Chapter 59: Hive-Mind Holocaust
The hum wasn’t a sound. It was a pressure, a wrongness that vibrated the fillings in Jake’s teeth and made the loose stones on the ground shiver like frightened animals. Bruce stood with his arm outstretched, veins standing in sharp relief along his forearm, his naked body glistening with a sheen of sweat that wasn’t from the desert sun. His hazel eyes had gone flat, the color of dull shale.
The pale things, a skittering, jerking wall of jointed limbs and clicking chitin, recoiled as one. It wasn’t fear. It was physics. The air in front of Bruce’s palm shimmered, a heat-haze distortion that sucked the color from the world, turning everything to blurred grays and washed-out yellows. Jake could feel the energy pulling, not from around them, but from Bruce himself, a deep, resonant drain that made the hairs on his neck stand straight up.
“Roland!” Jake yelled, his own voice thin against the gathering storm. “Get the people back!”
The gunslinger didn’t need telling. He was already herding the terrified survivors toward the narrow pass, his eyes never leaving Bruce. There was a new weight in Roland’s gaze, a recognition of a power that didn’t come from powder and steel, and it settled on his features like a fine dust of dread.
Then the queen arrived.
It didn’t crawl from the rocks. It unfolded from them. The basalt cliff face seemed to soften, to weep, and from the weeping stone a shape coagulated. It was the color of the inside of an oyster shell, mottled grey and sickly pearl. It had no true head, just a bulbous, pulsing mass at the front of a segmented body as thick as a railway sleeper and longer than three men laid end to end. Countless legs, thin and multi-jointed like the others but scaled up to monstrous proportion, scuttled with a noise like a cascade of dry bones. It moved fast, horribly fast, a blur of pale hate spearing straight for Bruce.
Bruce didn’t flinch. The hum peaked, becoming a silent scream that Jake felt in the marrow of his bones. The shimmer in front of Bruce’s hand collapsed in on itself for a single, heart-stopping instant.
Then it exploded outward.
There was no light, no fire. It was a wave of pure, concussive force, a wall of compressed nothing that hit the world and erased it. The sound it made was the sound of the air itself being murdered. Jake saw it happen in a series of frozen frames: the leading edge of the pale swarm simply disintegrating, turning to a fine, black-grey powder that hung in the air for a fraction of a second before being blown away. Then the wave hit the larger creatures behind them, and they popped like overripe fruit, splattering viscous fluid that evaporated before it hit the sand.
The queen skittered sideways, impossibly agile for its size, but the wave was wide. It caught the last third of its length. The pearlescent chitan didn’t shatter. It unraveled. Jake watched as the creature’s body simply came apart, segment by segment, leg by leg, in a silent, meticulous dissection. The remaining two-thirds of the thing, severed cleanly, writhed and flopped, a deep, shuddering screech tearing from some unseen orifice. The sound was a physical thing, a hot knife in Jake’s ears.
Then the wave hit the cliff face.
It didn’t crack. A perfect, semicircular section of it, thirty feet across, simply ceased to be. A smooth, curved bowl of nothing was carved into the solid rock, as if scooped out by a god’s fingernail. Sand, pebbles, and the destroyed remnants of the creatures hung in the air for a moment in the void, before gravity reasserted itself and they rained down in a gentle, ghastly shower.
Silence.
A deep, ringing, absolute silence, broken only by the soft patter-patter of stone dust falling on the sand.
Bruce swayed. His arm dropped to his side as if the bones had been removed. He took one stumbling step backward, his eyes rolling up white, and crumpled to the ground.
The collapse was more shocking than the wave. One moment, a force of nature obliterating an army. The next, a naked man lying face-down in the dust, utterly still.
“Bruce!” Jake was moving before he knew it, holstering Roland’s gun and sprinting across the cleared sand. Oy bounded ahead of him, a streak of brown and gold, whining softly.
