June sat up from the table, the restraint straps falling to pieces on the floor. She was now able to see everyone in the room: the tiny wrinkled doctor, Nurse Joya with her perfect blond hair and cherry-red lipstick, all five of the other nurses who were like slightly varied versions of their master. They all looked at June with wide eyes. They all kept very, very still.
June realized now that those things—Joya, the doctor, the nurses—were all different appendages of the same beast, one big monster capable of many forms simultaneously. She saw them now like a waving hand of finger puppets, each with a different face.
If she cut off the right head, so to speak, June knew that the rest of them would die, too. She remembered how the doctor had sometimes moved his lips along silently while Joya talked during their sessions. June had a pretty good idea who the head was, but it sure would be fun to test the others just to be sure.
There was no reason to rush things.
“Please,” the doctor whispered, putting his hands up, and with her mind, June made his fingers fold backward like a flower blooming, his bones crunching as they went, and he began to scream. June froze him so that only his throat gurgled, and his wrinkled face reddened, and then she caused his head to explode all over Nurse Joya and the other nurses, a satisfying wet pop! that sent an array of fluids and chunks flying through the air.
The other women tried to run; June made their legs disappear, and blood poured over the concrete floor. Some of them gave in to death immediately, but a few still tried to crawl with their arms toward the plastic sheet. So June made their arms go away, too, and then their eyes, and then their tongues, all within the blink of an eye.
“June,” Joya whispered, the only one who hadn’t moved, shivering and covered with the doctor’s entrails. “Please. There’s still a chance.”
“A chance for what?” June giggled manically, unable to imagine what the answer could possibly be.
“A chance to beat them,” Joya insisted. “You could use their own technology against them! They kept you in the dark, dangled you like a mouse in front of a snake. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Not particularly,” June said. “Especially since the mouse was given sharp enough teeth to chew off the head of the snake.”
Despite that, June still had a few questions.
“How were you so stupid that you couldn’t figure out I had the key the moment you saw me in that tunnel?” June went on. “I created the path to get in there myself, as I’m sure you knew. You deserve to lose.”
“I thought we caused that!” Joya cried out, pressing her back harder against the wall in her panic as if she could somehow disappear through it. No such luck. “We knew you were powerful. We only wanted to harness that to help us find the real key. Those other girls, they had powers, too—maybe not like yours but it all came from the same source—and we found them so much earlier than you. We thought your role would be...different.”
“Different how?” June was still sitting on the awful table they’d strapped her to. She used her mind to keep Joya from running away.
“A scribe of some kind,” Joya explained, softly, as though doing so might somehow save her life. “We weren’t alerted to your potential until you started writing your story. From the moment you typed the first word, we were able to smell you, smell where you’d been, just like we’d smelled it on Adie and Simpson and Cassy and Jessica.”
June didn’t miss that she’d artfully left out mention of Eleanor. An attempt not to pour gasoline on the fire, June assumed.
“The Others,” Nurse Joya said. “The ones that took you-all at one point or the other...they have a very distinct odor.” Her nose scrunched. “Our kind is hypersensitive to the stink.”
June knew the smell well, like warm salt water and formaldehyde.
“We began watching you, secretly,” Joya continued. “We started noticing that the story was causing a decline in you. And it was riddled with clues. We thought you were the one capable of finding the key, we just didn’t know you were carrying it yourself. We didn’t even know what we were looking for or what it would do—we just knew that they were coming for us and that there was a way to stop them. We thought having captured you-all was a victory in itself.”
Joya paused, and her face reddened in her rage over her own failure. “We thought we were being clever when we set you up to get admitted. We didn’t know that those disgusting things were one step ahead of us all along. We figured that having you admit that you’d killed that man with your mind, facing that impossible reality, would enable you to remember whatever it was they’d made you forget. Little did we know they were still in control. They always were. Your story wasn’t a side effect of you processing your trauma. It was just bait, plain and simple. And we took it.”
So that was why Nurse Joya and the doctor had been so fixated on the night of Stewart’s death in June’s sessions. They knew they were looking to make something click, they just had no idea what they were really messing with. They had no idea of the true nature of the key that would be used to destroy them. And they made the mistake of taking the repercussions for the other girls more seriously than hers.
Eleanor. Eleanor’s gift had been to pass along important messages through Simpson from the land of the dead. The other girls had played different roles at different points that had led to this. June wasn’t sure exactly how, but she remembered how Lauren had claimed to be able to see through anyone’s eyes she chose. How Cassy had spoken of past lives. How Adie had heard things nobody else could. How Jessica had made sculptures of things that didn’t look like humans.
