So much had gone wrong for Betty Cleaver since the summer of her sixteenth year. Sometimes it felt like wrong was the only thing that happened to her anymore. First the accident. Her parents hovering over her in a hospital room somewhere in Utah. Concussion. Malnutrition. Something bacterial in her urinary tract that just wouldn’t give up. The gray fog of the nine months that had followed, all neurologists’ offices and therapists asking her what happened, what was she repressing, who had touched her, until she broke placid old Dr. Kuzik’s nose and was barred from the only practice in the city that took their insurance. Then the infection in her leg, the moles and skin tags sprouting faster than dermatologists could cut them away, the fever, and the end of her boxing scholarship, and now here she was, pushing a mop at a quarter to midnight on New Year’s Eve in the glittering, colorless tomb of the Lansing township’s only Target superstore.
Stiff-legged and slow in her orthopedic brace, Eric Clapton wailing “You’ve got me on my knees, Layla!” through her headphones, Betty worked her way back and forth over the off-white linoleum of the cosmetics section near the checkout lanes and the front of the store. Fifteen minutes until 2012. Outside the wind was blowing snow over the parking lot where Diego and Miguel were probably still racking shopping carts, unless the spics had fucked off to smoke a joint behind the loading dock. The post-Christmas sales were always brutal. Immigrants rushing the racks for half-price dinner sets and discount linens, filling the aisles with the smell of rotten cabbage and the sinus-stripping spices she’d heard they used to cover up the taste of putrid meat. Ragheads and wetbacks and everyone else Obama had opened his arms to. It was enough to make her miss Clinton, who’d at least known where they belonged.
“Three strikes and you’re out,” she muttered to herself, not realizing her stepfather had often said the same thing four or five beers into the evening. “He was right about that one.”
The little clutch of moles on her hip stung with a sudden, painful intensity. She winced, reaching under the elastic waistband of her scrubs to scratch the insistent itch, then yanked her hand back with a grunt as wetness and a jolt of sickening agony met her touch. She stumbled, her bad leg sliding under her, and hip-checked a Revlon display, spilling compacts and lip gloss to the floor in a waterfall of brushed black plastic. “Shit, shit, shit!” she hissed, clawing for purchase on the shelving. A dark stain seeped through the hip of her blue scrubs, and she’d dislodged an earphone somehow, so now Clapton’s hollering had taken on a ghostly, doubled quality.
“Cleaver.”
The bottom dropped out of Betty’s stomach. At the end of the aisle, shelves of plastic storage tubs and toiletry organizers at his back, stood all five-foot-five of Richie Messeder, who had just turned twenty-two and might have weighed in at a hundred and twenty pounds if you dipped him in shit first. He was what Coach Parcell would have called a welterweight, she thought. He was also what Coach Parcell would have called a faggot, or at least Betty thought he looked like one, the way it puffed him up to order around decent people.
“Tripped, Richie,” she croaked, trying on a smile. It felt ghastly. She was sweating bullets. “I’ll clean it up. No problem.” She pushed herself off the shelves and a lone tube of liquid eyeliner clattered to the floor and spun a few times before falling still. Betty fumbled for the scuffed old Discman’s pause button, but it was stuck and the CD must have been scratched because Clapton kept belting out a mocking loop of got me on my knees got me on my knees and for some reason she was thinking of Athena, of kneeling in the darkness of their cabin—what cabin?—and taking that plump, downy pussy into her mouth, sixteen and insane with lust, practically clawing at herself in her need.
That’s just how I like you, baby. On your knees.
Richie was coming toward her now. His eyes were practically popping out of his narrow head. “Are you drunk, Cleaver? Are you actually drunk right now?”
Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Her whole thigh felt hot and sticky, like gum left out on the dashboard on a sunny day. She clamped her hand over the spreading stain in her scrubs and nearly blacked out from the pain. She vomited, doubling over as a searing cramp ripped through her belly and pelvis, like a dozen periods hitting all at once. Blackness shuddered at the edges of her vision.
