So much had gone wrong for Betty Cleaver since the summer of her sixteenth year. Sometimes it felt like wrong was the only thing that happened to her anymore. First the accident. Her parents hovering over her in a hospital room somewhere in Utah. Concussion. Malnutrition. Something bacterial in her urinary tract that just wouldn’t give up. The gray fog of the nine months that had followed, all neurologists’ offices and therapists asking her what happened, what was she repressing, who had touched her, until she broke placid old Dr. Kuzik’s nose and was barred from the only practice in the city that took their insurance. Then the infection in her leg, the moles and skin tags sprouting faster than dermatologists could cut them away, the fever, and the end of her boxing scholarship, and now here she was, pushing a mop at a quarter to midnight on New Year’s Eve in the glittering, colorless tomb of the Lansing township’s only Target superstore.
Stiff-legged and slow in her orthopedic brace, Eric Clapton wailing “You’ve got me on my knees, Layla!” through her headphones, Betty worked her way back and forth over the off-white linoleum of the cosmetics section near the checkout lanes and the front of the store. Fifteen minutes until 2012. Outside the wind was blowing snow over the parking lot where Diego and Miguel were probably still racking shopping carts, unless the spics had fucked off to smoke a joint behind the loading dock. The post-Christmas sales were always brutal. Immigrants rushing the racks for half-price dinner sets and discount linens, filling the aisles with the smell of rotten cabbage and the sinus-stripping spices she’d heard they used to cover up the taste of putrid meat. Ragheads and wetbacks and everyone else Obama had opened his arms to. It was enough to make her miss Clinton, who’d at least known where they belonged.
“Three strikes and you’re out,” she muttered to herself, not realizing her stepfather had often said the same thing four or five beers into the evening. “He was right about that one.”
The little clutch of moles on her hip stung with a sudden, painful intensity. She winced, reaching under the elastic waistband of her scrubs to scratch the insistent itch, then yanked her hand back with a grunt as wetness and a jolt of sickening agony met her touch. She stumbled, her bad leg sliding under her, and hip-checked a Revlon display, spilling compacts and lip gloss to the floor in a waterfall of brushed black plastic. “Shit, shit, shit!” she hissed, clawing for purchase on the shelving. A dark stain seeped through the hip of her blue scrubs, and she’d dislodged an earphone somehow, so now Clapton’s hollering had taken on a ghostly, doubled quality.
“Cleaver.”
The bottom dropped out of Betty’s stomach. At the end of the aisle, shelves of plastic storage tubs and toiletry organizers at his back, stood all five-foot-five of Richie Messeder, who had just turned twenty-two and might have weighed in at a hundred and twenty pounds if you dipped him in shit first. He was what Coach Parcell would have called a welterweight, she thought. He was also what Coach Parcell would have called a faggot, or at least Betty thought he looked like one, the way it puffed him up to order around decent people.
“Tripped, Richie,” she croaked, trying on a smile. It felt ghastly. She was sweating bullets. “I’ll clean it up. No problem.” She pushed herself off the shelves and a lone tube of liquid eyeliner clattered to the floor and spun a few times before falling still. Betty fumbled for the scuffed old Discman’s pause button, but it was stuck and the CD must have been scratched because Clapton kept belting out a mocking loop of got me on my knees got me on my knees and for some reason she was thinking of Athena, of kneeling in the darkness of their cabin—what cabin?—and taking that plump, downy pussy into her mouth, sixteen and insane with lust, practically clawing at herself in her need.
That’s just how I like you, baby. On your knees.
Richie was coming toward her now. His eyes were practically popping out of his narrow head. “Are you drunk, Cleaver? Are you actually drunk right now?”
Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Her whole thigh felt hot and sticky, like gum left out on the dashboard on a sunny day. She clamped her hand over the spreading stain in her scrubs and nearly blacked out from the pain. She vomited, doubling over as a searing cramp ripped through her belly and pelvis, like a dozen periods hitting all at once. Blackness shuddered at the edges of her vision.