Despite it all, June hadn’t been quick enough to figure it all out before Simpson was killed and Eleanor was taken away from her. It was unfair. Each and every one of these monsters deserved to die. June didn’t want to disappoint her makers.
“Come with me,” June said softly as she swung her legs over the side of the table, her newfound power creating an incredible and terrifying calm within her. There were many things left to do. “Follow.”
June didn’t have to look to make sure the nurse was listening: she knew it’d be so. In an effort not to slip, she stepped barefoot over the scattered bodies and through the surprisingly hot fluids that had spilled onto and flooded the floor. She stopped in front of a mirror, looked without reaction at the reflection of the blood-smeared face she still just recognized. The top of her head was still missing, her brain still exposed.
There, toward the front part of the pulsating gray matter, closer to her eyes, June could see a single gleaming piece of metal attached to the tissue. A tiny green light on it flashed. The key. June smiled and stepped away from the mirror. The monsters hadn’t been wrong per se. The code word had always worked. June knew now that it had simply never been activated in the right conditions: with the brain chip from outer space exposed, rather than hidden beneath layers of scalp and bone.
The gift of the stars, indeed. The beings had always known that the monsters would do it to themselves, go to any extreme in order to beat their foes. They had always known that June would be cut open like a cadaver. The key had worked exactly as intended. Everything had gone according to plan.
“Let me free,” Joya screeched from behind her, so for now June silenced the monster in a nurse costume. All she had to do was think something to make it happen, and it was wonderful.
Together they walked through the laboratory, through the elaborate office with the trippy carpet and the heavy furniture, into the hallway of rooms where the rest of the patients slept or cried into the night. June’s mouth twitched, and all of the doors flew open.
“Run,” she whispered, and suddenly girls and women emerged from the open doorways, running to the front of the building, running to their freedom. June spotted Jessica and Cassy, willed them to look at her and raised a hand in farewell. They gaped at her, disbelief painting their faces, and June hoped that they’d remember her in a fond way, hoped they knew how much she had gone through to free them, hoped they understood how much had been lost to bring them all to this point.
June led Joya to stand directly before the nurses’ station. The uniformed women inside looked panicked at the sight of June, her brain still exposed, and Joya standing immobile beside her. They rushed to lock the doors, but—those silly nurses!—June had no need for something as minor as a door.
They all exploded at the same time, splattering the glass that separated them with blood and tissue. June carried on toward the hallway that she’d snuck into earlier, where she’d lost any and all hope of succeeding. Despite the feeling of failure that had followed, she had been right to have blind faith earlier. She hadn’t been stupid or foolish. And there was nothing she could have done to save Eleanor while she was in a coerced, drugged sleep in the room they had shared.
They entered the room where Eleanor still sat, mouth open, gazing into forever. June knew what she had come for, but despite everything that had happened and was happening, she felt afraid. Upset. Angry.
She went to Eleanor in the chair, leaned down to kiss her blood-streaked cheek. “I love you,” she whispered, and then she made Eleanor’s body die, as quick as a flash, painless, a mercy. Now there was no more suffering in her already-dead body. There was only June and Nurse Joya in the room now.
“You didn’t care what any of us felt,” June said, turning to the nurse. “What was this place before you became aware of the impending threat? All those women, everyone who came before us...” She reverted Nurse Joya to a state where she could speak again.
“It was our lifeblood,” Joya explained, and June was surprised to see tears welling in the thing’s eyes. “Our infinite food source. Humans had already done such a good job of herding themselves, lobotomizing each other and worse. We simply...took over. We looked like them, lived like them, lived off them.”
“Disgusting,” June said, crossing her arms. “The Others were right. You deserve to be wiped clean from this planet.”
“We were born of this planet!” the nurse snarled, spitting. “It is ours!”
“No more,” June said with a little grin. “Maybe if you had handled things differently, I’d be on your side. This is going to hurt very much, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry!” Joya begged, and June let her drop to her knees. “I’m so sorry! Please, please! I’m sorry—”
“No,” June said impatiently, cutting the nurse off. “There are no apologies now. It’s much too late for that.”
Nurse Joya’s eyes filled with genuine fear as she realized she couldn’t move again. June took a deep breath and began the nurse’s transformation. The holes in her face were forcibly opened, the appendages shivering as they protruded painfully forth from them. Tendons snapped as the monster revealed itself in full, only to have the appendages ripped from their roots, the claws pulled from the fingers, the fangs torn from the mouth.
