Winter Moon

embrace that was as inexplicable as it was obscene.
        Its very existence was offensive. That it could be seemed proof that the universe was a madhouse, full of worlds without meaning and bright galaxies without pattern or purpose.
        It climbed two steps from the hall, toward the landing.
        Three. Four.
        Heather waited one more.
        Five steps up, seven steps below her.
        A bristling mass of tentacles appeared between the dead man's parted lips, like a host of black tongues spotted with blood.
        Heather opened fire, held the trigger down too long, used up too much ammunition, ten or twelve rounds, even fourteen, although it was surprising-considering her state of mind-that she didn't empty both magazines. The 9mm slugs stitched a bloodless diagonal line across the dead man's chest, through body and entwining tentacles.
        Parasite and dead host pitched backward to the hallway floor below, leaving two lengths of severed tentacles on the stairs, one about eighteen inches long, the other about two feet. Neither of those amputated limbs bled. Both continued to move, initially twisting and flailing the way the bodies of snakes writhe long after they have been separated from their heads.
        Heather was transfixed by the grisly sight because, almost at once, the movement ceased to be the result of misfiring nerves and randomly spasming muscles, it began to appear purposeful. Each scrap of the primary organism seemed aware of the other, and they groped toward each other, the first curling down over the edge of a step while the second rose gracefully like a flute-charmed serpent to meet it. When they touched, a transformation occurred that was essentially black magic and beyond Heather's understanding, even though she had a clear view of it.
        The two became as one, not simply entwining but melding, flowing together as if the soot-dark silken skin sheathing them was little more than surface tension that gave shape to the oozing protoplasm within.
        As soon as the two combined, the resulting mass sprouted eight smaller tentacles, with a shimmer like quick shadows playing across a puddle of water, the new organism bristled into a vaguely crablike-but still eyeless-form, though it was as soft and flexible as ever. Quivering, as if to maintain even a marginally more angular shape required monumental effort, it began to hitch down the steps toward the mothermass from which it had become separated..Less than half a minute had passed from the moment when the two severed appendages had begun to seek each other.
        Bodies are.
        Those words were, according to Jack, part of what the Giver had said through Toby in the cemetery.
        Bodies are.
        A cryptic statement then. All too clear now. Bodies are-now and forever, flesh without end. Bodies are- expendable if necessary, fiercely adaptable, severable without loss of intellect or memory and therefore in infinite supply.
        The bleakness of her sudden insight, the perception that they could not win regardless of how valiantly they struggled or how much courage they possessed, kicked her across the borderline of sanity for a moment, into madness no less total for its brevity. Instead of recoiling from the monstrously alien creature stilting determinedly down the steps to rejoin its mothermass, as any sane person would have done, she plunged after it, off the landing with a strangled scream that sounded like the thin and bitter grievance of a dying animal in a sawtooth trap, the Micro Uzi thrust in front of her.
        Although she knew she was putting herself in terrible jeopardy, unconscionably abandoning Toby at the top of the stairs, Heather was unable to stop. She went down one, two, three, four, five steps in the time that the crablike thing descended two. They were four steps apart when the thing abruptly reversed direction without bothering to turn around, as if front and back and sideways were all the same to it. She stopped so fast she almost lost her balance, and the crab ascended toward her a lot faster than it had descended.
        Three steps between them.
        Two.
        She squeezed the trigger, emptied the Uzi's last rounds into the scuttling form, chopping it into four-five-six bloodless pieces that tumbled and flopped down a few steps, where they lay squirming.
        Squirming ceaselessly. Supple and snakelike again. Eagerly and silently questing toward