Am I dying?
“Cleaver?” Richie crouched a few feet off, a look of anxious disgust on his pimply little rat face. “Jesus, do you need a doctor?”
got me on my knees got me on my knees got me on my knees
There was something squirming in her vomit. Something black and fragile, thin as living strands of angel hair pasta.
And then the pain was gone. All of it, and not just in her thigh but the constant ache of her bad knee, the knots in her back, the wire-taut sting of tension in her shoulders and the nagging, sickly hot throb of the molar her ex-girlfriend Jenna had kept telling her to show a dentist. Gone. In its place was a velvety, enfolding warmth, a sense of contentment she couldn’t remember ever having felt before except, in some neglected corner of her mind, in a formless, hazy memory of sucking at her mother’s breast. It took her a few moments to realize through the fog of her new bliss that she had Richie pinned against the floor.
You will need his meat.
He fought her, thrashing with all his pitiful might. She rolled him easily onto his belly, locking her arm over his throat. No muscle fatigue tonight. No ringing in her ears. Tinnitus, the doctors had called it. No. Her thoughts were clear and her body sang with strength, and in her thigh she could feel something moving slow and syrupy beneath her skin, closer and more tenderly than any lover had ever touched her. She twisted, shoulders straining, and Richie’s neck snapped with a dry, brittle crunch. He jerked once, then went limp in her arms, but his right eye still moved, still stared back at her in mute, unthinking terror. She bent to grab the little man by the ankle and set off for the empty registers, dragging his unprotesting weight after her as her right shoe slowly filled up with something warm and safe and wonderful. It squished wetly with each step she took, and when she looked back there was a trail of gray-blue droplets, some smeared by Richie’s body, leading all the way back to cosmetics.
“Gee, Rich,” she said dryly. “I sure hope you can find someone to cover for me.”
The automatic doors slid open for her like the Red Sea parting for Moses and she hauled the unresisting sack of flesh that had been Richie Messeder out into the squall. Her beat-up Baja was parked close, and she’d filled it up that afternoon. That was good. The warmth inside her told her that she had a long, long way to drive, but she didn’t mind. She had Richie for company, and her good buddy Eric was still singing in her ears, the loop cutting shorter and shorter each time it ran through.
on my knees on my knees on my knees
It would be so good, seeing everyone again.
The first day on the road went by without incident. Betty made good time, cutting through flat, endless Indiana with its cookie-cutter cities and its half-dry canals and crossing most of Illinois before the warm little voice in the back of her mind directed her to get off Route 80 in the suburbs north of Peoria. Streets lined with identical split-levels. A labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends, boring people living out their boring lives, the glare from their televisions flickering on the snow outside, to a house with red curtains hanging in the windows where a man her age was waiting in the driveway, tall and clean-cut in a black wool winter coat and dark sweater.
“Must have had a long drive,” he said, smiling as she stepped out of the truck and slammed the driver’s-side door behind her. Glare from the floodlights on the front of his garage lit nothing but his mouth and throat, leaving the rest of his face in shadow. The air was cold and clean after six hours in the truck with the stench of Richie’s voided bowels. He lay under a blanket in the back, motionless but still, last time she’d checked, alive.
Betty coughed. Something about him looked so familiar, so comforting. He smelled like cloves and cooking oil. “Not bad.”
It was smotheringly hot inside the stranger’s house, the air close and humid and full of the sound of running water. It smelled of warm root beer and diarrhea. He took her jacket and led her from the mudroom with its coats and scarves hanging from wooden pegs over ranks of winter boots and out into the kitchen, where his family was waiting. An older man and woman—they must have been the original’s parents—and two younger women, early twenties maybe, all blond, all blue-eyed. They knelt naked on peeling linoleum where a kitchen table should have been, leaning together to form a sort of shelter. Where their skin touched it was scabbed and warty, growing together so that heads and shoulders all formed part of the same flaking, oozing clot. Fingers twitched at the ends of their limp arms. Piss stains marred the floor and the exposed particle board where the synthetic tile had separated. A few of their eyes followed Betty as she passed, but mostly they stared dead and milky into space.
