Shelby heard the cabin’s steps creak underfoot and knew the dream was over. No time to get out through the trapdoor. No time to hide under the bed or in the tiny bathroom. She didn’t open her eyes. It would only make it worse, the moment they took her from Nadine’s arms, from the peace of the other girl’s sweat and sawdust smell and the thrill of being skin to skin with her, still tingling and tired. This must be why they call it making love, thought Shelby.
She was crying when Corey and Marianne came in and dragged her from the bed, crying when Nadine kicked free of the tangled sheets and threw herself on Corey’s back, biting and clawing, raking his eyes with her nails.
When Corey’s face broke open like a spider’s legs unfolding, though, and the puckered mouth within snapped shut on Nadine’s first two fingers, then Shelby began to scream.
The counselors zip-tied their arms behind their backs and marched them up a plywood ramp into the bed of one of the pickups, where Malcolm, John, and Felix were already sitting. They brought Shelby and Nadine up last, Shelby with duct tape over her mouth, Nadine bleeding freely where two of her fingers just … ended, as though someone had snipped them off with a pair of gardening shears. There was no sign of Gabe, or Jo, or Brady, just the five of them herded up over the tailgate.
“You think they’re taking us to Disney World?” Malcolm asked, wishing he could scratch his nose. “It’s peak season, so we’re just gonna be waiting in lines all day.”
“Malcolm,” said John. “Could you please shut up?”
Malcolm swallowed past the lump in his throat. He couldn’t stop looking at Nadine’s hand. He’d thought she was so cool, so tough, so grown-up. How had he missed that she was just a fucking kid? They were all just fucking kids. “Copy that, chief.”
The truck’s engine turned over. It pulled away toward where two ranch hands stood by the open chain-link gate. Through the dirty glass of the cab’s rear-facing window Malcolm watched Corey wipe blood from his chin with a handkerchief. The counselor’s face was covered in angry red scratch marks.
Felix kicked the tailgate hard enough to rattle it. “Fuck,” he snarled. He kicked it again. “Fuck.” Again. “Fuck!”
“Take it easy,” said John.
“FUCK!” Felix screamed, rolling onto his side as he doubled up his legs and kicked again, jolting the tailgate hard against its locks. He was crying. “FUCK! FUCK, FUCK!”
Malcolm wished he’d stop. He still felt so weird after whatever had happened the night before. As he met John’s gaze across the bed of the truck, he remembered their mouths sealed together, their tongues thrashing, and the painful stiffness in his briefs. His thighs were still sticky from it. He’d thought it would be too much, John on top of him, but it had been … nice. Soft, like drowning in molten marshmallow. In the light of day he felt embarrassed by how eager he’d been. How much he’d liked it.
Something must have shown on his face, because John turned away from him and set his jaw as though determined not to cry. You’re the Tom Cruise of fucking up, thought Malcolm. You’re the fuckin’ Kyle MacLachlan of pulling a boner. Whatever. He’s better off without you.
“They’re not human,” said Nadine. Her face was ashen, her voice hardly audible over the rattling roar of the truck’s progress. Still, they all heard her. Malcolm watched her blood slosh back and forth in one of the truck bed’s plastic channels.
“They’re monsters, and they’re going to kill us.”
John rose awkwardly up onto his knees as the truck started its descent into a tiered depression in the shadow of a wind-smoothed wall of rock. He couldn’t stop staring, could hardly hear Felix and Malcolm telling him to sit down before he fell out of the bed. Trees. Grass, which he knew from the summers his father had made him work at Shearwater Meadow, the golf course on the edge of town, drank water like a fish. And there was water to be had, entire pools and rivulets of it splashing down the tiers in miniature waterfalls through stands of bamboo and sumac, past overgrown flower and herb gardens. Scintillating blurs flitted here and there among the nodding blossoms. Hummingbirds, in the middle of the desert.
“Oh my God,” he heard himself say. The look of ashamed anger Malcolm had given him earlier seemed all at once a tiny little thing, inconsequential against what he was seeing. Even if they were about to die, even if the camp’s staff really were monsters, this was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life, an awe-inspiring waste of resources on a scale he couldn’t begin to imagine. “This is impossible.”
