CHAPTER TEN

 

 

Kimberly woke to the heavy thud of boots on the motel stairs.

The morning sun was dim through heavy cloud. She found herself wrapped double in the sheets, cocooned in sweat, and blinked away sleep as someone thumped on a door down the hall. Locked themselves out accidentally, Kimberly figured. Rude bastards couldn't solve their own problems quietly.

She swung herself out of bed. Chill air washed over her bare legs.

Her left foot crunched on the carpet.

She froze.

Lifted her foot.

Grimaced.

A cockroach still twitched feebly, crushed underneath her heel, stuck fast to the sole of her foot. She peered over the edge of the bed and swallowed a sudden, rising nausea.

God, they were everywhere. A writhing ocean of roaches in their thousands, still waiting for her command.

There'd been a part of her that'd hoped it was all a dream. One more fucked up night terror to add to the list. But here she was, and here they were, and it didn't look like they were willing to leave.

Unless she asked.

"Get out of here," she whispered, and waved her hands as if trying to startle a gaggle of pigeons. The cockroaches didn't flee, but they did clear a path for her, parting through the centre of their mass like the Red Sea opening before Moses. They skittered into clumps, washing away beneath her bare feet, allowing her empty spaces in which to walk to the closet where she'd hung the muddy, ruined remains of her clothes.

So the night before hadn't been a dream. They listened, but didn't quite know how to obey. Not yet.

Kimberly didn't know whether she wanted to train them or wanted them gone. Every moment she directed the roaches, she felt something swell in her chest. The creature Gull had put inside her, growing stronger with use.

How long until it was too big to contain, she wondered? Would it stay obedient, or was she going to turn into something like that nurse, Bo? A sack of flesh being dragged around, puppeted by something black and terrible?

More thumping down the hall. Growing closer. Like someone was moving door to door.

She shooed the roaches away and got dressed, hopping from foot to foot as she pulled her jeans on, not trusting the insects to keep a clear space beneath her feet. Then, after splashing her face with water and sighing over her reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, she peered into the hall.

Blue uniforms, three doors down. Pale faces beneath flat-brimmed caps. Wide, mirrored aviator sunglasses. Pistols on hips.

Kimberly's breath caught. Her hands trembled as she slipped back inside. She didn't think the cops had seen her, but Christ, had they followed her all the way over the mountain? Impossible. Everyone chasing her had stopped at the peak, like passing from one Rustwood into another had stung somewhere deep in their souls.

Maybe a coincidence, then. But why move door to door?

Staying to find out was too dangerous. She pulled on her shoes and stuffed her pockets with the stale miniature sandwiches left in the minibar. Then, to the window.

It was stuck. Painted shut around the edges. Only the top half tilted open to allow fresh air in, a gap just wide enough to thrust her fist through.

Breathe. Not everything revolves around you, Kim.

Breathing didn't help. It just made the world slam faster, panic rising in her throat. She crept to the door, pressed one ear to the cheap balsawood veneer, and tried to calm the thudding of her heart.

The cops had arrived at the room to her right. Every word came through clear. How many inside? Just you? You seen this woman? A crinkle of paper. What'd she do? Theft and homicide, sir. Yeah, you heard right. At the drugstore. Real nasty. If you see her...

Footsteps.

A knock at the door.

Kimberly staggered back. The cockroaches surged around her feet. Theft, sure. But homicide?

Sometimes, in Rustwood, everything does revolve around you.

The cops knocked again, this time more insistently. "Anyone there? This is the police. We need to..." A pause. A clatter of keys. A smaller voice muttered, "I have the keys, Officer. No need to kick the door in."

She had nothing. No back exit, no weapons. What good would weapons be, anyway? If the police in this Rustwood were the same as the police in the Rustwood she'd just left, they'd have monsters squirming beneath their sunglasses and orders to shoot on sight. No chance to plead her case. Nothing but a bullet in the head.

All around her rose a clicking, a chittering of wings against carapaces. A whisper rising into a roar.

She looked down at the seething carpet of roaches, the walls painted black with shiny beetle bodies, the ceiling squirming, ready to erupt.

