Karen took a step
back. So did Olik. A moment later Adolfa joined them. Jim
followed. Still watching. Still captivated, unable to turn away.
Xavier didn't
burst. His shirt tore, ripping right down the middle and exposing a
stomach branded with tattoos that had probably once been threatening works of
art meant to mark him as a gang member of some renown but which were now
distended so far they were distorted beyond recognition. The skin of his
stomach continued stretching, stretching. Blood started to seep from it,
as though it were tearing at a microscopic level.
"Please,"
whispered Xavier. Then he started screaming again.
And his stomach,
the huge, bloated, cancerous thing, started
moving
. Not
autonomously, not like it wanted to pull away and become a separate entity, but
more like…
… "What
is
that?" said Karen…
… something was
inside
it.
Xavier put both
hands – one whole, one half-ruined by Karen's well-placed bullet – on his
stomach. He was still screaming, but the screaming had lost volume, as
though his strength were waning. Or being siphoned off by something.
His belly bulged as
though something were pushing against it from the inside. Then the bulge
split, becoming two bulges. Then three. Jim had a momentary
impression of a tail. Or tentacles.
Xavier's screams
grew louder again.
The thing inside
him was still growing. It was half as big as Xavier himself, an impossibly
huge mass attached to him by skin that had stretched farther than was
possible. Blood was running down his dark flesh, discoloring the tattoos
that marked him, staining the floor around him.
"Help
me," he whimpered. "Get it out of me." Then another
scream wracked his body.
The bulges pushed
around his stomach. Then they moved, converging on a point just below
Xavier's ribs. Whatever was inside Xavier seemed to writhe, then burrow
under
his ribs. Jim wondered how that was possible, how the man's ribcage could
contain something that size.
The answer came an
instant later: crackling snaps ripped through the car as Xavier's ribcage burst
outward, inflating his chest to twice, then three times, its normal
circumference. But his skin still held. It bled, thick red coursing
over and around it from every pore, but it
held
. Like the skin of
a balloon, stretched to its limit but not ready to burst.
Xavier's screams
turned to coughs. The writhing thing inside him moved up his chest
cavity. Jim thought he could see tentacular extremities reaching into the
man's neck, which started to swell.
"Help,"
said Xavier. His voice was a whisper, but his eyes shrieked.
The ghouls in the
last car were still moaning, still gasping and shuddering like they were experiencing
the most erotic experience of their un-lives.
Xavier stopped
speaking, stopped shouting, stopped whimpering. The thing pushed into his
throat. Like his stomach, like his chest, Xavier's throat seemed to
inflate beyond its capacity. Jim could hear tiny snaps – what must be the
vertebrae in the rapist's neck popping like ten-cent firecrackers. He
looked at Xavier's feet, expecting to see them loose and limp, the nerves
severed at last. But they still tapped that death-dance against the floor.
And yet, though his
feet and legs moved, they were at the same time somehow… diminished. So
was Xavier's stomach. The thing within him had moved out of his belly,
and the skin there hung loosely, as though in passing the creature inside had robbed
Xavier of most of his mass, most of his flesh. Indeed, now that Jim
watched, Xavier's skin seemed to shrivel and wither. It was like he was
mummifying, a thousand years of weathering and aging occurring in a moment.
Jim's eyes went
back to Xavier's face. The man's face was still whole. His eyes
still screaming and in pain.
The thing was in
the rapist's throat. The throat had stretched so far it was wider around
than Xavier's head, Jim guessed it had a circumference of at least twenty-four
inches. Maybe more. Xavier's head looked like a grotesque pimple at
the end of his neck.
More
cracking. This time Jim couldn't pinpoint it for a moment. Then he
saw that Xavier's mouth was open. Open as though he wanted to scream, but
no sound coming out. Open wide. Too wide. He saw the
gangbanger's mouth stretch beyond what it should, the corners of his lips
growing white as the jaws underneath dislocated. Then the skin tore,
Xavier's mouth widening by several inches on each side. Twin pops sounded,
like low-caliber gunshots in the dark subway car.
Jim had been
riveted by what was happening. So had everyone else, he guessed.
Those two pops, though, shocked him into movement. He stepped back.
Again.
Xavier's hand –
desiccated and dried as though he had been sucked clean by a spider – reached
out to Jim. His eyes pleaded with him. "Don't leave me,"
they said.
But his mouth
continued splitting open. Wider. Wider.
And then something
reached
out
from inside the man's mouth.
================
================
Jim fell
back with a scream of disgust
and fear. Everyone did. Everyone but Karen.
Jim saw her face as
she darted past. She no longer wore that dead expression, that visage
that bore no pity or remorse. She had a visible emotion now: fear.
So why was she
moving
toward
Xavier?
At first Jim
thought she might be going to end his suffering. The man's mouth was
split open so widely that the ends had disappeared around the back of his
head. Jim was reminded of a game he had played as a kid: Mr. Mouth, a
game where two half-spheres joined at the back by a single hinge formed an
impossibly wide mouth that rotated around in a circle as kids tried to flip
tokens into it.
Xavier's turned
into Mr. Mouth
.
Why doesn't she
just shoot him?
His thoughts were
going everywhere. He was in danger of losing it.
Focus,
Jim. Keep cool
.
You'll end up
like Mom. Just like her.
Keep it
together.
Karen darted to the
back of the car. Not to Xavier after all. She grabbed her leather
satchel, which she had dropped there a few minutes and a million years ago when
they had first entered this car. Then she hurried back to the rest of the
group.
