THE RED WAKE

Chapter 40

"This is where you're supposed to say: "What do you mean, Richard?"" Stanford joked.

Unable to help himself, Alan missed the joke.

"Richard, what are you talking about?"

Stanford looked at Alan, eyes filled with compassion and a dark wisdom. They were eyes from which nothing could be hidden. They were the eyes of a dying man.

"I think you know."

Alan turned his head. He could not bear to look into those eyes. They were too potent somehow. And he felt heat building behind his own eyes.

"What's... what's happening?" Alan said.

"I think the infection...the infection from those...those creatures. It's done something to me, something that I can't understand. The closest I can come to explaining it is this;

I think that all these aliens, these invaders, are telepathic, or what we would call telepathic at any rate. At the very least they seem to operate on some level of perception far above our own. This infection has given me some measure of that increased perception."

Alan remembered the winged creatures that had somehow reanimated Nick Framer's severed head. They'd seemed to draw some form of sustenance from it. And the telepathic creature that had destroyed the people back at the Tarrytown View Apartments. He didn't doubt what Stanford said was true.

"Even the scavengers that attacked us... they project some form of telepathy or E.S.P... advanced senses... I can't explain..."

Stanford broke off. His brow crinkled in concentration. But something, some failure of language, prevented him from communicating what he'd discovered.

"When they attacked me, when I became the focus of their attack, at one point I realized that I could hear their thoughts. No..."

Stanford closed his eyes, searching for the words. "No, that's wrong, Richard," he said, speaking aloud to himself. "They're called dregs. They don't have thoughts, not as we do. Not even like the thing that attacked Jillian. When they were swirling around me, I could sense their rage, and a terrible suffering. And the fact that they're in constant pain"

Stanford took a deep breath before continuing.

"They're not aliens, Alan. They're human beings."

Alan stared at Stanford with dull amazement. He himself had killed several of the Dregs. That they might have once been human...
 "Or they were, God help us." Stanford continued. "They're people that the Yloi have captured and mutated somehow. They're being forced to serve the invaders, like agents provocateurs, created solely to spread chaos among us, to destabilize our attempts to organize any effective resistance.

"But they remember. They remember some of who and what they were before they became Dregs. I think the name means something like "Lower Beasts" or "The Lesser Beasts," I can't be sure. But they've all been driven hopelessly insane, made vicious, psychotic by the process that makes them Dregs."

Stanford's voice dropped away again and he didn't speak for a long time. Then a sudden fit of shivering wracked him. Alan reached over and touched his arm, but quickly snatched it away as if from scalding water. Stanford's skin was hot, feverish.

The physician weakly raised his hand to touch his own face.

"I'd say it's about one hundred and five. Remarkable. I don't have a lot of ... lot of time left."

"Don't say that, Richard. You..."

"Alan, I know what's coming, and I've made my peace with it. When the dregs attacked me, something, some pathogen in their saliva, invaded my bloodstream. It's burning me up from the inside out. I can feel it. And I'm very tired."