[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.But they are consuming her.As she stumbles wildly toward the top of the grand staircase, they are devouring her.“Blaaaaaaaaaaake!”There is almost none of Caitlin Chaisson left in the scream.It is, rather, the voice of this terrible, all-consuming cloud of insects so tightly joined to one another it’s impossible to tell what species they’re composed of.And they are transforming Caitlin into something that is more writhing, desperate spirit than person, while ignoring Blake altogether.He literally does not exist for them.At the top of the grand staircase, what remains of Caitlin inside the cloud loses its footing and goes over, and the swarm adjusts perfectly as Caitlin’s vaporous remnants tumble down the stairs, losing skin and flesh and bone on their descent so that halfway down the stairs, the matter inside of the swarm looks more like an abstract, animated sketch of Caitlin Chaisson’s fall than an actual person somersaulting down unforgiving wooden stairs.At the bottom step, all traces of Caitlin the human are gone.It is only at that moment that the swarm lifts into the air, organizing itself beneath the swinging chandelier.A sudden, dizzying uniformity sweeps through each tiny member, and now there is a clicking and clattering of pincers and thicker, heavier wings.Each place within the miniature cyclone of insects Blake directs his attention, he sees bigger and more formidable creatures, flashes of stingers and antennae.But they’re all moving so fast, it’s impossible for him to get a detailed picture of a single one—they seem to exist only as a whole.Their buzzing sound has deepened from an outboard’s high-pitched whine to something that sounds more like a motorcycle’s growl.Blake is about to fire at them.Maybe they’ll come after him, but he doubts it after the way they’ve been ignoring him.At the very least, it will disperse them.At the very least, it will give him something to do other than stand there, dumbfounded, emptied of recourse or any frame of reference for what he’s seeing, the gun in his hand now as powerful and protective as a fingernail clipper.And then they’re gone.It takes Blake a few seconds to see where they’ve gone to, and the effort requires him to stumble halfway down the grand staircase until he can see the hole that Kyle Austin’s body—not Kyle, the vines; the vines broke that hole—punched through the ceiling of the first floor.The more organized swarm of newly enlarged, otherworldly insects has spirited away up through the opening in the widow’s walk floor.His vision blurs and blackens around the edges at the same time.He hears the gun falling barrel over butt down the stairs, feels a vague distant sense of alarm that it might fire, but it doesn’t.It lands at the bottom with a hollow-sounding thud.Hollow and useless against these new terrors of the night.27Left foot, right foot, breathe.Left foot, right foot, breathe.It’s a mantra one of the senior nurses taught him after he first started working in the ER.She’d assured him it would come in handy after the first serious trauma case was wheeled in, an accident victim so hopelessly mangled her appearance in the emergency room was more of a grim formality than a first step toward recovery.Left foot, right foot, breathe.Left foot, right foot, breathe.There was a trick to the little saying he learned only later.It was meant to distract you from how shallow and stunted your breathing was by giving it the weight and duration of a single footfall.A normal breath should take two steps, not one.But by saying all three of them in rapid sequence, by giving them all the same illusory value and duration, you tricked yourself into believing you weren’t edging on a state of shock.And so that’s what Blake Henderson is doing now.Nova is in the kitchen washing her hands at the sink, and for a second it’s possible to believe that she has somehow missed the whole thing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]