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Dekka yelled a curse word, backed away, stumbled over the piano stool, and—
Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!
The three automatic weapons erupted as one, little starbursts flashing from the muzzles.
Dekka’s body was spasming, seeming to twist from the inside, but she had no time to observe, no time to think, no time to feel. There
was only time to react, and she raised both her hands defensively and opened her mouth to scream, an inhuman scream.
MmmmrrrrRRRROOOOOWWWW!
There was a flash of light like the sun itself and a vast shrieking of timbers and wallboard.
And the guns no longer fired.
The three masked intruders were no longer in the doorway, or in the hallway beyond. In fact there was no hallway beyond, nor any walls to left or right. Nor was there a ceiling—a patch of cloud-edged blue was visible above. A crow flew past, unconcerned. A semicircle of utter destruction fanned out ahead of Dekka, thirty or forty feet, so that part of what had been the far wall of the building was open to daylight.
Everything that had seconds before filled the semicircular blast radius had been reduced to shreds: walls, ceiling, wires, pipes, furniture, the piano, everything—reduced to shattered bits, bite-size chunks, and blasted up the hallway in both directions. It was as if everything around her had been run through a blender set on chop: wallboard in pieces the size of a packet of gum; copper pipe ripped into segments no longer than an inch, edges sharply torn; wood studs reduced to the sweepings of a carpenter’s wood shop; black keys and piano wire; and here and there, like decorative sugar confetti sprinkled on a cake, the bright bits of lacquered black piano cabinetry.
Dust filled the air. Water poured from a ruptured pipe in the ceiling. A tangle of fiber-optic cable glowed electric blue.
At first she did not see the three gunmen. And when she did, her mind at first refused to accept it. It couldn’t be real. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to see this.
“No,” Dekka whispered, knowing the answer was yes.
The three body-armored gunmen were shredded. They had gone through the same blender as the walls and ceiling, been torn into the same bite-size chunks, and those bloody bits, those fragments of bone and muscle and organ and brain, and above all blood, blood, blood . . . were everywhere.
Stunned, shocked, paralyzed, Dekka saw a bit of gore hanging from the end of a shattered wooden beam. An eye.
An eye.
It fell to the floor with a soft plop, and Dekka found her voice and cried out in horror. She roared like a wounded beast. Her eyes dropped to something shiny at her feet: a brass bullet. She’d seen bullets before, all too often, and there was something wrong with this one. Where the lead slug would normally have been, the brass was crimped.
A blank!
The truth hit her like a hammer blow. A test! It was suddenly clear to Dekka: the infuriating metallic shriek to get her adrenaline pumping, the banging on the door, the “gunfire” with blanks.
Dekka stared at her hands, which had gone up in an automatic defensive gesture when the gunmen burst in. What she saw sent her reeling backward: they were not her hands! They were the hands of a beast, impossible hands, with just three fingers and a thumb, all covered in glossy black fur.
But worse, worse by far, was the crawling feel, the rustling sound of her head. She raised a trembling alien hand and touched not dreads, but what felt like fat writhing worms, or . . .
Snakes!
“No,” she whimpered. No, no, it was some distortion from the concussion that . . . the concussion that she had not felt.
One of her dreads curved around and the serpentine head at the end looked at her, stared at her with tiny yellow eyes, its fanged mouth open, forked tongue slithering out and back, out and back.
Dekka screamed, screamed and backpedaled, swiping at the snake, hearing it hiss and withdraw.
Impossible!
She closed her eyes, willing the image to be gone, praying to the God she only half believed in to end this hideous too-real hallucination. But behind her eyes she saw a dark place, shapes moving, things that might almost have been human, but that surged through a pool of blue-black, liquid latex.
What?
The black shapes turned eyeless heads to her, black tar forming a parody of her own nightmarish Medusa head. The dark, inchoate things turned as if she was an interloper at their party, then moved toward her with sudden excitement . . .
“Stop!” she cried, and opened her eyes. She stared at her hands again, at the fur-covered flesh twice the size of her own hands. But now they were changing. A fourth finger, the little finger, was sprouting like a weed in a time-lapse video. The black fur was being sucked back into her flesh.
