Jo led the way down through the foothills, following the path of a dry stream. The others walked strung out behind her, no one talking about what had happened last night in the bunker’s soft, enfolding dark, that pale stripe of moonlight falling across their backs and limbs and open mouths. Her legs and pelvis still thrummed with the power of it, like static building in her veins, but it no longer felt completely real. Shame and exhaustion crept back in the farther they walked and the more the world became about wet socks and blisters and the crackle of dry air in thirsty throats. Felix’s best guess was that they had a two-day walk ahead of them, maybe more.
They had just passed beyond the forest’s edge and out into the flat country when the noises began. Jo turned at the first distant blast of wood exploding under pressure. The treetops swayed far back along the slope. That’s close to the bunker, she thought, her heart hammering. She still had the shotgun, for all the good it would do. Wood splintered. Groaned. Cracked with gunshot reports as forty-foot ancients toppled to the forest floor some miles behind them, the thunderous boom of impact presaged by the rippling crackle and snap of branches breaking. They stood in silence as the giants fell.
The squeal and clatter of stone against stone soon joined the cacophony. Dust rose up from among the trees and plumed from rockslides which grew and spread, gouging vee-shaped wounds in the dead forest. A scream came from the midst of all of it, not the strangled choral wail that had risen from the burning house but a sound like dogs at hunt in an old movie, a layered baying interspersed with a shrill screech of rage. It echoed in the hot, dead air until another cry, smaller and more distant, came up from the fading sound to meet it.
“We need to go,” said Jo, finding her tongue.
They walked, quickly at first and then slower as the heat pressed down on them in earnest. For the most part the ground was flat and barren, the soil dry, what little vegetation clung to the earth brown and dead and desiccated. Here and there it dipped where rain had rutted it, plates of dried mud peeled up separately from one another.
The next time she looked back, it was waiting at the forest’s edge. They must have been almost a mile away then, but the size of it made distance hard to judge. A landslide of flesh, white and pink and brown and scabby red, banners of wet hair hanging like moss from limbs that coiled around dead tree trunks. Delicate fronds waved among the branches as the thing heaped itself higher, cresting like a wave but never quite breaking for all that it strained toward them.
It doesn’t want to be out in the sun, Jo realized. She thought of her Oba-chan’s melanomas near the end, those dark, raised moles where the skin had died and replicated over and over and over until whatever engine drove it came apart in a rush of flames and screaming metal. Was that thing, that alien or monster or demon or whatever the fuck it was, afraid of getting skin cancer? The others looked back, following her stare.
“Oh God,” Shelby sobbed, burying her face in John’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. “No, no.”
A voice cut through Jo’s thoughts. Her mouth hung open, drying out. Drool dripped from her chin. Come back, Jo! Please, come back! It has us! It won’t let us go! Please help us. Flesh parting like a sigh. A green eye opening in the raw meat beneath, gazing at her through its thick eyelashes. Help me, Jo.
She staggered back, retching. Hair the color of wheat and honey wriggled out of the ground and caught at her legs, caressing her, wrapping itself in wet, clinging coils around her shins and ankles. Loose earth shook from the tresses as she struggled. Someone had her under the arms. They were pulling her, yanking her back. The earth from which the hair had sprung began to part, solid wedges of dirt rising as something beneath pushed its way to the surface, plump lips puckering, milky slime dripping from a cat’s rough tongue.
Only you can give me what I need.
And then, like a soap bubble popping, the voice was gone. No hair. No silky wet caress. Just the distant bulk of the Cuckoo at the edge of the wood, a vast serpentine thing coiled tight around a huge dead pine, fronds and feelers blooming from its fat segmented sides and shapeless head. It loosed another scream, raking empty air with scythe-like forelimbs. Shelby was still crying. Malcolm’s face was ashen, his hands trembling. Jo stared at the bloated thing, John still holding her up, until at last it uncoiled itself slowly from its perch and squirmed away into the wood, trees swaying and crackling as it brushed against them or used their trunks to anchor its progress.
None of them spoke until the sound of its retreat had faded into the distance, replaced by the hiss of the wind scouring the open flats. “It has her,” Shelby said, and Jo knew it had spoken to the others, had uncoiled the dirty tendrils of its mind and offered them its luscious, dripping gift. They had felt their own version of it last night, she realized, the dying embers of whatever telepathic fire it had worked so hard to bank in their minds giving them a single moment outside of aloneness, a little chemical byblow of its attempt to digest them into its protozoan bulk. Union, pure and true and beautiful.
