The Rebel stood between us and the Hatchling. He raised an armor-sheathed arm, pointing. “Flee.”
The Hatchling swatted him aside like he weighed nothing. The Rebel flew sideways across the room and hit an empty armchair. It toppled over, flinging him into the bookcase. Hardcovers rained down over him.
I shot a quick glance at Alex and saw that she was as scared as I was. If a Hatchling could overpower a Rebel that quickly, what the hell were we supposed to do?
The Hatchling dipped low on his haunches and then leapt right over the couch, arms spread, claws glistening. Patrick fired the shotgun right through his chest.
The mucusy skin absorbed the pellets, but still the blast was enough to halt his momentum. He twisted in midair and crashed through the glass table.
I swung the baling hook at his head. He turned, mouth open, and the tip sailed through his spread lips and embedded inside his cheek. The hook slowed down as if it had hit mud, my arm continuing the swing in slow motion. My biceps strained. The metal burrowed through the moist orange flesh even as the wound healed up along its wake. At last the baling hook popped out the other side. The cheek sutured itself closed as the Hatchling pulled himself from the glass table.
“Crap,” I said.
The Hatchling rose, his camouflage skin flickering, different patches changing to match the carpet, the couch, the wall behind him. Glass stuck out of him everywhere—a dagger in his side, a triangle in his cheek beside his nostril holes, a series of shards rising like quills from his thigh.
And then his skin healed, pushing out the glass. The shards fell to the floor, clinking against the wreckage.
Hopelessness descended on me, a blanket of despair.
He jumped at me, and I closed my eyes, remembering the burn I’d felt when the Hatchling had grabbed my forearm in the woods near the cannery. What would it feel like to have the thing land on top of my entire body?
I felt it clamp down on the nape of my neck, and I yelled. When I opened my eyes, I was flying backward.
Patrick had seized me and hurled me out of the way. In his other arm, the shotgun swung up. He shoved the muzzle into the Hatchling’s neck and fired.
Most of the neck flew away, spattering the back wall. The head hinged to one side. I prayed it would topple off.
But no. It stopped.
Then, slowly, tendrils of skin constricted and pulled the head into place again, seating it again on the stump of the neck. As the flesh knit itself together, Patrick backed up, bumping into me.
“We can’t kill it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We bolted for the kitchen. Alex was in the lead.
Behind us the Hatchling heaved himself forward. The Rebel, on his feet once more, tackled him. The acid flesh seemed to have no effect on the armor. But the Hatchling overpowered him quickly, backhanding him. The Rebel spun around and fell into the heap of glass. I prayed his suit wouldn’t crack.
Alex hip-checked the kitchen counter on her way to the side door that let out onto the cattle enclosure. Patrick slid over the counter, and I followed him. At the kitchen door, we piled into one another like dominoes.
We heard a series of thumps as the Hatchling bounded across the living room toward the kitchen. He leapt so high he struck the ceiling. Chunks of drywall crumbled down behind him. His claws pounded the floor when he landed.
Alex yanked the knob, but the dead bolt was thrown. She reached for it, but there wouldn’t be time.
I turned. At first I couldn’t see the Hatchling, but I smelled that he was close, felt the air from his movement brushing against my face. I sensed a ripple of motion fly up off the counter and realized that he was up there above us, camouflaged against the ceiling. He ghosted overhead, hurtling toward us. His hunched shoulders smashed the light fixtures, the contact making his flesh resume its natural orange hue. Sparks cascaded down. He led his descent with his claws, a bird of prey swooping in for the kill.
Patrick grabbed Alex around the waist at the last second and yanked her away from the door, hurling her across the floor tile like a bowling ball. Then he shoved me away, diving on top of me. We skidded painfully into the refrigerator.
The Hatchling hit the side door like a wrecking ball, blowing it out of the wall, frame and all.
Sliding beneath the table, Alex racked up two chairs, her hockey stick spinning off toward the living room. The plates and silverware jumped. The big wooden salt mill fell over and rolled off the edge of the table. One of the candles toppled, igniting the lace tablecloth.
Patrick and I stood up, our backs to the hard metal of the fridge. The overhead lights fizzled. The Hatchling turned, framed by the jagged mouth he’d knocked into the side of the kitchen wall.
We had nowhere to go.
He dipped down and hopped once, landing right before us. The claws of his feet tapped the tile. He leaned toward us slowly. His stink wafted into our faces. A foot away. Now two inches.
