The only reason they went into Burned Oak, California, on that smoldering summer day was because of Logan’s thirteenth birthday. Bridey was taking Logan for a birthday hamburger and shake in town, which is what Logan asked for. Logan was excited about it, in her quiet inward way, because she and Bridey—her mother—had spent most of the summer on the farm, with only the animals and the occasional visit from the livestock veterinarian. Bridey was reluctant to come to town. She made excuses; she even went to the considerable expense of having groceries delivered.
Bridey parked the old Toyota pickup across the highway from Meaty Mary’s Café. She turned off the engine and climbed out with a certain weariness. She was wearing her yellow sunglasses and sunhat and a yellow sundress.
Logan got out in a hurry. She wore her San Diego Padres baseball cap, shorts, thongs, and a white blouse. The sweat started on her forehead the instant she stepped onto the baking road. Blinking in the hot sun, Logan flapped along in her thongs close behind her mother.
Logan noticed a pretty blond teenage girl sitting on the shaded stoop of the hardware store next to Mary’s. The girl was frowning at her smart phone. Her rather strident makeup had been selected to match her very short blue and red flower-print dress. She glanced up, and her smirking inspection made Logan feel she should have worn sneakers and a nicer blouse, maybe even a dress. She only had one dress that still fit her, and she’d only worn it one time since school.
Bridey and Logan got across the highway just ahead of an enormous double-trailer truck carrying boron from the mine; the semi rumbled by, not fast but so weightily Logan felt the wooden walkway shiver under her at the café’s door. Burned Oak tried to keep an old-fashioned veneer, with false front buildings and wooden walkways. The little town, sparsely edging the Southeastern California highway, was aware that it was rustic and, perhaps, tourists could be encouraged to regard it as quaint.
To the left of the café’s front door a noisy air conditioner drooled rusty water. To the right, a big Sunshine Orange Soda thermometer was screwed to the wood.
Logan followed her mom into Mary’s. The café was almost cold after a ride in a truck with a broken AC. It was Sunday afternoon and there were a good many people—miners and shopkeepers and their wives—all looking at Bridey and Logan as if remembering they were from around here but not sure exactly who they were. Her mother was a modishly attractive brunette with short hair and large dark eyes, and she was a magnet for curious looks.
Logan and her mother sat at the counter because Bridey believed Logan liked to watch the shakes being made, an impression outdated by ten years.
A Mexican cook looked at them from behind his service window. He pointed to Logan’s baseball cap. “Hey, the Padres! I used to go see the Padres play, back in San Diego! Nice ballpark there.”
Logan smiled and gave him a thumbs up. “Padres!”
She and Dad had gone six times to see the team at Petco Park. He loved baseball more than he’d loved the Padres. Maybe still loved it, if he was alive. There were no more tickets to major league games after they moved out here to be near the Sierra Butte Army base. Just the two of them, then, her and Dad at the farm—which wasn’t really a working farm, though there was a milk cow, a bull, and some horses who were supposed to breed colts. Logan had been there most of a school year, Dad working on his classified project at the base. She didn’t mind making her own dinner, or the interminable bus ride to the middle school in Quarryville, miles and miles with a bunch of kids who never talked to her. True, there was that girl Brinda, with the big wine-mark on her face, and that spotty-faced boy, Erwin, who liked to tell her, breathlessly and cluelessly, about how he was breeding some kind of Japanese cattle for the FFA. Nice kid, anyway.
But then, Dad . . .
Don’t think about Dad today, she told herself. Birthday stuff. Seeing town with Mom. Think about that.
Meaty Mary’s waitress was an elderly white lady with bright red lipstick and vividly dyed orange hair caught up in an old fashioned waitress’s cap. She had arching, drawn-on eyebrows. “How you doing, honey?” she said, setting her little notebook on the counter. She smiled at Logan. There was some lipstick on her dentures. Lana was embroidered on her blouse.
“Okay.” Logan hoped that Bridey wouldn’t mention the birthday.
The waitress looked at Bridey. “Ma’am? Getcha something?”
Bridey ordered for both of them and Lana wrote it down. Then she looked Logan and Bridey over, and screwed her mouth up like an early television comedy actress, her head cocked. “You’d be . . . Bridey? Married to Harve Kelly?”
“I would be her, yes,” said Bridey dryly, taking off her sunglasses. “Except that Harve has passed on.”
“He’s missing in action,” Logan corrected, voice low but firm. “Overseas. In Tunisia.”
“The Army says . . .” Bridey let it trail off, and shrugged. “He’s missing in action.”
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, sweetie!” Lana said, her cartoon eyebrows knitting. “He’s . . . I thought he was stationed over here on some research thing? They put him into combat overseas?”
