Reality had been ripped, and through that tear a nightmare world of infinite malign possibilities seemed to be rushing into the world that Sam knew and—suddenly—loved.
One of the snakelike cables had reached his chest and found its way under his sweater to bare skin. He felt as if he’d been touched by a white-hot brand, and the pain broke his trance.
He fired two rounds into the computer, shattering the screen first, which was the second face of Coltrane’s into which he’d pumped a .38 slug. Though Sam half expected it to absorb the bullet without effect, the cathode-ray tube imploded as if still made of glass. The other round scrambled the guts of the data-processing unit, at last finishing off the thing that Coltrane had become.
The pale, oily tentacles fell away from him. They blistered, began to bubble, and seemed to be putrefying before his eyes.
Eerie electronic beeps, crackles, and oscillations, not ear—torturingly loud but uncannily piercing, still filled the room.
When Sam looked toward the woman who had been seated at the other computer, against the east wall, he saw that the mucus-like cables between her and the machine had lengthened, allowing her to turn in her chair to face him. Aside from those semiorganic connections and her nakedness, she was in a different but no less hideous condition from her husband. Her eyes were gone, but her sockets did not bristle with a host of sensors. Rather, two reddish orbs, three times the size of ordinary eyes, filled enlarged sockets in a face redesigned to accommodate them; they were less eyes than eye-shaped receptors, no doubt designed to see in many spectrums of light, and in fact Sam became aware of an image of himself in each red lens, reversed. Her legs, belly, breasts, arms, throat, and face were heavily patterned with swollen blood vessels that lay just beneath her skin and that seemed to stretch it to the breaking point, so she looked as if she were a design board for branch-pattern circuitry. Some of those vessels might, indeed, have carried blood, but some of them throbbed with waves of radium-like illumination, some green and some sulfurous yellow.
A segmented, wormlike probe, the diameter of a pencil, erupted from her forehead, as if shot from a gun, and streaked toward Sam, closing the ten feet between them in a split second, striking him above the right eye before he could duck. The tip bit into his skin on contact. He heard a whirring sound, as of fan blades spinning at maybe a thousand revolutions a minute. Blood ran down his brow and along the side of his nose. But he was squeezing off the last two rounds in his gun even as the probe came at him. Both shots found their mark. One slammed into the woman’s upper body, and one took out the computer behind her in a blaze of sparks and crackling electrical bolts that jumped to the ceiling and snaked briefly across the plaster before dissipating. The probe went limp and fell away from him before it could link his brain to hers, which evidently had been its intention.
Except for gray daylight that entered through the paper-thin cracks between the slats of the shutters, the room was dark.
Crazily, Sam remembered something a computer specialist had said at a seminar for agents, when explaining how the Bureau’s new system worked: “Computers can perform more effectively when linked, allowing parallel processing of data.”
Bleeding from the forehead and the right wrist, he stumbled backward to the door and flicked the light switch, turning on a floor lamp) He stood there —as far as he could get from the two grotesque corpses and still see them—while he began to reload the revolver with rounds he dug out of the pockets of his jacket.
The room was preternaturally silent.
Nothing moved.
Sam’s heart was hammering with such force that his chest ached dully with each blow.
Twice he dropped cartridges because his hands were shaking. He didn’t stoop to retrieve them. He was half convinced that the moment he wasn’t in a position to fire with accuracy or to run, one of the dead creatures would prove not to be dead, after all, and like a flash would come at him, spitting sparks, and would seize him before he could rise and scramble out of its way.