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ago, before your kind. It is the ultimate offense to Him-as your kind
dies, we replace you here. We reside in your brain. We are the worm that
burrows through his creations, these bags of blood and tissue, this ball
of water and dirt! And He can do nothing about it, for it was wrought
with your own hands. Your bodies belong to us! We control your flesh. We
have been waiting a long time to inhabit you. Many of us are here, and
many more await passage. For our number is greater than the stars! We
are more than infinity! And He can only watch! Watch and weep!"
Snot ran down her face. "S-so, you're doing all of this just-just to
g-get back at God?"
Ob sneered with Baker's lips.
"Indeed. That-and our own self-interest. We longed to be free of the
Void, of course."
He paused in his thoughts while Lisa squirmed on the pole. The dead body
of her companion started to move again. It looked at her and grinned.
Its fellow creatures began to loosen its bonds.
"Welcome, brother," Ob said.
"Thank you, lord. It is good to be free."
Ob turned back to her.
"So tell me, Lisa. If you'll pardon my melodrama, do
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you know who we are now? Have you gained an understanding? Did your
elders teach you of these things in Sunday school?"
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Her only response was a whimper. Ob flung his hands up in exasperation.
"I am attested to seventeen times in the Old Testament! Seventeen! I am
Ob of the Obot! I lead the Siqqusim, just as Ab leads the Elilum and Api
the Teraphim. Yidde-oni! I am Ob! He who speaks from the head!
Engastrimathos du aba paren tares!"
Cursing, he shoved the zombie with the knife out of the way. Lisa
relaxed slightly against her bonds. Ob grabbed a pistol from one of the
other zombies and shoved it between her breasts.
Lisa cringed.
"If you do not know of us, do not know of the Void, or of Heaven and
Hell, then I will show it to you firsthand!"
She screamed.
"I told you to stop mooing, cow!"
He squeezed the trigger and then squeezed it again. And again. And again
until it was empty. Only then did he let the weapon slide from his
grasp. It clattered on the blacktop.
"Undo these bonds, so that the one who will soon inhabit her may be free."
He stalked away. Something ruptured inside him and dark, noxious fluid
rushed from the open cavity in his abdomen, drenching his feet. Baker's
body was disintegrating faster than he'd expected.
When the Rising first began, Ob's original host body had been a black
Labrador named Sadie, owned by an elderly widow in Bodega Bay,
California. Unable to lead the Siqqusim in such a limited form, he'd run
amok, desperately seeking the body's destruction. He'd found it
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hours later at the hands of a fisherman who dispatched him with several
shots to the head after Ob tore out the throats of his wife and children.
As leader of the Siqqusim, Ob returned to the realms of the living
before his brethren. He liked to think of it as head-of-the-line
privileges. He also reanimated quicker than the others, almost
instantaneously. His second body belonged to a network systems analyst
in Gardner, Illinois, and had served him well. The host had been in
remarkable physical health and died of suffocation, leaving the body in
good shape. Ob still regretted the loss of that one. It ended when a
human set the entire town on fire. Ob became trapped in the inferno
while crawling through a ventilation duct after some prey.
His third body was a homeless man in Coober Pedy, Australia. The man was
already rotting before death claimed him. Ob only inhabited that shell
for a day before a human snuck up from behind and drove a pickaxe
through his brain.
His fourth had been the body of Dr. Timothy Powell, one of the men
directly responsible for freeing his kind in the first place. That body
had been dispatched during the recent battle. Now, here he stood, in the
body of Powell's superior, Professor Baker. The almost contrived irony
was not lost on the demon lord, and Ob wondered if some higher force had
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a hand in the fact that he'd taken possession of two of the men
responsible for his release.
He searched through Baker's memories as if riffling through a filing
cabinet. He saw the scientist's escape and flight, his capture by
Schow's forces, and the interrogation that followed. He learned of
Baker's other companions: Jim, the father searching for his son, and
Martin, the elderly holy man.
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These two, the father and the preacher, were not with them. They weren't
among the zombies ordered to scavenge weapons and round up stray humans [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]