Bridey adjusted her silverware. “Field testing something over there—I don’t know what exactly.” Her voice was almost inaudible.
Lana patted Bridey’s hand. “I’ll get your burgers and fries . . . and I won’t forget those shakes. One vanilla, one strawberry.”
They ate and drank in silence, Logan stealing a glance now and then at Bridey.
Since the day Bridey had shown up at the farm, Logan had never, ever called Bridey “Mom” or “Mother.” An ambitious lawyer for a while, Bridey had broken up with Dad when Logan was small. Apart from Christmas presents shipped from an internet site, she had been out of Logan’s life for years until Dad went missing. Just didn’t come home one day. She called the base, they said they’d look into it—and after three days alone at the farm, Bridey showed up with some papers from the Army and told her that Dad was overseas and hadn’t come back from a mission and, “As your mother, it’s my responsibility to take care of you, so . . . here I am.”
To be fair, she’d only said it that cold way because Logan had been crying and yelling at her and saying she wanted to talk to her dad on the phone and she didn’t believe he would leave without telling her he was going, she could take care of herself and she didn’t even want Bridey to take care of her.
But Bridey had stayed, and Dad hadn’t come home.
Two months of Bridey working from the farm, using the internet, some sort of legal consultant now, with Logan keeping to herself and Bridey sporadically dating a middle-aged Army captain from the base, a guy named Miles Winn. And sometimes a young sergeant named Chris something.
Then the word had come that Dad was listed officially MIA in some unspecified North African military disaster, possibly an encounter with an Islamic State spin-off.
Bridey wasn’t dating Miles now—coming home one night she muttered something, about a fight with him. “He was hounding me. Hassling me about dating Chris.” That was all she’d say. But a button was torn from her blouse, a small hole ripped where it had been.
Bridey preferred Chris anyway—only, Chris hadn’t been around in weeks. Which was maybe part of why Bridey was so pensive and silent lately.
Finishing her shake, Logan mentally rehearsed the speech for the ride home. I can live with Aunt Tracy in Riverside, we talked online and she said I could stay with her. I don’t want to stay here and you won’t have to take care of me and I’ll give the Army my contact information for when they find Dad.
Maybe she was tired of trying to “do the right thing.” Maybe she’d let her leave.
The sun was still blazing when they returned across the highway to the truck. They climbed in, sweating in the even hotter pick up. Bridey frowned over her purse as she looked for the keys.
“Can we go to the library, on the way?” Logan asked.
“The library? I doubt it’s open.” Bridey put the key in the starter and turned it. The key made a doleful clicking sound.
“I doubt it’s not open, Bridey. It’s air conditioned. I want to see if they got the book I ordered.”
Bridey’s frown deepened as she tried the key again. The engine wasn’t turning over. Click, click, click. “You have a book to return, before you can check anything out.”
“I have the book here, it’s under the seat.”
“Logan, hush—the car won’t start. I need to figure this out . . .”
She tried again. Nothing but clicking.
“Take the key out and put it in again,” Logan suggested.
“It’s not like rebooting a computer.” But she did try it. The starter still just clicked. “We have half a tank of gas, so it’s not that. Shit.”
They tried for a few minutes more, and then heat drove them out of the truck. They went back into the café, where Bridey, scowling now, called the tow truck at Milburn’s Car Repairs.
It was after five before Bridey let her walk down to the library. She got there just as Erwin was coming out, a few hefty books unsteadily tucked under his skinny arm. “Oh, hi Logan.” At school he’d been fairly cheerful, now he had the expression of someone in a hospital waiting room expecting bad news.
“Hi. Are they closed?”
He nodded. “Closing right now.” He looked glumly at the ground.
“Are you . . .” Logan broke off. She didn’t know him well enough to ask him why he was so upset. She nodded toward his books. “Are you reading about, um, animal husbandry?”
“No. About predators.” He looked out toward the hills overlooking the town. “California predators. Migration of cougars and like that. My cattle . . .” His mouth buckled and he looked close to crying.
“Something attacked those cows . . . the cattle you were raising?”
He gave a single quick nod. “Yeah. Something killed them all.”
“All of them?”
“Didn’t even leave much behind. Tore them up, ate ’em. Could be coyotes, even wolves—but no tracks.” He took a deep breath. “I got to catch the last bus home.”
“Sure. I’m walking up to the garage.” Logan dropped her book in the “Return” slot. “If you’re going that way.”
Erwin walked with her up to Milburn’s Car Repair, both of them silent, squinting against the maliciously angled sunlight. Her thongs seemed extra noisy on the sucking soft asphalt. When they got there he turned, smiled shyly at her—a touch of gratitude in that smile—and walked on.
