin to collect under the barrier that had been stretched over the hole, watched them straining upward against the steel mesh. Arrayed against them under the banks of lights was an army of exterminators sheathed in heavy protective gear and masks, wielding hoses attached to tank trucks equipped with high-pressure pumps. At a signal from somewhere down there, all the nozzles came to life, spewing out a golden fluid.

"What are they spraying?" Glaeken said.

"Looks like some sort of insecticide."

Glaeken grunted and turned away. "No toxins are going to hurt those things. They'd do far better simply with gasoline and a match." He turned on the television. "Here it is on the television. You'll get a better angle here."

Bill stepped to his side and watched the scene below in living color. Apparently Glaeken was right. In the telephoto close-up on the screen, the insecticide was having no effect on the steadily increasing number of creatures massed under the mesh. They were getting wet and that was about it. He turned and looked at Nick, sitting on the sofa, staring at the wall.

"Think the net will hold through the night?" Bill said.

"It doesn't matter," Glaeken said with his predictable pessimism.

Bill shook his head. Perhaps being pessimistic was being realistic, but he couldn't suppress the thrill of hope that shot through him when he saw all those monstrosities from the hole trapped under the steel mesh.

"Why doesn't it matter? It shows we can contain them."

"Even as we speak, the holes in Queens, on Staten Island and out on Long Island are spewing out the very creatures they think they've defeated here."

"Then we'll cap those, too."

"Bigger things are coming," Glaeken said. "The speedy little flying things arrive first because they're the quickest. Then come the slower flying things. Then come the crawlers."

Crawlers…the very word made Bill's skin crawl.

"Then they've only bought a little time here," Bill said, his spirits palpably sagging.

"They haven't even bought that. And somewhere along the way…the leviathans will come."

Bill was about to ask for some elaboration on that when he heard a whining howl from the Park, loud enough to be audible through the locked and sealed windows. On the screen he noticed the exterminators and observers start to back away from the hole. The streams from the hoses seemed to be blowing back in their faces.

"Something's happening."

He returned to the window with the binocs. Down in the Sheep Meadow, a gale-force wind was roaring from the hole, bulging the heavy steel mesh upward as it crushed the insects against it.

"Looks like the hole is trying to blow the lid off!"

Glaeken came up beside him. "No," he said softly. "Something's coming. Something big."

Bill squinted through the binoculars as the wind howl grew louder. The exterminators had turned off their hoses but were still backing away. As he watched, a number of the steel girders anchoring the mesh at the south side were torn from the ground. That end of the mesh began to flap free, releasing a hoard of the killer insects. Panic took charge in the Sheep Meadow.

"Big?" Bill said. "How—?"

And then it happened. Something burst from the hole. Something beyond big. Something gargantuan, filling the two-hundred-foot diameter of the hole, something dark as the deepest cavern at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at midnight. It rammed through the steel mesh like a night train through a spider's web and kept hurtling upward, a monstrous, rough-hewn piling thrusting its seemingly endless length into the darkening sky.

Bill tore the glasses from his eyes and watched as it came free of the hole and continued upward. Awed, he pressed his face against the window pane and followed its course, wondering how far it could go before it lost its momentum and fell back to earth, his mind reeling at the thought of the resultant damage from something the size of a small skyscraper crashing down on the city.

Its rate of rise slowed, then stopped. For an instant it paused, a cyclopean column of black hanging vertically in the air. Then it began to tilt and fall to earth. But as it fell it changed. Huge wings unfolded, unfurling like flags, spread, stretched across the sky, obscuring the emerging stars, blotting out most of the sky. It leveled itself and began to glide. It swooped over the Park, then banked to the east and was gone.

Thoroughly shaken, Bill turned to Glaeken.

"The leviathan you mentioned?"

Glaeken nodded. "One of them. There'll be more."