Roland reached Bruce first. He knelt, his fingers going to the side of Bruce’s neck. After a long moment, he gave a short, sharp nod. “Alive. Pulse is strong. But he’s gone deep. Used himself up.”
Jake skidded to a halt, kneeling on the other side. Bruce’s skin was cold, despite the desert heat. His breathing was shallow but even. He looked like he was in a sleep too profound for dreams.
“What in the name of all the gods was that?” a voice whispered from the pass. One of the survivors, a woman with a gash on her forehead, stared at the smooth, scooped-out cliff face with hollow eyes.
Roland ignored her. He was looking at Jake. “You felt it. The connection.”
Jake nodded, his throat tight. “Just before he came. It was like… a door blowing open.”
“He paid the toll to get here,” Roland said, his voice low. “And then he paid again.” He stood, brushing dust from his knees. “We need to move. This noise will draw other things. Things that might not hesitate.”
“We can’t carry him,” Jake said, stating the obvious. Bruce was a big man, solid.
“Oy?” Jake looked at the bumbler. “Ake! Ory!” Oy nosed at Bruce’s limp hand, then looked at Jake, his gold eyes puzzled. “Can you… watch him? Guard him? We’ll make a travois.”
Oy chirruped, a sound of clear affirmation. He settled his body over Bruce’s head, facing outward, a small, fierce sentinel.
It took twenty minutes to lash together a serviceable drag-sled from scavenged rifle stocks and a tarp. As they worked, the stunned silence of the survivors fractured into low, terrified conversation. They kept their distance from Bruce, eyeing him with a mixture of awe and raw terror.
Jake helped Roland lift Bruce onto the tarp. His body was a dead weight. As they arranged him, Jake’s hand brushed against Bruce’s inner arm. The skin there was raised, rough. He looked down. Fine, twisting lines, like the roots of a tree or the path of a lightning bolt, had etched themselves into Bruce’s skin from his palm up to his elbow. They were the color of old bruises, a deep, concerning purple-black.
Roland saw it too. His lips tightened. “The power left a scar,” he muttered. “He pushed through a channel not meant for that much.”
They started moving, a ragged, shell-shocked line now with a comatose god on a litter at its center. The smooth, carved cliff face receded behind them, a monument to something none of them understood.
Hours bled into one another. The desert gave way to hard, cracked plains, then to the skeletal remains of an ancient highway. The sky cycled through its sickly purple back to a more familiar, dusty blue. Still, Bruce did not wake.
They found shelter as dusk approached: a concrete shell that might have once been a pumping station. It stank of rot and animal dung, but it had a roof and three walls. Roland posted guards. The people huddled together, passing around a single waterskin, their eyes drifting constantly to the dark shape of Bruce on his litter in the corner.
Jake sat next to him, his own weariness a heavy coat. He’d killed today. He’d spoken the words of the gun. He’d felt the cold stone of purpose replace his heart. He looked at Bruce’s peaceful, sleeping face and felt a jealousy so sharp it surprised him. What would it be like, to have that kind of power? To be so drained by using it that you simply… checked out?
He must have dozed off. He jerked awake to a low, pained groan.
Bruce’s eyes were open. They were bloodshot, the hazel dim. He tried to sit up, gasped, and fell back. Every movement seemed to cause him pain.
“Easy,” Jake said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Just lie still.”
Bruce’s gaze found him, focused with difficulty. “Jake.” His voice was a dry rasp. “The others…?”
“Gone. All of them. You… you wiped them out.” Jake held the waterskin to Bruce’s lips. Bruce drank, coughed, drank again.
“Cost,” Bruce managed, looking down at his arm. He raised it, turning it to see the livid, branching scars. He let it drop as if it were too heavy. “Paid it. Where…?”
“Some old building. Roland’s got guards out. We’re safe for now.”