Am I dying?
“Cleaver?” Richie crouched a few feet off, a look of anxious disgust on his pimply little rat face. “Jesus, do you need a doctor?”
got me on my knees got me on my knees got me on my knees
There was something squirming in her vomit. Something black and fragile, thin as living strands of angel hair pasta.
And then the pain was gone. All of it, and not just in her thigh but the constant ache of her bad knee, the knots in her back, the wire-taut sting of tension in her shoulders and the nagging, sickly hot throb of the molar her ex-girlfriend Jenna had kept telling her to show a dentist. Gone. In its place was a velvety, enfolding warmth, a sense of contentment she couldn’t remember ever having felt before except, in some neglected corner of her mind, in a formless, hazy memory of sucking at her mother’s breast. It took her a few moments to realize through the fog of her new bliss that she had Richie pinned against the floor.
You will need his meat.
He fought her, thrashing with all his pitiful might. She rolled him easily onto his belly, locking her arm over his throat. No muscle fatigue tonight. No ringing in her ears. Tinnitus, the doctors had called it. No. Her thoughts were clear and her body sang with strength, and in her thigh she could feel something moving slow and syrupy beneath her skin, closer and more tenderly than any lover had ever touched her. She twisted, shoulders straining, and Richie’s neck snapped with a dry, brittle crunch. He jerked once, then went limp in her arms, but his right eye still moved, still stared back at her in mute, unthinking terror. She bent to grab the little man by the ankle and set off for the empty registers, dragging his unprotesting weight after her as her right shoe slowly filled up with something warm and safe and wonderful. It squished wetly with each step she took, and when she looked back there was a trail of gray-blue droplets, some smeared by Richie’s body, leading all the way back to cosmetics.
“Gee, Rich,” she said dryly. “I sure hope you can find someone to cover for me.”
The automatic doors slid open for her like the Red Sea parting for Moses and she hauled the unresisting sack of flesh that had been Richie Messeder out into the squall. Her beat-up Baja was parked close, and she’d filled it up that afternoon. That was good. The warmth inside her told her that she had a long, long way to drive, but she didn’t mind. She had Richie for company, and her good buddy Eric was still singing in her ears, the loop cutting shorter and shorter each time it ran through.
on my knees on my knees on my knees
It would be so good, seeing everyone again.
The first day on the road went by without incident. Betty made good time, cutting through flat, endless Indiana with its cookie-cutter cities and its half-dry canals and crossing most of Illinois before the warm little voice in the back of her mind directed her to get off Route 80 in the suburbs north of Peoria. Streets lined with identical split-levels. A labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends, boring people living out their boring lives, the glare from their televisions flickering on the snow outside, to a house with red curtains hanging in the windows where a man her age was waiting in the driveway, tall and clean-cut in a black wool winter coat and dark sweater.
“Must have had a long drive,” he said, smiling as she stepped out of the truck and slammed the driver’s-side door behind her. Glare from the floodlights on the front of his garage lit nothing but his mouth and throat, leaving the rest of his face in shadow. The air was cold and clean after six hours in the truck with the stench of Richie’s voided bowels. He lay under a blanket in the back, motionless but still, last time she’d checked, alive.
Betty coughed. Something about him looked so familiar, so comforting. He smelled like cloves and cooking oil. “Not bad.”
It was smotheringly hot inside the stranger’s house, the air close and humid and full of the sound of running water. It smelled of warm root beer and diarrhea. He took her jacket and led her from the mudroom with its coats and scarves hanging from wooden pegs over ranks of winter boots and out into the kitchen, where his family was waiting. An older man and woman—they must have been the original’s parents—and two younger women, early twenties maybe, all blond, all blue-eyed. They knelt naked on peeling linoleum where a kitchen table should have been, leaning together to form a sort of shelter. Where their skin touched it was scabbed and warty, growing together so that heads and shoulders all formed part of the same flaking, oozing clot. Fingers twitched at the ends of their limp arms. Piss stains marred the floor and the exposed particle board where the synthetic tile had separated. A few of their eyes followed Betty as she passed, but mostly they stared dead and milky into space.
