Andy had pulled out a book too. Kerri, sitting across, pointed her flashlight at the back cover.
“Why are you reading ‘another inspiring entry in our favorite pop-Gothic series,’ according to Sapphic Readers Quarterly?”
“It was a gift,” Andy said.
Then Tim raised his head.
The soprano quivered.
The books convulsed in their shelves, windowpanes rattled, paintings clopped, furniture neighed and furiously stamped the ground.
And then it all ceased.
The gramophone needle had drifted off the disc. Four pair of eyes checked one another.
“Okay. That’s our vacation done,” Andy gathered.
“Is this it?” Nate asked Kerri. “The limnic eruption?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was expecting something more dramatic.”
She pulled a curtain back to reveal a window and peered through the shutters. The isle’s lush plant life blocked her view of the lake. Andy had better luck with the window she chose. She could see gentle ripples surfing across the waters.
“It looks calm enough. It should explode like a Coke, right?”
“I’ve never seen it happen,” Kerri argued. “I don’t think anyone’s seen it happen.”
“?‘Should explode like a Coke,’?” Peter quoted, from the armchair opposite Nate. “Really, man, why is she replacing me?”
“What was that noise?” Kerri wondered.
“I mean, Kerri is the logical choice. She’s got the looks and the brains, no arguing that.”
“What noise?” Nate asked, fighting to ignore him.
“God, I would even understand you taking over,” Peter went on. “But Andy? I won’t deny she’s got initiative, but—”
Tim snarled at the window; Kerri instantly knelt beside him and tugged his neck.
“Shh. Quiet, Tim. Quiet.”
PETER: See? Even the dog is smarter.
NATE: (Rounding on him, hissing.) Will you shut the fuck up!
SOMETHING: Ggguh.
Nate sprang to his feet. Kerri looked back at him, nodding, That noise.
Andy, spying through the shutters, muttered, “Oh fuck.”
From the vaguely defined shoreline between vegetation and still water, half a Greek alphabet of gray, malformed figures was arduously and determinedly emerging. And then, staggering, undecided on which pair or pairs of extremities to stand on, they were approaching the mansion.
Andy tiptoed back from the window, readying her shotgun.
“Foyer,” she whispered, luring them with a finger.
They retreated back to the entrance hall, and Andy picked up a chair and stealthily propped it to hold the door while Kerri and Nate aimed their rifles at it. The occasional shy wheezing had turned into a frank, raspy choir of a tortured, yet relentless anthem.
(All in whispers.)
ANDY: (Side-glancing the room they just left.) Shit. The lights.
KERRI: It’s okay. They have no vision from living underground.
PETER: Really? Wonder Tomboy hadn’t figured that out?
NATE: (Appalled.) I hadn’t figured that out!
TIM: (Stares at the door like an X-raying Superman, all muscles ready to jump forward and attack.)
This standoff went on for longer than expected. Andy was able to count two full drops of sweat paragliding down her face while she stared at the door handle, daring it to budge.
It didn’t. But the wheezing didn’t cease either. Instead, it grew louder and lumpier and raspier than ever.
Andy couldn’t tell where it was coming from anymore.
She backed away from the doors and signaled the others to follow, the floorboards squeaking treacherously under her feet.
“Where are they coming from?” she wondered.
“Below the lake,” Kerri said. “They follow the CO2.”
“What about below the isle?”
That was the cue a wheezer was waiting for to slam open the door under the stairs and grab Nate by the neck and try to bite his head off. It would have succeeded had Nate not managed to jab the rifle into its mouth. The wrong end.
Tim was faster than the girls and managed to grab hold of Nate’s jeans, but the creature was already dragging him down to the basement. In a single second Nate screamed for help, his jeans ripped out of Tim’s mouth, he was yanked down the stairs, and the door slammed shut.
It stayed closed for the quantum time length before Andy swung it open again, but in that unnamable lapse everything beyond the door was gone. Struggling shapes and screams. Light and sound. Kerri and Andy and Tim found themselves peering into a flat black rectangle of darkness and interplanetary silence.
“FUCK THIS,” Andy spat at the intended end of the chapter, pulling out the flare gun from her pocket and shooting into the dark.
A wheezer at the bottom of the stairs opened its foul mouth to shout back, just in time to allow the flare to fly into its throat and burn inside its torso, the rubidium flames shining through its slimy translucent flesh like a bright red, black-smoking Halloween pumpkin of pain.
By the light of which Andy saw fit to jump downstairs, shoot a second wheezer charging for her, spot Nate’s rifle on the floor, bat the skull halfway off a third wheezer, let the charging Weimaraner finish him off, and run for Nate as he was being dragged to the dark end of the room, the creature that had seized him preferring to secure a meal before the fight.
Had Nate not seen a pillar to grab on to by the light of that howling, sparking wheezer-lamp still spasming on the ground, he wouldn’t have delayed the wheezer enough to let Andy jump on its back, sink her cannon into its spine where its four shoulders seemed to join, and pull the trigger, blowing up the concrete below.
Tim was latched on to the third wheezer’s leg, just waiting for Kerri to come downstairs and take a swing at its head. A substantial part of the skull did come off this time.
The wheezer-lamp had stopped moving. A bright red light burned inside its abdomen, its skin blazing white and crawling with overexposed blood vessels.
Andy held Nate’s head up. “Nate. Nate. Look at me.”
His face was drained white, the way living people, or even the recently deceased, never look. He had blood left inside him, though. It showed through his T-shirt, in groups of three parallel slashes at his chest and neck. Andy checked for arterial bleeding; there was none. Kerri was now trying to pry a word out of him.
“Nate. Can you walk?” she asked, propping him up. “Nate? Nate, speak!”
“CO2,” Nate fitted in one breath.
“What?”
(Facing Kerri, quivering.) “Flares…produce CO2.”
A change in the lighting marked the wheezer-lamp suddenly standing up, red light pouring out of the many holes in its torso and its mouth as it threw a ground-rippling, marrow-thirsty, pure carbon dioxide–fueled screech and crawl-ran on all six toward them.
Andy and Kerri both raised their weapons, aimed vaguely, and fired. The lamp exploded like any lamp would, throwing a wave of guts and severed limbs across the room to splatter off the wall.
“Upstairs,” Andy ordered, helping Kerri with the wounded, her sneakers squishing on monster pulp.
The foyer was clear. The front door still held.