Page 24

My name is Book, Regis—Regis Book—and yes, I am a coward. And you know why? Because the proper synonym for coward, in this messed-up post-Berlin Wall world of ours, is “smart person.” Cowards always come out on top. We try harder, and when we screw up it hurts worse, so we make damn sure it never happens again. We’re the ones who live to fight another day—or just to live.

. . . blood.

Stay alive: My sole, my only legitimate consideration. The only one that matters.

Five more minutes, five more hours. Five more days, more years. Fifty. Five hundred—I don’t discriminate. But I am selfish: Oh, yes. You damn betcha.

Because I’m not going to die, not here—never here, never like this. Watching image- and word-meaning shuffle off into disintegration as my mental deck of cards deals me a dead man’s hand, and the air runs out. Watching the Doctor cough his life away. Watching the lights dim, and hearing this thing inside me hold its figurative breath, waiting for me to get so loopy I don’t care whether or not I’m part of it, or it’s part of me. Or if there’s any me still left for it to be a part of.

No. I’m not going to die like this—or any other way, if I can help it. I?

?m coming out of this sub just the same way I came in, the same way the Doctor and company found me when they opened the Waiting Room’s mag-locked door, after the mandatory five hours had finally elapsed: Alive alive-oh, just like sweet Molly Malone . . .

. . . before the fever, that is. Before the last verse.

Yeah, well, whatever; folk music was never my strong suit.

Alive, spelled ay-ell-ei-vee-ee.

Anything else is gravy.

* * *

The Doctor has lapsed into some kind of half-sleep. In the two-way, I catch a glimpse of my fine new self, post-thing: My bone-blonde hair, my bleached-out skin. My eyes like bruises, cilia purple with broken blood-vessels. I sniff the air, and decide that my skin has begun to smell like hash packed in sulphur.

And this glow, this glow, around and inside me. This inmost light.

The whispers tell me: You are a chrysalis. And I counter by forcing myself to think hard about the shriveled husks I saw left behind in Nanny Book’s back yard, after the butterflies had gone on their merry way. I imagine my mouth splitting slowly open, ripping. Bending like vinyl under the eruptive strain, as a hitherto-hidden larva sloughs me off like so much deluded dead skin.

I feel the fear rise up in me again like wine, like flame—the salt and spices of it distributing themselves through my body while I struggle in its slow-cooking flame, rendering me ever more tender, more juicy. More appetizing.

’Cause fear is what this thing goes for, see? It loves it. Eats it. Got it in little tiny jolts from Kiley and the boy scouts, one by one by one; suck ’em dry and move along, bub. Skin packets, lit and hollowed from within, irradiated with detritus radiance. One big bruise, left to rot: An empty, man-sized wrapper, stuffed full of crumbly bones.

And why was I the only one, apparently, to ever figure this particular connection out?

Just my luck, I guess.

Dribs and drabs, after the long drought on the sea-bottom—aside from stealing the occasional muffled howl from a passing, boneless thing or two, in between geological epochs. From me, though, a veritable stream of terror, so constant as to skirt actual satiety. Fear-engine Book, running on empty: C’mon in and make yourself at home.

The Doctor turns his head again, heavier. Barely able to open his eyes. And tries to ask:

“What . . . happened . . . to—the—?”

“The shell?” I shrug. “Dust in the wind, Doc.” Adding, as though in explanation: “It was old.”

“Pre- . . . Pleistocene.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

A wheeze; a cough. “And—what was . . . inside . . . ?”

To which I smile, curling back my bruised lower lip. Showing the tips of all my remaining upper teeth—my ill-set front caps, my jagged, half-missing left incisor. And reply:

“ . . . Went—inside me.”

* * *

And hey, there’s even evidence: The Doctor taped it all, obsessively anal to the last, with a camcorder installed (as per tradition) behind the two-way—images skipping and fading between intermittent washes of static. I wound it back, watched it, in those first dim eons after I knew for sure that no matter what, the sub would just keep right on drifting further down and faster. Talk about post-modern: My cruel apotheosis, shot by shot, in all its real-time glory.