Try the dryer, Mare.
That was she herself, had to be, but she was damned if it sounded like her.. . and it didn’t feel exactly like a thought, either.
Not that this was the time to worry about such things. She hurried over to the dryer, taking less care
about where she put her feet this time and stepping on several of the spiders. The smell of decay seemed stronger over here, riper, which was strange, since the bodies were on the other side of the room, but- A diamondback rattler poked up the dryer’s lid and began slithering out. It was like coming face to face with the world’s ugliest jack-in-the-box.
Its head swayed back and forth. Its black preacher’s eyes were fixed solemnly on her. Mary took a step backward, then forced herself forward again, reaching out to it. She could be wrong about the spiders and snakes, she knew that. But what if this big fellow did bite her? Would dying of snakebite be worse than ending up like Entragian, killing everything that crossed her path until her body exploded like a bomb?
The snake’s jaws yawned, revealing curved fangs like whalebone needles. It hissed at her.
“Fuck you, bro,” Mary said. She seized it, pulled it out of the dryer-it was easily four feet long-and flung it across the room. Then she banged down the lid with the base of the flashlight, not wanting to see what else might be inside, and pulled the dryer away from the wall. There was a pop as the pleated plastic exhaust-hose pulled out of the hole in the wall. Spiders, dozens of them, scattered from beneath the dryer in all directions.
Mary bent down to look at the hole. It was about two feet across, too small to crawl through, but the edges were badly corroded, and she thought…
She went back across the room, stepping on one of the scorpions-crrunch-and kicking impatiently at a rat which had been hiding behind the bodies … and, most likely, gorging on them. She seized one of the picks, went back to the exhaust-hole, and pushed the dryer a little farther aside to give herself room. The smell of putrefaction was stronger now, but she hardly noticed. She worked the short end of the pick through the hole, pulled upward, and gave a little crow of delight when the tool yanked a furrow nearly eighteen inches long through the rotted, rusted metal.
Hurry, Mary-hurry!
She wiped sweat off her forehead, inserted the pick at the end of the furrow, and yanked upward again.
The pick lengthened the slit at the top of the hole even more, then came loose so suddenly that she fell over backward, the pick jarring loose from her hand. She could feel more spiders bursting under her
back, and the rat she’d kicked earlier-or maybe one of his relatives-crawled over her neck, squeaking.
Its whiskers tickled the underside of her jaw.
“Fuck off!” she cried, and batted it away. She got to her feet, took the flashlight off the top of the dryer, clasped it between her upper left arm and her left breast. Then she leaned forward and folded back the two sides of the slit she’d made like wings.
She thought it was big enough. Just.
“God, thank you,” she said. “Stay with me a little more, please. And if you get me through this, I promise I’ll stay in touch.”
She got on her knees and peered out through the hole. The stench was now so strong it made her feel like gagging. She shone the light out and down.
“God!” she screamed in a high, strengthless voice. “Oh Jesus, NO!”
Her first shocked impression was that there were hundreds of bodies stacked behind the building she was in- the whole world seemed to be white, slack faces, glazed eyes, and torn flesh. As she watched, a buzzard that had been roosting on the chest of one man and pulling meat from the face of another took to the air, its wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline.
Not that many, she told herself. Not that many, Mary old kid, and even if there were a thousand, it wouldn‘t change your situation.
Still, she couldn’t go forward for a moment. The hole was big enough to crawl out of, she was sure it was, but she would….
“I’ll land on them,” she whispered. The light in her hand was jittering uncontrollably, picking out cheeks and brows and tufted ears, making her think of that scene at the end of Psycho where the cobwebby bulb in the basement starts swinging back and forth, sliding across the wrinkled mummy-face of Norman’s dead mother.
You have to go, Mary, the voice told her patiently. You have to go now, or it will be too late.
All right. . . but she didn’t have to see her landing zone. No way. Not if she didn’t want to.
She turned off the flashlight and tossed it out through the hole. She heard a soft thunk as it landed on . . .
well, on something. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and slipped out. Rust-ragged metal pulled her shirt out of her jeans and scraped her belly. She tilted forward, and then she was falling, still with her eyes squeezed shut. She put her hands out in front of her. One landed on someone’s face-she felt the cold, unbreathing prow of the nose in her palm and the eyebrows (bushy ones, by the feel) under her fingers. The other hand squashed into some cold jelly and skidded.
She pressed her lips together, sealing whatever wanted to come out of her-a scream or a cry of revulsion- behind them. If she screamed, she’d have to breathe. And if she breathed, she’d have to smell these corpses, which had been lying out here in the summer sun for God knew how long. She landed on things that shifted and belched dead breath.
Telling herself not to panic, to just hold on, Mary rolled away from them, already rubbing the hand which had skidded in the jelly-stuff on her pants.
Now there was sand beneath her, and the sharp points of small, broken rocks. She rolled once more, onto her belly, got her knees under her, and plunged both hands into this rough, broken scree, rubbing them back and forth, dry-washing them as best she could. She opened her eyes and saw the flashlight lying by an outstretched, waxy hand. She looked up, wanting-needing-the cleanliness and calm disconnection of the sky. A brilliant white crescent of moon rode low in it, seeming almost to be impaled on a sharp devil’s prong of rock jutting from the east side of the China Pit.
I’m out, she thought, taking the flashlight. At least there’s that. Dear God, thank you for that.
She backed away from the deadpile on her knees, the flashlight once more clamped between her arm and breast, still dragging her tingling hands through the broken ground, scouring them.
There was light to her left. She looked that way, and felt a burst of terror as she saw Entragian’s cruiser.
Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson? he’d said, and that was when it had happened, she decided, when everything she’d once believed solid had blown away like dust in the wind. It’s empty, the car’s empty, you can see that, can ‘t you?
Yes, she could, but the residue of the terror remained. It was a taste in her mouth, as if she had been sucking pennies.
The cruiser-road-dusty, even the flasher bars on the roof now crusted with the storm’s residue-was standing next to a small concrete building that looked like a pillbox emplacement. The driver’s door had been left open (she could see the hideous little plastic bear next to the dash-board compass), and that was why the domelight was on.
Ellen had brought her out here in the cruiser, then gone somewhere else. Ellen had other fish to fry, other hooks to bait, other joints to roll. If only she’d left the keys- Mary got to her feet and hurried to the car, jogging bent over at the waist like a soldier crossing no-man’s-land. The cruiser reeked of blood and piss and pain and fear. The dashboard, the wheel, and the front seat were splashed with gore. The instruments were unreadable. Lying in the footwell on the passenger’s side was a small stone spider. It was an old thing, and pitted, but just looking at it made Mary feel cold and weak.
Not that she would have to worry about it much; the cruiser’s ignition slot was empty.
“Shit!” Mary whispered fiercely. “Shit on toast!” She turned and shone her light first on a cluster of mining equipment and then over to the base of the road leading up the pit’s north slope. Packed dirt surfaced with gravel, at least four lanes wide to accommodate the heavy equipment she had just been looking at, probably smoother than the highway she and Peter had been on when the goddamn cop stopped them … and she couldn’t drive the police- cruiser up and out of here because she didn’t have the fucking key.