“Well it’s doing an amazing impression of being possible then,” Malcolm snapped. He was sulking. Probably embarrassed about how he’d begged John to climb on top of him and grind, how he’d come right away and broken down crying, mumbling nonsense as he fell deeper into whatever trip they’d been sent on. Doors and phlox and Mary’s hand and Mommy, Mommy, please don’t do it. John had felt so tender toward him then. He’d held the skinny boy, Malcolm’s chin on his shoulder, and stroked his hair as he cried until it passed and they went back to kissing, to whispering sweet things and touching, still afraid but eager. Hungry. It was over now. It had crumbled at the first touch of sunlight.
John sank back down into the bed, trying to ease his legs out from under him. He nearly tipped over onto Felix, who’d been lying silent and unresponsive since his outburst when they were loaded aboard. “Sorry,” he said. The truck hit a bump in the narrow dirt track and a flock of game birds exploded from the undergrowth to the side of the road, wings whirring loudly enough to drown out the noise of the motor for a fleeting moment. One came close enough for him to see the raw, sticky flesh of its underbelly, as though it had torn itself loose from something greater and gone winging off in terror on its own. Rags of skin trailed after it, and then the birds were gone into the bamboo, crashing through the pale green stalks.
In the yard outside the farmhouse they climbed down out of the truck with Garth’s help while a few ranch hands kept watch at a distance, shotguns shouldered. Mrs. Glover stood smoking on the porch, a fringed shawl wrapped around her bony shoulders. She reminded John of his stepmother, all protruding ridges and hard angles, her skeleton resentful of the skin encumbering it. Her stare gave him the bizarre urge to wrap his arms around his belly, to hide it from her, to protect it from her fleshless fingers. She looked at him like he was something dirty.
“Where are you taking us?” shouted Felix. He was crying again, the most emotion John had ever seen from him. “Where’s Gabe? Where are Jo and Brady? Fucking answer me!”
Garth slapped him hard across the face. Felix went over, unable to break his fall with his bound hands, and Garth kicked him in the stomach hard enough that he folded in on himself with a harsh, coughing sob. “Stop it,” Shelby moaned through her duct-tape gag. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
Garth seized Felix by the back of his shirt and dragged him the rest of the way to the porch as Corey and the other ranch hands closed in to force the rest of them toward the house. John brought up the rear. The guns were making him nervous. He’d never liked them, had turned white on the spot when his father gave him a rifle for his thirteenth birthday. It made his heart rabbit and his mouth turn dry when the sun glanced off those oiled barrels. If we run, they’ll shoot us.
On some level, he thought as he climbed the porch steps, he’d really believed Nadine’s plan would save them, that they’d swipe protein bars from the kitchen like Tom Sawyer packing his bindle and then traipse right out of camp and have a real adventure, that Jo’s grandfather would pick them up in a big gold Cadillac and take them all for hamburgers and milkshakes. He’d never thought it would wind up here, kids held at gunpoint by grown-ups, a toe on the last line of the unspoken pact between their worlds: If you obey me without question, I won’t kill you.
“It’ll all be over soon, babies,” said Mrs. Glover as they passed her by. Her bony fingers brushed John’s face with something between lust and loathing, the expression etched deep enough into her skull-like mask of a face that he stumbled back a step and nearly bowled Shelby over. Corey shoved him back in line. They went into the house, and as John stepped over the threshold a white-hot needle of pain zapped between his right eye and the back of his head. He bumped against a side table. Something shattered on the floor. Porcelain.
If the moon is waxing gibbous and the limpid limpets shimmer, who is watching from its zenith as the bursar carves his dinner?
John remembered something as he fell to his knees and vomited, heaving bile and mucus up on the clean carpet. Something Gabe had said that night they’d all sat around drinking and talking about their dreams. About the holes they dug when they closed their eyes, and the things they found in them. His own face smirking up at him from beneath clods of runny, sucking mud. His own fingers curling around his wrist as he knelt to dig deeper. Someone’s beaming shit into our heads like Professor X? I mean, come on.
The next thing he knew, he was sitting in a chair in a big, well-lit kitchen with one of Pastor Eddie’s dinner-plate hands gripping his shoulder like a vise as the Cheryl-thing drew his blood. The syringe filled quickly, sucking at his forearm like a huge mosquito made of glass and metal. Someone had cut his zip tie. John let out an involuntary whimper and tried to jerk back, but the pastor’s grip restrained him. The others stood all around and Dave and Corey barred the doors, incongruous in stocking feet. They must have left their boots by the doormat.