“We have to go,” said John, his voice cracking.
Slowly, one by one, they turned and walked away from the memory of that sandy hair, those green eyes, the bruises and split lips and bloody teeth. Each of them, in their own way, left the ghost of Nadine and all the others behind.
They were out of water by the end of the first day. Jo thought maybe they should walk at night, avoid the sunlight that had left them all red and peeling, lips cracked, hair stiff, but the cold was worse, the ground riddled with gopher holes and squat dwarf cacti bristling with two-inch spines. A short while after sunset they stopped in their tracks, the sound of ragged breathing suddenly unbearably loud in the absence of their footsteps, and sank down to the dirt to bolt their MREs—a brownish paste masquerading as veal cutlets in tomato sauce—and collapse into exhausted, dreamless sleep.
In the morning Jo woke so sore she almost cried just getting to her feet. Her shoulder where Celine had clawed her throbbed and burned and the joints of her knees were swollen. She’d started her period sometime in the night and her underwear and the crotch of her jeans were soaked through and drying to an itchy, iron-stinking crust. At least her head had finally stopped aching, even if her stomach was in knots. She shuffled over to where Felix and John were poring over the atlas, spread out on the dirt and anchored at the corners by stones.
“We just need to keep heading for that rise,” croaked Felix, pointing toward a brown smear on the horizon where the flat, endless hardpan rose slightly into a small hill. He cleared his throat, tapping a finger against a faded illustration on the map. “My uncle’s a surveyor; these lines mean elevation. The town should be a little way past it.”
“I’m so glad we’re following the map of a guy who built a fallout shelter in the middle of nowhere and then slipped in the shower and died,” said Malcolm. He squatted not far off, picking at the wrapper of an MRE. “I can’t wait to fall into some fucking sinkhole he forgot to chart.”
“Shut up,” snapped Jo. She took a step toward him, suddenly unable to stand the sound of his whining for another second. “If you don’t have anything useful to say, just shut up. Shut up. Can you even do it? Can you do anything but fucking run your mouth?” She pushed him. He fell back on his ass and it felt good to see his eyes go wide. He scuttled back from her on his rear, heels kicking dust. “Shut up!” she shouted, catching his shin with a glancing kick. “Do something or shut up!”
He whipped something at her, a rock the size of a walnut. A bright, infuriating pain like being flicked by a giant just above her eyebrow. She staggered back. She felt raw flesh when she probed the wounded spot, and her fingers came away sticky with blood. She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting down an urge to scream and throw herself on Malcolm, to claw his face and gouge his eyes. It wasn’t his fault he was a stupid fucking clown. When her pulse finally stopped hammering, she looked down at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was small.
The others stood around them, tense and tired, John with tears in his eyes. Jo swallowed. “Me too,” she forced out. It was still so cold. For a moment they all stood there, saying nothing, as though they were trying to find the thread that would take them forward out of this huge, flat void of broken earth and empty sky. Those who could eat did so.
Gabe was almost done pissing by the time Jo thought to shout at him to stop, to finish in one of the canteens.
In case they needed it.
Every step found a new way to hurt John. A grinding, burrlike pain in his heel. A molten sting as torn blisters shifted between shoe and foot. A dry, feverish stiffness as his calves cramped, and the gummy chafing of the skin under his belly, which shifted each time he swung one leg ahead of the other. His head ached. His mouth was dry and cottony. He kept thinking about a hot summer day when his mother had taken him out for homemade strawberry rhubarb ice cream from the little place a few miles from his grandfather’s cabin on Lake Superior. He could still taste the tart, sweet ice flavor on his tongue. He could still see the tears in his mother’s big blue eyes—his father had been sleeping on the couch for months by then, and had for years until her diagnosis—and the soft weight of her belly in her lap. He knew even at nine that she didn’t think of herself as beautiful, but to him the sun rose and set with her smile. Mama’s boy, his father had called him more than once, lip curling in disgust.
Phillip Bates said it again the day he found John’s magazines, all those muscular, sweat-slicked bodies so unlike John’s own—I’ve been patient with you, learned to live with the laziness, the lying, the mama’s-boy theatrics, but I’ll be damned if I raised a queer—and now his son realized that he’d just been guilty. He hadn’t been able to love her, his soft round wife with her wavy golden hair and ruddy cheeks, the product falsely advertised by the thin, hollow-cheeked woman in their wedding photo, and he hated that John hadn’t minded at all, that his fat wife and his fat son had adored each other, had even sometimes been happy in spite of the cold, looming presence of his martyred disapproval.
