Alan Dean Foster Interlopers

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much subdued; the ebb and flow of those employees and visitors and
patients who remained was considerably reduced. Mark and Dana had long since
departed, but not before making him promise that if he needed anything,
anything at all, he was to call them either at home or work, regardless of the
hour. It was good to have friends, he told himself as he strode purposefully
down the hall, even if there was nothing they
could do. It was all up to him now. All up to him.
He turned corners and traversed passageways until it occurred to him that he
might be lost. He was more irritated than angry. It was the nature of
whoever was re-sponsible for the planning of hospitals to construct them in
such a fashion as to make their interiors as confusing as possible for
unknowing visitors. Theseus himself would not have been able to
follow the "simple instructions" that were commonly provided to
preoccupied visitors. To indicate direction, large urban hospitals resorted to
strips of colored tape affixed to floors and walls, when what each visitor
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really needed was an individual, hand-held GPS.
Finding himself in a comparatively busy corridor that looked exactly like
the dozen or so corridors he had already traversed, he confronted a
tall, preoccupied intern clad in surgical greens. A cap covered his
head and hair and a white mask hung from his neck.
"Excuse me. I'm lost, and I was wondering if you could show me the way out."
Despite his distress, Cody somehow managed a smile.
"The way out?" The intern smiled. He had a narrow but pleasant face
accented by a distinctively hawkish nose. "Most people use the Eighth
Street exit." Raising an arm, he pointed. "Keep straight on that way and go
through the double doors. Turn at the first right and you'll see
another set of doors. There's a security station on the other side, and
beyond that, the street."
"Straight, right, straight," Cody repeated mechanically. "Thanks."
"You're welcome." The intem grinned widely. "Of
134
Dean foster course, that's the exit everyone else takes. For you,
Coshocton Westcott, there is no exit. Not now. Not any-more."
Shocked out of his suffering, Cody stumbled away from the intern's
glacial, slightly twisted smile. As he stared at the other man, he saw
that his eyes were com-pletely glazed over, like a window on a particularly
frosty morning. Small, many-legged creatures bulged in the mid-dle and
translucent of aspect milled about on the surface of his corneas-or in that
general psychical vicinity. Somewhere behind those squalid, transient
cataracts there lived a decent, caring, concerned medical professional. But at
the moment, his entire system, from eyes to ears to mouth, had been taken over
and was under the tena-cious control of Interlopers unknown in strength and
num-ber.
One corner of the man's smile imploded, as if the par-asitic aberrations
fighting to command his body were im-perfect in their understanding of his
motor functions, unable despite their skill and power to operate the
com-plex human machinery they had taken control of with the same ease as its
evolutionary landlord. The left side of the intern's face hung slack, as if he
had suffered a seri-ous stroke. It rendered the ghastly grimace even more
grotesque. Expression-wise, before Cody's eyes the un-fortunate intern
metamorphosed into a cross between Dr. Kildare and the Phantom of the Opera.
The archaeologist didn't give a good goddamn what the man looked like. When he
spoke, he knew he was addressing anything but a bewildered apprentice
physi-cian.
"What have you done to my wife?"
"She sleeps." The intern was weaving on his feet now, caught in the grip of
and manipulated by purposeful night-
mares. "Not dead but not alive." The scornful sneer grew more contemptuous.
"She is become food."
Howling, Cody launched himself at the other man. Veering away from
the archeologist's lunge with preter-natural grace, the haunted
physician whirled and sprinted down the hallway. Blind with rage,
Cody pursued with-out stopping to consider what he would do if he
actually caught his tormentor. Whoever he actually was, the poor
intern was not responsible either for his scornful words or his
taunting actions.
Interlopers operated his muscles, his tongue, his palate, making clumsy use of
them to con-vey their feelings in terms a human could understand. Catch the
man, tackle him, bring him down, and carry the confrontation further, and
observant hospital person-nel in the vicinity might readily assume
that the tall out-sider was assaulting one of their own. Cody would be
swarmed by security officers, dragged off his inculpable quarry, and
arrested. Little good could he do Kelli in jail.
None of which penetrated his anger sufficiently to slow him down.
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They passed a wide-eyed night nurse and a startled janitor, a grieving family
on their way out and a pair of assistant administrators necking in a phone
alcove. The chase continued down a glut of corridors that were new to Cody. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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