Of course she had weapons.

The lock turned. The door swung open. Framed in the doorway was the pock-faced attendant who'd taken Kimberly's fourteen bucks the night before. On either side, the cops - one a young man, slim and goateed, the other a six foot woman with greying hair and the shoulders of a career powerlifter - had already drawn their sidearms.

"Mrs Archer!" The tall woman's expression was inscrutable behind her sunglasses, her lips compressed in a tight white line. "On the floor, on the-"

Maybe they were only regular cops, there to arrest her. Maybe they were the pretender queen's servants, more creations of chitin and claw hiding inside human skin.

It didn't matter. She had two options: violence or surrender.

She raised one hand and growled, "Bury them."

The roaches were a tidal wave of black, surging across the walls, the carpet writhing, the ceiling drooping like it was sagging beneath the weight of damp before a thousand cockroaches splashed on to the carpet and rose, hungry and chittering.

The cops didn't have time to scream before they were swallowed by the tide.

The late-night attendant shrieked, high and terrified. The tall cop fell back, cries muffled by the roaches flooding her mouth. Then a gunshot, deafening in such a small space, sending Kimberly reeling away, hands clapped over her ears. Plaster dust choked the air. Another two shots, dim pops through the tinnitus ringing. Holes the size of dimes opened in the ceiling. The attendant was running, tripping over his feet, clawing at the air like he could drag himself free. The roaches poured over his ankles, up his thighs, tasted his fear on the air.

They let him go.

The attendant shouldered his way through the door at the end of the hall, shrieking for help. The two cops writhed on the floor, blinded and choked beneath a blanket of roaches. They clawed at their faces, pulling handfuls of insects from their mouths, spitting legs, teeth grinding, but it wasn't enough. There were always more cockroaches hiding in the corners of cheap motels.

Kimberly stepped over the two cops as quietly as she could. The roaches made way, splitting around her feet, providing her with clear patches of cigarette-stained carpet.

"Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to..."

She clamped down on the lie. She was past bullshit apologies. Instead, she cleared her throat.

"Tell whoever sent you," she said. "They come for me, I come for them. Tell them to back the fuck off or I'll end them. Understand?"

The two cops were invisible beneath their robes of roaches, but Kimberly figured they'd heard.

She walked away with her hands in her pockets and a new fire burning in her chest. No weapons? Not any more. She had millions. All she had to do was figure out how to make them obey just right, turn them from blunt, dumb fists into keen blades...

A gurgling behind her. A crunch of carapaces beneath boot heels.

Kimberly turned.

The taller cop was on her feet. Her hands were sheened with roaches and, as Kimberly watched, she clapped her palms together, crushing them to paste. A roach ran across her cheek and something black and pincered darted from her open mouth, snatched the roach, dragged it back to be crunched between molars.

"Jesus Christ," she whispered, and ran.

The thud of footsteps behind her was the rhythm of an approaching steam train. She leaped down the stairs at the end of the hall, bounced off the wall, cursed at the flare of pain in her ankle. When she dared glance back she saw the cop closing, head rocking violently to and fro, neck bulging as something inside tried to force its way free.

Thin black pincers hooked out from between the cop's teeth, pulling her cheeks back in an awful corpse-grin.

Kimberly put her head down and kept running. She passed the night attendant, cowering behind the check-in desk, screaming into the telephone. In the hallway ahead, a guest opened their door, peeked out into the hall, saw Kimberly coming, and slammed it shut.

"Mrs! Archer!" The cop was laughing as she ran, every syllable jolted free. "The! New! Queen! Will! See! You! Now!"

She took the first left, shoes skidding out on old carpet. Up ahead, a green neon sign flickered: EXIT. But what good was that? She was fast. It was faster. She could hear it gaining, yard by yard, inch by inch...

Light shimmered on glass. A red-painted box mounted on the wall. Inside, a fire-axe with a factory fresh wooden handle hung on little hooks. BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.

Her first punch rebounded, splitting her knuckles and little else. Her second punch turned the glass into a spiderweb tapestry.

The glass caved in on the third try, and Kimberly snatched the axe off its hooks, ignoring the sting of shards against her fingertips, the lacerations across the backs of her hands, wet meat shining in the motel lights.

