Low, thick. Wet.
“Please,” Goat whimpered. He thought desperately about Volker’s information, uploaded to his email accounts but not sent. Not shared.
And with sudden screaming clarity he realized that he and Billy had made a serious mistake. That information should have gone out. Goat’s instinct had been to send it, but he hadn’t. It was in attachments. It was just sitting there. As useless as he was.
God …
Despite the carnage around him, Goat cut a sly, frightened look at his laptop, which lay on the floor not five feet away. How long would it take to locate the email and forward it to the listservs of reporters to which he belonged. How long?
Five seconds?
Less.
That’s all the time it would take to maybe save the whole fucking world.
A handful of seconds.
Goat felt himself begin to move, shifting away from his worthless hiding place, edging toward the laptop.
Then the laughter stopped.
“Hey,” said a voice, “I know you.”
The world seemed to freeze around Goat and for a terrible moment even the screams seemed muted as if those words had flipped a switch on everything. Goat didn’t look up, though, too frightened to risk acknowledging anything.
“Yeah,” continued the voice, “I seen you somewhere, ain’t I?”
Goat held his breath, refused to move.
Then pain exploded in his thigh as something hit him with jarring force. A cry burst past the self-enforced stricture in his throat, and he rocked sideways, suddenly whipping his arms out like defensive stabilizers. Despite his need not to see this man, Goat’s eyes opened and there he was. Standing right there, looming over him, bare-chested, ugly, covered in glistening red, eyes dark and wild, smiling mouth full of promise.
“Fucking-A, I knew I knew you,” said Homer Gibbon. “You were there when they killed me.”
Behind Gibbon and all around him was pain and horror.
People were broken.
Broken.
Arms shattered, mouths gaping to reveal broken teeth, handfuls of hair torn out from customers who had tried to run but were one step too slow. Everyone was bloody. Every single person.
Some of them lay sprawled, dead or dying.
But even as he thought that, Goat knew he was wrong.
Dying maybe. Dead?
Not really.
Death, as Goat had known it his whole life until yesterday, was no longer a fixed point in reality. It was no longer a doorway that, once entered, could not be passed again. All of that had changed.
Because of Dr. Volker.
Because of something called Lucifer 113.
And because of this man.
This monster.