Fear Me

“Jesus,” Aquintez said. “It wasn’t like this before…it wasn’t this bad. Something…I guess something must have happened…”

Outside the entrance to the infirmary, they found the body of a con.

His head had been nearly twisted from his shoulders, both arms snapped off at the elbows, and as a humorous gesture from a bored child, his tongue and everything that held it in place had been yanked out of a chasm below his chin where it hung like a pink and bleeding necktie. They stepped over him and, oh Christ, it was even worse inside. The infirmary was a long, narrow room like a hospital ward in an old movie and this one predated even the silents by nearly a century. You could see the looted drug cabinets and supply closets.

But that had happened before Damon went on his tear.

Now the walls, the beds, the ceiling were red with splotches and streaks of blood. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere. It was a study in ghoulish creativity and the mind of a jaded, degenerate child knew no earthly bounds. Men had been dismembered. Men had been beheaded. Men had been skinned and plucked and disemboweled. Men had their bones pulled right through their skins and stacked in red, tidy heaps next to their boneless shells. Men were strung from light fixtures by ropes of their own viscera and their skins were tacked up over the windows with shards ofwit… bone driven into the plaster. A slaughterhouse and butcher shop and dissection room laid bare and ugly and stinking.

But there was one bed untouched.

One form sleeping beneath a crisp white sheet that was wet with slime, but not so much as a drop of blood had stained it or the man who slept there.

Palmquist.

Romero got close to him, close enough to touch. He found a flashlight on the floor and put it on him. The kid did not stir. His head was bandaged and the bandages were dyed red. Using Aquintez’s penlight, Romero examined the kid’s eyes. One of them was dilated like a black marble and there was no response from the light. The other pupil was the size of a pinhole.

“He’s got a concussion and probably brain damage,” Romero said in a weak voice, the stink of blood and meat and voided bowels choking him. “He could be in a coma for a day or two weeks and every night-”

That’s when Aquintez screamed.

Romero felt something swing by him like a bell rope and then Aquintez was screaming. A pink tentacle covered with tumorous suckers pulled him right off his feet and into the air.

Romero put the light up there.

He’d brushed aside spiderwebs when he first got to the bed, but now he saw they weren’t spiderwebs but wire-thin gossamer filaments of something connecting the kid and what was above him, spread over the ceiling.

Damon.

Romero let out a tiny, involuntary cry.

Aquintez was dangling up there, looped by Damon.

Palmquist’s nocturnal brother was bigger than three bed sheets strung together. Just a roiling gray mass of tissue set with a coiling network of white, fibrous growths. Dozens of opaque tubes and feelers and bloated fleshy tentacles were writhing and snaking from that miasmic horror, roiling like flatworms and maggots and corkscrewing like the tails of hogs, searching along the ceiling and tapping the individual tiles like fingers.

It was obscene. It was positively obscene.

Romero just looked up at it, empty and numb and stiff, playing the light along that mass that reached out in every direction and seemed to be growing by the moment. Those tentacl Tht les were made of a gelid flesh that was transparent like the skin of deep-sea shrimp. You could see fluids flowing through veins and collecting in capillaries. Some of those tentacles ended in hooks and others in black depressions like mouths that dripped an acrid juice.

Romero wasn’t sure where he found the strength.

Outside, the war went on and on, but it was very distant like something heard playing from a neighbor’s TV on a summer night. Quite calmly and lucidly, Romero said, “Damon, put the man down. You know my voice, you know you can trust me…”

The thing up there surged and squirmed, its flesh broke open with blisters that weren’t blisters but flat yellow eyes set with red-slit pupils. At least two dozen of them and more opening all the time.

“Damon,” Romero said, droplets of that juice hitting him now and burning holes in his skin. He flinched, but did not waver. “Please, put the man down.”

And of all the crazy, unbelievable things, the creature did.

It set Aquintez back on his feet and Aquintez’s mouth was locked in a crooked, silent scream and his eyes were black as tidal pools. You could see where those hideous suckers had touched him, the red welts they had left, the bruising beneath the skin as blood vessels were burst from that awful suction.

Romero looked at the thing.

It looked back at him.