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56.
Jack was on the cell phone with his boss from outside the Walesky home. "Griff, it's out of hand. There are news crews all over the place. There are six reporters from various TV stations interviewing Aunt Nellie and the kids. I'm not telling you what to do, and I have to stay married to my wife, plus I'm under oath to Louise Trost and what not. If I were you, I'd set up a special team to cover this situation around the clock. I'll stay inside and keep my mouth shut, and I've been promised a major scoop if I do that."
"There's a book in it for you," Griff said wrily. "Sounds good, Jack. Do what you can. Do you have a camera?"
"Yep—a digital with spare chips, batteries, the works."
"Take all the pictures you can and put a story together that we can lead with as soon as they let you talk. I'll call Trost myself and ask how much longer she wants us to sit here and get run over by busloads of people from out of town."
As he hung up, a Fire Department Battalion Chief help up a yellow chemical suit kit. "Mr. Simon? The Mayor and the Fire Chief want you to go in with us if you'd like. We have our own camera crew, but you can be the public voice of record."
Jack brightened. As he put on the light plastic suit that totally enveloped his body and made him look like the other half dozen Fire and Police personnel wearing them—a cluster of yellow beach balls—his phone warbled. It was Louise. "I trust you are happy now?"
"I am glowing with joy. Is Linsey okay?"
"She's in a Highway Patrol chopper ringed by white hats."
"Perfect. We're getting ready to enter the house, Louise."
"Good luck."
Our first contact with the alien life form, Jack thought as he joined the line-up by the kitchen door. He glimpsed hundreds of spectators beyond the yellow police lines. Among them, he saw Nellie, Maribel, and Jimmy. They looked frightened, full of horrified anticipation, and grief.
A policeman in yellow chem suit, wielding a compact assault rifle, stood ready. Behind him stood a policewoman, in the same yellow, with a Glock automatic in both fists and aimed dead center at the doorway. Beside the kicker stood a third cop in yellow, holding a powerful flashlight up high and its battery in a suitcase type carrying case in his left hand.
"Everybody ready?" the team leader in the middle said—the battalion chief who had given Jack the suit. Jack was last in line, and missed his own Glock. Instead, he had a digital camera with flash in his hands, ready to take up to 140 high quality, 10 megapixel jpegs images.
"Go," the team leader said.
The kicker shoved the door open. A team of firemen wielding a steel battering ram nearby stood down. There was no resistance at the door. Like a snake, the six team members and Jack eased into the house. Everywhere they went, the powerful light darted back and forth. Jack knew the layout and called out: "Straight ahead into the dining room. That's my puke on the wall to your right." Nobody even snickered. They were probably all ready to puke.
The kitchen, including closets and cupboards, was clear. Everything sat in ghostly gloom and silence as if aboard a sunken ocean liner. They might as well be walking through the bowels of the Titanic. Going into the livingroom in one sinuous, sliding body, they explored on. "Nice job," the battalion chief said as they passed Jack's breakfast.
"I hope you didn't eat cheese with that," someone else said.
"Focus," the battalion chief said. "Enough jokes. We broke the ice. Now focus on the work or we could all die."
Jack told the battalion chief: "The livingroom is to the right."
"Small house," the other said. "Not a lot of hiding places."
They ransacked the living room. They turned chairs and couches, tables and chairs upside down.
"The garage," someone suggested.
"Outside," the battalion chief said. "We've swept the place. Nobody in here."
"How about the crawl space under the front of the house?"
"Okay," the battalion chief said. "Let's split up. Three on the garage, three on the crawl space."
As Jack watched, three of the people in yellow broke the lock on the garage and lifted the door. Three others pulled away a long piece of plywood covering the entrance to the crawl space. The garage was easy. Single-walled and big enough for one car, it was packed with typical household junk. The three explorers started passing out boxes, bird cages, skis, water equipment, a surf board, all the usual stuff, and no sign of Ernie and Joanie. Firemen trudged about on the roof with their normal fire gear on, but with oxygen masks. They used their picks to pry holes in the roof, looking for secret spaces. Nothing.
The man with the heavy-duty light lay spread-eagled on the gravel, and shone his light in while another man cautiously crawled to the entrance preceeded by a Glock automatic held in both hands. "There's something down there in the corner."
"Can you see what it is?"
"Something long and dark."
"Sounds about right," Jack said—recalling the bracketed shapes Linsey had told him about from inside Lima Voyager.
