The tangled mass of pipes coming from and going to nowhere were all that remained after the inferno. Usually a house fire leaves behind some charred shadow of the original frame, but the old woman must have used some serious fuel. There was nothing but a foundation around a plot of dirt from which grew a thicket of interwoven pipes made of stone, metal, and human bone. Maybe she was trying to take the monster down with her. She failed.
David stood on his own porch and considered all the gray, black, and white snake backs, each a tunnel to god knew where. The Army Corps of Engineers had dug long, deep trenches in the green hills outside town, but they didn’t find the roots. They erected an oil rig and bore two miles down, but the pipes burrowed deeper still.
There were reports of pipes near Sydney, Kyoto, and Shenzhen. Was it possible these pipes stretched straight through the Earth? The contagion was spreading one way or another, and those who tried to leave town found new invasions in their new homes, which explained all the concrete barriers and barbed wire that were now keeping David and his neighbors in quarantine.
David took a deep breath and went inside, which was no sanctuary. Little tubes had broken through the walls of his kitchen. He had to step around a hole in his living room through which a conduit wider than his own body shot up, looped a few times, and ended in a black hole that stared him down. It had been straight at first, but David had made the mistake of attempting to cut it down with his chainsaw. It grew back with the gratuitous loops just to spite him. Others had tried to burn or explode them, with similar results.
Clearly, this meant they were alive, despite no organic component besides the human bone, which they didn’t grow themselves. But he was sure the creature was listening. The pipe in his living room was an ear. The ones in the kitchen were dozens of eye sockets that could watch him despite their hollow ends. It listened and it spoke. And it ate.
Some people succumbed to madness and killed themselves. Holes opened up and swallowed their bodies. People swore they heard sobbing and the voices of their dead loved ones echoing from somewhere deep within the network. Souls were doomed to wander this labyrinth in confusion and pain. Those who dug deep found that the pipes became more numerous and tightly packed the further down you went. Perhaps the entire thing was some intestinal tract that crushed its victims into smaller bits until finally their bodies and their souls were digested. And the pipes grew. But why?
Upstairs, David found his wife on the bed. A needle lay next to her and she’d wrapped a belt around her arm. For some, this was the only way out. If you could not live here without going mad and you could not die without entering the belly of a beast, then you could shut off all your senses and merely exist within the safety of your own skull.
For some, that worked. But David was drinking coffee now to stay awake, as he had been for four days. He’d started dreaming of them. He was afraid drugs would have the same effect. So there really was no escape. He stood over his wife’s emaciated body and wondered how he was going to keep her alive. Food coming through the barrier had gotten scarcer. There were rumors that the pipes withered when they consumed bodies that died of starvation or poisoning. David’s wife believed that the food was poisoned and she stopped eating altogether.
David curled up in a corner and cried. It was all he could do. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder. Turning his head, he saw a tube about the width of his fingers looking right at him. There was another at his foot. He realized a cage of pipes was enclosing around him. His wife awoke, which was startling on its own. It was as if something that connected them dashed through all the haze and drew her back into consciousness. She sat up and saw what was happening to David. She screamed.
Her husband heard two screams, the one from across the room and one resounding from one of the pipes. The second was definitely his wife, though it was distorted and had come seconds later, as if it had traveled through miles and miles of tunnels before popping out in the same room from which it had entered.
David climbed through gap that was closing and went up to his wife. The pipe releasing the screams followed.The one gathering them stretched closer to the woman. He embraced her. This is how the end came in movies. If the heros were to go, they would go together. He closed his eyes as he heard the banging and bending sounds that signaled the rapid growth of a pipe. All the while, the woman in his arms was still screaming. Then the banging sounds stopped.
He looked up and saw that the two ends had fused together. Everything was quiet and still for a few moments.
“Maybe they got confused.” said David. “They each thought the other end was one of us.”
Something growled from beneath the house. Vibrations worked their way up the walls and transferred to rattling in the pipes. The two humans jumped off the bed and out of the room. From the doorway they watched the tubes that had chased them burst open at the point where they had first joined. A fluid that looked and smelled as if it were made of blood and bits of flesh spewed out and soaked the bed sheets. The splayed pipe ends vomited teeth and finger nail shreds.
At last, a puff of smoke blew through and loitered for a moment over the mess. It took a human shape and turned. There was a face in that smoke. It was the face of the old woman who’d burned her house down. She looked at the couple. She seemed to breathe and with that breath the cloud dispersed and was no more. She was free. As for the prison from which she had escaped, it began to crack and crumble into a blackened dust that formed the final layer on this horrific sediment.
The other pipes in the room became shorter. They didn’t retreat all the way back into the walls and ceiling and floor, but it was the first time David had ever seen them shrink at all.
David and his wife rose. They looked at each other and, as had often been the case in the past, the spoke without words. It was clear. This was the way out.
