Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"I don't want to go," he protested.

"What's the use of staying here, besides costing Abernethy a heap of money?"

"That's a start."

"Don't be petty, Grillo."

"I'm sick. I'm allowed to be petty. Besides, this is where the story is."

"You can write it better at home than lying here in a pool of sweat feeling sorry for yourself."

"Maybe you're right."

"Oh...is the great man conceding something?"

"I'll go back for twenty-four hours. Get my shit together."

"You know you look about thirteen," Tesla said, mellowing her tone. "I never saw you like this before. It's kind of sexy. I like you vulnerable."

"Now she tells me."

"Old news, old news. There was a time I'd have given my right arm for you—"

"Now?"

"The most I'll do is take you home."

The Grove could have been a set for a post-holocaust movie, Tesla thought as she drove Grillo out towards the freeway: the streets were deserted in every direction. Despite all that Grillo had told her about what he'd seen or suspected was going on here, she was leaving without getting so much as a glimpse.

Hold that thought. Forty yards ahead of the car a young man stumbled around the corner and raced across the road. At the opposite sidewalk his legs gave out beneath him. He fell, and seemed to have some difficulty getting up again. The distance was too great and the light too dim for her to grasp much of his condition but he was evidently hurt. There was something misshapen about his body; hunched or swollen. She drove on towards him. At her side, Grillo, whom she'd instructed to doze until they reached L.A., opened his eyes.

"Are we there already?"

"That guy—" she said, nodding in the hunchback's direction. "Look at him. He looks even sicker than you do."

From the corner of her eye she saw Grillo sit bolt upright, and peer through the windshield.

"There's something on his back," he muttered.

"I can't see."

She brought the car to a halt a little way from where the youth was still struggling to get to his feet; and still failing.

Grillo was right, she saw. He was indeed wearing something. "It's a backpack," she said.

"No way, Tesla," Grillo said. He reached for the door handle. "It's alive. Whatever it is, it's alive."

"Stay here," she told him.

"Are you kidding?"

As he pushed the door open—that effort alone enough to set his head spinning—he caught sight of Tesla rummaging in the glove compartment.

"What've you lost?"

"When Yvonne was killed—" she said, grunting as she dug through the detritus "—I swore I'd never leave home unarmed again."

"What are you saying?"

She pulled a gun out of hiding. "And I never have."

"Do you know how to use that?"

"Wish I didn't," she said, and got out of the car. Grillo went to follow. As he did so the car began to roll backwards down the mild incline of the street. He pitched himself across the seat to the handbrake, an action violent enough to spin his head around. When he started to haul himself up again it was almost like tripping: total disorientation.

A few yards from where Grillo was clutching the car door, waiting for his high to pass, Tesla was almost at the boy's side. He was still attempting to get to his feet. She told him to hold on, help was coming, but all she got in reply was a panic-stricken look. He had reason. Grillo had been right. What she'd taken to be a backpack was indeed alive. It was an animal of some kind (or of many kinds). It glistered as it battened upon him.

"What the fuck is that?" she said.

This time he did reply; a warning wrapped in moans.

"Get...away..." she heard him say, "...they're...coming after me..."

She glanced back at Grillo, who was still clinging to the car door, his teeth chattering. No help to be had there, and the boy's situation seemed to be worsening. With every twitch of the parasite's limbs—there were so many limbs; and joints; and eyes—his face knotted up.

"...Get away..." he growled at her, "...please...in God's name...they're coming."

He'd turned giddily to squint behind him. She followed the line of his agonized gaze, down the street from which he'd pelted. There she saw his pursuers. Seeing, she wished she'd taken his advice before she'd locked eyes with him, and all hope of playing the Pharisee was denied her. His plight was hers now. She couldn't turn her back on him. Her eyes—tutored in the real—tried to reject the lesson they saw coming down the street, but they couldn't. No use trying to deny the horror. It was there in all its absurdity: a pale, muttering tide creeping towards them.

"Grillo!" she yelled. "Get in the car!" The pale army heard her, and picked up its speed. "The car, Grillo, get in the fucking car!" She saw him fumble for the door, barely in control of his responses. Some of the smaller beasts at the head of the tide were already scuttling towards the vehicle at speed, leaving their larger brethren to come after the boy. There were enough, more than enough, to take all three of them apart joint by joint, and the car too. Despite their multiplicity (no two alike, it seemed) there was the same blank-eyed, relentless intention in every one. They were destroyers.

She leaned down and took hold of the boy's arm, avoiding the racheting limbs of the parasite as best she could. Its hold on him was too intimate to be undone, she saw. Any attempt to separate them would only invite reprisals. "Get up," she told him. "We can make it."

"You go," he murmured. He was utterly wasted.

"No," she said. "We both go. No heroics. We both go." She glanced back at the car. Grillo was in the act of slamming the door as the army's foot-runners came at the car, hopping up on to the roof and hood. One, the size of a baboon, began to throw its body against the windshield repeatedly.

The others tore at the door handle and worked their barbs between the windows and their frames.

"It's me they want," the boy said.

"If we go, they follow?" Tesla said.

He nodded. Hauling him to his feet, and turning his right arm (the hand badly injured, she saw) over her shoulder, she fired one shot into the approaching mass—which hit one of the larger beasts but didn't slow it a beat—then turned her back on it and began to haul them both away.

He had directions to give.

"Down the Hill," he said.

"Why?"

"The Mall..."

Again: "Why?"

"My father...is there."

She didn't argue. She just hoped father, whoever he was, had some help to offer, because if they succeeded in outrunning the army they were going to be in no fit state to defend themselves at the end of the race.

As she turned the next corner, the boy offering muttered instructions, she heard the car's windshield shatter.

A short distance from the drama just played out, the Jaff and Tommy-Ray, with Jo-Beth in tow, watched Grillo fumbling for the ignition, succeeding—after some effort—in getting the car started, and driving off, throwing from the hood the terata that had shattered the windshield.

"Bastard," said Tommy-Ray.

"It doesn't matter," the Jaff said. "There's plenty more where he came from. You wait 'til the party tomorrow. Such pickings."

The creature was not quite dead; it let out a thin whine of complaint.

"What do we do with it?" Tommy-Ray wondered.

"Leave it there."

"Some roadkill," came the boy's reply. "People are going to notice."

"It won't survive the night," the Jaff replied. '"By the time the scavengers have got to it nobody'll know what the hell it was."

"What the fuck's going to eat that?" Tommy-Ray asked.

"Anything hungry enough," came the Jaff's reply. "And there's always something hungry enough. Isn't that right, Jo-Beth?" The girl said nothing. She'd given up weeping and talking. All she did was watch her brother with pitiful confusion on her face.