Logan went into the cluttered, oil-redolent garage office. Bridey was standing by the window, chewing her lower lip and looking anxiously out at the empty street.
“Library was closed,” Logan said. “I dropped off the book.”
Bridey gave the faintest of nods.
Logan sat in an old wooden chair—and almost at the same instant, Miles came in. Miles Winn. He was loosening his tie, carrying his Army captain’s jacket over the other arm.
Bridey turned him a cold, heavy look. “Just to make the day complete.”
Miles was a round-faced man, a little plump, with sweat on his wide forehead. He took off his cap, wiped his face with a sleeve and said, “Wow. Still hot. I saw your truck in the garage there . . .”
“Yep, there it is,” Bridey said, voice tinder dry.
Miles nodded pointlessly. “I talked to Milburn. He doesn’t think you’ll get it fixed today. You need a ride?”
“I don’t, no,” Bridey said, her voice clipped. She looked out the window again.
He turned his hat in his hand. Logan was surprised at the way he was looking at Bridey—sucking air through clenched teeth and staring at her without blinking. Then he turned briskly away and walked out without a word.
“Damn,” Logan said. “What happened with you guys?”
“He’s been harassing me, is all. I’m going to report him to his commander. Don’t worry about it.”
“But—”
Milburn came in, then, wiping grease from his hands with a red rag, his incomplete smile stretching his thin red face. “Well, we got to order a part. New distributor. Don’t have it for that model.”
“How soon?” Bridey asked, getting wearily up from the plastic chair.
“Maybe tomorrow afternoon. If they have it in Quarryville.”
“I can give you a ride after work,” he went on. “But that’ll be after seven-thirty, or so.”
It was eight-thirty before they were bouncing and swaying along the curving country road, all three of them in the tow truck’s big front seat. Milburn was still wearing his coveralls; his blackened fingers left marks on the steering wheel. Logan was glad she was sitting by the window. She didn’t feel comfortable around Milburn.
She looked out across at an uncultivated field thick with a tall yellow-flowered weeds. The sun was barely down; the western horizon was still a brooding scarlet.
They were still half an hour from the farm when Milburn said, “You know, that distributor—looked like someone cut those wires.”
Bridey stared at Milburn. “Cut the wires? Why didn’t you tell us this back at the garage, that someone cut the wires? I’d have called the sheriff!”
“Because—” He licked his lips. “Captain Winn told me not to say anything. Said he’d take care of it. He thought it was somebody pranking you. He wanted to handle it.”
Logan gaped at him. “Miles told you not to tell us?”
“He—Miles is not a guy you cross. People in town, we learn that.” He shook his head.
Bridey swore under her breath. Then she asked, “Christ, Milburn—couldn’t you have just . . . I don’t know . . . spliced the wires or something?”
He grimaced—he had a scowl as big as his grin. “No ma’am, you wouldn’ta been sure to get all the way home, with spliced wires. Now, what I’m thinking—”
“There’s something in the road!” Bridey said suddenly, pointing.
Logan clutched at the dashboard as Milburn hit the brakes. They swerved to a stop about fifty feet from a big tree-trunk lying across the highway. In the headlights it looked glossy black. Maybe the bark had been removed, Logan thought.
Both ends of the trunk stretching across the road were hidden in shadow under the fringing oaks.
“Oh god, a fallen tree!” Bridey said. “That figures. That just fits right goddamn in with this whole damn day. Can you drive around it?”
“Well now, I don’t know, with that woods there. Maybe I could tow it out the way. Gotta have a look.” He switched off the engine, pocketed the keys, and climbed out of the truck.
Logan watched Milburn walk into the overlapping circles of headlight glow. He stopped and stared, looking right and left along the tree trunk.
The tree wouldn’t be easy to move even with the tow truck—it looked to Logan like it was four feet in diameter.
Milburn shook his head and turned toward them, shouted something. “I don’t think it—”
Then the tree trunk started to move.
It was sliding, right to left, across the road, very slowly, with the thick sluggishness of a lava flow.
“Is something pulling it or . . . ?” Bridey asked. “No. It’s . . .”
Logan’s mouth was dry. It was hard to talk. “It looks like . . . it’s moving itself.” What was making her heart pound, her mouth dry, was the fact that the tree trunk was slithering, weaving very slightly from side to side, as it went. It was supple, and it was big, and it was sliding along on its own power, shimmering in headlight glow with the motion. Milburn was gawking at the big, sliding black form. He backed away, still gaping.
“Didn’t even leave much behind. Tore them up, ate ’em. Could be coyotes, even wolves—but no tracks.”
“Bridey?” Logan heard herself say. “What is that?”
“I don’t know. Is it really. . . ?”
