F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

Bill gasped and instinctively pressed himself back in his seat when he saw what waited at the far end of the causeway. The light from his high-beams reflected off a huge, smooth, featureless, glistening black mass, thirty feet high and at least a hundred feet across. He looked for eyes or a mouth but could find none. Just slimy-looking blackness. A huge slug-like creature with tentacles.

And those tentacles were reaching for him, stretching closer.

Bill looked for a way out, a way to get around it, but its massive bulk blocked the end of the causeway. Even if he could run the land-rover over the tentacles, he'd end up against the immovable wall of the thing's flank.

The tip of one of the tentacles suddenly appeared at the end of the hood. It coiled around the hood ornament and pulled. Bill shifted into reverse and backed up a dozen feet. The tentacles inched after him.

I'm trapped, dammit! Trapped until morning!

He pounded the steering wheel in impotent rage and undiluted frustration. He had the shards that he'd come for and he couldn't get them back to Glaeken, couldn't even set off for his return trip to Ploiesti until dawn.

More time wasted. And another night without seeing Carol. He wanted to be with her. Every moment was precious. How many did they have left?

Using the rearview mirror, he carefully backed the vehicle through the gates of the keep, then sat behind the wheel and swallowed the pressure that built in his chest as he stared out at the night. He felt like crying.

"We're back?" Nick said, smiling. "Oh, I'm so glad we're back."

WNEW-FM

FREDDY: Jo's catching a few much-needed Zs, but I'm still here with you, and I'm afraid it's time to get back inside. It's 4:48. Ten minutes to sundown. Get your butts to safety right now.

MANHATTAN

Carol watched the light fade from the sky over the darkened city and thought of how lucky they were to have generators for the building. She thought of Bill. He'd been an integral part of each thought since he'd left yesterday morning, but especially now, with dark coming.

"Where is he?" she said to Glaeken.

He was passing behind her, carrying an empty tray from Magda's room. He paused beside her.

"Still in Rumania, I should think."

She glanced at her watch. Almost five here. That meant it was almost midnight over there. Almost Wednesday.

"But he should have been back by now."

"Could have been back, perhaps, but as for should…" He shook his head. "I don't think so." He reached out and laid a scarred hand gently on her shoulder. "Don't worry yet. Not until tomorrow. If he's not back by this time tomorrow, then worry. You'll have company then—I'll be worrying with you."

He left her and headed toward the kitchen.

Carol continued to stare at the darkening city, wondering about Hank now. The thought of him was a sharp blade sliding between her ribs. He'd deserted her. How could he do that? And yet, strangely, she felt no malice toward him. But where had he disappeared to?

THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE

By nightfall Hank was utterly exhausted, but he would allow himself no sleep.

How could he? With darkness the drain pipe had come alive. First the sibilant stirrings, echoing softly around him, ballooning to a cacophony of hard-pointed mandibles clicking a hungry counterpoint to countless chitonous feet scraping against the concrete; then the sinuous shapes, faint and vague in the light of the rising moon slanting through the grate, undulating toward him from left and right, sloshing through the water below, crawling along the ceiling of the pipe directly above him, the thinnest of them as thick as his upper arm, the largest as big around as his thigh, ignoring him as they slid by, weaving over, under, and around each other with a hideous languid grace that seemed to defy gravity, blackening the pale gray of the concrete with Gordian masses of twisting bodies, blotting out the moon as they nosed against the closed grate.

He heard a metallic scrape, a screech, then a clank as the grate fell back onto the pavement above. A sudden change came over the millipedes. Their languor evaporated, replaced by a hungry urgency as they thrashed and clawed at each other in a mad frenzy to join the night-hunt on the surface.

Moments later, the last of them had squeezed through. Once again there was moonlight and Hank was alone.

No…not alone. Something was coming. Something big. He knew without looking what it was. And a few minutes later he saw her huge pincered head rise and hover above him, swaying.

Not again! Oh, no, Lord, not again!

He'd worked since dawn on regaining control of his limbs, and for most of the day it had seemed a hopeless task. No matter how he concentrated, how he strained, his body simply would not respond. But he'd kept at it, and as the light had started to fail, he'd begun to achieve some results. He'd noticed muscle twitches in his arms and legs, in his abdominal muscles. Either the toxin was wearing off or he was overcoming it. It didn't matter which. He was regaining control—that was what mattered.

But all his efforts would be for naught if the queen dosed him again with her neurotoxin.

She made no move, simply hovered there with her head hanging over him. Did she suspect anything?

Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord!

He'd spent the entire day willing his muscles to move, now he was begging them to be still. One twitch, one tremor, one tiny tic, and she'd ram her proboscis into his gut again and put him back where he started.

She watched him for what seemed like forever, then she began to move—

No!

—her head lowering toward his belly—

NO!

—and past him. She arched over him, her hard little feet brushing across the skin of his abdomen. He could feel nothing but he saw his abdominal muscles twitch and roll with revulsion and he prayed she wouldn't notice.

She didn't. Her near-endless length finally cleared him and she wound her way up through the drain opening and into the night.

Now he was alone! And now was the time for action.

He strained his arms and legs upward as if fighting against steel manacles. To his delight he saw the muscles bulge with the effort. His fingers didn't move, didn't close into the rebellious fists he willed for them, but he watched the veins in the undersides of his forearms swell as blood coursed into the resistant muscles, watched his abdominals ripple and swell around the wound as he tried to sit up.

But nothing was happening. His veins and arteries continued to swell, stretching against the envelope of skin, his abdomen rippled like the Atlantic in a hurricane, but there was no sign of voluntary movement, only chaos.

And then his eyes snapped to the wound below his navel. Something moved there. Something wriggled within it. This morning's scream built again in his unresponsive throat as two slim black pincers, each no more than an inch long, poked into the air. A multi-eyed head, deep brown and gleaming, followed. It paused, glanced around, fixed Hank with its cold black gaze, then dragged its long, many-legged length from the wound with a crinkling slurp. Another identical creature quickly followed. Then another.

Hank's once quiescent and unresponsive body was moving now with a will of its own, writhing, bucking, convulsing, rocking up and down, back and forth in its webbed hammock as his veins and arteries bulged past the limits of their tensile strength and ruptured, freeing more wriggling, pincered, millipedic forms.

Something snapped within Hank's mind then. He could almost hear the foundations of his sanity begin to crack and give way. And that was good. He welcomed the collapse.

Yes. Welcomed it. A whole new perspective. Everyone above ground was dying. Dying and decomposing. Not Hank. No way. Hank was alive and would stay alive through these, his children.