The car shuddered down the logging road. White threw up his hands and screamed. Wade screamed, too, when he saw what White was screaming about.

At least a dozen more sisters blocked the road.

Where the h.e.l.l did they come from!

"RUN "EM DOWN!" White bellowed.

Wade proceeded to do just that. He gripped the wheel hard and trounced the gas. They stood like bowling pins. Wade plowed into them with such impact that the lead sisters exploded jets of black blood from their mouths, inundating the windshield. Wade turned on the wipers and kept plowing. He watched each rank collapse under the b.u.mper, and saw now that they numbered more than a dozen, much more. They were using themselves as barricades-they didn"t care. They just stood there, grinning, as Wade mowed them down. The bodies thumped under the cruiser"s wheels; there were so many of them it was like driving over hay bales.

In the rearview, the sisters, though crushed, were getting back up to run after them. It figures, Wade thought. And in front, the grinning white faces loomed and fell, only to be replaced by more. Then the pa.s.senger window shattered.

I have had better days, Wade considered.

Several sisters hung onto the car, s.n.a.t.c.hing at White. White screamed honorably, gouging at their hideous, giggling faces. It"s me they want, Wade realized, not White. But White was in the way, and that was his hard luck. The sisters struggled further to get to Wade, clawing through White. White just screamed and screamed.

At last the car had run over the last of the cloaked women. Wade whipped out onto the Route, but he still had two sisters hanging onto the pa.s.senger door. Wade expertly sideswiped a fat oak tree and skimmed them off.

He drove for miles before daring to stop. The grille was pounded in, the fenders crumpled, the hood aglaze in shiny black blood. But White, Wade noted, had come out of this worse than the car. The sisters had pulled his face and scalp off, pulled his arms off, pulled his throat out. What now rode as pa.s.senger bore no likeness whatsoever to good old shucking and jiving Chief White. He"d written his last traffic ticket, that was for sure.

Wade idled up to a ravine. "Rest in peace, Chief," he muttered.

He rolled White"s remains out of the car and took off back toward campus.

CHAPTER 30.

Jervis grinned. "How about some entertainment, Lydia?"

Lydia moaned.

On the germinationwarren"s floorwall, Elizabeth Whitechapel lay nude, twitching. Orangish, swirling light hovered within the warren as Jervis led in an exceptionally grotesque holotype. Four shoulders composed its arched back, housing four sets of arms. A fifth set of arms served as legs, joined by a muscled b.u.t.tocks. The beast"s sinuous skin shined blood-red in sweat. Puffy vertical slits formed its eyes, nose, and mouth.

By now, Lydia was catching on. The word s.p.a.ceship didn"t sit well with her, but what else could this be? She"d picked up bits of conversation: they kept talking about leaving, leaving tomorrow night. As in...taking off? They"d also mentioned recharge, which could refer to a power supply of some kind. Other words, weirder words, had reached her ears, too. Stasisfield. Psilight. Interspecielmetis. The word alien didn"t sit well with her either, but if the labyrinth"s tenants weren"t aliens, what were they? She"d noticed many of the cloaked women. Many pranced about naked, their sleek white bodies faintly veined, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s nippleless, their p.u.b.es bare. They were clones.

Invaders, Lydia thought.

Movement caught her eye. The holotype, whose genitals looked like a cl.u.s.ter of spoiled grapes, hobbled a circle around the naked girl. The girl seemed paralyzed. Nevertheless, there was wantonness in her eyes. Somehow they"d induced a positive s.e.xual response when the girl should be screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder. The girl wanted this multilimbed thing. She wanted it to mate with her.

Oh my G.o.d, Lydia thought. With all eight of its webbed hands, the holotype kneaded its cl.u.s.tered genitals, which soon swelled to a budded red pole. The pole was then inserted into the girl"s mouth. This oral foreplay did not last long, however, before the thing"s member grew too large for the confines of the girl"s mouth. It was withdrawn, pulsing. Lydia"s stomach churned.

Jervis appeared at the static barrier, "How do you like the entertainment so far? Beats Seinfeld any day, huh?"

Behind him, shrieks of pleasure erupted, unearthly grunts, and a vigorous slapping sound. Thank G.o.d Jervis blocked Lydia"s view. "Why?" she croaked.

"The master plan," Jervis encrypted.

