The Forbidden Zone by Whitley Strieber

She took a deep breath, blew it out. Then she revved her ATV, put it in gear. "Here goes nothing," she muttered under her breath.

  They moved off, deep into the forest.

  At first the trip was uneventful, as far as Ellen was concerned. She did begin to notice the twisted limbs, the funny leaves. Then she saw a fern that looked like a pile of seaweed. A few minutes later a black, complicated creature flashed past in her headlight. It was too big to be an insect, too full of spindly legs and feelers to be a bat.

  She watched for lightning bugs.

  With a soft scratching sound something landed briefly on her chest. She glanced down just in time to see what appeared to be a flying scorpion, its wings still whirring.

  Before she could even scream, it had sailed off into the dark.

  The closer they got to Mound Road, the more things changed. The trunks of trees were grotesquely twisted, and their leaves were withering like small, closed fists. Purple light glimmered beneath the forest floor. Wet brown tendrils sprouted from the moss, twisting and growing, seeking.

  Closer, and the fattened tree trunks were sprouting great black sheets of material in place of leaves.

  Along with the trees everything was changing, the ferns turning to flopping, rubbery slabs that exuded black ichor, the mushrooms growing to great size, a fog of mold-stinking gas.

  A pearl-white millipede at least eight feet long glided out in front of her. Before she could stop she had driven over it. With a splash the soft body exploded, slopping her feet with liquid that reeked like clabber.

  Despite the rough ground, Brian increased speed. Behind him Ellen's vehicle careened along, bouncing into a gully, then bursting back into the thicker woods.

  Now the leaves when they touched her clung a little and felt like leather. Purple sparks played in the soil, and the haze was like dust. She coughed, bringing up something like black tapioca.

  Brian kept his eyes focused ahead, watching the dark woods whip past. It wouldn't do to hit a tree. Even letting those crawly leaves touch his bare arms made the gorge rise in his throat.

  He wanted only to follow Loi's fate. If she was dead, then he would die. If she had been changed, then he would submit.

  The thought of her suffering even a little bit made him twist his throttle and go speeding even faster through the woods, forgetful of the less efficient driver struggling to keep up.

  Rough limbs dragged at his chest. His stomach felt as if it was boiling.

  A glow flickered in the woods ahead, as quickly died.

  Ellen also saw the glow, and sensed her will faltering. Then she fixed her attention on the speeding ghost in front of her.

  He swerved to avoid a sapling. At the same moment he saw another flicker off among the trees. He grew wary, began to sweep the area ahead with his eyes. Above all, he didn't want to be destroyed on the way in.

  They'd used his equipment to open a door into another world and this was what had come out.

  Behind him he could hear Ellen's four-wheeler slurrying and slipping, the engine alternately guttering low, then screaming. She wasn't much good with it. Maybe she'd get lucky and the thing would overheat. She'd be out here alone, but at least she'd be alive.

  Off to the left he saw a gray strip. For a moment his heart raced. They were closing in on Mound Road.

  They broke out onto the grassy shoulder at more or less the same time. The clouds had parted and they could see the Milky Way overarching the heavens. The moon hung low in the west, above it the evening star.

  But their light shone down on a forest that was twisting and lurching and changing, limbs sweeping back and forth against the sky, whole trees splitting with explosive reports, contorting into new shapes, growing great, misshapen leaves as black and slick and floppy as sheets of fungus.

  The din was horrendous. The crunching and creaking of limbs, the sighing of leaves in extreme agitation, the bellows and shrieks and ululations of the forest creatures, all combined into a single groaning cry.

  When they stopped their ATVs this new sound at first confused them. Then Brian understood. He could hardly bear to do it, for he knew what he would see. But he forced himself to look down the road toward the judge's house.

  There, in all its contorted glory, stood the borderland of a new world. Huge, bloated barrels topped by fungoid sheets had entirely replaced the trees. Black, twining vines covered with hair so stiff they looked as if they had been shocked attempted to choke the barrels. Here and there dark forms moved slowly along. Cries rose and fell, gawps and croaks echoed. All stood beneath a purple haze. The farther they looked, the thicker the monstrous forest became, the broader and higher the barrels, the wider the black, mucus-dripping sheets that they presented to the sky.