Bruce closed his eyes. “Not safe. Never safe.” He was silent for so long Jake thought he’d slipped back under. Then his eyes opened again, clearer now, fixed on Jake with an unsettling intensity. “I saw it. When I let go. I saw… the fabric. It’s thin here, Jake. Worn through in places. What came through… it’s just a symptom. A flea from a sick dog.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the dog is coming.” Bruce tried to push himself up again, this time with more success. He winced, his whole body protesting. “We can’t stay here. In this… in-between. This borderland. It’s amplifying everything. The bond, my power, the tears. We need a fixed point. A real place.”
“Where?” Jake asked, a cold knot forming in his stomach.
Bruce looked toward the broken doorway, past the huddled forms of the sleeping survivors, out into the gathering dark. “The city. The one you told me about. With the train that never stops.”
“The Slow Mutants? The Speaking Ring?” Jake’s mouth went dry.
“A place of power,” Bruce said, his voice gaining strength, edged with desperation. “A weak spot. We can use it. I can… punch a hole. Back to my island. A clean tunnel. But I need a focal point. I need the energy of a thin place.”
Roland appeared in the doorway, his silhouette black against the twilight. He’d heard. “The city is days from here. And it is a nest of madness.”
“This whole world is a nest of madness,” Bruce fired back, a spark of his old force returning. “I have a home. I have people who depend on me. I left them wide open to do this.” He held up his scarred arm. “I need to get back. And I need to take Jake with me.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the wind seemed to die.
“No,” Roland said. The word was final, a stone dropped into a still pool.
“He’s marked, Roland,” Bruce said, his eyes never leaving the gunslinger’s. “The bond isn’t just with me. It’s with all of us, with that place. It’s a part of him now. You keep him here, in this dying world, and that connection will be a wound that never heals. It’ll fester. It’ll attract things worse than those pale bugs. Or it’ll drain him, trying to bridge two worlds, until there’s nothing left.”
Jake looked from Bruce’s fierce, scarred face to Roland’s impassive one. He felt the truth of Bruce’s words in the quiet hum at the base of his skull, the echo of a pleasure so intense it had scared him, the memory of sunlight and laughter that felt more real than the dust in his mouth.
Roland walked into the room, his steps silent on the concrete. He knelt by the litter, his blue bombardier’s eyes level with Bruce’s. “You ask me to give up my ka-tet.”
“I’m asking you to save him,” Bruce whispered.
For a long minute, they just stared at each other, two pillars of will in a broken world. Finally, Roland broke the gaze. He looked at Jake. Not as a gunslinger looks at a pupil, but as a man looks at a son he knows he must let go.
“You choose, Jake,” Roland said, his voice rough. “The desert… or the beach.”
Jake’s heart hammered against his ribs. He thought of Oy, of the road, of the Tower that stood somewhere in all this dying grandeur. Then he thought of the bond, of the warmth, of not being alone in his head with the memories of killing. He thought of a future that wasn’t just dust and blood.
He opened his mouth to speak, but a scream from outside tore the night apart.
It was one of the guards. It was cut off with a wet, choking finality.
Roland was on his feet in an instant, guns leaping to his hands. Bruce swore, trying to heave himself upright. Jake drew Roland’s revolver, the weight both alien and comforting.
From the darkness beyond the doorway, a new sound arose. Not a skitter. A hum. A deep, electrical, hungry hum. And beneath it, the grinding of metal on metal, getting louder.
A single, flickering neon light sputtered to life far down the ancient highway, illuminating a broken sign half-buried in dirt. It depicted a subway train.
The hum wasn’t coming from the creatures.
It was coming from the tracks.
Roland stepped out into the open, peering into the gloom. “The city found us first,” he said, cocking the hammers of his guns. The grinding roar grew, accompanied by the shriek of unoiled wheels. From the tunnel of night, a single, blood-red eye of light appeared, swelling rapidly.
It was a train. Old, rusted, covered in strange, pulsating graffiti that seemed to move in the jagged light. It was not slowing down.