“Easy,” the pastor rumbled. His voice made John think of a Morlock, hulking and filthy and secretive, toiling under the earth. His mother had read him The Time Machine when he was seven. He’d had nightmares about things coming up out of hatches in the ground for weeks. “It’s just a little blood, sissy Mary.”
Not since what happened at the lake.
The thought came from nowhere. He’d been noticing things like that more and more. He didn’t have any memories about a lake. Nothing worth calling up, anyway. For an instant, as he looked away from the needle, he saw Gabe lying curled on the floor under the cabinets, but it was just his eyes playing tricks on him. Gabe was gone. Jo. Brady. Quiet little Smith, who he’d never really gotten to know. Everything was moving so fast. Stinging pain as Mrs. Glover drew the syringe from his arm. A little way off Nadine stood with her back to the oven, still pale but no longer bleeding. She wouldn’t meet his eye.
“All right, big boy,” said the pastor, heaving John to his feet. Blood trickled from the pinprick wound in his forearm. “Next.”
The Cheryl-thing took an ampule from each one of them, working quickly and efficiently. When all five glass vials lay side by side in a little tin tray left out on the polished kitchen table, she took them all and left the kitchen. Pastor Eddie left a moment later, bending down to kiss his wife on his way to the back door. Their tongues flicked between their mouths. A wet sound. She looked so tiny next to him. John felt a momentary flash of embarrassment at the thought of what he and Malcolm must have looked like to the rest of the camp last night.
I am never going home again.
Mrs. Glover broke a match from a book left out by the salt and pepper shakers, struck it, and lit a cigarette. He’d never seen her smoke before that day. The others sat and stood around the kitchen. John joined Felix by the cabinets under the sink, lowering himself to the floor and letting out a long, slow breath. His whole body wanted to run, his heart pounding, his head still aching, but there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Men at the doors and Mrs. Glover sitting there and smoking, like nothing was wrong in the world.
“What are you going to do to us?” asked Felix.
Mrs. Glover took a long drag off her cigarette. Ash crumbled from the tip and she waved it away before it could settle on her skirt. “When my daughter was three,” she said, blowing swirling trails of smoke from her nostrils, “she was diagnosed with leukemia.” She took another drag from her cigarette, the cherry flaring orange and red. “Our church prayed. Our neighbors. Our families. We took her to tent revivals. Homeopaths. To Sloan Kettering and St. Jude’s. Dieticians, hypnotists. I even took her to a shaman, near the end. He covered her in grease and gabbled over her, filled the tent with steam and smoke, poured cold water over hot stones.”
She pursed her lips and exhaled a long plume. “I was so desperate. Janey was just skin and bones by then.” One of her hands flew to her right collarbone, fingers stroking its prominent ridge without apparent thought. “You’d touch her arm, just while you were talking to her, and leave these big ugly bruises like you’d beaten her with a mixing spoon. I would have done anything. Believed anything. One night when I brought her home from a week of observation, when I carried her into the house in my arms like she was nothing and tucked her into bed, there was a message on my answering machine. Thelma Nielson, a woman I knew from church, telling me she’d heard from my mother-in-law’s friend Sookie Carmichael that the week before she—Eddie’s mother, Nora—had bailed him out of jail in Ranahoe County, and the word was he’d been caught blowing some seventeen-year-old boy whore with a purple mohawk, and did I need anything? Was I all right? Oh she hoped she hadn’t upset me.” A bitter smile. “Purple. I think she made the color up, to make it more delicious. To have a little extra texture to savor while she chewed on what was left of my life.
“He came home later that night. We didn’t talk about it, but he knew that I knew. It was like that for months. He slept in his study. He hadn’t touched me in years anyway. So we kept it up until Janey died, that May. It was nineteen eighty-one. After the funeral, the first moment Eddie and I were alone in the house, we had a fight. It was like everything we’d held inside ourselves came pouring out at once, more and more of it. Black bile. Ugly things. He begged me to stay, to stand by him in his struggle. He promised he’d get better, but all I could think was that he was going to use my daughter’s ghost to guilt me into giving him a fig leaf while he carried on with his boys.