It felt strange, to realize something like that out here where it didn’t matter at all, where it couldn’t shield him from the dust and grit the hot wind drove across their path or prevent the sun from crisping his face, his arms, the back of his neck. His skin was hot and tight. What a joke, a fat boy thinking about ice cream as his body started shutting down. How’d that old chestnut go? I love you like a fat kid loves cake. He’d heard that one a lot at the fat camp his father and Sheila had sent him to a few years back. Sometimes it had snuck into his thoughts as he lay in his bunk at the end of the day, heartsick and crying for his mother, who’d been buried just a few months earlier. I love you like a fat kid loves cake. I love you like a fat kid loves cake.
It was so dumb on its face, so bluntly simple in its cruelty, that he hadn’t figured out until the humiliation of his final weigh-in the deeper, more insidious barb it had hooked deep inside him, tangled up in bone, impossible to remove: that he could never again hear the words “I love you” without finishing the sentence in his head.
Like a fat kid loves cake.
They had to drink it, of course. By noon they were all practically delirious, so dehydrated they could barely cry, and so when the canteen came around Gabe tipped it back without hesitation and swallowed a mouthful of acrid piss. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, really. He’d tasted it before while sucking cock, a little trace of bitterness in the gamey bouquet of an unwashed groin. At least the hunger was easier to bear. It made him feel good. Special, almost. Like he was sacrificing something for the greater good by leaving his unfinished MREs scattered across the desert. Maybe he’d never get a chance to be a girl, not really, but at least when they found his body out here his collarbones would be standing out like the prows of battleships.
I’d have to pick a whole new name, he thought. Buy new clothes. Hormones, somehow. And then what, spend my life saving up for someone to cut my thing apart and shove it up inside me?
He tried to make it a hateful thought, a lash of punishment thrown back over his shoulder, but just the idea of it brought such a wave of relief that he almost stopped in his tracks. That was exactly what he wanted. His whole life he’d been creeping along with the weight of his manhood crushing him as flat as a cockroach, dirty and untouchable even when a lover was inside him, when someone blushed and smiled just at the sight of him. It was like the minute he’d slipped out of his mother the doctors caught him in a trash bag full of putrid sludge and tied it off, trapping him inside for the rest of his life.
Shelby was a few paces ahead of him. He wondered if she’d felt this way, if she still felt this way. How long did it take to slip out from under their burden and start life as something new? He watched her hips move, her ass swaying from side to side. She looked like a girl. A real one. A sudden spasm of misery cramped his stomach; he would never look like that, those curves, that hourglass shape. Shoulders too broad, hips too narrow, chest too wide. He would be a cheap knockoff of a woman, a slouching scarecrow in garish lipstick and blue eyeshadow.
He found himself wishing he was home in Idaho again, walking somewhere in a shaded wood. It was so much easier there to feel safe, to feel unseen and anonymous. Here there was no escape, nowhere to hide or shelter or rest, just the unrelenting emptiness stretching away on all sides, heat haze shimmering at the horizon, and the sun staring down at them like the eye of God. A formless little nothing in a plastic bag full of filth, writhing as it drowned. He wanted to lie down in the dirt and curl into a ball. He wanted Shelby to hold his head against her chest and whisper that he was a good girl, he was pretty, he was good and sweet and perfect. He wanted his mother, though the thought of her touching him as she hadn’t since the lake made him sick to his stomach. He wanted her to tell him it would be all right.
She sent me here to die, he thought. They both did. They’re home now with Mackenzie and they’re not thinking about me at all. They don’t care that it’s been three weeks. They don’t care that I haven’t called. They want me to go away so they can go back to being perfect, so she can forget the lake and try again with a fresh kid. She’d never do it to Mackenzie. She’d never do it to her little girl.
Her only daughter.
They stopped to eat as their shadows lengthened, spilling dark over the rocks and soil. Gabe’s legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. His spine ached and his head felt curiously empty, as though his thoughts were draining out his ears to dribble on the sand. Ham and scalloped potatoes. It tasted like ashes. A swig of piss to wash it down. This time he swilled it through his teeth to ease the rasping dryness in his throat.
“Are you going to finish that?” John croaked.