Now the thick, tubular sliding thing was changing directions. Its middle was rippling toward the truck, where Milburn had backed up against the grill. There was a whickering sound, and a kind of heavy white static that rattled the windows with its intensity. And then the black trunk suddenly looped, in a motion almost too fast to follow, and nosed around Milburn, looping, gripping him, squeezing . . .
Killed them all, Erwin had said.
Milburn’s head popped off his shoulders. Blood splashed thickly on the hood of the tow truck.
Logan screamed and Bridey clapped a hand over her mouth to smother a scream of her own.
The slitherer was dragging Milburn’s limp, headless body closer . . . It reared up, over the left side of the car—Logan couldn’t see it up there, but Bridey could.
With an odd mix of hissing and grumbling the thing was sliding onto the truck cab. The windshield began to crack on the left side; then the roof started to buckle downward.
“Oh no,” Bridey said. “Logan—get out of the truck!”
“No! We’re safe in here!” She tried to huddle under the dashboard.
“No, dammit, Logan listen to me! That door’s going to fly open, it’s going to come over there! Get out! We need to get out that door!”
A sharp authority in Bridey’s voice stirred her; Logan opened the passenger side door, and wriggled out. She saw something dark looming over them . . .
“Run back toward town!” Bridey shouted, her voice cracking.
Panic washing over her, Logan ran. She plunged blindly down the curving road, into the night; after a time she stepped into a pothole, lost a flipflop from her right foot, kicked the other one off, ran barefoot, on and on.
Bridey. . .
Breathing hard, her feet hurting, Logan stopped, turned to look for her mother.
She couldn’t see anyone—just the empty highway, the truck hidden beyond the curve. She was afraid to call out, afraid it might bring the thing that killed Milburn right to her. Moaning, Logan turned back toward town, and went on. But the town was a long ways away.
Was that a car, coming toward her?
Lights lanced the dark, vanished behind trees, then reappeared about a half-mile off.
Logan heard a noise from behind. She spun around, squealing with fear—a dark figure rushed toward her.
“Logan!” It was Bridey’s voice.
Bridey’s arms clasped Logan, pulled her close. Logan let her mother hug her, and they both panted with relief.
Then Logan caught her breath and pulled back, whispered, “Is it coming?”
“I don’t know!”
“There’s a car coming. We could wave to them . . .”
Headlights washed over them. Bridey took Logan’s arm, drew her to the side of the road. The sedan pulled up—it was an olive-colored government vehicle, with a number on the door.
Chris was at the wheel, ducking his head to look at them. He was a sergeant, in uniform, with buzz-cut blond hair, a clipped blond mustache, a slightly weak chin, gray eyes that usually squinted as if at some private amusement. Right now his mouth was grimly compressed. The window hummed down. “Get in! Quick!”
They climbed in, Logan in the back. Bridey had scarcely gotten the front passenger door closed before Chris gunned the engine, spinning the car to head back toward town.
“You know about it, don’t you,” Bridey said, looking at him. “That thing back there.”
“I . . . yeah I do, Bridey. Lana said you were going out here with Milburn—and the thing is out there tonight.”
“It killed him,” Bridey said huskily. “Milburn.”
“Figured when I saw you.”
“If you know about it . . .”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to people about it, who to go to. The right chain of command and—I wasn’t sure I could do it without some Green Machine clean-up crew punching a hole through my head.”
Logan stared at Chris. Was he saying the Army might kill him?
“I should have left the farm before now,” Bridey said. “I should have taken Logan away.”
“Why didn’t you?” He was driving rapidly but carefully, slowing more than he needed to when he came to a curve. Like he was worried about what might be around the bend.
“Miles. He said if I stayed, he’d find out exactly what happened to Harve. If I left—no soap. I’d never know. Logan would never know. And . . . he just made me feel like it wasn’t safe for me to leave.”
“Christ. You still seeing him?”
She shook her head. “No. He calls me. Texts me. Way too much. He’s . . . I’m scared of Miles.”
“He knows exactly what happened to Harve. And that implied threat stuff . . .” Chris smacked the palm of his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s the real Captain Winn! Just under the crust of ‘officer regular guy,’ that’s the real Miles: a prick.” He glanced in the rearview at Logan. “Sorry about the language.”
“I thought he was a prick too,” Logan said. “Can’t we call the sheriff?”
Chris took a phone from his uniform shirt pocket, and passed it to Bridey. “Give it a try. I’m not optimistic. Wasn’t working ten minutes ago. I came out here following the captain and . . . I think he saw me.”
Bridey tapped the phone. She listened. “Emergency number’s not ringing.”
“Try the base’s number.”
She tried, and shook her head. “It’s all fuzzy. Just static.”
“Yeah. He’s got the damper on the area now.”
“Then—just get us back to town, Chris. Please. Fast!”