“They’ll be ready very soon now,” said the stranger. “Have you seen a chrysalis before?”
“No,” said Betty. She felt calm staring at the family, the stench of their putrefying flesh and accumulated waste so thick in the air she could almost chew it. She felt good and right and satisfied. “What does it do?”
“It will protect me, when it’s time for my change.” He smiled. Even inside under the even yellow lights it was hard to get a sense of what he looked like. A smile. A smile between flesh and shadow. “Come.”
Through the silent living room and up the carpeted stairs. A hall. Bathroom, tub full of black fluid. Mushrooms growing from the sodden carpet outside the open bedroom door, the bed itself a collapsed, moth-eaten mess. Dusty wings beat silently as their footsteps disturbed the feast. A guest room at the hall’s end. Narrow twin bed. On the side table, a plate covered in raw ground beef and a glass full of cloudy liquid.
“You must be tired,” the stranger said. “Eat. Drink. Sleep. In the morning you continue west.”
Betty sank down gratefully onto the bed, which creaked beneath her. She took the plate into her lap and scooped up a handful of raw meat. It tasted sweet. She thought of the family downstairs. She thought of Richie, lying boneless in the truck, and Athena smiling cruelly down at her so many years ago. She had died in the garden. Died in her arms.
“Will I change, too?” she asked, her voice soft.
His smile widened. She thought of the Grinch, Boris Karloff narrating as that lipless green slit curled into spiral dimples. “Only a little.”
In her dream Athena came to her like a breeze through the open window. It was warm, not winter, and they were girls again, curled together in Betty’s bunk and whispering about their firsts. Winnie Prince, blond and mean and two years ahead of Betty, making her kneel down in front of the sinks in the little bathroom on the third floor—the one by the music department, that nobody used—and guiding her mouth between those strong thighs. Pink nails like talons digging into her scalp. Cigarette smoke coiling around fingers stained red from the tampon Winnie had pulled out and dropped into the sink.
Do you suck your daddy off like this?
But Daddy never touched her. Not like that. He would only say Jesus Christ, you just ate, fucking mower blade’s bent, is this your fucking glass here with the milk all dried inside, and then he would hit her, sharp and quick like you hit the big steel bell on the carnival game. Test your strength. How high would she whizz up that thin metal rod? The clank when the weight struck home. It was her stepfather who’d done the rest. The dark, wet things she’d known even then were wrong. Athena’s first, a teacher at her school who’d later killed herself. The light from the refrigerator. Picking the crust off a quiche and savoring the buttery pastry as she listened for footsteps on the stairs.
You want to look like a pig, you can eat like one. Get down on the floor. The smell of her mother’s menthols. Was that why she hated smoking? Dirty habit. She’d gotten drunk and hit Tricia once after finding that mint-and-silver pack crumpled up in the bathroom wastebasket. Closed fist. Cheekbone broken. Bruise like an apple dropped on the floor, but hadn’t she wanted to be back on her knees? Winnie blowing smoke from her nostrils, like a dragon.
Here, piggy, piggy.
It was why, she understood on some dim, guilty level, the thing under the farmhouse hadn’t wanted her the way it had the other children. She and a few others it had saved for the camp, the next generation of Garths and Enochs and Mariannes. It preferred to keep such people close so they could do its fighting for it. It hated fighting. Hated work. It had a great task, something it had come to Earth to do, but it left the little things to humans. Insects it paid in replicas of loved ones, in diseases cured, in deformities rectified. It had come to her, she now remembered, as she lay burned and half-conscious with her head in the lap of Athena’s corpse. It had spoken in a voice like ten thousand buzzing flies.