“They’ll be ready very soon now,” said the stranger. “Have you seen a chrysalis before?”
“No,” said Betty. She felt calm staring at the family, the stench of their putrefying flesh and accumulated waste so thick in the air she could almost chew it. She felt good and right and satisfied. “What does it do?”
“It will protect me, when it’s time for my change.” He smiled. Even inside under the even yellow lights it was hard to get a sense of what he looked like. A smile. A smile between flesh and shadow. “Come.”
Through the silent living room and up the carpeted stairs. A hall. Bathroom, tub full of black fluid. Mushrooms growing from the sodden carpet outside the open bedroom door, the bed itself a collapsed, moth-eaten mess. Dusty wings beat silently as their footsteps disturbed the feast. A guest room at the hall’s end. Narrow twin bed. On the side table, a plate covered in raw ground beef and a glass full of cloudy liquid.
“You must be tired,” the stranger said. “Eat. Drink. Sleep. In the morning you continue west.”
Betty sank down gratefully onto the bed, which creaked beneath her. She took the plate into her lap and scooped up a handful of raw meat. It tasted sweet. She thought of the family downstairs. She thought of Richie, lying boneless in the truck, and Athena smiling cruelly down at her so many years ago. She had died in the garden. Died in her arms.
“Will I change, too?” she asked, her voice soft.
His smile widened. She thought of the Grinch, Boris Karloff narrating as that lipless green slit curled into spiral dimples. “Only a little.”
In her dream Athena came to her like a breeze through the open window. It was warm, not winter, and they were girls again, curled together in Betty’s bunk and whispering about their firsts. Winnie Prince, blond and mean and two years ahead of Betty, making her kneel down in front of the sinks in the little bathroom on the third floor—the one by the music department, that nobody used—and guiding her mouth between those strong thighs. Pink nails like talons digging into her scalp. Cigarette smoke coiling around fingers stained red from the tampon Winnie had pulled out and dropped into the sink.
Do you suck your daddy off like this?
But Daddy never touched her. Not like that. He would only say Jesus Christ, you just ate, fucking mower blade’s bent, is this your fucking glass here with the milk all dried inside, and then he would hit her, sharp and quick like you hit the big steel bell on the carnival game. Test your strength. How high would she whizz up that thin metal rod? The clank when the weight struck home. It was her stepfather who’d done the rest. The dark, wet things she’d known even then were wrong. Athena’s first, a teacher at her school who’d later killed herself. The light from the refrigerator. Picking the crust off a quiche and savoring the buttery pastry as she listened for footsteps on the stairs.
You want to look like a pig, you can eat like one. Get down on the floor. The smell of her mother’s menthols. Was that why she hated smoking? Dirty habit. She’d gotten drunk and hit Tricia once after finding that mint-and-silver pack crumpled up in the bathroom wastebasket. Closed fist. Cheekbone broken. Bruise like an apple dropped on the floor, but hadn’t she wanted to be back on her knees? Winnie blowing smoke from her nostrils, like a dragon.
Here, piggy, piggy.
It was why, she understood on some dim, guilty level, the thing under the farmhouse hadn’t wanted her the way it had the other children. She and a few others it had saved for the camp, the next generation of Garths and Enochs and Mariannes. It preferred to keep such people close so they could do its fighting for it. It hated fighting. Hated work. It had a great task, something it had come to Earth to do, but it left the little things to humans. Insects it paid in replicas of loved ones, in diseases cured, in deformities rectified. It had come to her, she now remembered, as she lay burned and half-conscious with her head in the lap of Athena’s corpse. It had spoken in a voice like ten thousand buzzing flies.
You will want for nothing.
