Vicky scurried over to Kurt, whispering, “Would you please tell me what’s going on. I turned on the walkie-talkie a few minutes after you went in. What was all that crap he was talking about?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kurt said, his attention divided between her and the two men. “He’s crazy, that’s all. Willard’s crazy. He murdered everyone.”

  “But I heard him say he only killed his wife and Glen.”

  “He killed them all,” Kurt reiterated. “You heard his explanation; what more evidence of insanity do you need? Crazy people believe crazy things. The way I see it, Willard became obsessed with Muslem folklore when he was overseas. And now, on top of his obsession, he’s had some kind of psychotic episode, like a fragmented personality or something. He may not remember killing all those people, but he did just the same. He’s simply blaming it all on a delusion that’s been growing in his head for years—mythological monsters from the Middle East. He’ll spend the rest of his life in a nut shack.”

  Kurt had never seen so much money in his life. It formed a virtual pile on the desk. From the pile Sanders took five sets of banded fifties. He skimmed the corner of each band with his thumb, listening to the flitter. “Squared away,” he said.

  Willard’s eyes pinched, as if costive. “You mean you’re not going to take it all?”

  “You owe me twenty-five grand, and that’s what I’m taking. No more, no less. You’ll need the rest, anyway. For a lawyer.” Sanders seemed satisfied now. He put the money into a dark green string bag. Then he flung the bag over his shoulder and said, “Adiós, all.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kurt cut in. “Your friend Dr. Willard here just confessed to two counts of murder. You’re not leaving just yet.”

  “I didn’t murder anybody,” Sanders exclaimed. “You can’t hold me.”

  “I suppose you’ve paid your licensing fee for that automatic weapon. I kinda have a feeling that unlicensed machine guns are illegal in this state. Of course, I might be willing to look the other way if you should decide to maybe hang around a bit and do me a little favor.”

  “A little favor?” Sanders looked back in dismay. “I don’t believe you, man. If it weren’t for me, your brains would be all over that wall.”

  “Okay, you saved my neck, and I’m grateful, I really am. But I still got a job to do here, and there’re procedures I have to follow. This man just admitted to murder, and you overheard that admission. I’m going to need a statement from you, and you’ll have to testify as a witness against him.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Sanders said. “I’m getting out of here. She can be your witness. Why don’t I just leave, and we’ll call it even. We’ll pretend I was never here.”

  “At least stick around for a few minutes,” Kurt asked. “Let me call the county and start to get things straightened out. Then you can take off.” He picked up the phone.

  “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” Sanders warned. “Better take care of things yourself, forget about the county.”

  “Why?” Kurt said.

  “The fewer people who know about the ghala, the better.”

  Kurt paused a moment, thinking, Oh, no, not you, too. He looked at Sanders in a funky sideglance. “Dr. Willard is insane; I thought that was pretty obvious. Are you trying to tell me you believe all that cock-and-bull nonsense?”

  “It’s not nonsense,” Sanders said. “It’s true. Everything he told you is true. The ghala are here, and they’re out there now, tearing this neat little town of yours a new asshole.”

  Vicky was shaking her head. “Kurt, don’t be an idiot. There’s something really wrong here. Arrest them both.”

  “He saved my life!” Kurt snapped back. “I can’t just bust him and toss him in the can.”

  Sanders appeared hard-pressed not to laugh at them both. “What’s to lose just looking into it? Believe me, your man in the mine is dead; he never stood a chance. So what’s the hurry?”

  Kurt paused further, trying to rein his anger. He gave Sanders a long, hard stare, then broke, yelling, “You’re both fucking nuts—in fact, you’re nuttier than Willard! Go on, get out of here if that’s what you want! Take your money and your fucking illegal machine gun and leave!” He pushed his hair back, which was now shiny with sweat. Veins beat on his brow. “I’m going to call the county. I will not believe some bullshit tale about ghalas and grave-robbing.”

  Sanders slung his rifle and shrugged. “Suit yourself. You wanna dig your own shit-ditch and jump in it, go ahead. Would it help if I told you I was the one who got the larvae for Willard in Saudi Arabia?”