Bruce managed to get to his knees, his scarred arm held before him like a shield, but the light in his palm was faint, guttering. “I’ve got nothing left,” he gritted out.
Jake raised the gun, aiming at the single blazing eye. The words came to him, cold and sure. I do not aim with my hand.
The train roared out of the darkness, not on the long-gone rails, but crushing the broken asphalt beneath it, a charging behemoth of sheet metal and screaming, dying machinery. It was heading straight for the building.
I aim with my eye.
The hum was inside his head now. It was the same hum from Bruce’s power, but twisted, polluted, full of a static hunger.
I do not shoot with my hand.
He pulled the trigger. The report was lost in the world-eating scream of the train.
The single red eye exploded in a shower of glass and sparks. The train slewed sideways, its momentum carrying it into a catastrophic roll, metal shrieking as it tore itself apart mere yards from the doorway, a tidal wave of shredded steel and corroded wiring about to engulf them all.
The world dissolved into noise and flying metal. Jake threw himself backward, his shoulder slamming into Bruce, shoving them both deeper into the concrete hovel. Roland didn’t retreat. He stood framed in the doorway, his long coat whipping in the displaced air, as the train completed its brutal ballet of disintegration.
A wall of shattered glass and twisted steel sheets hammered the ground just outside, digging a furrow in the earth before piling up in a shrieking, groaning mound. The red eye was gone, replaced by the hellish orange spark-show of shorting cables and grinding metal. The sound died into a settling, metallic groan, then an eerie silence broken only by the tink-tink of cooling debris and the panicked whimpers of the survivors.
“Everyone alive?” Roland’s voice cut through the dust-clouded air. A few weak affirmatives answered him.
Jake coughed, pushing himself up. Bruce was beneath him, gasping. “Get off me, kid. I’m already broken enough.”
“Sorry.” Jake rolled off, his eyes fixed on the new landscape. The train hadn’t hit them. It had somehow, impossibly, stacked itself into a mangled barricade directly in front of their shelter, closing off the open side. They were now in a crude box of three concrete walls and one of smoking wreckage. “It’s… blocking us in.”
“Or blocking something else out,” Roland murmured, stepping closer to the jagged metal wall. He reached out a hand, yanked it back as a fat blue spark snapped at his fingers. The graffiti on the torn sides wasn’t paint. It pulsed slowly, a deep bruise-purple, like a living, necrotic tattoo. “This isn’t right. Trains don’t leave their tracks. Not in any world.”
From the other side of the wreckage, a new sound started. A wet, syncopated clicking. It was followed by a slow, dragging scrape.
“Something’s coming,” Jake said, his hand finding the sandalwood grip of Roland’s gun again. It felt colder now.
Bruce managed to sit up, leaning against the wall. His scarred arm lay in his lap, the purple lines looking darker, angrier. “It’s the hum. Can’t you feel it? It’s in the ground.” He placed his palm flat on the concrete floor. “It’s following the old lines. This place… it’s sitting right on top of them.”
The scraping grew louder. Something heavy was moving through the wreckage on the other side, methodically shoving metal aside. A piece of corrugated siding bent inward with a shriek.
“Ideas?” Jake asked, his voice tighter than he wanted.
“The hum’s a frequency,” Bruce said through gritted teeth, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration. “It’s not alive. It’s a machine pulse. I can… maybe I can disrupt it. Jam the signal.” He opened his eyes, looked at his ruined arm with disgust. “But I’m tapped. I need a battery.”
Roland understood first. His gaze flicked to Jake, then back to Bruce. “No.”
“It’s that or we die here,” Bruce said. “The boy’s already part of the circuit. He’s got the bond. It’s in him. I just need to borrow a little.”
“You’ll burn him out.”
“I’ll siphon it,” Bruce insisted, but his face was gray with pain. “Not take it. Use him as a conduit. But I have to touch him. Skin to skin.”
The scraping was right behind the metal wall now. A long, multi-jointed limb, glistening with black oil, slithered through a gap, feeling the air like a blind worm. It was followed by another.