"Get a hook in there and see if you can pull on it," the battalion chief said. "Have a gun ready, and we'll have both your feet in hand so we can yank you out."
That is a brave man, Jack thought. He tried to make himself small as he got in close to take pictures.
Fifteen minutes and a lot of sweat and tension later, out came an abandoned, rotting Boy Scout tent. Everyone stood around and scratched their heads.
"We had to have missed something," the battalion chief said.
Jack said: "From what I'm told, this thing always likes to nest against a baseboard horizontally close to the floor."
The battalion chief exchanged looks with the on-site police inspector. The latter shrugged. "Go in with your hooks and axes and take the baseboards apart."
Fifteen minutes and a lot of hammering and racket later, including the scream of tortured nails coming out of wood where they'd been compressed by half a century of drying, and there still was nothing. A thick dust drifted in the air.
The police and fire bosses looked at Jack, who, by default, had the most knowledge of the situation, and it wasn't much.
Jack raised a finger. "Wait!"
Everyone looked at him. He sniffed. "I smell weird soil."
"I smell it too," the cop who'd been the kicker said.
"That's a sign that you got close." Jack strode to the door. He pointed to the kicker and another man. "You two, grab crow bars and follow me." Together, they went back into the deathly silent, shadowy house which now was a total wreck. Drywall up to a foot high was gone, and daylight shone in with sharp spikes through the bottoms of the broken walls. Dust drifted thickly. Dust that had lain in these walls for generations, sealed up on some summer construction day back when life was black and white, Eisenhower was president, and the first Disney lunch boxes were carried to school.
Jack stepped forward one step at a time. His feet crunched on rubble. The others crunched along behind him. Hardly anyone dared breathe. The smell of mushrooms got stronger toward the bathroom. Jack nudged the door open with his foot, while keeping the camera ready to start shooting. The smell became overpowering.
Bathtub, sink, waste basked, shower curtain…
Bathtub was empty. Nobody hiding behind shower curtain.
Then Jack saw liquid oozing on the ground. He knelt down and touched it with his gloved finger. It looked like greasy water. Not rusty, like from old pipes. Nothing fecal or pissy. This looked more like it had floating mites of white in it like…he rubbed some between his fingers…greasy…like decomposing human fat tissue, but without the heavy cadaverine odor.
Jack pointed to the 40-gallong water heater that was built into the wall, with its other side in the garage. The ooze came directly out of the wall, leaking through the caulking around the bathtub, and down onto the floor around the top of the tub.
At Jack's signal, the two men with him used their steel hooks and bars to pull the wall apart. The smell of loam and mushrooms was unmistakable, along with a noticeable corpse smell.
"Oh God," one man said, and the other turned away. He could be heard retching into this suit and ran outside.
Jack and the remaining man stood looking at the inside of the crawlspace. Lying along a hidden space beside the water heater were two bodies, if one could call them that. One was the late Aunt Joanie, who had lost about 100 pounds of water and fat, which had oozed out into the bathroom and decayed in the afternoon heat. She looked withered like a dying grape, covered by white fungus like a fine mist, but Jack knew that a nonhuman resembling a far younger and more attractive Joanie would rise out of his union. Embracing her, and embraced by her, was the late Uncle Ernie. He'd been late getting his victim, and was already decaying when he'd taken Joanie. One could still see the anguish on his crumbling face as it rotted away like the brown and dry husk of an apple left on a barn windowsill. He still had one gloved hand lying over his mid section. Dead, tangled black hose still dangled from his mouth and entered her neck, but now her mouth was open and a fresh black hose extended from her mouth directly into his brain via his left ear. She was becoming the new walking asexual spore. She was sucking his identity, his memories, his marrow and brains out of his body. They were exchanging genetic material and at times it almost seemed one could see minute visible changes—a ripple under the arm skin, a bubbling of the belly skin, a shudder in the cheek skin.
Most remarkable of all, however, was the fact that the former Uncle Ernie had already started coming apart into two dozen or more semi-circular bracket mushrooms whose faint gray caps were speckled with faintly darker round spots like a form of camouflage. In its mordant way, it was very beautiful.
The cop choked out his words one disgusted, tortured syllable at a time: "What-the-hell-are-these-things?"
Jack said quietly: "A life form that wants to replace ours and be master of the earth."
A central dilemma suddenly occurred to him—something nobody else realized. He went outside to call Louise Trost. It might be too late to save mankind and the earth.
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