  "I think speed's our only hope."

  Ellen got on her bike, turned it around and prepared to escape. "What if we meet up with the humvees?"

  "Ellen, the only direction I'll go is forward."

  "Into that? We'll be killed for certain."

  "But we might be able to do some damage."

  Under the grass and weeds around them, she began to notice purple flashes and sparks. It was coming, moving like a wave out of the dark, changing everything it touched.

  From behind them on the road there came a series of wet snarls, loud enough to be heard over the forest's agony. A bend in the road made it impossible to see what was there. Ellen heard Brian take out his pistol, did the same.

  An enormous creature on four segmented legs came stalking around the bend. The legs were at least fifteen feet long. Lurching like a sedan chair in their center was a boxy body that had once clearly been a humvee. Beneath it gnarled, troll-like shadows humped along, seeking the protection of the great beast. They bore long, thin arms. The ruins of the uniforms and chemical protective gear of these creatures who had once been ordinary American soldiers hung in tatters from various appendages.

  Where the lights of the humvee had been, the head of the creature had compound eyes that glowed with purple fire.

  This light struck joy into their hearts. They did not expect it, and they cried out with the pleasure. Brian stomped his feet and yelled. Ellen staggered in circles, wailing, impotently waving her gun.

  It was like being burned to death in glory.

  But Ellen also felt it as rape, and the single, tiny spark of anger that this produced was enough to cause her to turn away for a moment.

  The thrall broke. Beside her Brian was on his back, supported by heels and shoulders, bellowing and thrusting his pelvis at the oncoming monstrosity with the fury of a sex-maddened rodent.

  She leaped on him, pressed her face to his and screamed out his name with every ounce of strength in her body.

  Then they were rolling—and not a moment too soon, for the huge walker with its phalanx of trolls had positioned themselves not a hundred feet away. As Brian and Ellen scrabbled, stumbled, finally ran deeper into the forbidden zone, the monstrosity poured purple light into the two ATVs, which belched yellow smoke and began to grow legs.

  Ellen, who had been terrified beyond words, now reached another place entirely in her heart, the place where men in battle go, that is beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond hope, beyond everything.

  She was a body, bone and blood and brain, sweat and flying hair, racing between bloated monstrosities through foul purple air, behind a man in a tattered T-shirt who was waving a pistol as he ran.

  They went toward the judge's vine-encrusted house and beyond it, now running, now climbing through curtains of vine that shuddered when they were touched. When Ellen slowed for a moment, she felt these vines begin slipping stealthily around her legs, felt leaves plastering themselves to her arms, her thighs. Stifling a scream, she snatched them away. More came, and she could feel all the limbs and twigs and leaves bending toward herself and Brian, could see the fat bodies of the trees beginning to pulsate.

  But then they reached the area of the root cellar, and suddenly conditions changed again. Here there weren't so many
of the monstrous plants. The brush that had choked the cellar's entrance had given way to sheets of the slick fungus. This had the effect of increasing the opening rather than narrowing it.

  Brian sat down on the stuff, began inching toward the hole.

  "Brian, don't!"

  "We've got to go where we're least expected. There's no other way."

  She looked back. With the strange grace of a spider, the enormous machine marched after them. The shadows of the trolls were fanning out, cutting off all escape. Two dead black piles of what appeared to be gleaming meat jerked and heaved in the background: the remains of the ATVs were continuing to mutate.

  "We need flashlights, Brian."

  "Oh, Christ, you're right." He peered across the seething lawn. "We've gotta try the house." He sounded sick.

  Crossing the heaving, tortured earth, they crouched like soldiers under fire. They kept their faces carefully averted from the oncoming juggernaut, but now even the purple flickering in the subsoil had become bright enough to deliver pleasure.

