I can make it stop, Nadine. I can show you what the mushroom did, the dance of chemicals and electricity that will strip loneliness away from you forever. The final yielding up of meat to consciousness. The boundless freedom of the void. My servants have prepared you and the time has come, Nadine. Lovely Nadine. Let me in. I will show you true love.
A deep, tooth-rattling concussion shook the chamber. Dust and plaster sifted down from overhead and Nadine was halfway up the staircase, Felix and Shelby dragging her between them as below the chittering Gabe-thing skittered from the Cuckoo’s path. It squirmed toward them, moving rapidly for its huge size. Up ahead Gabe staggered in John’s wake, on his feet but covered in sweat and with vomit down the front of his shirt. John threw himself against the inner door.
Below, the Cuckoo reached the steps. Its bulk spilled into the narrow defile as with spindly fingers it seized hold of its lower jaw and wrenched it down, opening a bloody furrow in its mass. Teeth wriggled from the seeping flesh. Tongues spilled from the cleft. Over the top of its humped enormity she could see the rest of its bloated caterpillar form writhing in the chamber below, plaster and dust raining down on it along with the occasional chunk of concrete. Fat, hairy eggs slid from openings near its rear. Inside them, murky forms were thrashing. Thick snakes of muscle coiled around its flopping makeshift maw, giving it structure as the thing dragged itself toward them.
Another blast, this one followed by a thunderous, rippling series of crashes as something aboveground collapsed. More rock dust showered them. Nadine got her feet under her just as John kicked the inner door open, the lock splintering and tearing loose. They spilled out into the laundry room. Garth was on his hands and knees beside a workbench set along the far wall, a shotgun lying near him. He must have fallen in the tremors. John crashed into him and knocked him to the ground. The shotgun skittered away over the concrete as Gabe and Malcolm piled onto the fallen counselor, punching and kicking his prone form. As the man thrashed, John grabbed his head in both hands and slammed it hard against the floor. Garth’s legs jerked. His back arched. He collapsed and didn’t move again.
Nadine.
She staggered back. The Cuckoo had reached the top of the stairs, its swollen mass overflowing the frame as its toothy snout, draped in folds of quivering flesh, snapped at the air. Hooked claws and fumbling fingers pulled it slowly, inexorably into the laundry room, its neck extending as fresh lattices of muscle squirmed under its skin. In the depths of its gnashing maw, a pale eye blinked. Its pupil dilated.
Lovely Nadine.
The door frame buckled outward with a resounding crunch. Nadine staggered toward the steps up to the farmhouse, groping for Shelby’s hand. She found it and squeezed hard, not caring that it sent a red-hot shock of pain up her mutilated fingers. Halfway up the stairs, Gabe just ahead of her and Shelby just behind, she caught a whiff of sulfur in the air. A rotten egg stink. They didn’t notice the gas, or whatever’s going on outside distracted them.
She looked back over her shoulder, only for a moment, and saw the thing drive one of its hooks through the back of Garth’s skull as it squirmed past him. The counselor convulsed and let out a strangled sort of squawk. Above the limb that had dealt the killing blow, a mouth opened in the Cuckoo’s sloping bulk and echoed Garth’s gargling death wail.
Then they were pounding out into the hall that cut down the center of the farmhouse, framed pictures falling from their hooks as a third explosion—this one unmuffled by rock or concrete—shook the house around them. What the fuck is happening out there?
“Gas!” she shouted, pushing Shelby ahead of her toward the front door. She could hear the basement steps breaking like matchwood under the Cuckoo’s weight. “Outside! Outside!”
Shelby looked back at her, eyes wide with terror, and Nadine wondered how anyone could ever have mistaken her for a boy. She had such beautiful eyelashes. Such a perfect mouth.
“Go,” said Nadine. “I’m right behind you.”
Halfway to the front door she ducked into the kitchen. Through the windows over the sink she could see the barn was burning, its roof mostly collapsed and a thick tower of black smoke pouring out of the wreckage. Flames caressed its sole standing wall. Cinders danced in the air.
