JOHN
The van was not travelling; it was screaming. The accelerator was hammered home by Craig and, over the background of a failing city, the howl of the engine was an angsty scream flinted. We were not driving, we were shuddering, we were in the cage of metal and we were hurling at a gauntlet of falling cement and rising dust.
I was holding the dashboard as if my knuckles would have burst right through it. The Ngong Road was outside; it was a moving graveyard. An apartment block to our left moaned, then shook, ripping off its outer covering of brick and glass in a tidal torrent of rubble. But--the humans who were not changed--they ran like ants in a burning nest. Others had been snatched halfway along by the shadows falling out of the smog; others were merely buried.
"Left! Craig, go left!" I screamed like a bus that had overturned on its back like a dead beetle, blocking the lane.
Craig yanked the wheel. There was the scream of tyres sliding over a film of oil and something blacker. Fisktailing, the passenger quarter hit a concrete barrier with some sparks and the cabin was as bright as a flash of lightning.
The seat next to me gave a choked and wet sound.
I turned, and my stomach churned slowly and sickly. Marco was standing leaning up against the door, and his face was as wet chalk. The left shoulder he had was a peaked rag of red. The previous attack of the wasp had not alone torn him; the shaking of the automobile, the very force with which we had been propelled on our run, had completed the task. His arm had been cut off--clean at the joint.
John, said he, which I can hardly hear, and his eyes are out of focus, glazed with amazement. He wasn't screaming. He was past screaming. He was drifting. Blood was gushing into the upholstery and the small space was filled with thick and steaming blood.
"Hold him! Chris, grab him!" I shouted, yet Chris was fastened in the rear, and his hands were around the senseless body of Zak.
Zak was dead weight, and his head would be lolling in each jerk of the car. It was he who put us in this hell, and he could not allow us to stop. He was a bothersome expense which we could not bear, and a brother whom we could not part.
Suddenly, the roof groaned.
A wasp of man-size shot onto the hood and its multi-faceted eyes displayed the mesmerisms of mayhem in a million broken pieces. It weighed down and broke the windshield. Its scythe-like clippers moved downwards, at the throat of Craig through the glass.
"It's on us!" Zak! said Chris, throwing himself over Zak.
His car went wildly as Craig ducked and attempted to control it. The legs of the creature raked along the metal--knife on a chalkboard. I took my blade, but I knew I shouldn't be too tardy. The wings of the wasp became blurred and the hum was an aching in the steering column.
Then, Teresa's hands moved.
Her body was small and bent, and she sat in the front with her bald head as a result of the rounds of chemotherapy that she had gone through before the world crumbled. She didn't look at the wasp. She stared at the holes in the asphalt before her.
There was a rhythmic, unnatural twitch in her fingers.
Great dark vines were growing out of the fissures in the road. They didn't grow; they surged. They were muscled serpents, which were obsidian-green, and had teeth-like thorns on them. They whipped upwards, round the thorax and legs of the wasp with a moist, binding crack. The animal was ripped off the hood in the middle of a leap and its cry cut off as it was hurled against the side of a collapsing billboard.
Teresa didn't speak. She didn't even breathe. She only gazed away, with a frozen, weary concentration on her face. No one in the car looked at her. We couldn't. Occupying ten thousandth part of us to see what we have just seen was to admit the unbelievable, unbiological speed of those vines--the fact that the world was some stranger and more deadly than we could contemplate.
"Keep going!" I screamed at Craig.
We ripped through a crowd of yellows so dense I could not see the hood. The odour of rot and ozone was stifling. We went past a row of, as we call them, shufflers--men whose wasp inclinations were such huge hemorrhagic boils, that it almost brought them to their knees to pass between the fragments. And one of them crashed into our side mirror, which broke like a twig.
And the junkyard is but a few miles! Craig choked, and his eyes were stinging with the sweat. And then as soon as we could get over the overpass--
The road stretched before one like it were opening its gate. The dust cleared.
Nevertheless, the road did not desire us to go.
Some wasps were bigger than others, and a shade broke off on the ruins of a bank. With a frightening, massive graciousness it moved. A Spider a monster of crimson belly and terrible size, nine feet long, including its eight legs--the tip of which is lined with obsidian spikes.
It didn't scuttle; it launched.
The monster hit the pavement like a cannonball and, with tremendous force, broke through the asphalt, shaking the car and almost causing us to overturn. Its eyes reflected the light, and a momentary cessation had become the time.
Craig dropped to the brakes, but we were too much about. We were driving right into the mouth of the monster.
"Brace!" I screamed and the world turned red.