Gabe felt a surge of selfless euphoria as he handed the plastic packet to the other boy. Now it wasn’t his decision. He had to go hungry, because someone else needed his share. In a perverse way it comforted him to watch John eat, to see those soft, round shoulders move as the other boy scooped grayish paste into his mouth. His bulk was reassuring, every calorie poured into it one more that separated them, that assured Gabe he would never look that way, never have to drown in a body like that, wrists creased like a baby’s, heavy rolls spilling over the waistband of his shorts.
You’re being cruel.
They started walking again not long after. For a while they went in silence, Jo leading them and Shelby at the rear, their shadows slithering huge and dark and spindly beside them. It seemed impossible that just a day ago they’d all been in each other’s arms. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe all of it had been one long and terrible nightmare, and any minute now he’d trip or pinch himself and wake up back in his bunk at a good old regular American torture camp for troubled teens. In another few weeks they’d drive him home and his father would say gruffly that he liked the short hair and his mother would make a comment about his color, and then at some point he’d climb into the bath and slit his wrists with a broken Coke bottle and they’d find him there, face slathered in clownish makeup, staring at nothing while flies cleaned their forelimbs on his glassy, open eyes.
There’s no place like home, he thought bitterly. The rise in the distance didn’t seem any closer. His feet hurt. His head had started to swim, and his sunburns were peeling. By sunset he knew he’d look like one of Francis’s lizards midmolt. He wondered if he’d still have pee in his stomach when the coroner cut him open, assuming anyone found their bodies out here. The desert was probably full of half-grown bones. He was still mulling that unsavory thought when Malcolm, his voice hoarse and ragged, started singing.
Great big globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat
Hairy pickled piggy feet
Jo groaned. Felix looked back with a grin. Behind Gabe, Shelby took up the uneven chant, yelling in something like harmony with Malcolm.
All comes rolling down the dusty, dirty street
And I forgot my spoon!
And then they were all singing it, belting it out loud enough that their voices pushed back the endless emptiness, loud enough to take the worst of the sting out of every step, to wash away the morning’s stupid arguments and scuffles and make them feel, if only for a little while, that the thing they’d left behind was nothing but a slimy lump, an overgrown Jabba the Hutt, and someday its voice would stop echoing in their heads and its memory would leak away, and they would feel clean again.
Great big globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat
Hairy pickled piggy feet
As if to say, you’re nothing special, you Spencer’s Gifts–looking bitch. You dillhole. You’re just a sack of roadkill and old wigs. You’re a pound of hamburger somebody dropped on the carpet. They sang until their throats were raw, their shadows starting to dissolve into a deeper darkness, and even after the words trailed away Gabe felt lighter, more free. He was still smiling when his knees buckled, firecrackers of incoherent sensation going off in his head, and he dropped face-first into the dirt. Grit on his lips. Taste of blood. Then nothing.
Malcolm held Gabe’s head in his lap as the others clustered close around them. Gabe was breathing, but his pulse felt fluttery and weak when Malcolm pressed two fingers to his throat and his bruised eyelids twitched as though he was caught in some awful dream. He hadn’t stirred, not even when slapped and pinched. The sun was getting low.
“We’ll sleep here,” said Jo. Her whole face was peeling, right up to the hairline, and her dark hair was stiff with salt and dirt. She looked like shit. They all looked like shit, and now stupid anorexic Gabe—could boys even get anorexia?—was down and the rest of them wouldn’t be far behind.
Malcolm stroked Gabe’s hair for lack of a better idea. “It’s okay,” he murmured to the other boy. “You’re okay, baby.”
They ate in silence. The thought of drinking from the canteen made Malcolm want to hurl, even though his mouth felt like it had been packed with sawdust, so he waved it on. John broke out a gas lantern he’d found in the bunker and in silence they tried to find the most comfortable patches of dirt. Malcolm could just see the first stars coming out over the mountains, pinpricks of white in the bruise-purple sky.
The coyotes appeared not long after the sun had set. Three of them, waiting on their haunches outside the pale circle of lantern light. They were gangly things, no bigger than collies but with long, slim legs and pointed snouts. Their tongues hung from their grinning jaws and in the dark their eyes glowed flat and cold as coins. They’re waiting for us to die, thought Malcolm. He was tired enough that there was no drama to it, just an exhausted sense of resignation.
