Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,105

faster. Their little red eyes, so like jewels, seemed to glow in the light from the corridor as they tracked Owen and Toshiko’s movements.

One of them started to rise shakily into the air.

Jack gazed levelly at Doctor Scotus.

‘How can you tell he’s a host?’ he asked Gwen.

‘Look at his hair,’ she replied.

‘Yeah, OK, I grant that he’s got that whole “mad scientist with wild crazy hair” aesthetic going, but I see that a lot. It’s not proof.’

‘His hair is waving in the breeze, isn’t it?’

Jack looked at Scotus, who was staring at Gwen in disbelief. ‘Yeah, so?’

‘So there isn’t any breeze.’

Jack looked back at Scotus. Thin blond strands haloed the man’s head, but Gwen was right. Now that he was concentrating, he could see that the strands weren’t only waving in the absence of any breeze; they weren’t even moving in the same direction as each other.

‘What the hell…?’ he muttered.

‘Remember the worm thing that attacked us in Scotus’s office?’ Gwen moved to one side; the goon who had been standing behind her, guarding her, moved too, but so did some of the tendrils on Scotus’s head, shifting to track her motion. ‘That thing had a whole bunch of thin white tendrils at both ends of its body, didn’t it?’

‘I had other things to worry about at the time, like stopping it from throttling you, but let’s say I do remember that.’

‘Imagine those tendrils much longer. Six feet, maybe. Imagine them finding their way up his throat, out into the air. Imagine them finding their way in between the cells of his body, infiltrating themselves past arteries and veins, through muscles and into his brain, and then out through his scalp. Imagine—’

‘Thanks. I get the picture.’ A thought struck Jack. ‘Hang on – that worm thing had tendrils at both ends.’

They both glanced down to Scotus’s groin. Was it Jack’s imagination, or was there something stirring down there as well?

Jack looked up at Scotus’s face. ‘What happened?’ he asked simply.

‘I tried one of the pills,’ he said. ‘I had to. Who would buy diet pills from a fat nutritionist? I got the same cravings as the others, the same desire to eat anything, no matter what it was. I suppressed it, with powdered protein supplements at first, then using drugs. Eventually, I discovered that by taking sedatives I could cause the creature’s appetite to reduce. Its weight is stable now, but the tendrils you mention – the way it perceives the world – continued to grow. They permeate me. They have infiltrated me.’

‘Then why not take the second pill?’ Gwen asked. ‘Why not flush the thing from your system?’

‘Because the tendrils are too entwined with my brain and my nervous system,’ Scotus said simply. ‘Killing the creature would most likely kill me. That’s one reason. The other is simpler. It won’t let me.’

‘It won’t let you?’ Jack stepped forward.

The goon behind Gwen tracked Jack with her gun, but let him go. The man was too engrossed in what was going on. It was obvious from the expression on his face that he thought he’d fallen into a pit of madmen. ‘You mean, it’s controlling you?’

‘Nothing that obvious. It’s not intelligent; not as we measure intelligence, anyway. But it does have instincts, which it communicates to me. The instinct to survive is very strong.’

‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ Jack said. ‘Have you heard enough?’

‘More than enough.’

Jack reached into a pocket of his greatcoat. His hand closed around the alien device that they had found at that Cardiff nightclub what seemed like years ago now. Toshiko had already set it up so that it would pick up local emotional reactions and amplify them further away. All he had to do was to press a couple of buttons to activate it. His fingers found them quickly.

He nodded to Gwen. She bent and quickly pulled the shroud off the bird-cage before the goon could stop her.

The winged alien creature in the cage shifted, confused by the sudden flood of infra-red signals.

‘Jesus!’ the goon said, and stepped backwards, raising the gun and aiming it at the cage.

One of the other alien devices that Toshiko had determined was part of a matching set was wired to the cage, shoved in through the little flap through which the creature had originally been shoved. It transmitted electrical charges along a plasma path generated by a low-power laser beam. It was aimed directly at the creature, which didn’t have any room to squeeze out of the way.

Before the goon