  “No!” Kurt began to punch in the county number.

  “Look, before you call your precious county, at least take a look in the basement.”

  It wasn’t what Sanders had said, it was the indifference with which he’d said it. Kurt teethed his lower lip, sweating. He hung up the phone.

  “Now you’re starting to use your head,” Sanders said.

  What a gullible jackass I am, Kurt thought, and he could tell by Vicky’s expression that she was thinking along the same lines. Sanders opened the oddly placed door in the corner, then led Willard down at gunpoint. Vicky went next, frowning.

  Kurt stepped hesitantly into the doorway. The others’ footsteps clattered up through hollow darkness. A fetid draft blew into his face, and there was a faint, tarry stench. He placed his foot on the first step, the second, the third. As he went down, the stench thickened, and by the time he got to the bottom, it was making him sick. He’d noticed the same odor in the mine.

  Directly overhead, fluorescent tubes buzzed gray, then flashed on all at once. Now white, brutalizing light filled a small room much like the latent lab at state police headquarters. There was a sink counter, a Beckman chromatograph, shelves stocked with glassware, chemicals, lab apparatus, and the like. There was also a shiny metal table encrusted with random shapes of what must be blood.

  Kurt ground his teeth at thoughts of what Willard must’ve done down here. It was a madman’s playroom, a torture chamber. On the counter, beside a large oil-immersion microscope, he saw bloody pliers and a hypodermic with a needle the size of a masonry nail. A heavy canvas blackout curtain hung at the far end of the room, from ceiling to floor.

  “What’s behind there?” Kurt asked.

  “The main attraction,” Sanders said. He leveled his rifle on Willard’s belly and reached across for the curtain.

  Willard leaned against the counter, arms crossed, composure revived. “I’ll pay each of you thirty thousand dollars to let me go.”

  “Shut up,” Kurt said.

  “Fifty thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Sanders said. His hand wavered.

  “Just open the curtain.”

  Sanders hauled the canvas back on its rung, to reveal two cinderblock compartments built against the back wall. The access to each compartment was a hinge frame of steel bars, roughly six feet high and three wide, held shut by padlocks. They looked like crude jail cells.

  The right compartment was empty. Through the hinge frame, Kurt could see the hole where the grate had been torn off—the channel which led to the ventilators outside.

  Something moved in the left compartment.

  Vicky leaned forward, staring vexedly past the bars. Her voice was broken, splintery. “Are those…men?”

  Kurt stepped past her to see. This charade had gone on long enough.

  “Don’t get too close.” Sanders said. “They have a good reach.”

  Kurt stood entrenched, peering in. There were actually two shapes in the pen, one hunched in the corner, the other upright. He thought they must be shadows at first, just odd shadows— they had to be. But slowly details began to form, a semblance of limbs, heads, checked watchful movement, pale aberrations of figures not quite human. He looked at them for a long time, and he felt a sensation like snakes swimming in his gut when he realized they were looking back.

  “It’s a trick,” Kurt murmured, but he knew it wasn’t. He knew he was face-to-face with something that couldn’t be. He felt dangerously unstable, like standing on skates; cold rushing numbness flowed through him as he continued to examine the stark horror before him.

  Their skin was mottled, viscid-gray, sluglike in its exuding moistness. The first one stood raw and lean in the slanting light, the shadows of the bars thrown crookedly across its corded, sinuous torso. It breathed imperceptibly; its muscles slid, flexing, beneath tight, inhuman skin.

  “How many did you say escaped?” Sanders asked.

  “Two, my control group,” Willard lamented. “It was about a week ago. They chose the old mine for their lair, which is ideal for them, perhaps even better for them than their natural environs.”

  “But why?” Vicky said, aghast. “Why bring those things here?”

  Willard leaned forward, puppetlike in deep, reactive wonder. “Why?” he asked. “Why does any man venture a great question? To reveal before the world something unseen, unbelieved until now, to bring to life a thousand-year-old myth… I would have been credited with the discovery of a new bipedal life form.”