John sat down beside him. For a while they said nothing, Malcolm still stroking Gabe’s hair, the coyotes fading in the gathering dark until only the glow of their eyes and the gleam of light on spit-slicked teeth remained. A tight knot of anxiety formed in Malcolm’s chest as the silence stretched on and on. It was getting cold again, the icy chill of night in the open desert creeping back into his bones. Finally, John spoke.
“I like you,” said the other boy. Malcolm could practically hear him blushing. “Do you like me? I honestly can’t tell. If it was just the drugs, whatever they gave us, that’s fine. That’s okay. It’s just that I’d like to know.”
“You know there are literally scavengers waiting to, like, pick our carcasses clean right now,” said Malcolm. He didn’t like how snippy his voice sounded, how panicked and defensive. He sounded like his mother when someone pointed out she wasn’t making sense, or caught her in one of her lies.
“I know,” said John.
Malcolm thought of the other boy’s weight on top of him, of the feverish intensity with which his body had given itself up to John in the midst of whatever drug trip they’d been sent on. Part of him wanted to lunge back into those soft, strong arms, to spend however long he had left rubbing himself off against John’s thigh, but another part, one he didn’t fully understand, that spoke not in words but in the silent language of sidelong looks, knew that to be with John was to give up something precious, some indefinable cachet that everyone knew by sight without ever having heard its name spoken aloud. That same sense had driven him to mock the fat boy on their first day digging postholes for the fences, and it kept him silent now.
Something screamed in the distance, breaking the unpleasant stillness between them. Not the Cuckoo, but something like it. Some nasty little tumor, he thought, that must have wriggled loose from its vast bulk and slunk out after them across the plain. One of Jo’s dog-things. The coyotes fled at once, the glow of their eyes vanishing into the gathering dusk. He wondered if they knew to fear it from experience, if it had crept out here in the years before it found Mrs. Glover and snatched their pups, if it had given them sweet little replacements, balls of fluff with too-big paws, mischievous, panting grins, and cold, dead eyes like little chips of glass. Malcolm felt like his guts were full of ice water.
Jo bent and lifted the lantern. She had the shotgun in her other hand, its stock across the crook of her arm. “Can you move him?” Her voice trembled. Her pupils looked huge in the hissing white light. “John, can you carry him?”
John scrambled over and after a false start got his arms under the skinny boy and heaved him up into a fireman’s carry, then straightened with some effort. Malcolm tried to help, standing with him and supporting Gabe’s head where it lolled against the other boy’s back. The others were on their feet, too, pain and exhaustion forgotten. Something yelped out in the dark, whining and whimpering before it fell suddenly and totally silent. It sounded like one of the coyotes. Malcolm realized as he backed away from the sound that he’d pissed himself, urine soaking the crotch and leg of his jeans, and before shame he felt despair at wasting water.
A voice came from the darkness, high and desperate.
“Wait! Please, wait!”
They froze. Malcolm’s own breathing seemed suddenly thunderous. He knew that voice. It was Nadine’s.
“It’s a trick,” Felix whispered.
“Malcolm, take the light.” Jo shoved the hissing Coleman lantern at him. “I need both hands. Quick. Now.”
He took it, fumbling with the handle, his fingers half-numb in the cold, and Jo broke the shotgun, checked the barrels, and then closed and cocked it. Click, click. She brought it up to her shoulder. He wondered if he could get it from her, if he could shove both barrels in his mouth and still stretch to reach the trigger. That or run. Run. His whole body ached for it, but he was so tired, and the dark was so complete out here, even with the whole sky bathed in a bright sea of stars. He’d never seen anything like that in Connecticut.
“Okay,” said Jo. “Everyone, walk. Follow Felix.”
“Help me. Please, you guys. I’m hurt. My leg … there’s something wrong with my leg.” The voice trailed off into a thready sob. “Why won’t you wait for me?”
“Move,” Jo snapped. She started backing away from the voice and Malcolm stumbled forward just to keep ahead of her, the lantern’s light swinging wildly.
“Keep it steady,” said Jo, her voice terse and taut. “I think it’s the thing, the one I didn’t kill back at the bunker.”
“What if it’s her?” Shelby sobbed. “What if she’s alive?”
“Pleeeeeeeeeease.”
It sounded closer now.
“You saw the house,” said Felix. He had her by the arm and he was dragging her after him as John shuffled forward, bent under Gabe’s weight. “She’s dead. She was dead before it even blew. That thing ripped her apart. The roof caved in.”