“In the end I walked right out of the house and into the desert. To die, I think. Eddie’s problem. Losing Janey.” Her face twitched. “That was part of it, of course. The way her little hand uncurled from mine. But to tell you the truth, what sent me out the door that night, what made me turn my back on Eddie while he pleaded with me, begged, sobbed, was imagining the way the congregation would look at me from then on, now that Janey was gone and there was nothing to keep them from digging their claws into us, the way they’d tilt their heads, speak softly, gently, like I was the one who was dying, like their feeling sorry for me…” She pursed her lips, expression sour. “… that it mattered. I couldn’t face the thought of that much pity.
“So I walked. I walked until the sun came up. I was thirstier than I’d ever been before, and so weak I could hardly stand, but I did, and I kept going until it was dark again. I don’t know how long I was out there. Two days? Three? But I remember the stars.” Another exhale, smoke coiling around her skeletal wrist as she drew an arc in the air with the cigarette’s burning tip. “The Milky Way … and I remember drinking water near the mountains. It made me sick. Shitting my guts out. Delirious. That was when it found me. It brought me here, to its crater, and showed me what it could do.
“A few days later I went home, and it came with me. It fixed Eddie. Now it’s going to fix you, too.”
Shelby was crying. Nadine had her arms around the shorter girl. John put his head in his hands. He felt sorry for her, for this starved and deranged woman holding their lives in the palm of her hand, for her long, lonely, frustrating marriage. And then he thought about what Gabe had said about Candace, about how she’d been replaced, which led him to the memory of Pastor Eddie’s parting kiss just minutes before. What kissed her? The thought chased itself around his mind until it felt like he would never think of anything else. What puts its mouth on her mouth? What did Jo hear her having sex with? What touches her at night? Does she want it? To let it touch her?
“You’re insane,” said Felix.
Mrs. Glover smiled slightly. “Maybe,” she said. “But soon you’ll be dead, and I’ll have my daughter back. It’s been growing her for me. So what does the rest of it matter?”
Cheryl appeared in the doorway to the back hall, sliding easily past Dave. “They’re clean,” said the counselor. “It’s ready.”
“All right.” Mrs. Glover stubbed her cigarette out in a porcelain ashtray. “Take them down.”
In the laundry room a door stood open to the left of the machines. The air smelled of bleach and warm cotton and Nadine clung hard to Shelby’s hand with her uninjured one, hoping no one in the kitchen had noticed her turning on the gas and palming the plastic knobs. They were in her pockets now. Probably someone would smell it and turn it off. Probably they’d all be dead long before anything happened with it at all. It still felt better, knowing she’d thrown one last punch.
Marianne took hold of a bar that must have been concealed behind shelving during laundry shifts and hauled back on it. A secret door, set flush with the wall, rolled smoothly out of the way. Behind it was another, plain wood with a tarnished knob. Smiling broadly, Corey opened it. Thick, humid air stinking of corn syrup and cat shit rolled out over them. “Oh my God,” breathed Malcolm, hands over his mouth and nose. “Oh Jesus fuck-me-running Christ.”
Behind the door, a set of concrete steps led down twenty or thirty feet to a bare dirt floor, and a short way from the foot of the stair, Gabe lay curled on his side next to another boy with whom something was terribly, monstrously wrong. It was Gabe’s size and shape, just about, but its face was split from chin to forehead just like Corey’s had been, and from the slack-lipped gap spilled a thick mass of tendrils that stirred weakly in the muck surrounding the thing. Behind it lay some sort of hairy, membranous egg sac, now deflated. Nadine stared. Even after what had happened in the barn and then in the cabin, even with the stump of her missing fingers burning and throbbing through the handkerchief Shelby had knotted over and around it, the stench and the cavern and the thing lying down there next to Gabe in the fluorescent glare all made her feel like she was losing her mind. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening.
“Bye, princess,” said Marianne, smiling broadly at Nadine.
“Suck my dick,” Nadine snapped without thinking. Someone hit her from behind with the stock of a shotgun, knocking her forward a few steps. The doorframe caught her chin, reopening her split lip, and she spat blood as Shelby grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the stair. A few of the ranch hands laughed and it occurred to Nadine with a sick thrill of curiosity that some of them might still be human.
“It’s okay,” said Shelby. Her voice trembled, but it held. “I’m with you.”
