Frankenstein

composed of billions of tiny winged piranha mimicking the human form.
    One of the patients Jean-Anne didn’t know, a bald man with a red mustache, had leaped up from his wheelchair, had staggered toward the door. He tried to fend off John Martz, but the nightstick broke his fingers and then broke his face. Looking up from the dead or dying man, John Martz grinned at Jean-Anne from across the room and shook the club at her, saying, “You want some of this? Come get it. You want some?”
    Having abandoned her wheelchair, Susan Carpenter huddled in a corner, and the two other patients were in a different corner, all of them screaming or crying out for help.
    Jean-Anne wanted to scream, she kept trying, she couldn’t make a sound, she couldn’t move, she could only stand there holding the container of mini muffins, holding it in front of her, gripping the Tupperware with such force that her fingers dimpled it, presenting it as if the muffins were an offering to appease the savage god that had abruptly manifested from the young man, but this malevolent deity wasn’t satisfied with prizewinning muffins, he wanted more than what had pleased the judges at the county fair, he wanted much more from her, he wanted
everything
.
    As if mocking the screams of his waiting victims, the greatly deformed young man, no longer handsome by any standard, opened his mouth wide, and from within him rippled forth thick silvery ribbons. As they lapped across Jean-Anne’s face and she went blind in an instant, she remembered the large silvery fabric bags, pear-shaped, filled with something heavy, hanging from the ceiling, and now she thought, as her last thought:
Not bags. Cocoons
.

    Nearing the southern end of the roof on the main wing, Bryce heard faint cries like those he had listened to at the return-air grille in the bathroom.
    Travis heard them, too. He grabbed the sleeve of Bryce’s robe. “Wait. What’s that?”
    “What I heard before.”
    “It’s coming from over there.”
    “There’s no one on the roof but us.”
    “Over there,” the boy repeated.
    “Don’t let it into your head, son. Come on.”
    “No, wait. Just wait.”
    The boy wove through an obstacle course of vent pipes, cocking his head this way and that until he identified the source. He dropped onto his knees to listen.
    The voices rose from such a distance, through fibrous filters and past the slowly rotating blades of exhaust fans, through so many turns of insulation-wrapped duct that they were thin and faltering. Yet the misery and terror they expressed were so affecting that Bryce shivered more because of those faraway cries than because of the cold air.
    The boy said, “It’s not a TV.”
    “No, it isn’t.”
    “They’re real. They’re real people.”
    “Don’t listen. Come on.”
    “Are they being killed?” Travis asked.
    “Don’t listen. You’ll never stop hearing them.”
    “We’ve got to help them. Can’t we help them?”
    “We don’t know where they are,” Bryce said, “except probably in the basement.”
    “There must be a way down there, past the guards.”
    “No, there’s not.”
    “There’s got to be a way,” the boy insisted.
    “I know that’s how it seems, that there’s got to be, but sometimes there’s just
not.”
    “It makes me sick to hear it.”
    “If somehow we could get to them,” Bryce said, “then we’d be in the same trouble they’re in now. It would be our voices echoing up the pipe.”
    “But it’s horrible, just to let it happen.”
    “Yes. Come on now.”
    “What
is
happening to them?”
    “I don’t know. And we don’t want to find out firsthand. Come on, son. Time may be running out for us here.”
    Reluctantly, Travis rose from the vent pipe and rejoined Bryce.
    When Bryce put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he could feel him shaking.
    “I like your spirit, Travis. You’ve got a righteous instinct. We can’t save those people. They’re already dying. But if we can get help and learn what’s going on, maybe we can save others.”
    “We’ve got to.”
    “We’ll try.”
    The roof of the main wing became the roof of the south wing. Bryce found the fire ladder curving up and over the parapet just where he thought it would be.
    The sky was a field of vaguely phosphorescent ashes, darker in the east than in the west, but dark to one degree or another from horizon to horizon.
    Leaning over the parapet with Travis, Bryce could see a paved fire lane that ran along the side of the