Jake didn’t think. He crossed the space, dropped to his knees in front of Bruce, and ripped open his own shirt. “Do it.”
“Jake—” Roland started.
“He saved us from the bugs,” Jake snapped, not taking his eyes off Bruce’s weary, determined face. “You taught me to use what’s there. It’s there. Use it.”
Bruce nodded, a sharp, grateful jerk of his head. He placed his scarred palm flat on Jake’s bare chest, over his heart. His other hand gripped Jake’s shoulder. The touch was electric, but not with power. It was a hollow, sucking void.
Nothing happened for a second. Then Jake felt it. A cold pull, deep in his gut. It wasn’t painful, but deeply violating, like a cord being yanked from his spine. He gasped. Visions flashed: Camille’s laughing face, the sun on the pavilion water, Susannah’s fierce eyes, the overwhelming, shared pleasure-pain of the bond. The energy wasn’t his, but it had been flowing through him, a quiet river in the background of his mind.
Bruce was dipping a cup into that river.
The purple scars on Bruce’s arm began to glow, a faint, sickly light thrumming under the skin. The dragging, clicking sounds from the other side of the wreckage faltered.
“More,” Bruce whispered, his voice strained.
Jake focused, pushing the memory of the connection toward him. He thought of the feeling of belonging, of not being alone. The cold pull intensified. Jake felt a wave of dizziness, a sapping weakness in his limbs. The glowing in Bruce’s arm brightened.
The limbs jerked back through the gap. A frustrated, mechanical shriek echoed from the other side of the metal wall.
Bruce tore his hand from Jake’s chest as if burned. The glow in his scars died instantly. Jake slumped forward, caught by Roland. He felt drained, hollowed out, like he’d run for days.
“It’s confused the signal,” Bruce panted, sweat beading on his forehead. “Bought us time. Not much.”
Roland helped Jake to his feet. “Can you stand?”
“Yeah,” Jake lied, his legs trembling. He pulled his shirt closed. The spot where Bruce’s hand had been was ice-cold.
“The city’s calling its dogs back,” Bruce said, struggling to rise. Roland offered an arm, hauling him up. “That train was a herder. It’s trying to funnel us. We go where it wants, or we go through it.” He nodded at the towering wreck.
“Through is better,” Roland said. He pointed his gun at a lower section of the piled debris, where two heavy panels formed a slanting cave. “There. We go now, while it’s disoriented.”
They moved, a ragged, terrified convoy. Roland went first, crouching low into the dark, jagged opening. Jake followed, with Bruce leaning heavily on him. Oy scurried at their heels. The survivors scrambled after, their panic giving them speed.
The inside of the train wreck was a cathedral of nightmares. Twisted seat frames hung like gibbeted skeletons. Wires dangled, still spitting faint sparks. The pulsing graffiti on the walls seemed to watch them pass. The air smelled of ozone, burnt plastic, and something sweetly rotten.
Jake’s foot kicked something soft. He looked down. It was a shoe. With a foot still inside it, severed cleanly at the ankle. The flesh was grey, desiccated. He stumbled, bile rising in his throat.
“Don’t look,” Bruce grunted, pulling him forward. “Just move.”
They emerged on the other side into a landscape of shattered concrete and rusted iron girders. Before them, under a sky the color of a fresh bruise, stood the skeletal remains of the city. Skyscrapers, their windows blasted out, leaned against each other like drunken giants. And at the heart of it, a deeper darkness yawned: the mouth of a subway entrance.
From behind them, back through the wreck, the wet clicking started again. This time, it was faster. Hungrier.
“It reacquired the signal,” Bruce said, despair etching his voice. He stared at his scarred arm, now dormant and dead-looking. “It’s coming.”
Roland looked at the distant subway entrance, then back at the wreck from which the clicking was now accompanied by the sound of shearing metal. The things were coming through.
“Run,” he said.