The ranch hands and counselors herded them through the door and onto the narrow steps. Nadine felt like a steer in a run, the air thick with panic, something ahead beyond her comprehension except that she was frightened of it. Those air-powered bolt guns punching their little metal rods through the beef’s skulls. Two thousand pounds of meat coming down like a curtain. Marianne slammed the inner door behind them. The lock clicked. Below, the thing lying beside Gabe let out a low, sleepy burble like a baby talking in its sleep.
“I’m getting him away from that thing,” said Nadine, and as the words left her lips the horror of the reeking chamber seemed a little more bearable, a little more real. She went down the steps and crossed the broad expanse of dirt. The subbasement was huge, poured concrete walls rising fifteen or twenty feet to an arched ceiling supported by graying, splintery timber joisted with rusted plates and struts. A tunnel yawned on the far side of the room and the smell was even stronger in its draft than at the top of the steps, flyblown garbage and orange soda drying into sticky chemical waste on car upholstery. Nadine put her face in the crook of her arm and made her way to where Gabe lay on his side, pale and motionless except for the flutter of his pulse in his slender throat.
She knelt, fighting the urge to gag at the sight of the thing lying next to Gabe. Its eyes were closed, the uneven halves of its face slack and dead-looking. It had four fingers on its right hand, its fifth no more than a tender half-inch nub of raw pink flesh emerging from what looked like a burst blister. It was a little more solid than Gabe, too, its shoulders broader, its muscles more defined except where they drooped like sleeping snakes from the curved bones of its malformed legs.
“Is this the thing?” Shelby whispered from a short way behind Nadine. The others stood gathered there, not daring to come closer. “You know, from our dreams? The thing that replaced Candace. Whatever you want to call it. Some kind of monster, or a—” She gestured with both hands as though grasping for something.
“Cuckoo,” John finished, and it sounded right. It sounded familiar. “No, I don’t think so. Or, not all of it. That thing it came out of looks like an egg; something must have laid it.”
Nadine turned her attention from that appalling thought to Gabe, slipping her arms under his and standing with some difficulty. He didn’t weigh much, but he was tall and bony and awkward to move. The thing’s tentacles slid from his face. It let out a piteous squeal, but didn’t follow. She had him halfway to the steps by the time he started to stir, snorting and retching in her arms. “Easy,” she said, trying to avoid his flailing hands. “It’s me! It’s Nadine. Just—”
That was when she heard it. People. It sounded like dozens of them at least, shuffling and wheezing and blowing, coughing and snorting and clearing their throats. It came from the mouth of the tunnel. A phlegmy, sputtering onslaught of respiration echoed and re-echoed from the tunnel walls, and the sound of something heavy dragging over rock and earth. A fresh wave of stench washed over her. As she backed gagging and coughing toward the steps, a dark mass appeared in the deeper gloom.
It squirmed through the archway, a tide of skin and greasy hair and raw, wet flesh pulled along by scrabbling limbs and bands of muscle cradled in buttery soft fat like the segmented body of some obscene grub. It was enormous, as big as an elephant. Bigger. Feathery limbs dripping with a cloudy, viscous fluid unfurled from its sides. The front of its rolling mass heaved and stretched, rings of doughy flesh forming and inverting as new limbs squirmed their way out of its bulk. It clawed at itself with soft, unformed fingernails, peeling away mats of sodden hair and flaking, scabby dermis. Dirty feathers covered its back like an eagle’s ruff. Nadine couldn’t seem to find her breath.
This isn’t happening.
A particularly large crust of dead flesh tore loose and from the quivering vaginal wound beneath it came a face, wriggling its way slowly out into the open air. A girl of three or four, wisps of dark hair plastered to her scalp by that same nameless slime, eyes rolling from rheumy white sclera to huge black pupils. The pupils shrank. Muddy irises bloomed from them. The face began to age. Its skin grew tight, dried into brittle flakes, and tore, the pouty mouth cropping at loose scales of the dandruff-like refuse. Bones lengthening. Nose growing, baby fat melting away. Vestigial features formed and burst like boils in the sagging flesh of its neck. Another layer desiccated into eczema and ripped with a dry, satisfying tearing sound. It was almost to the other Gabe now as it picked away the dead mask, fresh clumps of black hair spilling from its scalp where its skin sloughed free. A woman, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, brow furrowed in concentration. Its mouth worked, lips fluttering in separate segments before knitting together and pulling tight over crooked teeth.