June let Nurse Joya scream as loud as she wanted. June peeled the skin from the meat, then peeled the meat from the bone, then let the bones crumble and disintegrate until they resembled nothing more than blood-soaked sand. The screaming was long over, but June continued until nothing was left.
When she was through, June walked calmly through the empty institution, hardly processing the sound of the fire alarms, only vaguely realizing that she had started the fire herself with just a look. Burn it all to the ground. Chew the head from the snake to ensure it will never grow back.
June finally found the front desk, also empty, and looked out the window that faced the parking lot. For the first time in months, she saw the morning sun beginning to rise. She stepped out of the Burrow Place Asylum, felt the breeze upon her skin, real and clean, felt it lick her exposed brain tissue, felt the blood that covered her face and neck begin to congeal.
She knew just where to go first.
“I’m coming, sweet husband,” June sang into the morning as she made her way down the winding road leading to town. “I’m coming home to you now.”
She walked the whole way, making it so that nobody could see her. When she passed a bus stop crowded with people, nobody even looked up from their newspapers or books, although for fun she let one random young man see the truth. Nobody could seem to figure out what the hysterical man was pointing at, screaming and screaming, and June was ashamed to know that the screams gave her joy. She shivered, her new gift causing her entire body to buzz in pleasure.
It occurred to June that even though she had just acted as a mere cosmic weapon to wipe out the monstrosities of the institution, she didn’t mind one bit. It was nothing like being used by Dad or Mom or Robert or Fred. It didn’t take power away from her but rather provided it in droves, made it flow, washing and warm and wonderful through her every vein. She savored her gift from the land of stars and voids. It’d been her destiny ever since she was ten years old. Out of everybody on the planet, June had been the one who was chosen to carry the key. Imagine what else they are capable of, she thought breathlessly as she walked.
Surely, surely, they only had more greatness planned for June. Surely they would never discard their precious weapon, years in the making, after just one use. Surely their only plan was to cleanse the earth of the monsters, not the humans. They would have done that already...right? June wished she could ask Eleanor.
Eleanor.
June firmly told herself that she didn’t have a place in her current state to think about Eleanor. Not one bit, not now, maybe not ever. If she thought about Eleanor, she might accidentally lose control and cause everything in existence to just...go away. She didn’t care to face the fact that she was unbearably, unspeakably alone.
There were things she wanted to do, needed to do, and only then would she stop and think about what could possibly come next.
June willed herself to know exactly where Robert’s new house was, the one Stewart Dennings had bought as an engagement gift. She made her way to a very well-maintained neighborhood, all lawns and mailboxes and high-end automobiles. Stewart hadn’t gone cheap on his son, had kept the image rolling hard and fast. June was glad that she’d killed him, caught deep in a rare moment of brushing her fingers against the power that was hidden in her mind, a flash of ability that had sparked out as quickly as it’d occurred. Joya and the doctor had been truly stupid to underestimate her potential.
June stood in front of the bushes until she saw Robert emerge from the house, dressed in his work clothes. Only after he drove away, oblivious to June’s presence, did she go inside. She spent hours exploring every nook and cranny of the building, laughing at the mess, such an immense mess by a man obviously drowning in loss. She saw that he kept a photograph of them together on his nightstand and was truly surprised at the sight of it. Somehow, Robert still held on to the idea of being with her forever, even after everything that had happened. It baffled her beyond belief. She continued to search through the house.
After she had checked all the rooms and seen everything, she clapped her hands together and got to work.
When evening came and Robert’s car pulled into the driveway, June was ready. He opened the door, and June was standing right there, holding a fresh bourbon on ice for him, and even though he initially froze and tried to back away, June had him take the drink and sit at the dinner table, which was already set.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get home, darling,” June said, stooping to retrieve a whole roasted chicken from the oven, the juices bubbling, the skin browned to a perfect crisp. “I’ve been cleaning all day for you, made sure the house was spotless for our first night together.”
Robert sat still at the table, his eyes wide with terror, his body rigid with what June supposed was terror. She could feel that he was trying very, very hard to move, to scream, to run. She’d taken the time to wash all the blood from herself and find a fresh dress that showed a lot of leg, but dear heavens, she’d forgotten to do something about her exposed brain. No matter. Robert soon wouldn’t mind, she knew.
“What’s wrong?” June asked into the silence, as Robert’s eyes began to fill, tears streaming down his face. “Isn’t this everything you ever wanted, darling? Us, together, in our very own home? Me making you the perfect dinner? My mother is quite the cook, as you know, and of course she was happy to pass those skills along to me.”
June, still smiling and holding the steaming roasting pan, made her way over to Robert and leaned in close, making sure to hold his eyes with hers. “Fuck you for thinking that the world owes you something,” she whispered. “Fuck you for thinking that I ever owed you anything.”