You will want for nothing.
The smell of cigarettes and urine and that tang of menstrual iron. Why did people always talk about how clean girls’ restrooms were? Strands of mucus glittering between her lips and Winnie’s, caught in the flickering light.
There will be no loneliness.
It had set its many lips against her skin. It had placed its hands over her torn and bleeding leg.
And it had smiled.
Betty woke to find what was left of Richie lying beside her in the bed. For some reason it didn’t bother her, though he smelled worse than he had in the car. He must have shit himself again. He was painfully thin, his skin gray and wrinkled, his hair gone colorless and brittle as dead grass. He looked like a Capri Sun pouch someone had sucked until their cheeks hollowed out and the reflective plastic collapsed in on itself.
She reached out to touch his shoulder and found his flesh spongy and yielding. It held the imprint of her fingers even after she withdrew her hand. Her hand? It was a third again as large as she remembered it, though in the warm peace that had descended on her this felt right and good and reassuring, like the name of a close friend she’d forgotten and just now recalled. Her fingers were long and thick, wormlike blue veins crawling along the back of her hand. She sat up, the blanket sliding from her body, and saw herself. A snippet of some stupid shit she’d read in high school rattling through her brain like a beetle’s dead husk.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed.
Except she wasn’t vermin. She was beautiful. Perfect. She pushed Richie off the bed onto the carpet. A little sack of foamlike skin and broken bones, he hardly made a sound. She rose up and stepped over him, and in the doorway the handsome man stood, and he was small now, a head and a half shorter than she was, and smiling, smiling wide, and she thought as she ducked through the doorway of what he’d said about the things that had been the family of someone who had once looked much like him: They will protect me while I change.
“I need something for the road,” she said, her voice hoarse and deep. Her head brushed the ceiling as she made her way toward the stairs. “Meat.”
Meat, whispered the voice of peace.
“It’s in your car,” said the handsome man. “You know, we needn’t talk like this. Not any longer.”
She turned back toward him and found that his face was open, that its fleshy petals had parted and the mandibles and fronds within uncoiled. Her body answered. From her left leg came a questing tendril of pink, dripping flesh that wriggled through a tear in her straining scrubs. Another followed it. Another. Pseudopods grappled and entwined. Slippery flesh deformed. Communion. He gripped her. She him. Thoughts and images melted together like tin under a welder’s torch. Smoke and cunt and the doctors probing at her knee, freezing warts and slicing skin tags, and the Cuckoo dragging itself toward her from the wreckage of the burning house. The eyes. The kiss. Bags of muscle, meat, and suet dragged out of a freezer in the garage and loaded into the truck’s bed. A boy, something like a boy, thrashing frightened in the dark. Malcolm curled around her leg as she stood over him, hands braced against the cabin wall, spittle dangling from her mouth as she drew her foot back for another kick.
The man and Betty broke apart. They smiled.
Cuckoo, said the voice of peace. Cuckoo.
It had seen something. The closer Betty got to its nest, the more she comprehended the finer nuances of the call that had woken her up and drawn her south and west across the map. The sentinel flesh it had placed in telecom and in Silicon Valley had found it quite by accident in their sweeps of email logs and traffic cams and motor vehicle records: a beat-up old Impala, different plates each time but always the same dings and scratches, in twenty-minute proximity to three different youth wilderness programs. A tall, blank-faced Mexican man glimpsed through the dirty windshield. Felix, the voice told her, conjuring a lanky brown girl-child from the haze of memory. Inez.
So, an excess of caution. Betty and a select few others plucked from the thing’s precious reservoir of servants—not its hatchlings, growing year by year in number but occupied in their entirety with grand designs beyond the scope of single minds—and called home for communion with the mother cyst, that huge impacted womb that had reached out to them and found their thoughts young, eager, and aching to be molded. They would defend it with their lives and afterward, the voice of peace had told her, there would be a sweet reward. A kiss. Well done. Good girl.