I clutched for Patrick’s hand, found it.
A salamander-orange lip wrinkled back from a set of fangs. Pearly-white incisors gleamed. The smaller teeth were just as sharp.
This was it.
Then there was a clunk.
The Hatchling stiffened.
Then he shrieked.
He twisted onto his heels. His face lit with agony. The screams continued, loud enough to hurt my ears. He was clutching at his back, his spine twisting. He dropped onto his knees, and as he fell away, we saw Alex standing behind him.
She held the wooden salt mill in one hand. It had snapped in half from the force of the blow.
A trickle of salt spilled out of the splintered core, dribbling down onto the Hatchling.
He writhed and screeched.
The salt ate into his skin, shriveling him up like a slug. His body was pocked with holes, his damaged guts and organs exposed. His limbs stopped rasping against the floor.
And then there was only the stench, hanging heavier than a cloud of car exhaust.
Behind Alex on the table, the lace crackled, a neatly contained garden of flame. The fire fluttered across her features, and I thought it might be the most romantic lighting I’d ever seen.
She poured a mound of white crystals from the broken shaker into her palm. Then she lifted it up and smiled that smile.
“Kryptonite,” she said.
She walked over to the sink, plugged the drain with the stopper, and dumped the rest of the salt in. Then she turned on the hot water.
Patrick and I remained frozen against the refrigerator.
Alex shot us a look. “You can move now,” she said. “Go check on the Rebel. Tell him Unnamed Girl just kicked some Hatchling ass.”
For once Patrick was speechless. He straightened his black cowboy hat. Nodded at the sink.
“What are you doing?” Patrick asked.
Alex walked a quick circuit of the kitchen, retrieving her hockey stick, picking up my baling hooks where they’d fallen. Then she stuck them in the salt water in the sink, dunking the blade of her stick and the ends of my hooks beneath the surface.
“Preparing,” she said.
Shaken, I walked over to the living room.
The Rebel rose unevenly. His armor now sported a few more scratches, but the suit had held. He looked at where the Hatchling lay puddled on the kitchen floor. “Amazing,” he said.
“The salt?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And Girl.”
“I agree. On both counts.”
“We need to evacuate immediately,” he said. “The noise will draw more.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
When I turned around, Patrick was coming back up the hall from Uncle Jim’s old study, cradling a dozen boxes of shotgun shells in his arms. “Rock salt,” he said.
Uncle Jim had used them to scare wolves away from our livestock.
The Rebel said, “I must leave now to track down my compatriot and the serum.” He stepped across the melted mess of the Hatchling without bothering to look down. “You, too, should leave as quickly as possible.”
“We will,” I said.
The Rebel slipped through the gash in the kitchen wall and vanished into the night.
Alex pulled my dripping baling hooks from their saltwater bath and tossed them to me. Then she whipped her hockey stick clear of the sink. The blade gleamed wetly.
“Ready?” she said.
“Not yet.”
I looked at my brother, and I could tell he could read my mind, like always. He gave me a nod.
I walked over to the hedge of flame rising from the dining-room table. I stabbed the edge of the lace tablecloth with the tip of my baling hook and yanked it, flame and all, off the table and onto the carpet of the living room.
Orange and yellow spread, a billowing second carpet on top of the first one. It caught the wallpaper and climbed to the ceiling, tendrils wrapping around the doorway into the hall. The curtains went up all at once with a sound like a rush of wind.
We kept our eyes on the flame, watching the fire devour our old house as we moved backward out through the hole in the kitchen wall and into the cool night.
We gave it some distance. When we got to the barn, we paused.
The big barn door was still rolled back from when we’d left in a hurry that awful night two months and a lifetime ago when it had all begun. I’d been out here baling hay, and Patrick had come to fetch me.
I could see the metal catch inside where the baling hooks were supposed to hang.
Back when they were still used for hay.
I turned my attention again to Jim and Sue-Anne’s ranch house. I thought about my aunt and uncle up there on the second floor, resting on the bed where they’d slept for so many decades. I didn’t want to leave them to the flies and maggots. Flame licked at the downstairs windows. Black smoke poured from the chimney and then started leaking through the shingles.
The last piece of our old life, up in flames.
Maybe it would burn itself out. Maybe it would catch and take down the whole house.
I found myself hoping for the latter.