  Every time they as much as slowed down for breath, the grass itself came spinning up around their ankles, the blades having taken on the configuration of thousands of busy, tapered worms.

  By the time they reached the porch, these creatures had covered their shoes with a substance so slippery that they could hardly keep on their feet. They entered the quiet, inky black kitchen, feeling their way, unsure of anything.

  When Brian inhaled, he noticed a strong odor. "What's that smell?"

  "Sweat, I think."

  "Is it us?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "Where would an old man keep a flashlight, Ellen?"

  "A cabinet, a drawer?"

  She heard a scrape, then clinking. Brian had opened a drawer. Flailing ahead, she found the refrigerator, opened a cabinet above it. Her hands swept the shelf. She snatched them back. There was something slick. It felt... organic. She listened, but nothing moved. Licking her paper-dry lips, she stuck her hand in again. "Brian, I've found some candles!"

  "Matches?"

  "No... Yes!" She pulled down a familiar box. "Kitchen matches. Big box!" Holding them, she grabbed the candles. "Four candles."

  He came close to her. They fumbled with their booty like excited children opening Christmas presents. Then he struck one of the matches and held it high.

  They both screamed at once, shrieked, really. Standing in the doorway was a seven-foot-tall insect with gigantic, glaring eyes. Lying before it on the floor were five supple arms of the type that had destroyed the Dick Kellys and the Huygenses. They emerged from an unseen source in the dining room. With the easy stealth of a cobra, two of them rose from the floor. Both were carrying purple crystalline eyes.

  The insect's mouth parts vibrated and it emitted a buzzing caw. They could hear the excitement.

  Then the match went out.

  Brian fired his pistol into the dark. In the first flash, the thing's eyes glared, filled with malevolence. In the second, it had spread great, sheet-like wings that looked like black, veined plastic.

  In the third, it was gone.

  "Let's get out of here," Ellen yelled. She was thinking of those arms.

  This time they did not stop at the edge of the root cellar: there was no time to stop. The humvees were in the yard; something was crowing angrily from the roof of the house; the arms were snaking out the kitchen window, their surfaces gleaming in the last failing light of the moon.

  Ellen landed on Brian, both of them sinking a foot into the spongy, giving surface that had replaced the earthen floor of the root cellar.

  Working with furious haste, Brian lit another match. The room was empty, and the entrance to the mine gaped unattended. They lit candles and went in.

  Ellen was so scared that her nervous system was beginning to betray her. She could hardly walk, let alone keep the candle lit in the stinking draft that exuded from the tunnel. "Brian."

  "I smell them." He sighed. "If only we had flashlights," he muttered. He was cupping his hand around his guttering candle, leaning into the opening.

  "I can't go in there!"

  "Where else is there?"

  For the first time in her life, the idea of suicide crossed her mind. "Why did I come back? Am I crazy?" She sobbed a ragged sob. It made her mad when she cried, and she choked it back.

  "Look. I came back because there's no place in the world I'd rather go. And I have a chance of doing something in here. Out there, none."

  "What sort of a chance?"

  "There's bound to be something we can do."

  "Don't make me think there's hope if there isn't any. Because I think I want to blow my own head off before I get made into one of those... things. I don't want to miss my opportunity, Brian."

  "If somebody opened a door into another universe—a parallel reality—then the door can be closed. My theories suggested this possibility."

  "It's science fiction."

  "The Many Worlds Interpretation is accepted physics. Parallel universes are real, I'm afraid."

  They went down the mine. The walls were iron, but the floor was mushy. It was like trying to walk on raw dough.

  They went down twenty feet, then fifty.

  And they encountered an elevator. "Goddamn that Nate Harris.

  He's a liar!" Beyond the elevator a tunnel went off toward the surface, no doubt to the main entrance to the facility, which would be hidden well back in the woods.

  "The project was classified, Ellen. They probably didn't even let him come down this far."

  "They? You mean people?"

  "Of course. The scientific team that was working on this."