"What's in
there?" asked Olik with a look at Karen's satchel. It was a
perfectly legitimate question but one that struck Jim as unimportant
considering what was going on a few feet away.
Karen didn't
answer.
The ghouls in the
final car exhaled climactically. Xavier coughed. Retched.
Things pushed out of his mouth. Jim expected to see the ghouls' fingers,
the things that had forced themselves into the other man. He figured they
would have sucked him dry somehow, would have grown in size and strength and
would emerge even hungrier for human flesh.
But he was wrong.
It wasn't
disembodied fingers that squeezed out of Xavier's ever-widening, ever-tearing
mouth. It was entire
hands
. Tiny, dark, coated with mucus
and blood. They pulled themselves out of the gangster's raggedly
stretched mouth. Followed by thin arms. Shoulders.
A head.
Black hair,
plastered tightly against the skull beneath.
And under the
hair….
Jim felt his
stomach draw into a frozen knot, felt his testicles pull tight against
him. He would have thrown up, but his body knew somehow that to do so
would be to use time he did not have. To do so would be to stay and die.
"What is
this?" said Olik, wonder and disgust mixing in his voice.
"
Blasfemia
,"
whispered Adolfa.
Jim shuffled
back. He bumped into something soft. Adolfa. Or maybe
Karen. He didn't care. He just wanted to get away.
The tiny arms
reached for them. Small eyes opened, and as they did the light at last
went out of Xavier's eyes. His withered body relaxed, went limp.
But Jim didn't think the man's suffering was over.
The tiny hands….
Olik was
whispering. One word over and over, something in his language. A
word that could only be a denial, a whispered refusal to believe.
The hands reached…
reached for them….
Jim looked behind
them. Hoping that the door at the other end of the car would be open,
hoping that they could get to the next car.
It wasn't
open. But there
was
something there. Standing on the other
side of the still-closed door at the front of the car.
The driver.
The conductor of the train. The skull Jim had seen driving the subway
when all this hellish nightmare had begun.
But not a skull, he
saw now. Just a terribly thin man. Old and drawn, like he had been
living far too long underground and had suffered terribly for lack of sunlight
and open air. His skin was so white it fairly illuminated the space
between the cars. The transit cap on his head seemed large and unwieldy
on his head.
He locked eyes with
Jim. Smiled and raised a finger to his cap. An oddly old-fashioned
movement that was beyond insane given the circumstances.
The driver's smile
widened. Lights flashed outside the train. The ghouls in the last
car moaned at the same moment, and when the light and sound collided, it seemed
as though Jim could see the skull again, the skull he thought he had first seen
driving the train.
Then the old man
stepped back. Stepped back. And, still smiling, disappeared into
the darkness of the next car.
The door to the
next car slid silently open.
Jim
hesitated. Perhaps they would be better off here. Things had just
been going from bad to worse, after all.
Then he looked back
at Xavier's destroyed form. At the…
thing
… that was still crawling
out of his mouth. The dark arms. The nude body.
The tattoos that
covered it. Gang signs. Four of the tattoos, on the thing's
grotesque, misshapen face, looked like tiny tears.
The thing looked up
at them. Looked up at Jim. "Help," it whispered.
And the voice was small and weak and pitiful… and chillingly familiar.
Xavier's voice.
The rest of the
tiny body, the replica that had been born of itself, slid out of its
father/self's mouth. Completely nude, it lay in a pool of blood and tears
on the cold floor of the subway car. It tried to push up on small arms
emblazoned with gang symbols.
Beyond the glass,
in the back car, the ghouls moaned.
The small thing
screamed. It fell to its back.
Its stomach started
to bulge. "Get it outta me!" it screamed. "
Get it
outta me!
" The stomach started to move. Its ribcage
started to crackle.
The cycle was
beginning again.
At the same moment
the belt on the back door fell away and the back door opened. The ghouls
shuffled in. Moaning with the pleasure of the damned, rubbing their
wounds and injuries as though doing so brought them to greater heights of
ecstasy. They writhed over and among themselves like an orgy of the dead.
They surrounded the tiny thing that had come out of Xavier, that
was
Xavier; that had killed Xavier and borne Xavier and would do so again.
The Xavier-thing
shrieked. Its mouth started crackling open. Tiny fingers – even
tinier this time – appeared at the corners.
When will it
end? Will he get smaller and smaller until he puffs out of
existence? Or will this go on forever?
Jim felt hands at
his arms. Pulling him. Adolfa? Karen? Olik? He
didn't know. He couldn't tell. He didn't want to – couldn't – look
away from the thing that had killed Xavier, the thing that had taken his place
and become him.
The hands pulled
him back.
They pulled him
through the door to the enclosed platform between cars. Then to the next
car in the subway.
He watched Xavier's
eyes. Watched them scream. And knew. Knew, somehow, that for
Xavier this was not going to end.
Then the ghouls
encircled the smaller body that had come from Xavier and become Xavier and now
had another Xavier within him and coming from him. The ghouls moaned in
that strange single voice, they writhed over him, they became a creeping,
wriggling mass of dead-alive flesh. They sighed and seemed to melt into
one another. It was impossible to tell where one body ended and another
began. It was an endless round of death and pain, a never ending circle
of doom.
Xavier screamed.
Hands – Adolfa's,
Jim thought – reached out and pulled the door closed. It slid shut and he
heard it latch. Darkness fell in the car beyond it.
But the sounds
could still be heard. The sounds of a man dying and being reborn into
pain, over and over and on and on forever.
And the subway
continued on.