“It hurts. Please, it hurts so bad. My leg…”
Close enough now that Malcolm thought he could hear the scratch of claws on rock and dirt, the soft weight of padded footfalls. He caught a whiff of something rancid, a septic reek mingled with something like the bright, bitter tang of grapefruit juice. He kept moving backward, trying not to think about whether anyone else knew he’d peed his pants. How long had it been since he’d wet the bed? Four years? Five? He’d lived in terror of sleepovers in middle school, when people had still invited him to sleepovers. He’d lain awake at night staring at the ceiling and willing himself not to pee, or sit hunched and miserable on the toilet, horribly certain that somehow there were just a few more treacherous drops to squeeze out.
“Help me. Shelby, is that you? Shelby? I love you. I love you. It’s the last thing I said before you left. Why did you leave me?”
Shelby was screaming now. No words, just animal shrieking, raw and awful. It reminded Malcolm of the time his uncle Marlon had shot a rabbit. The thing had been eating Marlon’s cabbages and the bullet had severed its spine, leaving it to drag itself through the rows of tilled earth as it squealed and squealed in high-pitched agony. The worst sound he’d heard in his life before the last few days.
“Just keep walking,” said Jo. “It must not want to get too close. Keep walking. Don’t listen.”
“I’m so cold,” the thing whimpered. Malcolm caught a glimpse of something at the edge of the lamp light’s circle. A glimmer of white fire reflected in huge eyes. The shine of spit on teeth as long as a woman’s manicured fingernails. “Please don’t leave me. I can’t keep up, you guys. Shelby … John … Please…”
They kept moving. Malcolm felt sick to his stomach. His arms burned with the strain of holding the lantern up, but he didn’t dare lower it. He could almost feel the thing’s jaws closing like a vise around his throat. He could feel its claws unzipping his belly. The Cuckoo couldn’t chase them, but it had sent a little part of itself after them, a guided missile of flesh and fat and bone streaking out across the flatlands, keeping out of the sun because the thing it was made of hated the sunlight, feared the cancerous blaze that baked the desert by day.
After a while the pain no longer seemed so urgent. The thing’s pitiful whispers and entreaties became just white noise like his grandmother’s The Healing Sound of Rain CD. Greasy grimy gopher guts, he thought, and almost giggled. At the light’s edge the thing still lurked, pacing them effortlessly. John was red-faced and sweating bullets. Shelby had gone silent and let Felix lead her by the hand. Malcolm wondered how long they’d been walking. It might have been an hour. It might have been five minutes. He was so tired. The night seemed to swim around him. The starlight gleamed in the oiled barrels of Jo’s shotgun.
This can’t be happening, he thought, remembering the thing that had sniffed at the door of his cabin, the thing that had scratched at the planks. Had it been the dog? He missed her horribly. Gabe said she’d died, that Corey—or whatever the thing that called itself Corey was—had killed and eaten her. Had she belonged to someone? A stray lost in the trackless waste, or maybe abandoned by the side of the road. Or maybe there were other dogs out there, hunting gophers and hares and sleeping in big matted piles to stave off the cold, and they were mourning her right now, howling at the moon together.
I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
Mary’s hand in the door. Later he’d snuck her some of his Halloween candy, had told her jokes until she laughed and threw her arms around his neck and forgot the throbbing pain in her little fingers, which still didn’t close quite right. Hairline fractures. Reese’s peanut butter cups. Her little face against his shoulder. You got your boogers all over me! Thanks. Now I’ll have a snack for later.
Ewwwww.
She’d called him Mallum when she was little. She couldn’t make the hard C sound, not until she was almost six. He wondered as he took what felt like his millionth step of the night if he’d ever see her again. The lantern swayed at the end of his shaking arm.
The thing slunk along with them, smiling, drooling freely. Sometimes its claws caught at the edges of the light. Brown and cracked and curved, like the raptors in Jurassic Park. Click click, click click. He could see its humped back and the line of thick, bristly hair running along its spine.
“Shoot it,” he begged. It felt like days had passed, slipping by in drips and dollops. His arm was on fire. He switched the lantern to his other hand, the light shuddering over clawed fingers too much like a person’s. Snout a nightmare combination of weasel and girl, blond tresses dragging in the dirt. Lips wrinkling back from pretty little teeth. Rows and rows of them, all moving slowly, rasping at the air. “Shoot it. Please, Jo.”