The cop came around the corner at a sprint. Kimberly was already swinging.

Kimberly was no expert when it came to chopping wood, but she'd done three years of junior softball and the muscle memory hadn't faded. There was real weight behind the axe-head, and even though the cop threw up one hand to catch the handle it wasn't enough. The blade caught her in the chin, splitting her jaw like cordwood.

A hot spray of blood across her cheeks. Red mist spattered on earth-tone wallpaper.

The cop went down in a marionette pile, her head hanging by a string of muscle. Kimberly panted, jerked the axe free, and raised it high.

Something squirmed in the awful meat of its throat.

A flicker of black. A skittering of limbs. Then it was free, not a centipede or snake but something altogether worse, as thick as Kimberly's arm and twice as long, hundreds of pine-needle limbs making horrible scratching noises as they caught in the carpet.

It wormed toward her feet, bull-whip quick.

Kimberly slammed the axe down but the creature looped left, wriggling up the wall, sharp claws punching into the wallpaper. Kimberly struggled to yank the axe out of the floorboards as it climbed to head-height.

It stopped.

Pivoted.

Looked at her, even though it had no eyes, only a horrible circular maw wide enough to swallow her fist, a mouth lined not with razor canines or cilia but with perfect white teeth, human teeth in blunt, crushing rows.

The creature lunged. The axe pulled free.

She screamed as she swung.

The axe stuck, quivering, into the wall. A hot, stinking spray in her eyes. Kimberly reeled away, swearing, rubbing the muck away with her sleeve.

A blur of black twitched at her feet.

The centipede-thing writhed in two neat halves, coiling in pools of blood and ichor. It sawed across the carpet, the back end knotting noose-tight around Kimberly's right ankle, the front end gnashing at the air, blunt teeth grinding like gravel.

Kimberly shook it free and brought her foot down, hard.

It was still twitching as she levered the axe out of the wall. "You tell her," she whispered. "Tell your queen not to fuck with me, or I'll fuck her right back. Tell her-"

"Tell her what?

Kimberly turned. The axe trembled in her hand.

The corridor before her was lightless - not just the pre-dawn gloom, but a black so deep it smoked at the edges, sucking at her eyeballs, aching in the back of her skull like all the light and love had been drained from the world.

Waiting in that darkness was a hunched figure in a rainslicker.

She raised the axe as best she could, grip sweaty, heart thundering, vision blurred by sweat. Or was it the thing in the rainslicker blurring across the hall? Staring too long at the shadows beneath the hood gave Kimberly the feeling of trying to make out distant shapes through a snowstorm.

A brow. A wide nose. The shadow of an eye socket.

Only glimpses, and then they were gone.

The thing in the rainslicker took one step towards her. No, not a step. A flutter, like it was blurring the hallway around it. "Do you know who I am?" Another step forward. Was it even moving? She blinked, and the thing was close enough to touch. "Don't you know me?"

Her throat was closed. Every instinct screamed at her to run, run, run.

And yet, she found the strength to answer: "No."

The creature stopped. Its hands - if they were hands, only the tips of dead-fish fingers peeking from the ends of its rubber sleeves - twitched and curled into fists.

"I came so far," it hissed, in a voice like a coffin lid being pried open. "You have no idea where I've been. And you don't remember?"

"I..." One long breath. "I don't give a fuck who you are. You don't scare me."

"You should. You must. You-"

She was waiting for the blur, the twitch as it approached. Kimberly was already swinging as the thing in the rainslicker closed the distance.

The axe reverberated in her hands as it cut through the plastic slicker and impacted something harder than bone. It was like slamming the blade into bedrock, and the handle shot from her grip, her arms numb, fingers curled into painful claws.

The thing looked down at the axe jutting from its ribs. "That should've hurt," it said, in a tone of mild surprise. "You hurt me so much. Not any more." Then up, to look Kimberly in the eyes. The static beneath its hood swelled and flared, sending pain lancing through Kimberly's skull.

The creature laughed like a blocked drain. "You should run, Mrs Archer."

She did.