  "They oughta be thrown into the deepest dungeon in the world and left to rot."

  He thought he might know the fate of two members of that team: one might have died screaming in the mound, another could have been the woman disinterred from her living grave near Towayda.

  To one side was a glass-fronted box with an elevator key in it. Brian broke it with the butt of his pistol and they got the shaft open. Down one side there was a row of ladder rungs. The car was nowhere to be seen.

  Without a word, Brian started down, his candle dripping wax into the gloom below. Ellen followed him. She'd never much enjoyed heights—bungee jumping was good copy, no more—and she fought to keep her vertigo from making her lose her balance.

  Perhaps an impossible task. "Brian?"

  "Yeah?"

  "How deep is this?"

  "Could be hundreds of feet."

  They were now lost in the gloom, two people in a tiny pool of fluttery candlelight, dropping down and down.

  "Hold it," Brian said crisply.

  She stopped. Her blood was blasting in her ears, her breath snapping.

  "Now come ahead. Be careful."

  She hit a surface. There were cables going up. "Where are we?"

  Brian pulled open a hatch. "We've gotta go through the elevator car." He dropped down inside, making it bounce. "Shit, lost my light!"

  Carefully, she put out her candle and thrust it down in her pocket with her other two.

  The darkness was now absolute. "Brian?"

  "I'm right here. Just drop."

  She slid into the hatch, let go. An instant later she hit the rocking floor of the car. She flailed, felt Brian, then grabbed something thick and cool and wet. "Jesus, it's full of that ick!"

  "Strike a light!" His voice was high with terror, and that made her fumble.

  Her right hand was covered with goop, so she used her left. "I can't find the matches!"

  "Jesus, Jesus, I hate this stuff!"

  Her hand closed around the box, drew it out of her pocket. Her candles scattered on the floor. "Brian—" She thrust the matches into his hands.

  There was a scrape, a spark, then the small sound of dozens of matches hitting the floor. He scrabbled. "It's OK!"

  The match lit, revealing his gray, sweat-sheened face, his bulging, glistening eyes. She looked down at the mate
rial on her hand. Black gel. As best she could she rubbed it off against the wall.

  Filling the back of the car was a thick, black mass of the material she had touched. It looked like a wet, lumpy garbage bag slathered with ooze.

  They stared at it for a moment without comprehension.

  Then Brian doubled over, retching loudly. In the semi-opaque gel floated parts of a human being. There were eyes suspended in the mass, connected by tangles of nerve endings to a dark, shriveled appendage, the congealing remnant of a brain. A face, stretched to extremes of distortion, the eye-sockets wide, the lips like red rubber bands, the cheeks crazed by horizontal wrinkles.

  "Jesus Christ, it's Bill Merriman! He was our security director." He pointed down into the complex mess. "On his belt—that's his pager!"

  "Got a page from hell, I guess."

  "Poor guy."

  They found the hatch in the floor, and pried up the sunken handle with Ellen's pocketknife, a pitiful little thing with two blades and a fingernail file.

  They went on, descending another thirty feet before they reached the bottom of the shaft. The floor was littered with gum and candy wrappers and other familiar debris: lost coins, a half-empty pack of cigarettes—things people had dropped on their way in and out of the elevator. There were stacks of cinder-blocks, coils of wire.

  "This is only half finished, Brian. It's a mess."

  "Yeah." His voice was bitter. "They didn't have enough time. Not quite enough."

  A moment later they stepped out into a hallway. Ellen held up her candle. "This part's finished."

  The hall was short, the ceiling low. Brian looked around at the blue pipe that lined the walls. "This is all very familiar. It's a waveguide. The visible part of one. The rest is buried."

  "What's a waveguide?"

  "When you create an extratemporal particle, it flies off through time and space both. It leaves a sort of track in time. This guides it, so you can detect its passage. But somebody with superior understanding could use its track to literally climb through the ages to reach you."

  "From the future? These things are from the future?"

  Brian shook his head. "If they're not from some sort of alternate reality, then they must be from the past."