Curt glanced toward Sandy. ‘If that green thing was its brain, what do you suppose is in its head? Inquiring minds want to know.’ And before either of them completely realized what he was doing, Curt reached out with the smaller of his scalpels and poked the blade into the thing’s glazed eye.
There was a sound like a man popping his finger in his cheek. The eye collapsed and slid out of its socket whole, like a hideous shed tear. Tony gave an involuntary shout of horror.
Sandy uttered a low scream. The collapsed eye struck the thing’s furry shoulder and then plopped into the drip-gutter. A moment later it began to hiss and turn white.
‘Stop it,’ Sandy heard himself saying. ‘This is pointless. We’re not going to learn anything from it, Curtis. There’s nothing to learn.’
Curtis, so far as Sandy could tell, didn’t even hear him. ‘Holy shit,’ he was whispering.
‘Holy fucking shit.’
Fibrous pink stuff began to bulge from the vacant eyesocket. It looked like cotton candy, or the insulation people use in their attics. It came out, formed an amorphous node, then turned white and began to liquefy, like the green thing.
‘Was that shit alive?’ Tony asked. ‘Was that shit alive when it — ‘
‘No, that was only depressurization,’ Curt said. ‘I’m sure of it. It’s no more alive than shaving cream when it comes out of the can. Did you get it on tape, Sandy?’
‘Oh yeah. For what it’s worth.’
‘Okay. Let’s look in the lower gut and then we’re done.’
What came out next killed any real sleep for at least a month. What Sandy was left with were those short dozes from which one wakes, gasping, sure that something one can’t quite see has been crouching on one’s chest and stealing one’s breath.
Curt retracted the hide from the abdominal area and asked Tony to pin it, first on the left and then on the right. Tony managed, although not without difficulty; the work had become very fine and both of them had their faces close to the incision. The reek in that close must have been tremendous, Sandy thought.
Without turning his head Curt groped out, found one of the Tensor lamps, and turned it slightly, intensifying the light pouring into the incision. Sandy saw a folded rope of dark liverish red stuff — intestines — piled on top of a bluish-gray sac.
‘Cutting,’ Curt murmured, and caressed the edge of his scalpel down the sac’s lumpy, bulging surface. It split open and black ichor shot out directly into Curt’s face, painting his cheeks and splashing his mask. More of it splattered Tony’s gloves. Both men recoiled, crying out, while Sandy stood frozen behind the video camera with his jaw hung down.
Pouring out of the rapidly deflating sac was a flood of rough black pellets, each of them wrapped in a swaddle of gray membrane. To Sandy they looked like spider-snacks which had been put up in cobweb shrouds. Then he saw that each pellet had an open glazed eye and that each eye seemed to be staring at him, marking him, and that was when his nerve broke. He backed away from the camera, screaming. The screams were replaced by a gagging sound. A moment later he vomited down the front of his shirt. Sandy himself remembered almost none of that; the five minutes or so following Curt’s final incision were pretty much burned out of his memory, and he counted that a mercy.
The first thing he remembered on the other side of that cigarette-burn in the surface of his memory was Tony saying, ‘Go on, now, you hear? You guys go on back upstairs. Everything here is under control.’ And, close to his left ear, Curt was murmuring another version of the same thing, telling Sandy he was all right, totally cool, fi’-by-fi’.
Five-by-five: that was what lured Sandy back from his brief vacation in the land of hysteria. But if everything was five-by, why was Curt breathing so fast? And why was the hand on Sandy’s arm so cold? Even through the rubber membrane of the glove (which he had so far neglected to take off), Curt’s hand was cold.
‘I threw up,’ Sandy said, and felt the dull heat hit his cheeks as the blood rose there. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so ashamed and demoralized. ‘Christ Jesus, I threw up all over myself.’
‘Yeah,’ Curt said, ‘you hurled like a hero. Don’t worry about it.’
Sandy took a breath and then grimaced as his stomach knotted and almost betrayed him again. They were in the corridor, but even out here that cabbagey reek was almost overpowering. At the same time he realized exactly where in the hallway he was: standing in front of the rickrack cabinet from which he had scrounged the extension cord. The cabinet’s door was open. Sandy wasn’t sure, but he had an idea he’d fled down here from the supply room, perhaps with the idea of crawling into the cabinet, pulling the door shut behind him, and just curling up in the dark. This struck him funny and he voiced a single shrill chuckle.
‘There, that’s better,’ Curt said, sounding as pleased as a mother whose child has just managed to tinkle in the potty for the first time. He gave Sandy a pat and looked shocked when Sandy shrank away from his touch.
‘Not you,’ Sandy said. ‘That mung . . . that goo — ‘
He couldn’t finish; his throat had locked up. He pointed at Curt’s hand, instead. The slime which had come out of the bat-thing’s pregnant dead uterus was smeared all over Curt’s
gloves, and some of it was now on Sandy’s arm as well. Curt’s mask, pulled down so it hung against his neck, was also streaked and stained. There was a black crust like a scab on his cheek.
At the other end of the hall, past the open supply room door, Tony stood at the foot of the stairs, talking to four or five gawking, nervous State Troopers. He was making shooing gestures, trying to get them to go back up, but they weren’t quite ready to do that.
Sandy walked back down the hall as far as the supply room door, stopping where they could all get a good look at him. ‘I’m okay, fellas — I’m okay, you’re okay, everybody’s okay.
Go upstairs and chill out. After we get squared away, you can all look at the video.’
‘Will we want to?’ Orville Garrett asked.
‘Probably not,’ Sandy said.
The Troopers went upstairs. Tony, his cheeks as pale as glass, turned to Sandy and gave him a little nod. ‘Thanks.’
‘Least I could do. I panicked, boss. I’m sorry as hell.’
Curtis clapped him on the shoulder this time instead of just patting. Sandy almost shrank away again before seeing that the kid had pulled off his stained gloves. So that was all right.
Better, anyway.
‘You weren’t alone,’ Curt said. ‘Tony and I were right behind you. You were just too freaked to notice. We knocked over Huddie’s videocam in the stampede. Hope it’s okay. If it’s not, I guess we’ll be passing the hat to buy him a replacement. Come on, let’s look.’
The three of them returned to the supply room resolutely enough, but at first none of them was able to go inside. Part of it was the smell, like rotten soup. Most of it was just knowing the bat-thing was still in there, pinned to the corkboard, flayed open and needing to be cleaned up like the weekend road accidents where when you got there the smell of blood and busted guts and spilled gasoline and boiled rubber was like some hideous old acquaintance who would never move out of town; you smelled it and knew that somebody was dead or almost dead, that somebody else would be crying and screaming, that you were going to find a shoe — hopefully not a child’s, but all too often it was — lying in the road. For Sandy it was like that. You found them in the road or on the side of the road with the bodies God gave them saying Here, get through life with it just as best you can tortured into new shapes: bones bursting out through pants and shirts, heads twisted halfway around the neck but still talking (and screaming), eyes hanging loose, a bleeding mother holding out a bleeding child like a broken doll and saying Is she still alive? Please, would you check? I can’t, I don’t dare. There was always blood on the seats in pools and fingerprints of blood on what remained of the windows. When the blood was on the road it was also in pools and it turned purple in the pulse of the red bubblegum lights and you needed to clean it up, the blood and the shit and the broken glass, oh yes, because John Q. and his family didn’t want to be looking at it on their way to church come Sunday morning. And John Q. paid the bills.