Chapter Forty-Six
I hope this goes without saying, but just in case, here it is: Please don’t try this at home. For one thing, you need a specific ceremonial dagger, one carved from the bones of a king who fell in battle. I won’t go into all the other specifics because I know if I do, someone out there will try and recreate the process.
The idea behind the host possession was simple enough. Step one involved spilling the dark god’s blood. Step two involved using the same bloody knife to fatally wound the host. At the point of death, the two souls would combine in a single body. The god’s power would heal the host, and in return the host would temporarily offer full physical control to the possessing entity. Call me a worry-wart, but the part I had a real problem with was the fatal stabbing of Rosa.
“No,” I said.
Rosa put up a fight. She had some strong arguments. This was her decision to make, after all. I also had strong arguments. Like how this Benjamin was admittedly a monster in disguise and how even the original Benjamin almost never knew as much as he thought he knew.
“Wait a second,” Jerry interrupted. “You’re a clone?” Benjamin nodded solemnly. Jerry could barely contain himself. “I would like to ask you a few questions about your penis.”
A truck barreled into the parking lot. We all shrank away from the door, just to be safe. All of us except for Travis.
I asked, “You didn’t tell anyone you were bringing us here, did you?”
“No, of course not! That was the deal. I gave y’all a place to clean up and lay low and nobody had to know but us.”
The truck came to a stop on the other side of the gas pumps, and out stepped Brian Locke, one of the few people in town who I knew for a fact had been replaced. He had sunglasses on his face, an M16 assault rifle in his hands, and a second strapped around his shoulders.
“Not even Brian?” I asked.
“Oh, well yeah. I definitely told Brylock what’s going on, but that’s just ‘cause he’s my boy. I tell him everything, but don’t worry. He ain’t gonna tell nobody.”
The gunfire started, and we all dove for cover. All of us but Travis, who took the full force of the attack. The bullets ripped through his head and torso. He was definitively deceased long before his body hit the ground. O’Brien tried returning fire as the young man walked across the parking lot, switching one assault rifle for the other. A few of her bullets even landed, but the wounds closed up almost immediately. We were, in a word, fucked.
Benjamin and I were trapped behind a shelf display with his stupid potted handplant between us. As far as cover goes, we may as well not have even bothered. There were so many bullet holes already in the shelving that we could see straight through to the other side.
Benjamin didn’t waste any time plunging the dagger into the palm of the handplant. The fingers curled inward like a dying spider. When he pulled the weapon out, the plant skin down to the arms had turned gray and ashy, while the knife itself was suddenly glowing hot red.
“Now for step two,” he said.
“No!” I yelled. “I don’t care if the world is at stake, I’m not going to let you stab my friend.”
“Relax, I’ve done this hundreds of times before. ROSA!”
She looked out at us from her space below the booth table as a second hail of gunfire lit up the room, sending her back underneath, hands over her ears and knees to her chest. Benjamin crouch-walked to the edge of the aisle and called out to her with his hand outstretched, “Rosa! Come to me. It’s going to be okay!”
She looked like she was about to take him up on the offer. I crouch-walked to the opposite edge of the aisle, held out my own hand, and called out, “Rosa! Come over here to me! Ignore that guy.”
She turned her head to me. Benjamin stole her attention back with a loud whistle. “Come on, Rosa! Come on, this way!” He patted his leg.
I clapped my hands, and she looked back at me. “Come here, Rosa. I got you!”
“Hey, Rosa!” Benjamin started waving a candy bar in her direction, beckoning her over. “You want the candy? Come get the candy!”
“Hey!” I yelled at Benjamin. “That’s not fair!”
Rosa screamed, “I’M NOT A FUCKING DOG!”
“Sorry,” I said, looking down at the ground in shame. That was all the distraction Benjamin needed. Before I could stop him, he’d already rolled out of his spot, lunged at her, and thrust the glowing dagger into her chest.
There was a flash of light, and I was on my back looking up at Brian’s evil grin. The holes in his neck and head were stitching themselves closed with fine lines of shiny black. An ammo clip bounced against the ground at my feet as he loaded a new one into his weapon.
“Jack,” he said in a growl. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
Unbeknownst to him, a twisted series of brown tentacles were snaking their way up the ceiling towards him. The tentacles grew and thickened and sprouted green buds that rapidly blossomed into leaves. By the time I realized that they were branches, they had already fallen down and twisted around each of his limbs, pulling him into the air, kicking and cussing. The branches pulled in every direction. His arms snapped off first. Then the legs. A coil of branches wrapped around his face and torso completely, blood and black goo squeezing freely from either end.
Behind me, Rosa stood several inches above the floor. Her eyes were pure white. Her hair floating, as if she were under water. Her smile spread from ear to ear. Her voice a thundering boom.
“I’m back, bitches!”
***
With Brian out of the picture, we felt like it would be a good time to take stock of our situation. The smells of fresh death and old death kindly invited us to have our conversation outside. The dark god seemed absolutely elated to be alive again, but even more so to be inside of a human.
“Aw jeez, this is incredible. Is this how humans feel all the time? I can go anywhere I want, but I can only see where I point my eyes? And what’s with only one heart? What do you do if something happens to it? Actually, there are no backup organs in here at all. Oh man, look how tiny my boobs are!”
He cupped his breasts with both hands, and Jerry immediately smacked him across the face.
“Owww! What was that for? Is this what pain feels like?! How do humans live like this?!”
O’Brien took the lead as our voice of reason, “What are we doing here? What’s the plan? Because from where I’m sitting, we’re not in a better place than we were a few minutes ago. There are, evidently, monsters hiding inside half the people in town and if I understand properly, a god with access to an army. And we don’t even know where they’re located.”
“I know where they are,” the dark god answered. “I can feel their presence from space. You can’t cluster that much power into one building without making some noise.”
A sheriff’s cruiser sped into the lot, followed closely by another, and another, and then I lost count. It looked like they were all here for the final fight. Doors opened, men with guns jumped out, people started screaming at us to “get on the ground right now.” And above it all, Rosa—or the dark god possessing her—cackled maniacally.
Tree trunks erupted out of the concrete lot, overturning cars. Branches erupted through men’s bodies. Giant vines picked up vehicles and used them to turn deputies into human sandwiches with twisted metal crusts. Some tried to run, but the branches caught up to them and ripped them into bite-size pieces. In the span of a minute, the entire sheriff’s department (Clyde included) was nothing but a writhing collection of chunks and pieces.
Except for Deputy Love, who stood at a distance with his hands in the air.
“Why didn’t you kill that one?” Benjamin asked.
“He’s not a mimic,” the dark god answered. “They didn’t want to waste resources on him.”
“Aww,” I said. “That’s kinda mean.”
O’Brien screamed to him, “Love! This is the part where you run away!”
“Okay!” he answered before busting into a light jog straight into the forest.
Once he was gone, I turned my attention back to the dark god, who was now floating at eye level with me. “You say you know where he is. What are we waiting for?”
“I don’t know how to drive a car.”