“Quiet,” said Jo. She kept backing up, each step slow, steady, and deliberate.
“Mommy’s hurting me, Malcolm.”
Mary’s voice.
“Kill it,” Malcolm begged. He felt like he was going to lose his mind. “Kill it. Shoot it. Shoot it.”
“She shut the door on my hand again. She caught me touching myself and she held my hand there and she slammed the door like Grandma Ella did to her. You remember when she told us that story? You remember her eyes?”
“Stop, stop,” Malcolm sobbed. His hand shook. The lantern’s light danced wildly over that smug grin, those glistening eyes and under them the slow, meticulous shifting of something like a spider’s mouthparts, palps rubbing against each other, mandibles clicking excitedly. Long ropes of drool shone bright.
“Mommy,” it simpered in Malcolm’s voice, pursing fleshy buds that came together into something like a pair of lips. “Mommy, why’d you do it? She’s just a little girl, Mommy. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Easy,” said Jo. “It wants you to freak out.”
We’re all going to die.
“Don’t know how much longer I can … go,” puffed John. His face was red, his back bent. Gabe showed no sign of stirring.
How far have we come? How long has it been?
The sky seemed a little lighter, the stars a little fainter. Would it stay with them once the sun was up? Malcolm kept moving. The thing had fallen silent. Only its smile showed in the deep dark, a ruthless Cheshire Cat grin. Then, suddenly, the lantern flickered with a sucking hiss. The pilot light guttered, dark and light stuttering over the ground and the others around him. Shelby let out a long, terrified moan.
The voice came again. So small. So vulnerable. Malcolm wanted to scream. He wanted to die.
“I’m scared of the dark.”
“Off, then on,” Jo hissed.
He stared, uncomprehending. The flame flickered again. Outside its shrinking circle, the thing smiled and stole a little closer, sinking lower to the ground.
“Off, then on again!” Jo screamed.
Malcolm twisted the lantern’s key. The flame went out. He fumbled for the igniter, found it, punched it twice, three times, dry coughs from the pilot light, a shriek from the dark as claws scrabbled over stone and soil, the fitful hiss of gas, and then light, light like a star, and an earsplitting boom as Jo fired both barrels into the huge shape plummeting down on them like a pouncing cougar from above. It struck the ground near John, thrashing and squealing in agony, claws slashing at the air, the huge hairy duster of its tail sweeping clouds of grit into the air as it slobbered and vomited. It must have been ten feet from its pointed muzzle to the tip of its tail, its coat long and matted and patchy with something like mange. The others stumbled away from it. John fell, Gabe sliding from his shoulders to sprawl in the dirt, and Shelby was screaming again. Blood covered the ground, black in the dwindling light, and Jo was loading one last shell into the shotgun’s breach. She shoved both barrels right down the thing’s throat, ignoring the little fleshy digits and bony claws that scratched at the polished metal. She fired. Malcolm dropped the lantern to instinctively clap his hands over his ears. Glass shattered. The flame roared, licking at the breach, and then went out.
The echoes of the last shot faded. The thing fell still except for a slight spastic twitching in its eight gnarled and bandy limbs. As Malcolm’s eyes adjusted to the starlight and his pulse slowed to a dull, distant roar he could make out the human eyes set far back on its skull, and see the little traces of freckled skin, the hints of thin-lipped mouth pulled taut over alien bones. Had it been Corey? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.
He took a few unsteady steps back from the carcass and heaved up his guts. More wasted water. When he straightened, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his filthy flannel, the others were helping Gabe to his feet. The skinny boy was pale and shaken, tears shining on his cheeks, and as Malcolm watched he threw his arms around John and the two held each other tight, crying, and he realized for a fleeting instant of embittered clarity that he’d let something slip through his fingers, and that he might never touch it again.
They went together down a slope of scree and loose red earth into the town of Resolution. A single main road cut through ten or fifteen side streets, a dull little grid of boxy stucco houses with flat roofs. Jo had never really thought about it, but with no snow to worry about you could pretty much build whatever kind of shoddy little box you wanted out here. No need for an incline or tight shingles. Just ugly shoebox rectangles of varying sizes, bigger the closer they got to the main drag, smaller the farther away from it you went.
At the base of the slope Jo paused to look back up the way they’d come, watching the eddies of sand and rock fragments. In a few moments it had all ceased, their tracks already starting to fill in as the wind wailed across the incline. She could still see the thing thrashing madly out there in the dark, its voice Nadine’s one moment, her mother’s the next. Bad girl! Bad girl! The way her mother spoke to her when Jo had really pissed her off, as though she were a dog that had piddled on the carpet.
