Chapter XVIII: The Last Laugh

The people of Boron had learned to recognize the infected.

That knowledge had been purchased dearly.

They knew the staggering walk. The pale skin. The sudden aggression. They knew which roads to avoid and which buildings could still be barricaded before nightfall. Survivors had learned to travel quietly, sleep in shifts, and never assume a familiar voice calling from the darkness still belonged to the person they remembered.

Runecorp called it adaptation.

The people of Boron called it survival.

But nothing they had learned prepared them for what came out of the carnival that night.

The first warning wasn't a scream.

It was laughter.

Three different laughs, overlapping one another somewhere beyond the abandoned midway. One was deep and booming. Another came in short, excited bursts. The third sounded almost playful.

Then all three stopped at exactly the same time.

Those sheltering inside the buildings nearest the carnival froze. Nobody needed to be told to stay away from the windows anymore. They had learned better.

Then something enormous struck the side of a building.

The entire structure shook.

A moment later, a man came crashing through the wooden doors and landed across the floor. He had been thrown hard enough to splinter the frame behind him. Before anyone could ask what had happened, he pointed toward the street.

"Run."

Nobody argued.

What emerged from the fog no longer resembled anything the carnival had ever put beneath the Big Top.

Once, there had been three performers.

Bubbles.

Snippy.

Jack-in-the-Coffin.

Three clowns. Three acts. Three very different reasons for making people scream.

Now there was only one.

The infection had done something to them that it hadn't done to the others. Their bodies had twisted together into a towering mass, three heads rising from a single mutated frame. Pieces of their old costumes still clung to the creature, stretched and torn across a body that had grown far beyond anything human.

Yet the faces remained recognizable.

That somehow made it worse.

Bubbles still grinned.

Snippy's eyes still darted eagerly from one survivor to another.

Jack-in-the-Coffin laughed as though the entire nightmare were simply another performance.

Three personalities trapped inside one monster.

Three voices.

Three laughs.

One enormous appetite for destruction.

Nobody understood why the infection had transformed them so differently.

Runecorp did.

Inside the underground facility, warning screens filled with images of the creature moving through Boron. Analysts compared the mutation against everything they had recorded since Patient Zero.

The numbers made no sense.

Ordinary exposure couldn't produce something like this.

Then someone pulled the original distribution records.

Three names had been marked separately.

Bubbles.

Snippy.

Jack-in-the-Coffin.

The dosage estimates were dramatically higher than every other subject.

The room went silent.

This wasn't accidental exposure.

The Stranger had deliberately given all three of them far more.

Runecorp had instructed him to test transmission.

The Stranger had apparently decided to test something else.

Back in Boron, there was no time to wonder why.

The creature reached the town square shortly after midnight.

Barricades that had held back dozens of infected lasted seconds.

It didn't climb over them.

It went through them.

Wood shattered across the street as survivors scattered. A wagon was flipped onto its side. Barrels rolled through the square. One man attempting to reach a nearby doorway was caught and hurled across the street like he weighed nothing.

Every impact was followed by laughter.

Bubbles laughed.

Snippy laughed.

Jack laughed.

Sometimes separately.

Sometimes together.

The sound echoed between the buildings until it seemed as though the entire town were laughing at the people trying desperately to survive inside it.

The survivors ran toward the old market district.

Behind them came another crash.

Then another.

Nobody looked back.

They could hear enough.

A wooden storefront collapsed somewhere behind them. Glass shattered. Something heavy scraped across the road. Then came the unmistakable sound of Snippy's old gardening shears snapping together.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

Some part of him had remembered.

That realization made everyone run faster.

By now, the people of Boron understood what The Stranger had done. His infection wasn't merely spreading. It was changing. Different victims reacted differently, and nobody knew what the next infected person might become.

The carnival had transformed from the happiest place in Boron into the birthplace of things that should not exist.

And somewhere beyond the containment perimeter, The Stranger was still missing.

Perhaps he was watching.

Perhaps this was exactly what he'd hoped would happen.

Or perhaps even he had no idea what he'd created.

None of that mattered to the survivors hiding inside the market cellar as something enormous entered the street above them.

The ceiling groaned.

Dust fell between the floorboards.

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed.

Then came the laughter.

One voice.

Then two.

Then three.

A child buried her face against her mother's coat. Someone quietly reached for the cellar door, making certain the lock was secure.

Above them, footsteps stopped.

Silence.

For one impossible moment, everyone believed the creature might continue down the road.

Then they heard Snippy.

"Found you."

The first strike against the cellar door nearly tore it from its hinges.

The second split the wood.

The survivors backed toward the far wall as the three voices outside erupted into laughter.

There was nowhere else to run.

No Runecorp checkpoint.

No safe road.

No carnival gate left to close.

Only a weakening door between them and whatever The Stranger's experiment had created.

The third impact shook the entire cellar.

The lock began to break.

And as three different laughs filled the darkness, one question remained for everyone still alive in Boron:

When the door finally opened...

who would get the last laugh?