The Rains (Untitled #1)(33)
As we neared the doorway, Ezekiel drew slowly into view. Arm. Shoulder. Then the head nodded to the side, facing away, those two tunnels bored through the back of the skull, framed by mouse-brown hair.
We confronted the body, that twitching hand.
The palm slid a few inches on the tile, making a squeaking sound, and Chatterjee gave a little yelp. Ezekiel repeated the motion, as if he were trying to paddle.
“So check it out,” Ben said, stepping across the body. He grabbed the legs, rotated Ezekiel around, and pulled him out into the hall like a rolled-up carpet.
Ezekiel’s head knocked the doorjamb, his arms drifting up over his head as if he’d jumped off a cliff. A deep indentation cratered the flesh above his left eyehole where the stun gun had caved in his skull and penetrated his brain. A black slick showed beneath, a smear of infected white matter. One cheek twitched. His Adam’s apple lurched, and clicking sounds emerged, as if something were trying to talk through his voice box but had no idea how to operate it.
I thought about Dr. Chatterjee’s description of the parasite wrapped around the frontal cortex—how it had its figurative hands on the control levers of the human body—and I shuddered. I heard Alex gasp. Chatterjee’s hand was up, covering his mouth. Patrick alone didn’t flinch as he stared down at the thing that used to be Ezekiel.
Ben kept pulling him by the ankles, the body shushing across the tile, the head leaving behind a six-inch swath of blood. Once Ezekiel was well into the hall, Ben dropped his legs with a thump. Then he kicked the limbs wide, posing the guy so it looked like he was doing a jumping jack.
Patrick stood back a few feet with the rest of us. Watching Ben drag Ezekiel around like a sack of trash, I felt something clench in my stomach. I was intimidated by Ben, and that feeling was made worse when I glanced over at Patrick and could tell that he was, too. It wasn’t just Ben’s ruthlessness that was scary. It was the fact that he actually seemed in his element.
He looked up at us, the scar tissue pulling into different arrangements on his face. “You’re not gonna see from back there.”
We eased forward. Alex hesitated a moment over by the duffel bag containing what remained of her best friend. Patrick rested a hand on her lower back, steering her with us.
We ringed the twitching body.
I’d not yet seen a Host up close. The eyeholes were bizarrely clean, the insides rimmed with vessels and brain matter but not dripping or bleeding at all. It was almost as if they’d been bored by a laser that cauterized as it went.
Setting his feet on either side of the flung-wide arm, Ben crouched by Ezekiel’s face and beckoned us to come in even closer. I’d seen too many horror movies to not be freaked out. But I wasn’t willing to let Ben see me scared, so I bit the inside of my cheek and bent in a little more.
Ben took a slender Maglite out of his pocket and clicked it on. He tilted the flashlight’s beam across Ezekiel’s face, and what I saw made my nerves jump.
The eyeholes weren’t holes at all. Each had a transparent membrane stretched across the surface like Saran Wrap. It looked like the liquid sheet covering the little plastic ring on a bubble wand after you dip it in the soapy solution.
Ben grabbed a handful of Ezekiel’s hair and tugged his head up off the floor so we could see through to the second membranes stretched across the backs of the tunnels.
“God in heaven,” Chatterjee said. “What in the world is that?”
“Dunno,” Ben said, breathing heavily from all his exertion. “But watch this.”
He let the head clunk back to the floor. Then he tapped the membrane with a forefinger. The membrane turned on like a computer screen but stayed transparent at the same time, so we were looking through an image and at it at the same time.
It showed the gray early-morning sky broken by a few clouds, their shapes rendered with lines, sort of like you see on a blueprint. The picture—if you could call it that—twitched a few times, fuzzed with static like the TV back in the gym. Somewhere beneath my shock, it occurred to me that this interference might be because of the damage to the brain caused by the stun gun. Were the clouds in the image drifting? Before I could process any of this, the angle shifted, scanning across the sky.
It wasn’t a still picture. It was footage.
As the view tilted downward, the football stadium’s bleachers scrolled into sight, marked with those same odd structural outlines. It was as though some software program were tracing every edge and contour of the visual field. The point of view rose higher, about six feet off the field, and then the angle tilted forward severely so we were looking at the grass.
“What are we seeing?” Patrick asked.
The footage continued at a rapid clip, the line of the end zone coming into sight. A ninety-degree right turn spun the field on its axis, and the point of view moved forward, turf sweeping by, each blade of grass delineated by those digital-looking lines. Every now and then, the toe of a boot poked into range at the bottom.
My burning lungs told me I’d been holding my breath. I only realized that I knew the answer as I heard myself say it out loud: “We’re seeing what Ezekiel saw after he turned into a Host. This is the inside view.” My heartbeat made itself known against my ribs. “He’s being played like an avatar in a video game.”
Chatterjee blew out a breath. “It’s as though the virus was … engineered.”