“What do we do?” Jorge asked.
“Nothing we can do,” Ryan replied.
Dean stood next to his father, watching, an expression of sheer horror on his young face. He’d seen death before, but usually it came from an outside source, not from inside a man’s own body.
Luis bent his dying physique, his neck muscles taut as bands of stretched steel. His upper torso arched into a backward U-shape, the spine beneath contorted into a direction never intended by nature. The man’s arms twisted and shook, his entire body writhing in a mass of agony before he flopped over on his back. His legs kicked a few times, feet bent out like the graceful arc of a dancer, then his heels drummed a last tempo of pain as he finally died.
At that second, Krysty spotted new movement, like the fin of a shark breaking the surface of the ocean under the front of his sweat-soaked shirt. “There, lover,” she shouted, pointing it out to Ryan.
Ryan drew his panga and stepped close, reaching down and slitting open the tight cotton T-shirt. The cloth, damp with sweat and blood, tore easily as he pulled the blade of the panga up and across the fabric, revealing Luis’s bare torso.
There were wiggling movements under the dead man’s skin, as if something was trying to frantically break out-an angled something, like a broken bone trying to rip free of the skin.
Only there were no bones in the immediate area of the disturbance.
“What the hell is that?” J.B. demanded in a tight voice, his knuckles white as he clutched his well-maintained Uzi, ready to send a barrage of 9 mm bullets into the mystery inside the corpse on the ground before him.
“Don’t know offhand,” Ryan replied, stepping back and watching the queer undulating movements at a safe distance.
“There’s something inside him,” Soto murmured, speaking the obvious.
As if in reply, a single oversized mandible two inches long poked through the flesh of Luis’s stomach, a shiny black eyetooth all wet and glistening in the dim light as day continued to fade into night.
“Bug,” Jak said, a hint of distant disgust in his flat voice. The albino had seen all kinds of insects during his youth in the fetid swamps of Louisiana, all kinds of squirming, crawling, creeping insects, and most of them large and nasty-biting bugs, sucking bugs, flying bugs-the kind where it took far more than a single well-placed stomp to end their scurrying across a kitchen floor.
There was very little blood as the size of the wound increased in diameter. The cut was jagged, but straightforward, like the release of a zipper as it widened. Some clear stomach fluid and digestive juices spurted up at one point but quickly trickled down to nothingness.
Both cruel black mandibles were free now, along with the insect’s small head. Overblown fangs, sickle-shaped like inverted question marks extended from the front of the bug in an almost comical display of exaggeration. Above the quivering mandibles on the shiny black head was a mass of compound eyes. Festooned about the eyes were four horned antennae, quivering in the naked air.
Approximately five inches long and streamlined, the creature continued to eat its way free, poking out the rest of the shiny black carapace and six legs, and coming to a stop on the lifeless form of Luis. Each member of the group had the uncomfortable sensation of being studied, the watchers being watched in return by the insect.
“I know this insect,” Soto breathed, his voice a mix of disgust and awe. “They are very rare and unusual. They eat more than your flesh, see, for since they burrow inward, they also have the access-and the hunger-to devour your soul. But no one I know has died from the beetle’s kiss in many years.”
“Saw one like it once,” Ryan replied, as he exchanged a knowing look with Krysty.
In his mind’s eye, Ryan summoned up memories of being forced to helplessly watch as Cort Strasser and his underling Kelber prepared to use a similar black beetle as an instrument of torture on a bound and helpless Krysty Wroth, and it wasn’t until Ryan agreed to tell Strasser what he wanted to know that the insect had been removed from her bare buttock. Now he saw Krysty shudder, her eyes hypnotically fixed on the gleaming horror.