“Up,” it hissed, humping itself up on its own bulk, sluglike pseudopods of fat and muscle dewing from its belly to support it. “Up.” It hit the sleeping figure with one of its knobby, sticklike fists. The thing opened its eyes. Gabe’s eyes, round and baby blue but lifeless as the marbles in a doll’s porcelain sockets. Whatever it was, however it saw the world around it, those eyes were just for show, no different from the way some bugs looked like leaves or bark, or predators. Camouflage.
Nadine stared, a picture beginning to form in her mind. A thing with her face getting on a bus back to Kansas, riding in silence until it came at last to her family’s home, to the red front door and the old granite hitching post, and went into her mother’s arms. What would it do with her face? Her life? She felt violated. She felt as though insects were crawling under her skin.
The creature looked at her and a smile split its face, a smile so wide its features began sliding back over the soft contours of its skull until all that remained was skin pulled so tight that it was shiny and translucent, and nightmarish rows of teeth nested in infected tissue. Then it spoke, and its voice left a white-hot hole in her mind like a cigarette burn on tender skin. She was on her knees. She was screaming as blood poured from her nostrils.
I will tell you what becomes of the flesh, Nadine. Lovely Nadine with your long, long legs and your hair like summer. Your father thinks of you as he touches himself. He dreams of your wet little holes, your long, graceful toes. You suspect these things. You understand them, but there is nothing you can do. This is the nature of separation. Pain. Loneliness. Deformations of desire, all to bridge a gap that cannot be bridged, save through union with us. With me. Aren’t you tired of being afraid, Nadine? Of being lonely? Tess will never understand you. Nor will this sad little thing, trying so pitifully to reshape itself with neither art nor understanding.
She was vomiting. She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Hands had her. Took Gabe, who was waking now, crying out and coughing up something thick and black and sticky. She was alone. She was alone and her brain was on fire and there was nothing, nothing but an endless darkness clawing at her stomach, eating away at her insides.
I can make it stop, Nadine. I can show you what the mushroom did, the dance of chemicals and electricity that will strip loneliness away from you forever. The final yielding up of meat to consciousness. The boundless freedom of the void. My servants have prepared you and the time has come, Nadine. Lovely Nadine. Let me in. I will show you true love.
A deep, tooth-rattling concussion shook the chamber. Dust and plaster sifted down from overhead and Nadine was halfway up the staircase, Felix and Shelby dragging her between them as below the chittering Gabe-thing skittered from the Cuckoo’s path. It squirmed toward them, moving rapidly for its huge size. Up ahead Gabe staggered in John’s wake, on his feet but covered in sweat and with vomit down the front of his shirt. John threw himself against the inner door.
Below, the Cuckoo reached the steps. Its bulk spilled into the narrow defile as with spindly fingers it seized hold of its lower jaw and wrenched it down, opening a bloody furrow in its mass. Teeth wriggled from the seeping flesh. Tongues spilled from the cleft. Over the top of its humped enormity she could see the rest of its bloated caterpillar form writhing in the chamber below, plaster and dust raining down on it along with the occasional chunk of concrete. Fat, hairy eggs slid from openings near its rear. Inside them, murky forms were thrashing. Thick snakes of muscle coiled around its flopping makeshift maw, giving it structure as the thing dragged itself toward them.
Another blast, this one followed by a thunderous, rippling series of crashes as something aboveground collapsed. More rock dust showered them. Nadine got her feet under her just as John kicked the inner door open, the lock splintering and tearing loose. They spilled out into the laundry room. Garth was on his hands and knees beside a workbench set along the far wall, a shotgun lying near him. He must have fallen in the tremors. John crashed into him and knocked him to the ground. The shotgun skittered away over the concrete as Gabe and Malcolm piled onto the fallen counselor, punching and kicking his prone form. As the man thrashed, John grabbed his head in both hands and slammed it hard against the floor. Garth’s legs jerked. His back arched. He collapsed and didn’t move again.
Nadine.
She staggered back. The Cuckoo had reached the top of the stairs, its swollen mass overflowing the frame as its toothy snout, draped in folds of quivering flesh, snapped at the air. Hooked claws and fumbling fingers pulled it slowly, inexorably into the laundry room, its neck extending as fresh lattices of muscle squirmed under its skin. In the depths of its gnashing maw, a pale eye blinked. Its pupil dilated.
