Aftershock & Others by F. Paul Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

plugged drain…remembered the heat, the suffocating feeling. He’d been so scared then, afraid he’d been caught in some real-life replay of The Blob, absolutely sure he was going to die. But he hadn’t died. After blacking out for a minute or so, he’d come to on the basement floor, half in, half out of the shrinking puddle. He’d scrambled to his feet, looked at his hands, felt his neck, his face. The goo was gone—not a trace of it left on him. Everything seemed almost normal.
    Almost. His skin didn’t feel quite right. Not slimy or nothing, just…different. He ran upstairs to his place, the super’s apartment on the first floor. He seemed to be moving a little different, his steps quicker, surer. Almost, like, graceful. He got to the bathroom and stared in the mirror.
    He’d changed. He looked the same, but then again he didn’t. His normally wavy brown hair was darker, straighter, maybe because it was wet and slicked back. Even his eyebrows looked a little darker. His eyes were still blue but they seemed more intense, more alive.
    And he felt different inside . Usually when he finished a day’s work he liked to get a six-pack, flip on the tube, and mellow out for the night. Now he wanted to move. He felt like going places, doing things, making things happen instead of letting them happen.
    He stared at the reflection for a long time, telling himself over and over he wasn’t crazy. He’d just had some sort of daymare or something. Or maybe fumes—yeah, some sort of fumes bubbling up from the drain had screwed up his head for a little bit. But he was okay now. Really.
    Finally, when he sort of believed that, he staggered back to the basement. Still had to do something with that water.
    But the water was gone. The drain had unclogged and all that was left of the stinking puddle was a big round glistening wet spot. Relieved that he didn’t have to stick his arm down that pipe again, Doug collected his gloves and junk and headed back upstairs.
    In the hall he ran into Theresa Coffee, the busty blond graduate student in 308. He gave her his usual smile—at least he thought it was his usual smile—and expected her usual curt nod in return. She’d caught him staring at her underwear down in the laundry room once too often and had been giving him the cold shoulder ever since. Treated him like a pervo. Which he wasn’t. But her underwear, man—looked like it came straight out of a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. Whoa.
    But this time she actually stopped and talked to him. And he actually talked back to her. Like, intelligent. He sounded like he had a brain in his head. Like a guy who’d finished high school. College even. He didn’t have the faintest idea where all that talk came from, all he knew was that for the first time in his life he sounded brainy. She seemed to think so too. She even invited him up to her place. And before too long she was modeling all that underwear for him.
    Much later, when he left her, he didn’t go back to his apartment to sack out. He went back to change into his best clothes—which weren’t much then, for sure—and headed for Manhattan. For the King Kong.
    The rest was history.
    History…the celebrity friends, the notoriety, the promised writing career, LuAnn, a way up and out …history.
    Yeah. History. Only right now history seemed to be coming to an end.
    Doug stared down at the two-gallon bucketful of goo. Cloudy goo. Marc used to be clear. Crystal clear. Like Perrier. What kind of game was it trying to run?
    “C’mon, guy,” Doug said, rolling up his sleeve. “One more time.”
    He slipped his right hand up to his wrist in the goo. He noticed how Marc was cooler than usual. In the past there’d always been a near-body-temperature warmth to it. Slowly it began to slide up his forearm.
    “There y’go!”
    But it only made a few inches before it started to slide back into the bucket.
    “You bastard!”
    Doug couldn’t help being mad. He knew he owed a lot