There. The matchbook Mrs. Glover had used to light her cigarette. She started toward the table when it struck again. The white fire in her head.
Nadine, it whispered, its voice clawing at her forebrain, shredding her thoughts as she crawled to the table on hands and knees and fumbled for the matches, hardly able to see. Lovely Nadine, aren’t you tired of being so strong for everyone? Aren’t you sick of how they cling to you, look to you, need you? Come and be my baby, sweet Nadine. Crawl into my arms and I will nurse you at my breast. Sweet girl. Baby girl.
It made an obscene kissing sound just as her fingers found the pack. She grabbed it and lurched in the direction of the door, hoping she wouldn’t smack full tilt into the wall. Everything was smears of black and white and red and she heard Shelby calling for her. She had to get to the front porch, to get out of the reeking gas before it got to her. Just a few more steps.
Just a little farther.
“We have to go back!” Shelby screamed, clinging to the door frame. John had a hold of her shirt and he was shouting about gas and the pastor and the other counselors. None of it mattered. Somehow, Nadine wasn’t with them anymore. “She’s still in there! She’s still in there!”
And then she was back. Nadine lurched out of the kitchen a few yards back along the hall, washed in the blue static glow of the TV, and brandished something at them with a wide, bloody grin. A match torn from Mrs. Glover’s matchbook, which she held in her other hand. She took a step toward them. Shelby felt an overwhelming crash of relief, as though a wave had broken over her and flattened her into nothingness, serene and empty. It was going to be okay. Nadine would know what to do.
The floor under the other girl’s feet erupted, splintered planks and shreds of fiberglass insulation flying. The Cuckoo had Nadine. Its malformed jaws worried her legs and side, shredding fabric and flesh. Dog mouths. Little ratlike rodent heads and crooked human teeth tore at her flesh. Its claws and spines punched through her skin, which tented against the penetrating barbs, as it extruded a long, glistening stinger from its bloodied mass and rammed it through her stomach. Shelby stared. There was an awful roaring in her ears. Someone was pulling at her, dragging her through the door and out onto the porch. Voices shouting words she couldn’t understand. Down the steps. Reaching out with helpless hands.
No, no, no.
Nadine still held the match in her uninjured hand, her thumbnail poised against its head. Her lips moved, forming words that cut themselves deep into Shelby’s heart. Shelby screamed them back. “I love you,” she wailed. “I love you!”
Nadine flicked her nail against the striker. There was a spark. A flame. A wave of blinding red and white and yellow, the house’s windows flexing like sails catching the wind, and then everything was fire and flying glass.
XIV VIRGINS
“No!” Shelby screamed, a sound so high and wild and desperate it put a lump in John’s throat as he dragged her back from the inferno. It was nothing next to the scream coming from the burning house. It sounded like a cat in heat being fed backside-first into a blender, a high, thin, gobbling cry that jumbled his thoughts, making it impossible to focus on anything more complicated than staying upright and pulling Shelby along with him. Glass from the windows had cut them all to shit, but there was no time to stop and see if any of it was serious.
As they retreated, Pastor Eddie came around the corner of the burning house. His little glasses flashed white in the flickering glare. He was in his shirtsleeves. Behind him, under the pall of smoke rising up from the house and barn, John saw other figures staggering and crawling in the heat haze. Maybe they’d been trying to form a bucket brigade when it was only the barn on fire. Then Nadine had—he couldn’t think it, couldn’t touch the memory of her face framed in the open doorway. Shelby was just keening now, no words, only a long, terrible wail. John pulled her back another step, and then Malcolm was in front of them, grabbing Shelby by the front of her shirt.
“We have to go!” he shouted. He slapped Shelby, not hard, but hard enough. She blinked at him with those big soft eyes. “Shelby, baby,” he said, softer. “We have to go.”