Logan leaned forward. “Where’s my dad, Chris? You said Miles knows. Do you know?”
Chris slowed for a curve—slowed a lot. “I just found out for sure. It’s a hard thing to tell anybody. That thing—it’s all about the big snake.” He shook his head. “It’s called Zhuyin.” He pronounced the name zou-heen. “Zhuyin was . . . It’s a myth from China. Giant snake with a man’s face. It was supposedly a god who brought daylight by opening its eyes, night by closing them. For us it’s the Zhuyin Project. What’s more elastic, more camouflaged, more subtle, more adaptable to terrain, more under the radar . . . what’s got more stealth . . . than a snake? They’re powerful, terrifying to the enemy. Make them big enough and responsive enough, armored enough—an exquisitely effective weapon.” He added in disgust, “Miles tested it on some of the local cattle . . .” He brought the car to a jolting stop. “Oh no, no, that’s . . . Jesus, that thing is fast!”
The shiny black oozing thing had cut across country. As they watched, it nosed out ahead of them, weaving across the road into the headlight glow.
Logan saw it clearly now. Zhuyin. It was a snake—a snake sixty feet long, thick as a considerable tree, tapering at the tail, scales as big as cup saucers, jet black except for two rings of white back of its jaws, and what looked like a blister of glass and metal on the very top of its head, just above and behind the eyes.
Zhuyin reared up in the headlights’ glow and turned to look at them. Its face, a living bas-relief on the diamond shaped head, was made of scales, and was proportionate to its body, but it was did not have a snake’s eyes, nor quite a snake’s muzzle.
In a rough way, it was a man’s face. A man’s eyes.
Its visage was black-scaled and too large, but still human. It had eyes like a man’s, though larger than normal; the nose was a bit flattened; it had scales over its flattened lips.
It shifted, catching the light differently—and she recognized the face. It was her father.
She screamed and Bridey sobbed and Chris swore.
He put the car into a grinding reverse, looking over his shoulder as he backed the vehicle up. He spun into a turn, roared off down the road, and left the gigantic serpent in the shadows.
“I guess . . .” His voice was hoarse. “It cut across country. And it’s going to have a chance to do it again.”
Logan felt unreal, distant from everything. The only clear feeling she had was a sickness in the pit of her stomach. She was distantly aware they were driving alongside a ravine lined by dusty, twisted oaks.
“It wasn’t really him,” Bridey said, between two angry sobs.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “It was.”
A car was blocking the road ahead. Chris hit the brakes; Logan had to grab the headrest on the front seat. Their car squealed to a halt.
“Is it?” Chris murmured, then added, “yeah,” as someone got out of the car blocking their way. “It’s Miles.”
As if something were breathing on neck, Logan turned to look behind her—and saw a pair of eyes gleaming red in the taillight’s glow, as it slithered rapidly after them. It was coming fast, unthinkably fast.
“It’s coming . . .” Logan could barely get the words out.
“Just drive around the son of a bitch,” Bridey said coldly. “Or over him if you have to.” She hadn’t heard Logan.
“I’ll try to deal with him,” Chris was saying. “But—”
“It’s coming!” Logan screamed.
Zhuyin came slamming down on the car, so that the thin steel roof dented in, then cracked—the back window exploded outward into diamond-like fragments and the back door next to her popped open. Logan threw herself down behind the front seats.
The car twisted against the ground, like a trapped animal struggling to get free of a boa constrictor, tires spinning as Chris jerked the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator and Bridey shouted wordlessly—
Then the car lurched free, and seemed to leap up . . . and abruptly it dove down.
Logan was slammed against the back of the seats, obliquely saw a branch smash in through a side window as the car plunged down through a sickening series of bounces.
They jolted to a stop in a cloud of dust and smoke.
“Out!” Chris yelled. “Out!”
Logan felt dazed, incapable of deciding what to do. This wasn’t a time to move; it was a time to lay still, to play dead, to hope it would all pass over them . . . To hope that Zhuyin would slide over them and away, in search of fresh prey.
She felt something tugging on her feet and she screamed and tried to writhe away.
“Stop fighting me, Logan, let me help you get out!” Bridey yelled.
Logan looked, saw that Bridey had hold of her ankles, was trying to pull her out the popped-open door.
Logan let her pull, got her feet on the ground, and clambered out the rest of the way on her own.
She stumbled, coughing, out of the smoke, with Bridey clasping her arm.
They found themselves in a dry creek bed choked with leaves and sticks. Chris was nearby, with a small flashlight in his left hand, and one of those big square-barreled pistols in his right hand. He turned them both to point up the hill.
A whickering and the static sound came from up there. Something was sliding down toward them.