Elizabeth Whitechapel screamed in staccato bursts. The wet slapping speeded up to a blur.

"He"s one of the bigger ones," Jervis noted, "and I don"t mean shoe size. But we soften the girls up first so they can take it."

Lydia grew dizzy. Her head spun with the screams.

"And if you think that f.u.c.ker"s big, take a look at Pretty Boy over there." Jervis pointed to the adjoining hold. "You haven"t forgotten about him, have you?"

No, as a matter of fact she hadn"t. The holotype they"d reserved for Lydia was thumping the repulsion screen with its fingerless hands. Its raw meat face surged forward, red l.u.s.t in its gelatin eyes.

"You"re gonna get every inch," Jervis promised. "Right up the a.s.s."

It beat its ma.s.sive erection against the screen and mewled.

Jervis laughed out loud. Lydia fainted.

Wade awoke just past noon, glare on his face. Sunlight, he thought. Oh, bliss. He"d hidden the cruiser behind the town theater and had dozed off. He"d slept as if dead.

By now the cops would be going apes.h.i.t looking for White, Peerce, and Porker. And there was still the question of Lydia; she was the only one Wade trusted enough to tell, but where was she?

He left the cruiser, electing to return to campus on foot. He"d have a hard time explaining to the gate guard how he came to be driving Chief White"s cruiser without the company of Chief White. He crossed campus stealthily, mindful of police. Something deep in his gut told him not to return to the dorm, but this he dismissed as nerves. It was daytime now. He had nothing to fear in the daytime, did he?

He trotted down the bike path which paralleled the student shop. He stopped in his tracks and nearly shouted with joy.

His Corvette sat shining in the shop lot.

Wade ran. "Lydia! It"s me!"

No reply. But she must be close by-the keys were still in the Vette, and on the console lay Tom"s pendant that she found on the Route, and the little pistol. There was something else too, something that looked like a portable tensor lamp. Hadn"t he seen it before, at the sciences center?

"Lydia!"

Pieces of padlock lay on the pavement. The shop door stood ajar. Wade knew something was...f.u.c.ked up. Inside, he peeped, "Lydia?" First he noted the untarped cars, then the jugs. Then he found Lydia"s Colt Trooper Mark III on the floor.

Then he heard voices.

The wall? he thought.

The voices were coming from the wall. Like walking in a dream, Wade moved closer. What is that? He noticed a black dot on the wall. But when he put a finger to it, he discovered it wasn"t a dot at all, but a hole.

Hole, he thought moronically. In the wall. Voices... Hole. Wade put his eye to the hole and looked in.

Jervis was hanging a naked girl on a harness. Behind him, a wall glowed orange around racks of big circles, like kegs. Steam rose amid distant machine sounds.

As if in supervision, Professor Dudley Besser looked on.

"You know, Prof, five girls doesn"t seem like much."

"It"s exponential, Jervis," Besser said. "The fissionizationvessels are needed only to provide basic metis prototypes. From there, after computer calculated transfections, the desired metis types are ma.s.s produced exponentially."

"Oh," Jervis remarked. "Like a production line."

"In a sense, Jervis, yes."

Wade"s eye seemed sewn open to the hole.

Jervis was kneeling now, punching some kind of nozzles into the bottom of the hanging girl"s feet.

"We still leaving tonight?"

"Yes, we have to. The stasisfield is draining."

Jervis glanced up in a sudden concern. "What about Wade?"

"Leave Wade to me," Besser said.

Was it Wade"s imagination, or was the nude girl in the harness...stretching?

Now Jervis was milking white sludge out of her feet. The sludge oozed from the nozzles into big jugs-identical to the jugs Wade had just seen in the shop. The gelatinous white glop reminded him of the stuff he"d seen in that sump at the clearing.

Wade, as usual of late, was doubting his sanity. This was a reasonable surmise when you were seeing and hearing people through a hole in a cinder block wall, the other side of which was a f.u.c.king parking lot, and even more reasonable when the people you were seeing and hearing through that hole were pa.s.sively milking white sludge out of a naked girl in a harness. And Wade was right; the girl was indeed stretching. Her body now sagged fully to the floor. She looked boneless. Jervis took her down then and very calmly-Jesus, gag me! Wade thought-stuffed her into a big can. The girl"s head flapped like a rubber bag, her limbs as slack and pasty as baker"s dough. Jervis packed her in tight and lidded the container.