  “And never mind how many get killed in the process,” Sanders remarked. “We were pawns to you, weren’t we? Mules who broke our backs for your great discovery.”

  “Not mules. Pioneers, men of destiny. You should feel honored to have taken part.”

  “Tell that to the two Marines.”

  “Oh, really, Sergeant, a man of war as yourself must acknowledge the expendability of human life in crucial circumstances.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. They were my friends, not yours. And you didn’t have to watch them die.”

  The words never reached Kurt. He was still staring into the pen, entranced by revulsion. The faces, he thought. My God, the faces. Like incarnations of a medieval vision of hell, the faces leered back at him. They were narrow, snouted wedges, heinously lacking in detail. The thing forward stepped closer to the bars. Two rimmed holes for a nose quivered, sniffing. The jutting, long jaw lowered just a bit, stretching sleek lips over a razor row of teeth which glittered like tinsel. Worst of all, though, were the eyes, with no signs of pupil or iris—just huge black orbs widely spaced on the foreskull. They shone, unblinking and black as spheres of polished smoke glass.

  The thing’s hand shot out between the bars. Shouting a prompt, “Jesus!” Kurt jumped back as the frame slammed loudly against its mortar bolts. A single inch closer and he would’ve been grabbed by the throat.

  Before them all, the twisted, three-fingered hand opened and closed, talons clicking.

  “I told you they have a good reach,” Sanders reminded, though unmoved by the momentary start. “And once they get hold of you—believe me—they don’t let go.”

  The scare made Kurt’s chest want to burst. The thing’s face and shoulder pressed tight against the bars, its hand still reaching vainly out. For a churning, sickening moment, Kurt feared it might actually squeeze through the frame of bars.

  “Ultimate killers,” Willard observed in a flat voice. “Perfect in their purpose. Ferocity is instinct for them; they kill without forethought.” A proud hush crept into his words. He pointed to the pen. “Look at them. They’re marvels, patterns of biological excellence. Their physical superiority is incontrovertible. What my research has revealed will split the world of natural science wide open.”

  “Now’s your chance to impress us,” Sanders said. “Give us a rundown.”

  Willard spoke in illusionary fragments. “Maximum scotopic vision. Auditory perceptibility in excess of 100,000 hertzes. Pulmonary volume, oxygen transport, and carbon-dioxide disposal close to twice that of men. Voluntary cardiac and catecholamic innervation; they can raise or lower their heart rates and certain hormonal levels at will. A completely hermaphroditic reproductive mode, full larva gestation in fifteen days. Hyperosmotic urine synthesis, specific gravity 1.08, absolute fluid retention—which all means they can live weeks without water. Their central and peripheral nervous systems alone surpass anything man has yet seen; conduction velocities and reaction times may triple or even quadruple those of human beings. They defy everything we’ve ever thought of as axiomatic in vertebrate life. There are organs in their bodies I haven’t even been able to identify yet. Most important of all, they possess an additional physical system that drastically reduces metabolic energy demands in extreme states of hypoxia—living proof of the theories of cellular hibernation, a self-contained mode to live for extended periods with little or no oxygen.”

  For the whole time Willard talked, Kurt’s eyes remained riveted to the things in the pen. A block of shadow engulfed the back of the compartment, but soon he became aware of something only part in view near the farthest corner. It was an odd, ragged heap of some sort, and the one that crouched seemed to be guarding it.

  Kurt looked demandingly to Willard. “What is that?”

  “What is what?”

  “That.” Kurt pointed, anger rising like steam. “That stuff in the corner of the cell.”

  “You’d be better off not knowing.”

  Kurt took Sanders’s flashlight and turned it on, this time keeping a safe distance from the frame. He then learned why Willard had made no reference to the exact nature of Glen’s murder.

  The heap in the corner was a pile of bones, all gnawed clean and glistening in the shaft of light. The largest of the bones had been split and drained of marrow. The skull had been pried apart. A pair of jeans lay in shreds nearby, and also Glen’s old poplin jacket.

  Vicky moaned wanly. She turned away.

  “You fed him to those things,” Kurt said.