That must have been when Pastor Eddie saw them, because he let out a bellow like a wounded animal and broke into a jog, and then a run, his long legs eating ground as he pounded toward them, so much bigger than Garth, who he’d—don’t think about that. John took a step back, and another. Then he remembered the shotgun. Malcolm and Shelby were already running. Felix had gone on ahead, and he was so fast. John would never catch up. One moment of bravery in his whole chickenshit life and he’d wasted it breaking down a door and—Garth’s head in his hands, the older man wide-eyed and blowing spit through his teeth—Felix darted past him, wielding a shovel like a baseball bat, and swung it in a brutal arc to bury the side of the spade in Pastor Eddie’s face with a wet thunk. John fumbled with the gun, knowing there should be a safety, but not where to find it.
The pastor’s arms flew up, flailing blindly as Felix steered him around John and down onto his knees. John stumbled back as Pastor Eddie’s face came apart like a fist unclenching. Fronds and tendrils dripping with clear, viscous mucus uncurled as his features opened, skin unsticking from itself, features reduced to a random topography of bumps on the thick digits of its grasping orifice, a gaping, crotch-like fork where alien muscles met around a puckered anal maw lined with peglike yellow teeth that clicked together rapidly, shifting in their gums.
“Pull the hammers down!” Felix shouted, leaning hard on the shovel to trap the Eddie-thing’s head against the ground. “At the back of the barrels!”
The whole of the verdant crater seemed to bow inward as John found the little metal catches and thumbed them down. The thing gobbled at him, a sound like a turkey drowning in mud, and wrenched its head off of the shovel’s blade. It slapped Felix away, knocking him sprawling, and John brought the gun up, his hands trembling, and pulled both triggers at once. There was a titanic boom that left his ears ringing and the Eddie-thing’s face and shoulder came apart in a cloud of flying blood and meat. It fell, convulsing, and then curled in on itself like a dead spider and went still. John stood there, staring.
Then Jo, covered in soot and dust, a heavy satchel at her side, was tugging at his elbow, shouting something at him that he couldn’t hear. Where had she come from?
There was no time to make sense of it. They ran.
Betty kept wondering when the sound would stop. It was a high, insistent whine in her ears, an unpleasant sense of pressure as though someone had stuffed her head with cotton balls. There was something wrong with her leg and she was thirsty, terribly thirsty. She’d watched Dana die when the barn roof came down. They’d been mucking the stables. She dragged herself through the garden, clawing at the grass and pushing with her right leg, her left sliding uselessly after her and the heat of the burning house beating against her back. She was almost in its lap before she noticed the body.
It was Athena. There was blood all over her, and Betty could see bone poking through her jeans. “Princess,” Athena breathed. Her bloody, lacerated hand reached for hers. She must have been caught close to the explosion. “My princess…”
Betty hadn’t cried since her sixth birthday when her older sister Charlotte had pulled out a fistful of her hair in a fight over her Dolly Surprise. Not when her father died, not when she broke her leg during a soccer game in freshman year, or even when Edith van der Lee had a breakdown the year after and told wrinkled old Sister Mary what she and Betty had been doing in the girls’ room between periods. She was crying now as she let Athena take her hand, as she crawled another agonizing foot and laid her head down in that warm, familiar lap, now wet with blood. Athena ran her fingers through her hair.
“What’s happening to me?” Betty sobbed. Someone was screaming, but she didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see anything else. “Am I sick? Am I dying? Athena—”
“Shhh, princess,” Athena said, her voice cracking a little. “Shhhh, now.”
Betty hadn’t cried at her grandma June’s funeral, even though Grandma June had been her favorite, had always let her eat what she wanted and play in the mud or in the woods out back of the old house. She hadn’t cried when her stepfather got drunk and broke her kitten’s back by stepping on her. Not even when he’d found her alone that first time in the backyard, by the birch trees, or any of the times after. Maybe it was all coming out now, those unshed tears. She couldn’t seem to stop, not until long after the hand stroking her fell still.