The car started howling then, making Logan shriek in reaction—it was a car horn blaring. She turned, saw their car was crunched into a tree stump, its front end twisted; small blue flames flickered under the crumpled hood.
“Come on!” Chris yelled. “Get away from the car—fast!”
Logan and Bridey stumbled after him, Logan’s feet smarting, the car horn howling warningly from behind them; they tripped over roots, barely kept to their feet as they went down the creek bed at the bottom of the ravine. Trying to keep up with Chris, they followed the creek bed as quickly as they could.
The car horn stopped. Logan heard a dull thump and caught a flash of light, looked back in time to see the wrecked car engulfed in blue-yellow flames.
And the living black enormity was coming out of the flame whipped shadows, its eyes catching the firelight, glowing blue-red now. It was a quivering S-shape towering over the fire, looking toward the flames as if hypnotized. Zhuyin.
The face turned toward Logan . . .
She sobbed and looked away, hurrying awkwardly on, her feet crackling through dry leaves, and layers of twigs. Chris had stopped, his flashlight, pointing at something.
Logan caught up with Bridey, and saw Chris was pointing his gun now too—the sparse flashlight beam picked out Miles Winn, who was skidding down the slope from the road. He was still in his uniform, but without the jacket and cap, and wearing a headset like something the boys in San Diego wore when they were playing co-op videogames.
There was something in his hands—hard to see clearly in the uneven red light. Then she knew. It was an assault rifle, and it was aimed at Chris.
Up above, the Army captain’s car was angled partway into the ravine, its lights on, spotlighting the two men.
Logan stumbled closer—but Chris waved her back, never taking his eyes off Miles. “Logan, stay with your mom.”
Logan backed up, and felt Bridey’s arms close around her. “It’s coming!” Logan called out. “It’s behind us.”
“He won’t come any closer, unless I tell him to,” Miles said, skidding a little farther down the dirt of the slope.
He. Miles calls it a he.
Miles was about ten feet from Chris now. “I can talk to him, Chris. He knows my voice. He’s wired to obey that voice. Only that and nothing else.”
“You weren’t supposed to go this far with it. You weren’t supposed to hybrid anything but chimps.”
“He volunteered.”
“Not for this, Miles. He didn’t volunteer for this.”
“Captain. Call me captain, Sergeant Eckhardt.”
“I don’t recognize your authority,” Chris said. “You’re a fucking criminal. You planning to keep Bridey in building twenty-three? What’s the plan for the girl—hybridization?”
“They can both be useful. And there’s a very unusual form of hybridization you may not be—”
Chris broke in, “They’re not going to let you turn building twenty-three into your personal dictatorship!”
“I was given full—”
“They did not give you permission to do this to Harve!”
“Dear God, it is him, it’s him, it’s him. . . .” Bridey muttered. “Harve.”
Miles chuckled. “I told you. Harve volunteered.”
“He volunteered a sample of his DNA,” Chris grated. “Not his body, and not his brain, Miles! You set him up! You obsessed on Bridey and you needed Harve out of the way! You’re a fucking psychopath!”
Bridey caught her breath.
“I need what I need,” Miles said equably. His smile was light and pleasant, but his eyes, in the uneven glare, were dark pools. “And the Army needs what it needs. All we’ve done is make one soldier more like all soldiers should be—how they will all become. What’s the difference if . . . inside becomes outside?”
From behind them came the whickering sound, the waves of static . . . and a long, exhaling hiss. Logan thought she heard pain in that hiss.
There was a growing crackling sound too—and the smell of wood and leaves burning. It had been so hot, so relentlessly hot; it had been dry for so long . . .
Miles was looking past them. “Your car’s started a fire. That fire’ll spread fast. We don’t have much time.” He looked at Bridey. “You should have trusted me, Bridey! I control him. You come with me, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you! You’ll be with me and all will be well!”
“You pretended that Harve was dead . . . overseas . . .” Bridey’s voice was hoarse now.
“He was never more than twenty miles from you!” Miles said, with a mocking tone of apology. “He is dead though—he wasn’t cooperating. And we used some of him. We needed to bioengineer something that had human memory. Fuse it with some very special reptilian genetics . . . And glory is upon us! Zhuyin!”
Logan tried to grasp it all. Daddy. Violated. Dead. Reborn into. . .
“You crossed the line a million years back, Miles,” Chris said, raising the pistol and aiming.
“Chris!” Bridey shouted. “Don’t! He’ll—”
Chris and Miles fired at the same time.
Miles staggered . . . and Chris, taking three rounds in the chest, sank to his knees, and coughed blood.
Logan started toward him—Bridey dragged her back, whispering, “Get ready to run, just follow me . . .”
Miles shifted his rifle to one hand, touched his left side, grimacing. “Just a crease. You choked, Chris . . .”