It was a thought that warmed her as she slept in the truck’s unheated cab at a rest stop a few hours west of Omaha, the limitless void outside the windows blanketed in a thin crust of frozen snow. Barren cornfields. Pig runs full of squealing meat with steam rising from their flanks. It made her wistful, not for places she knew, but for places her flesh remembered. Nautilus spirals of something smooth and shiny, decorative bodies merging and splitting in the pulsating light, wet strands of skin and mucus stretched between them. The chilly existential thrill of communion with rare strains of isolated flesh, alien ideas denuding her neural net. So much excitement in allowing separation to curdle and ferment, to bloom with the fungal growths of differentiation, to allow it—in more senses than one—to culture. Reabsorb and feel it break against the final hegemony that was its own endlessness. Exaltation. Like a crown lowered again and again and again onto your brow.
You are the only way. The only thing.
There were others everywhere. She could feel them. See them in a crowd, as though they emitted some form of secret radiation. Three skinheads at a biker bar in Cascade where she stopped to eat. They fed with her in the alley after closing time, holding down the little dyke she’d pulled. A plain-faced housewife in Lamoine. Her six-year-old son in the back of her car, though not the older girl beside him. Not yet, anyway. A state trooper sitting silent in his car beside Route 5 in Northern California, eyes hidden by mirrored aviators, who watched her blow past going a hundred and five without moving a muscle. It had spread so far in the years since it had come to her. Its children were everywhere, on school boards and on naval bases, in churches and in hospitals. What it loved best, though, was the home.
In a home it could draw the blinds, lock the doors, and do its work in private. It could spread from flesh to flesh, not in the careful way with which it made its cuttings in the desert, but through crude assimilation and replication. A boy went to sleep one night, and the next day a thing wore his face to school. It was the miracle of modern life, the insular nature of the home. Work, church, education could all be satisfied with only the most trivial investment of energy. It let relationships wither. It fell away from extended family, allowed its cuttings’ memberships in clubs and in societies to taper off to nothing, and slowly, meticulously, it created streets, then neighborhoods, then entire counties ruled by a dark and watchful silence.
Chico’s outskirts weren’t yet part of that hidden country dug deep into the sclerotic corpse of America, but its day was coming. There were houses with red curtains. Strange plants growing in neglected lots. The sewers swarmed with things that were no longer rats. On a hill overlooking a vacant lot where locals dumped used batteries and broken electronics among the rusted hulks of vintage cars, a line of stucco row houses kept a lonely vigil. In one of these lived a man named Charles Sutter, and in Charles Sutter’s phone, the voice had determined, was a way to find the people who might mean it harm.
For decades it had ignored all attempts to expose it, hiding in plain sight in an ocean of incoherent conspiracy theories. There were YouTube videos—not many, but no longer very few, either—in which people spoke with terror and heartbreak of loved ones going blank and empty, of mothers disappearing from their lives, of children going through life’s motions with no sign of their former spirit. Whole families irreparably ruptured by sudden changes in a loved one. They were dismissed as cranks. Laughed at. Scorned. It could fool most doctors ably enough, and in America it was not so unusual to avoid a physician’s office for years or even decades.
These people were different. They had injured it. They had escaped it. They had eluded it ever since, vanishing for a decade and a half, until Vargas gave himself away by surveilling the Cuckoo’s lair. From there a complex web of facial recognition software and digital necromancy led its cuttings to old emails, now inactive but preserved in the bloated wasteware of corporate code at Google and in the shell of America Online, and in the contacts of those accounts were a few precious phone numbers, long since abandoned but which led in turn to other numbers. Current numbers. Charles Sutter’s was one of them, and his social media overflowed with pictures of a tall, gangly Black lover whose whimpers Betty could still call to mind. Malcolm, now Mal.
She parked across the street from Sutter’s building and waited for night to fall.