Lovely Nadine.
The door frame buckled outward with a resounding crunch. Nadine staggered toward the steps up to the farmhouse, groping for Shelby’s hand. She found it and squeezed hard, not caring that it sent a red-hot shock of pain up her mutilated fingers. Halfway up the stairs, Gabe just ahead of her and Shelby just behind, she caught a whiff of sulfur in the air. A rotten egg stink. They didn’t notice the gas, or whatever’s going on outside distracted them.
She looked back over her shoulder, only for a moment, and saw the thing drive one of its hooks through the back of Garth’s skull as it squirmed past him. The counselor convulsed and let out a strangled sort of squawk. Above the limb that had dealt the killing blow, a mouth opened in the Cuckoo’s sloping bulk and echoed Garth’s gargling death wail.
Then they were pounding out into the hall that cut down the center of the farmhouse, framed pictures falling from their hooks as a third explosion—this one unmuffled by rock or concrete—shook the house around them. What the fuck is happening out there?
“Gas!” she shouted, pushing Shelby ahead of her toward the front door. She could hear the basement steps breaking like matchwood under the Cuckoo’s weight. “Outside! Outside!”
Shelby looked back at her, eyes wide with terror, and Nadine wondered how anyone could ever have mistaken her for a boy. She had such beautiful eyelashes. Such a perfect mouth.
“Go,” said Nadine. “I’m right behind you.”
Halfway to the front door she ducked into the kitchen. Through the windows over the sink she could see the barn was burning, its roof mostly collapsed and a thick tower of black smoke pouring out of the wreckage. Flames caressed its sole standing wall. Cinders danced in the air.
There. The matchbook Mrs. Glover had used to light her cigarette. She started toward the table when it struck again. The white fire in her head.
Nadine, it whispered, its voice clawing at her forebrain, shredding her thoughts as she crawled to the table on hands and knees and fumbled for the matches, hardly able to see. Lovely Nadine, aren’t you tired of being so strong for everyone? Aren’t you sick of how they cling to you, look to you, need you? Come and be my baby, sweet Nadine. Crawl into my arms and I will nurse you at my breast. Sweet girl. Baby girl.
It made an obscene kissing sound just as her fingers found the pack. She grabbed it and lurched in the direction of the door, hoping she wouldn’t smack full tilt into the wall. Everything was smears of black and white and red and she heard Shelby calling for her. She had to get to the front porch, to get out of the reeking gas before it got to her. Just a few more steps.
Just a little farther.
“We have to go back!” Shelby screamed, clinging to the door frame. John had a hold of her shirt and he was shouting about gas and the pastor and the other counselors. None of it mattered. Somehow, Nadine wasn’t with them anymore. “She’s still in there! She’s still in there!”
And then she was back. Nadine lurched out of the kitchen a few yards back along the hall, washed in the blue static glow of the TV, and brandished something at them with a wide, bloody grin. A match torn from Mrs. Glover’s matchbook, which she held in her other hand. She took a step toward them. Shelby felt an overwhelming crash of relief, as though a wave had broken over her and flattened her into nothingness, serene and empty. It was going to be okay. Nadine would know what to do.
The floor under the other girl’s feet erupted, splintered planks and shreds of fiberglass insulation flying. The Cuckoo had Nadine. Its malformed jaws worried her legs and side, shredding fabric and flesh. Dog mouths. Little ratlike rodent heads and crooked human teeth tore at her flesh. Its claws and spines punched through her skin, which tented against the penetrating barbs, as it extruded a long, glistening stinger from its bloodied mass and rammed it through her stomach. Shelby stared. There was an awful roaring in her ears. Someone was pulling at her, dragging her through the door and out onto the porch. Voices shouting words she couldn’t understand. Down the steps. Reaching out with helpless hands.
No, no, no.
Nadine still held the match in her uninjured hand, her thumbnail poised against its head. Her lips moved, forming words that cut themselves deep into Shelby’s heart. Shelby screamed them back. “I love you,” she wailed. “I love you!”
Nadine flicked her nail against the striker. There was a spark. A flame. A wave of blinding red and white and yellow, the house’s windows flexing like sails catching the wind, and then everything was fire and flying glass.