Chris tried to stand—and then pitched over on his left side.
“Chris!” Logan yelled. He didn’t respond. His legs twitched. Dead. Chris is dead.
“Run!” Bridey cried.
Bridey tugged at Logan and the two of them ran into the darkness, out of the shine from Miles’ headlights.
“Bridey—!” Logan called, tripping—almost falling headfirst, then catching herself, staggering on. They were running toward the wildfire; toward the giant black serpent waiting somewhere close by. “Bridey—that’s the wrong way! That thing is down there!”
“He controls it!” Bridey shouted between harsh breaths. “He won’t let it kill me!”
Was that true? Maybe he would punish Bridey for running away from him, Logan thought.
Maybe he would tell Zhuyin to kill them both.
As they ran from the man with the gun, the wildfire’s flames seemed to be running toward them, as if to meet them, to embrace them.
Then, Zhuyin was there—she saw it peripherally, shimmering off to their left, its whickering sound mixed in with the crackling of flames . . .
Smoke billowed toward them, as they ran, and they coughed. “Up the hill, Logan, we—” Bridey broke off, coughing.
Logan tried to follow her up the slope, slipped down the steep loose dirt of the hill. She found herself on her hands and knees, and turned to look at the black, serpentine hulk of the Zhuyin limned in flame. She saw it was coiled like a cobra but turning attentively back toward Miles. Clearly it was listening to him.
Black smoke drifted in front of her, itself like a Chinese spirit serpent, and she lost sight of it.
“Logan!”
She got up, coughing, reached out to Bridey’s offered hand and caught hold. They struggled up the hill . . . but the flame was there before them.
A thick bank of Madrone and scrub pine burst into flame up ahead, as if it had been dipped in kerosene—prepped by the endless drought the dry half-dead foliage ignited, and in seconds there was a wall of flame blocking the way.
One hand raised against the heat and glare, Bridey seemed to hesitate, as if despairingly stunned by all that had happened. The serpent. Miles cutting Chris down. The fire. Harve. Zhuyin.
Eyes stinging from smoke, Logan looked around, and thought she saw a way out up to the right. “This way!” She tugged on Bridey’s arm.
Bridey turned to follow, and staggered. She fell to her knees, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t understand what’s—” The rest was swallowed in a coughing fit as smoke swirled more thickly around them.
It wasn’t just the brush. The very ground under the plants was burning: “dead fuels” they called it, fallen twigs, desiccated plant matter, the ground’s coating becoming an instant carpet of flames. The world was filling with crackling and the hissing of living white static.
The flame rushed toward them. Bridey turned and embraced Logan, covered her as if to take the fire on herself.
“Mom! Mom, we have to go back to Miles—maybe he—”
But as she spoke Logan looked toward Miles, and saw the dead fuel catching fire up the dry creek bed, like ignition running along a fuse. It was filling the valley, and closing in around them, rippling sinuous heat waves and stealing oxygen as it came.
Logan felt a thump on the back of her legs, a hard push, unstoppable and weirdly cunning, and Logan was suddenly up in the air, Bridey clinging to her. Both of them were hoisted up, now too weak from the smoke to resist, and Logan saw that they were just behind the head of the Zhuyin. They had been lifted up by the enormous snake.
Bridey started to slip off—she would fall into the fire that closed in around them. She clawed at the slippery scales. But Zhuyin writhed purposefully in place, shifting so that Bridey remained aboard its wide serpentine back just behind Logan. Then the great serpent swayed upward, raising them above the flames, and went sailing toward Miles like a water snake, skating atop a lake of red and blue fire, until it had passed clear, out of the smoke and spreading flame.
Twenty seconds more—they had were getting close to Miles who was partway up the hill, backing away and coughing.
Logan clung to the scaly body just behind the Zhuyin’s cold head, clinging to her sanity at the same time, rasping and gasping between sobs.
Something gleamed on its head—the glass node, a small transparent hemisphere impregnated with hyper-attenuated wires that pulsed with reflected firelight.
She looked past it and through smoke-teary eyes Logan could see Miles, closer now, talking into his headset with a fierce pertinacity. The Zhuyin slithered closer to him . . .
Take it off me. Take it off me. Take it off me.
Whose voice was that? Take it off me. Arising out of the white static sound, the hissing, the crackling, the whickering, all of it together, and somehow bound into it: a voice.
A voice Logan heard in her mind.
Take it off me. Take it off me. Pull it off. Take. It. Off.
Logan gripped the serpent with her legs, and reached with both hands to claw at the glass node.
Yes. Take it off. Tear it away.
It was implanted into the Zhuyin’s scaly black head—and into what remained of her father. She couldn’t get a good grip on the glass node. Her fingers were slippery; the glass offered no purchase.