There came a knock on the door then. Robert’s eyes turned desperately toward the sound.
“Now, who might that be?” June said playfully, rising and setting the chicken down on the counter to quickly tent it with aluminum foil. “I know you like to be the very center of my attention, Robert, but—surprise! After a moment to think about it, I’ve decided that you’re not actually going to be the guest of honor tonight after all.”
She went to the front door and opened it, where her brother, Fred, stood with a bottle of champagne in a twitching hand. “Right on time,” June beamed, taking the bottle from her brother’s hand. “Oh, for me? So polite, Freddie. You shouldn’t have.”
Fred said nothing. His face was red, and the veins on his neck and temples were bulging with effort as he tried to fight against the force that drove him. June had him step inside, had him hang his own coat up, had him pour his own drink before sitting at the table directly across from Robert.
“How long I’ve waited for a moment just like this,” June sighed dreamily, sitting at the head of the table. “I’ve got a few minutes while I let that chicken rest. Seems to me like the perfect moment for us all to have a little talk.”
She could see Fred and Robert looking at each other, neither able to move their heads or stand or run.
“One of you is a symptom to be treated,” June said. “And one of you is a cancer to be cut out permanently.”
She loved seeing them try to figure out who was who.
“You were controlling,” June said, starting on Robert first. “You were dismally boring, you only cared about yourself, and you only loved me because your mother was dead.” Her face darkened. “And you hurt me. You shoved me against a wall when I wanted to follow my whims, all because you believed that I somehow owed you something.” A painful nuisance of a lump formed in her throat. “You pretended to care about my feelings on marriage, but you lied. You let our parents play you like a pitiful little puppet. You let them try to force me into the wrong fate.”
June took a breath, realized her hands were shaking. “But despite all of that,” she kept on, keeping her voice steady, “I can’t help but harbor just a touch of pity for you. You see, Robert, I was just as guilty as being a puppet as you were. Live and learn, right, darling?”
June stood and went back to the kitchen, peering at the boys via the pass-through. She cut into the chicken with a sharp knife, made up plates for Robert and Fred loaded with thick slices of breast meat, as well as some mashed potatoes and scoops of a bubbling green-bean casserole topped with toasted cornflakes. She drizzled pan juices over the meat and added two piping hot rolls with fresh butter to the side. It was the first dinner she’d ever made on her own, and judging by the taste of the delicious meat juices on her fingertips, she’d done very well.
“But I’m willing to give you another chance,” June said, setting one of the plates down in front of Robert. “Let you discover what purpose lies in store for you. It’s much different than what you ever expected, I can assure you that. You’re going to find out exactly what it feels like.”
She allowed Robert to eat then. She let go of him completely for a moment, just to see what he would do, and when he lifted his arms and realized he was back in control, but refrained from running away and instead began eating, pale, sweating and trembling, June knew she had made the correct choice. He was learning to be obedient already.
June set the other plate in front of Fred, but he wasn’t able to move to eat it. “Not hungry?” June asked, crossing her arms over her crisp new dress. “Now, my dear brother, that simply won’t do.”
Fred stared at her, pleading, and June remembered the false hope of protection that she’d granted him when they were young. He had failed her. She let her smile fade, dropped the bubbly demeanor and leaned over the table so that her face was inches from his.
“You made a horrible mistake the night the bus station called,” she said.
June knew now that it had never been her real fate to go to the writing retreat in New York and that she’d been meant for something else, and her story had simply been the vehicle that led her there chapter by chapter. But it didn’t matter. Fred wasn’t aware of any of that. For all he knew, he’d happily taken away the one chance June had to escape her miserable life without so much as a second thought. She remembered the disgusting glee in his eyes when he came into the living room, hardly able to wait to spill her secret to Dad.
You can’t train that sort of betrayal out of someone. June supposed that Fred had shown her his true colors in that moment all those nights ago. A sibling that showed such hatred, that was willing to inflict such damage, had no purpose being a sibling at all.
Despite feeling it so strongly, June was unable to articulate to Fred why she was about to do what followed. She wanted to so badly, wished that she could make him fully understand, wished that she could slow it down so he really knew, but in the end, June got so upset at the memory of the night her dream had been extinguished that she lost more control than she would have liked.
“My patience has simply run out,” she murmured to herself, defeated. “It really is a crying shame.”
Fred’s eyes stayed on June’s, at first anyway, but then the blood started to drip down his face and his eyes rolled back into his head, where they stayed.
June never allowed him to scream.