  “I had no choice,” Willard countered. A definite crack could be detected in his voice: For the first time, he was beginning to lose control. “I already told you. Glen and my wife were conspiring against me. It was them or me, can’t you see that?”

  “You’re insane,” Kurt said, though by now all he felt and thought had been tapped dry of emotion. A great chill filled his soul now, not shock, not horror; the reality was finalized at last. These things behind the bars were not men, but obscenely less. Willard had unleashed monsters.

  Kurt reached for his handcuffs. His voice was like the drone of a machine. “Dr. Willard, I’m arresting you for the murder of Glen Rodz and Nancy Willard…”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Willard exclaimed, straightening against the counter. “Can’t you comprehend the importance of my work? I’ll carve milestones of knowledge from what I learn of the ghala.”

  “Please understand that from this moment on you have the right to remain silent—”

  “No! Please, I—” Willard snapped his gaze to Sanders. “Sergeant, kill him, I’ll make you rich. If I’m taken into custody, the authorities will destroy the ghala. All my work will have been in vain; no one will benefit. Kill him and the girl, and you can name your price.”

  Sanders offered him a remiss grin. “Eat shit and die.”

  “—anything you say can be used against you—”

  Willard moved with stupefying quickness. Before anyone could react, he’d grabbed a bottle of ethyl chloride and sprayed it precisely across Sanders’s eyes, while at the same time flinging a tray of instruments at Kurt’s face. Sanders tottered back, firing several rounds into the ceiling. Blinded, he tripped and fell, and the rifle slid across the room.

  Before Kurt could draw his gun, Willard was holding Vicky in front of him, using her as a shield. He held a #22-blade scalpel to her throat.

  “I seem to have regained a few cards in the shuffle,” Willard said, tightening his arm around Vicky’s waist. The scalpel turned, glinting. “Shall we try the old routine one more time? Very carefully now, with your left index finger and thumb, I want you to remove your service revolver by the tip of the hammer and place it on the counter. You will then take one step back.”

  Kurt stood as though his joints had fused. He couldn’t move, not even slightly. Vicky looked at him in squirming silence. Terror made her eyes seem large as cue balls.

  “Please, Officer Morris. Do as I say, or I’ll cut her throat to the bone.”

  “If you hurt her…”

  “Not hurt, kill. And I will kill her unless you do exactly as I say. You’ll get to watch her bleed to death before your very eyes, and there’ll be nothing you can do to stop it.”

  Kurt’s hand began to lower. He would have to give it to him.

  “Jackass,” Sanders said, only now getting his sight back. He blinked painfully and leaned up off the floor. “Never surrender your weapon. Never.”

  “He’ll kill her!”

  “He’ll kill us all if you give him that gun.”

  I could try for a head shot, Kurt thought perilously. Chances can’t be any worse than a million to one.

  Willard was smiling. The scalpel edge gleamed like a thread of molten silver. “Officer Morris, if you don’t place that pistol on the counter by the time I count three, I will punch this blade right through her carotid artery.”

  Shit.

  “Don’t do it,” Sanders said.

  “One,” Willard said.

  A headshot was impossible. By the time he drew and lined up, it would be over. There had to be another way. But what?

  “Two.”

  Vicky whined, cheeks and forehead reddened to a blaze of panic. She rose up on her tiptoes, some visceral compulsion causing her back to arch. The scalpel began to push against her throat, soft flesh going white around the tip.

  “Three—”

  Kurt withdrew his revolver as instructed and set it on the counter. Sanders mouthed several hopeless obscenities, closing his eyes, shaking his head. Willard then laxed his grip, leaving an inch between the blade and Vicky’s throat. He reached across for the gun.

  Go for it, Kurt’s mind flashed, and without conscious direction he sidearmed his handcuffs forward as hard as he could. It was perhaps the most reckless, imprudent thing he’d ever done. He’d thrown Vicky’s life away, and his own, with less calculation than a hand of twenty-one, for surely the handcuffs would miss by a country mile and Dr. Willard would laugh uproariously as he pumped them all full of bullets from Kurt’s own gun…