The Hunter Page 0,42

find at a dump, nothing that would be in anybody's bedroom. Food in all stages of decomposition. Every kind of refuse, trash, and litter.

No one was smiling anymore.

Dee picked up a tattered Easter basket, paused. An awful smell wafted from it. She stirred the cellophane grass with one long finger, and then her face convulsed. In the basket was a solid mass of white, writhing maggots.

"God!" In one fluid motion Dee threw the basket at the closet, where it hit the door and scattered a shower of white. Michael bolted up from his magazine with a yell. Audrey and Summer were shrieking.

Jenny felt the quick, cold touch of real fear.

"Summer-just what did your grandmother say about your room?" she said.

"Oh-she said things were growing in it," Summer reported, her eyes large and worried. "She said it would attract bugs. She said it looked like an earthquake hit it. She said someday I would get lost in it and never come out."

Dee, who had been staring at Summer, now cut a glance of startled revelation at Jenny. The tension in the room was palpable.

"Ana just what kind of nightmares do you have about it?" Jenny asked, trying to discipline her voice.

"Oh." Summer shivered. "Well-it's like I hear a scratchy noise, and then I look and it's these cockroaches-but they're big, big as ... as sneakers. And then I see this thing on the floor. It's like fungus, sort of a column of fungus, but it's got a kind of mouth on the top and it's howling. It's howling fungus."

Summer's lips were trembling by now.

"It may not sound scary, but it was. It was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life."

A primitive warning was going off in Jenny's brain. She, Audrey, Dee, and Michael all looked at one another. "It sounds plenty scary to me," she said. "I think maybe we'd better get moving."

Michael's lips were puckered in a soundless whistle. "I think maybe you're right," he muttered. He bent to work without another word of complaint.

The closet was full by now, and they were just transferring things from before them to behind them, like digging a tunnel. The garbage kept getting grosser and grosser and scarier and scarier. Things Jenny didn't want to touch with her hands. She wore crumpled Tshirts like oven mitts to move them.

Then the bugs came.

It started with a rustle, a pleasant sound like a taffeta prom dress. Jenny stiffened, then turned slowly to look.

A cockroach, flat and brown. But it was huge, far larger than Jenny's foot. It crawled languidly out of the floor vent, squirming through somehow, its barbed back legs catching on the metal louvers. Its feet made soft ticking sounds on the paper debris.

Summer gave a reedy shriek and pointed at it. Then another one came out of the vent, and another. Summer's pointing finger became a shaky blur.

Jenny reached for a water glass to revive her and snatched her hand back. The glass was jam-packed with crickets, antennae twitching delicately.

Summer saw it. She stopped pointing and went still.

Smaller roaches emerged from a discarded candy box, the frilly paper cups crinkling as the bugs crept out.

Summer's face was so white there were blue patches under her eyes.

Iridescent green beetles the size of footballs began to climb the walls. They flexed their chitinous outer wings, their membranous inner wings hanging out like dragging petticoats.

Summer stood like a statue of ice.

Jenny looked up. A dozen brown moths as big as small kites were clinging flat to the ceiling, their dark-spotted wings outstretched.

"Come on, Summer, help us!" Audrey said in a fear-clotted voice as she raked at the trash. Disturbed ants swarmed out of it, forming thick trails like black waterfalls over the debris.

Summer didn't move. She was staring at one of the hard-shelled beetles like a witless rabbit caught in a headlight.

The ground rocked beneath Jenny's feet.

At first she thought it was some effect of the garbage shifting. Then she remembered: "She said it looked like an earthquake hit it...."

"We have to hurry!" she shouted at the same time as Dee yelled, "Go, go!"

They were clawing through the garbage now, tearing just enough away from the wall to reveal cracked and peeling wallpaper, to make sure there was no door. They climbed on the smaller mounds, wading through them.

The ground shook again.

The whisper of terror inside Jenny had become a scream.

"Hurry," she gasped, clearing refuse with sweeps of her arms. "Hurry, hurry ..."

The towering piles of rubbish quaked.

They were all working frenetically, even