Markovic knew that any moment they might spot him. He wondered if Simone was among the dead and felt a pang at the thought, though God knew Simone was already on the path to an early death in Markovic’s mind—her experimentation with drugs, her bad taste in boys followed by a decision to cast herself as a lesbian. Her radical politics.
Still, she was his daughter. And he knew he should be feeling more than he was. The effects of stress, shock?
The effect of being both dead and somehow alive?
He wondered if he could stand and run. But he knew he could never outrun the gunmen. Somehow they had failed to kill him, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find a way. He doubted being incinerated would be a good thing.
Run!
Markovic tried to stand, expecting it to be hard, but to his surprise he stood easily, and was so shocked by this that for a moment he forgot to run. He held up his hand and could not stop the shriek of horror that came from him. His hand was not his hand. It was shaped like his hand, there were four fingers and a thumb, but it was a hand entirely covered by a seething mass of what had to be insects. Thousands of them.
A scream of pure panic rose within him, a scream that somehow emerged as an agitated buzzing sound. Like the sound a hive of bees might make if you poked it with a stick.
He looked down at his own body, and all of him, every exposed inch, was covered in a thick carpeting of tiny creatures, creatures as small as ants, creatures as large as small beetles.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Three rifle shots, all carefully aimed. All struck their target . . . and passed harmlessly through Markovic.
“What the . . . ,” a black-clad man yelled. “Shoot that thing!”
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Now half a dozen weapons opened fire, bullets passing through Markovic and digging into the tree behind him, leaving small holes in him that were instantly covered by the insect mass.
At the same time, he felt himself sinking, sliding down along the tree trunk, sliding down until the damp earth seemed to have swallowed his bottom half up.
“Get that gas can over here!” a voice yelled.
Two men ran with heavy steps toward him, carrying jerricans. Gasoline spilled from one of the tanks.
Fire! No, he did not like fire. Down! Down! a panicked voice cried soundlessly. Down into the ground!
He was just head and shoulders when the first splash of gasoline landed on him. Markovic held up a bug-covered hand as if to shield himself, but something else happened.
Hundreds of insects flew in a mass at the nearest man with a jerrican. Markovic stared stupidly at what he’d thought was his hand, a hand that had just flown off. Beneath what he’d thought was a coating of insects, there was nothing. He had no body. He was nothing but . . . he was just . . .
He fought against a wave of terror that would cripple him if he let it. He had no body now, nothing, because if he’d had a body his heart would be hammering and his flesh would be tingling and his throat would be widening to scream and scream and never stop.
Markovic did not scream, but someone did; Markovic heard the inhuman cry as he disappeared from view beneath the soil.
He heard guns firing right above him, bullets thudding into the earth, but the sound was muffled by dirt. Irrelevant. Because now Markovic was in a hallucinogenic dream, a dream that he was not one man but millions. A dream that he swam through soil as easily as he might move through air.
His mind was overwhelmed with images, shattered visuals, all devoid of true light but somehow lit nevertheless, as though the soil itself glowed faintly. But there was no making sense of what he saw; nothing was right, nothing was real, at least not any kind of real he’d ever known. It was like seeing the world through a million eyes at once, and even as that tidal wave of dim, distorted, kaleidoscopic visuals was overwhelming his ability to process, there were other inputs as well. He felt scraping all over his body, like sandpaper. He smelled things he could not place, things he knew he’d never smelled before
.
Down he went, dirt-swimming, flowing, not a great, solid human, but thousands of individual bits and pieces, all digging and squirming as if directed by one will.
And they are, he thought: my will!
Markovic then felt a swelling rush of power, of the realization of power, of the thrilling knowledge that the extent of his power was not even yet known.
I can’t be killed with bullets!
He was on a speed high, reveling in the liquid swiftness with which he bored through solid ground, flowing around rocks, reassembling, unstoppable. Like a flood. Like a swarm of locusts.
He felt no fear now, which was odd. He should be feeling fear; he knew that. He should be feeling scared to death. But, then again, he should be dead. Maybe was dead by most conventional standards. Certainly he was not breathing, nor did he feel any urge to.