Take it off. Tear it away.
Logan dug her fingers under scales near the node, and ripped at it with all her strength . . .
The effort threw her off balance and she fell, sliding off the Zhuyin, thumping heavily onto dirt and gravel.
Flame cooked up, close by . . .
“Mom!” Logan shouted. Feeling the bloody glass thing in her hand. She’d torn it from the Zhuyin.
Bridey slipped down beside her. She put her arms around Logan, helped her stand.
Zhuyin was flowing along beside them, toward Miles, who was backing away, shouting at it.
“Go back! Pick them up, both females, and bring them to me!”
Zhuyin bore toward him . . .
There was a black flash, and Miles yelped.
Zhuyin was rearing up with Miles clasped in its widening jaws—jaws unhinging to make more room. The assault rifle was rolling away down the slope.
Zhuyin tossed Miles screaming into the air—caught him, headfirst, gulped him partway down. Then it turned, and slithered toward the rushing wildfire. Which was spreading, charging up the hill like a herd of translucent yellow-red beasts, surrounding them . . .
Zhuyin didn’t look at Logan, or Bridey. It glided past, toward the heart of the fire, undulating a little left and a little right, left and right, the whole long length of it wending back to the inferno . . . and it spat. It flung Miles into the flames.
Smoke rose thick and black, and there was screaming and hissing behind a roiling, thickening curtain of smoke. Logan couldn’t see the great black serpent now.
Bridey tugged Logan away, and up the gravel scree toward Miles’ car. They were almost at the top, and then Logan slipped and fell, rolled yelling for Mom, her mama, not Bridey anymore, Mama now . . .
Smoke closed around her. Fire burst through. Somewhere Bridey called her name. Then the shining eyes . . .
A week later, Bridey was driving a rented pickup smoothly along the highway between wide, blackened stretches of landscape, a no-man’s land that had almost consumed their farmhouse. It was a cooler day, clouds had blown in from the north, bringing a soft faintly damp breeze. She wanted to turn back. But she made herself go on, her mouth dry, her stomach fluttering. She kept going.
There—the ravine.
Bridey slowed and pulled over. Hands trembling, she got hesitantly out, and thought, I shouldn’t look. The Army had used canine teams to find what little remained of Captain Miles Winn, Sergeant Christopher Eckhardt, and Logan Kelly. Forensics experts identified them from DNA and dental records.
Or so they said. But she didn’t trust them.
Bridey sighed and walked stiffly onto the cold ashes, so very black, toward the edge of the ravine. Puffs of ash rose up around her footsteps.
She paused at the edge and looked down into the small, ashen valley.
It took her a few moments to make out the wreckage of the government car they’d crashed into the tree. There it was, in the old creek bed, so blackened that at first she’d thought it was a boulder.
Then she saw something else, along the edge of the burn, past the burned out car, on the other side of the ravine. The breeze was exposing it, now. Blowing ash aside . . .
The numb thought came to her that it must be what was left of Zhuyin. Maybe that was its skin, its skeleton. Or Logan’s.
At the very end Logan had called her Mama.
Bridey skidded down into the ravine. Hesitated. Then went a little closer. She stared.
There were no bones. But on the edge of the burned, blackened earth, was an empty snakeskin. It was an impossibly big snakeskin, big as an ancient myth. She knew the look of it, she had seen shed snake skins many times.
It was the shed skin of Zhuyin, parts of it slightly charred. And nearby, a long ashen track was pressed into the ground, where something big had slithered off, up the slope, and into the countryside.
She clambered up along the snake track, a mark big as the print of a semitruck’s wheel. The grade was steep, and sometimes she had to claw her way up, coughing from disturbed ash.
Sweating, she got to the top, her hands and knees black with ash . . .
Nothing. Just countryside. And the track fading as it approached the thick growth. Unburnt close-growing copses of Sierra shrubbery and small trees; bitterbrush, deer brush, buck brush, sage, Manzanita. Dense and dark.
Hissing, rustling . . .
Then—something reared up, shedding petals from the flowering buck brush. It was a serpent—with two heads, one a little more petite than the other.
Another kind of hybridization, Miles had said . . .
There were two faces forking from the serpent’s body. Her ex-husband’s. Her daughter’s. Faces flattened, scaly, faintly recognizable. There was a deep hiss, a soughing of static . . . and she heard a voice in her head.
I love you, Mama. . .
And then Zhuyin turned and slid away, into the shadows within the shadow-woven, fragrant underbrush. She could see its outline, a purposeful motion rippling the top of the bushes. That direction . . .
Goodbye. Hungry now.
And Bridey knew just where Zhuyin was going. It was heading straight for the Army base.