Dead Man's Song полностью

It came out as a whisper of mingled desperation, self-loathing, and fear that he had lost her forever. He stared inward across the vast empty landscape that stretched between his wife and his own impotent, damaged soul and wondered how he could ever make such an impossible journey back to her. With each beat of his breaking heart he pounded on the side of the barn with a balled fist. Inside the barn the echoes sounded like the amplified beating of a giant’s pulse.

“Connie!” he whispered in a voice choked with tears. Slowly, his knees buckled and he sank to the cold ground, huddling against the barn, not cowering away from the cold, but sinking into his own defeat and failure.

He did not see the shadow rising between him and the distant cloud-choked sky. He was so lost in his grief that he never even felt the coldness of it, a frost harsher and deeper than the icy blast of the October wind. He never saw the pale white hand reach out of the shadows, and knew nothing at all about it until it was far too late.

Chapter 26

(1)

The first swarm of roaches swept toward them. Fifty yards away. Forty. The second swarm was still a hundred yards away but it was moving with incredible speed.

“Keep running!” Crow yelled and reached back to grab Newton’s shoulder. With a growl of fury he propelled the reporter forward and then ran a half pace behind him, ready to shove him again if he slowed. “Run!”

They ran toward the rough path Crow had hacked through the vines, but by the time they had taken twenty steps it was clear that the second swarm would cut them off long before they reached it. Crow grabbed Newton’s arm and they both skidded to a halt as around them the whole forest seemed to be rustling with the sound of a million tiny legs. Crow looked back toward the house and the field. There was still that one big patch of sunlight and there was the fact that the wave of roaches had split apart to avoid it.

“God, let me be right about this,” he said and quickly squatted down to make sure his trouser cuffs were tucked tightly inside his boots. “Newt, listen,” he said, rising and talking fast. “No questions, no arguments. Just follow me. Fast!”

With that he spun around and ran full tilt toward the field—straight at the oncoming mass of insects.

Newton goggled at him. “Are you crazy?” he screeched, but Crow was going at a dead run and within seconds had reached the wave of roaches and kept going. From twenty feet away Newton could hear the sound of Crow’s Timber-lines crunching on the shiny backs of the creatures, the carapaces cracking like pistachio shells. Crow ran fast, arms and legs pumping, heading deeper and deeper into the sea of bristling black bugs. Some of them turned to pursue him and collided with the wave of oncoming bugs, causing a rage of overlapping currents that bubbled up off the ground.

“RUN!” he heard Crow yell over his shoulder.

“Oh, Jesus,” Newton said as the leading edge of the swarm flew toward him, “don’t make me do this.” Then he was running, too, and with his first step his sneaker crunched down onto the shiny black shells and he could hear the bugs pop wetly. He ran as fast as he could, and he stared at Crow’s back twenty feet ahead of him. He fixed on that, not daring to look down, knowing without seeing that the roaches were milling in confusion as the leading edge of the wave was fighting to turn and follow while the main mass of them was still in motion forward. Their bodies boiled up around his ankles as he ran and he tried to pick up his knees so that his ankles would be as high off the ground as possible with each step. He was horribly aware of how low his sneaker tops were.

He ran and ran, and within a dozen steps his shoes were smeared with a sticky white-green goo of insect guts and still the roaches swarmed around him in their legions; the hiss of their bodies scraped against one another and the whisper of their legs over the rough ground was dreadful. He ran as the air burned in his lungs and pain blossomed in his chest like fireworks, all the time watching Crow’s back as the man pelted down the path back the way they had come. Crow was running faster, pulling ahead yard by yard.

We’re going to die! He thought as he ran. We’re going to die! It was the only clear thought he could manage.

Roaches leapt at him, clung to his clothes, crawled up his pants legs as he ran, and Newton was uttering a high-pitched continuous cry of total terror. The field was still a hundred yards ahead and now Crow was almost up to the back wall of the house. Newton saw this and a fresh wave of terror struck him as he suddenly remembered that whoever or whatever had locked itself in that house could use their keys to unlock the locks, and then those doors would open. Front door, back-door, cellar door. All of them would open, and what—dear sweet God, what?—would come howling out?