"I"ve still got some bodies to bury. Then can I-"

"Yes, Jervis, but be sure to tend to this first." Besser handed Jervis something, a black cube of some kind, the size of one of those Rubik things. "It"s programmed to detonate at one minute after midnight. Make sure you"re back before recharge."

"When"s that?"

"Eleven fifty five, exactly."

A bomb, Wade concluded. They"re talking about a bomb.

Was Besser smiling? "And now I have a little business to tend to myself. I"ll trust you to see that there are no problems."

"Right, Prof. Later."

Then both figures left the glowing orange room or corridor or whatever it was. Wade took his eye from the hole, aghast.

He had no idea what he"d just seen or heard, nor did he try to explain it to himself. All he knew was this: They had a bomb, and it was going to go off at one minute past midnight.

Tonight.

CHAPTER 31.

Winnifred sauntered naked through the low warrens. Heaven down here, she mused. She was out of control in her ecstasy. The psilight bathed her flesh as stark as bone as she wandered amid the humming, tinged dark. She was probably insane by now.

Soon they"d be gone, to greater miracles ahead. The joy of being part of it stunned her. Me. G.o.ddess Winnifred. Excited blood pumped through her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and s.e.x, and there she went again, touching herself, plying herself with her fingers.

The psilight hummed. Orange mist glowed within the productionholds, relative influx of the catalyticexchangers, which ran constantly. These low warrens seemed to extend infinitely. Just how deep did they go?

A factory! she thought in rushing pulses. A factory of love!

The sisters paid her no mind. They were perfect in their duplicity. Most were naked, as Winnifred herself, unflawed bodies moist in the orange tint. She recessed into the emwguidancetrackingpoint, a simple processor which countered magnetic quadrupole activity, generating negative kinetic charge momentum. The chamber was just a black honeycombed wall laced with fine threads. She sat down. Here, in the labyrinth"s heart, she would finish her o.r.g.a.s.m.

Murmuring, she closed her eyes. The psilight licked her nerves, sucked heat into her body. She filled her mind with the most base s.e.xual images: she was a cave woman being gang-raped in the woods. One dirty Neanderthal after the next stuck a p.e.n.i.s that had never been washed into her mouth. Some came right there, sending globs of sperm down her throat, or pulling out to spatter her enraptured face. Other used the oral act as a primer after which they rammed their excited c.o.c.ks into her s.e.x, humped her hard in the dirt-one after another-until she was filled with s.e.m.e.n, overflowing...

Winnifred"s legs tensed as the images grew more vile. She was being choked, sodomized, spat on and p.i.s.sed upon, yet each demonstration only inflamed her more. Then she lay sopped and filthy; above her the cavemen stood round, all chuckling, as they m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed in unison for a final climax. By the time they were all done coming on her, Winnifred felt covered with a hot, pale rue, and then- Her fingers worked furiously, and there it went, like a bomb burst in her loins.

Lovely, lovely...

When she opened her eyes, a shadow stood over her.

"Dudley?" She squinted; it was him. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you," answered the dark voice.

What could he want? He was supposed to be bringing in the holotype. She got up, taming her disdain. What did they need him for anyway? He was fat and arrogant. He sickened her.

Immediately, his fat arms were about her; he was kissing her, caressing her. "I love you," he whispered, and urged her back into the servicepa.s.s. Here the psilight shined more keenly, replenishing her desires. His fat fingers fiddled at her s.e.x. She could feel the puny erection through his size 54 trousers.

Lips like a fish groveled to hers. His tongue went into her mouth, his hand squeezed her b.u.t.tocks.

Winnifred giggled. "Oh, Dudley, you"re impossible."

His trousers fell. He pushed her to her knees.

So that"s what he wants. She gave it her best, pushing up, but- "I"m sorry, Dudley, but you"re so fat I can"t get to it!"

Besser looked down. "Maybe you can get to this, then."

Winnifred screamed. Besser jammed infusers into her neck, one in each hand, then discharged a third into her navel. The overdose of calciumdecimationliquetactor flooded her bloodstream. Winnifred"s bones dissolved at once, and she flopped on the floor.

Besser stepped on her stomach. Winnifred spouted vomit.

"How fat am I now, b.i.t.c.h?"