If it heard me calling Oji, this is all for nothing.
They crossed a stretch of empty ground and passed into a cul-de-sac framed by three houses. Heavy red curtains hung in every window. Lawns were overgrown, fleshy stalks of sumac swaying over salt-eaten fencing and pushing up through the sidewalks. Hummingbirds danced in the morning chill. No one was out. It all felt half-real, the way things did after staying up all night; like seeing the world through one of those mounted binoculars they had on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The big blocky kind you had to pay a quarter to use.
They’ll be waiting at the feed store. They’ll take us back.
Fremont Street to Thornton Avenue to Rumfitt Parkway. More red curtains. More greenery. More silence. There were no cars. Dawn was breaking now, pale pink and rosy red and a thin blush of gold, and Jo wondered half numbly when the things inside the houses would wake up. The houses on Rumfitt were nicer than the others they’d passed, big two-story sprawls with terra-cotta tile roofs.
Even if it hasn’t been able to get word out here, they’ll smell us. They’ll see us. Even if they don’t, even if we make it another day, or two, or a week, what if Oji isn’t coming? What if he couldn’t get out of that place? What if he couldn’t get a car?
They turned onto Ransom Court Road, passing a shuttered pizza parlor and a corner store with a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. Inside were metal shelves of chips and candy, engine oil and shaving cream. A revolving rack of videotapes in black plastic cases, the names of the movies written in magic marker on strips of masking tape. She could just make out the names. The Last of the Mohicans. Single White Female right below it, and then something obscured by the edge of the front counter and the big plastic cases of scratch tickets atop it.
At least it will be over. At least I’ll get to sit down and close my eyes. Maybe we can hide out in the sewers. Maybe—it occurred to her suddenly that it was probably down there already, wallowing in filth and runoff, feeding on the town’s rancid sewage and waiting for some idiot to pop up one of the grates and wriggle right into its grasping claws. Eaten alive with her mouth and nostrils coated in the stench of shit. She put one blistered, aching foot in front of the other. There was blood leaking through the side of her left shoe, she realized, but the thought of bending down to see what was wrong made her want to collapse and roll into the street. Let it bleed. It didn’t matter.
Savage Street. An auto repair place named Bud’s, piles of tires beside a whitewashed cinder block garage. A tow truck and a few older station wagons parked in the oil-stained lot. Jo’s heart leapt before she realized that chances were the engines were all dead, some crucial wire or cable cut. This place was like a duck blind painted to blend in among the waving reeds. Not nature, not really, but a lifeless imitation of it meant to lull the idiot prey into a false sense of security. People probably drove through every day, never noticing anything out of the ordinary.
They came to Main Street. A Chinese restaurant. A post office. Diners and shoe stores and cars parked in front of steel and plastic meters and a record shop with BLACKTOP VINYL stenciled on its storefront window. They stood on the corner for a little while, the sun in their eyes, and then Jo set off following the building numbers downward from 361. It was the longest moment of her life, going down that sidewalk, all those still, dark buildings pregnant with the threat of the things that would wake up and crawl out of whatever brackish pools they slept in to open up and make this place seem ordinary, just another no-name dump in the middle of nowhere, too small and sleepy to spare a second thought about.
She saw her mother’s gray Lincoln before she realized they’d reached the feed store. It was parked out front, Oji asleep behind the wheel. He’d changed its Jersey plates out for dirty Ohio ones that read BIRTHPLACE OF AVIATION in little red letters under the serial number.
“Is that him?” croaked Gabe. He looked like a skeleton, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, lips peeling and flaking. He gripped her arm. His hand was feverish. “Jo, is he really there? Is this real?”
“It would really be something if it was just some other old Japanese guy,” said Malcolm, but Jo wasn’t listening. Oji must have heard them talking, because suddenly his eyes were open and with a cry he levered himself up out of the driver’s seat and hobbled toward her, arms outstretched. She ran to him and flung herself into his embrace, the last four days crashing down on her all at once like an avalanche until she was sobbing so hard into her grandfather’s shoulder she could hardly stand. “My girl, my girl,” he said, his frail voice cracking as he stroked her hair. “What did they do to you?”
It wasn’t until the town was far behind them that she told him everything.