}}}Jackie. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Costa Soberbia.}}}}}}}}}
At first, it really was for revenge. I’d gone full Inigo Montoya for a few hours, the anger urging me on, filling me up, making me feel full and strong. Like a badass on a mission, instead of a skinny white girl in waaaaay over her head. But then …
Oh god, this is so stupid. I don’t even want to admit it to myself.
I stewed in fury the whole car ride from Brentwood to here, scowling like a pixie-cut Charles Bronson. I even kept it up for the first few feet down that terrifying cliffside trail. But as soon as we came to that broken section, where the ground gave out and it was just broken rocks and crashing waves like a hundred feet down? All the anger left and I was just cold and I just wanted to go home.
So why didn’t you, Jackie? Huh? Why, exactly, did you do the stupidest thing in the universe and crawl down into the Village of the Damned without so much as a flashlight?
Well I’m super glad you asked, Jackie. I didn’t turn back because I didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of the people that just got my parents killed.
No seriously, that was it. That was the whole reason. I’d made such a big show of coming with them, that I just couldn’t bear to turn to Kaitlyn and Carey and Zang—all of whom totally dealt with and pretty much deserved this life—and tell them that I’d lost my nerve. So, instead, I was just going to lose my life.
I wonder when I got this stupid, exactly? Like, when was the precise moment it happened? When I hit my head in that skateboard crash in seventh grade? When I huffed spray-paint behind the 7-Eleven to impress Tommy Zucker? Or is it just a slow degradation of brains that continues even now? Maybe I’ll just get stupider and stupider until one day I eventually wind up eating out of a bucket. God, I should be so lucky to live long enough for a feed bag.
I’m definitely going to die down here. No question.
Carey’s hand in mine was actually pretty comforting. I always pictured touching him to be slimy somehow, like his personality could ooze out of his pores, coating him in a thin film of beer-sweat and sexism. Like actual, liquid sexism. But no, it was relatively dry, warm, and firm without being crushing. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was either scared himself, or else trying to comfort me.
But I do know better.
All of these people are insane and selfish. Carey might not be technically inhuman, like that Asian guy and Kaitlyn, but there’s still something wrong with him inside.
Kaitlyn, Jesus—it’s weird to even call her that, now. I should come up with a new name for her. If only so I don’t disparage the memory of my friend by pretending I recognize this awful thing that took her place.
Crazy K?
Killer K?
Kryptonite K?
These sound like B-list professional wrestlers.
Wait, am I really going to die with these as my last thoughts?
I guess I always figured when the end came you’d be thinking about something deep, but nope—my inner monologue is just as inane as ever. That’s almost comforting to know.
But hey, gotta think about something down here in the dark. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to see. I’d been staring so long into solid, unrelenting black that I’d be genuinely surprised if I ever saw something again. What actually was the last thing I saw?
Carey’s exposed buttcrack as he crouch-walked in front of me, into the dark.
Great. That’s actually perfect. Totally fitting with the rest of my life.
They say your other senses become heightened when you take one away, but so far that was bullshit. Instead of becoming Daredevil and echolocating my way through the blackness, all I could hear was the distant rumble of crashing waves and the occasional grumble from Carey. We’d been stuck here, squatting uselessly for what were probably minutes, but felt like decades. I’d asked him what was going on when we first stopped, but he just grunted at me and squeezed my hand. Now I was too busy pretending I was still a vessel of righteous anger—and not about to pee my jorts in terror—to pursue the point.
I stared deep into the hypnotic black for so long that I honestly forgot whether I was awake or asleep. Sleeping would make so much more sense: This was just a crazy nightmare brought on by smoking too much weed while binge-watching Home Room on cable. This being reality—me squatting here blind in an underwater monster suburb? That was the absurd option. I could almost feel the plush fabric of my parents’ couch, hear the TV’s canned laugh track after J.C. Sable called Spaz a “real nerd’s nerd.” Smell my dad grilling fish in the backya—
A short, sharp scream.
A scream was bad enough: That it cut off so quick was gut-wrenching.
Was that … was that Kaitlyn?
Oh, no, Jackie, there are tons of other girls just wandering these pitch-black ruins—this is the new hip spot to be seen, metaphorically speaking. Pitch-black fucking monster ruins are the new Silver Lake, don’t you know? Of course it was Kaitlyn. And she’s in big, big trouble.
The dull twist of fear in my belly actually surprised me: Sometimes, no matter how hard you mentally write somebody off, your gut still calls them a friend. A surge of panic, up from the soles of my feet, creeping across the back of my neck, tingling in the back of my skull.
Something tugged at my hand.
Oh, right: Carey.
What is he doing?
He’s holding me back.
Why is he holding me back?
Wait, back from where?
Holy shit, where am I going?
The second Kaitlyn screamed, I began automatically crawling toward the source of the sound. Like a totally and completely insane idiot. And like a much more insane and far completer idiot, I was still doing it.
“Stay put!” Carey hissed.
“We have to help,” I pleaded, as much to the enveloping blackness as to Carey.
Let us see. Let us go. Let us help.
“We can’t,” he said.
His responses were uncharacteristically short and to the point. No elaborate swears or jokes about my tits. Either he was trying to stay tactically quiet, or the bastard was scared. And if he was scared …
“So we’re just going to cower here?” I asked. “Like a bunch of frightened little girls?”
Wait for it. Please. Please be this stupidly macho. Please …
“Hell no,” came the response, after an aching eternity. “You were just going the wrong direction.”
He jumped ahead of me and pulled on my hand—apparently hoping I wouldn’t notice we were still going in the exact same direction—and I followed. Between the two of us, we probably spent more time falling than moving. Turning our ankles on unseen dips, snaring our wrists in invisible tangles, each of us loping awkwardly on three limbs, unwilling to let the other’s hand go and risk them being swept away in that sea of black.
The texture of the ground changed from loose dirt to smooth pavement. I took it as a sign we were heading in the right direction, though there was absolutely no good reason to believe so. Carey had started ever so slightly veering off to the left, but I knew which way was straight. I yanked his hand. He yanked back. I yanked harder and felt him stumble. I won that argument.
He fell in line behind me then, and I trekked through the void on my knees, outstretched fingers groping in front of me—hoping against hope they’d brush up against Kaitlyn’s long hair or thick shoulders instead of sinking into some unseen monstrosity. I hit something hard and splintery, felt around until I recognized it—the siding of a house—and let out a thin, quiet sigh of relief that lasted so long I felt light-headed after. We scooted along the exterior wall of the house, arms out, feeling for a door, a window, a broken section, anything. Then my fingers brushed against something strange in the darkness ahead—it was cool, slick, and rubbery. It gave a bit beneath my touch, but not completely. I moved my hands around it: some kind of skinny, warped pillar. No, scratch that, there were two of them, leading up to a point in the middle where they met and grew thicker.
My stupid brain put it together seconds too late. Seconds after I realized it was skin that I’d been touching. The cool, damp skin of something that had lived down here in the dark for years. Seconds after I dumbly pawed my way up its legs and patted it right on the belly. Seconds after it started screaming its high-pitched, painful wail.
From all around us, the others answered.