The smell of cigarettes and urine and that tang of menstrual iron. Why did people always talk about how clean girls’ restrooms were? Strands of mucus glittering between her lips and Winnie’s, caught in the flickering light.
There will be no loneliness.
It had set its many lips against her skin. It had placed its hands over her torn and bleeding leg.
And it had smiled.
Betty woke to find what was left of Richie lying beside her in the bed. For some reason it didn’t bother her, though he smelled worse than he had in the car. He must have shit himself again. He was painfully thin, his skin gray and wrinkled, his hair gone colorless and brittle as dead grass. He looked like a Capri Sun pouch someone had sucked until their cheeks hollowed out and the reflective plastic collapsed in on itself.
She reached out to touch his shoulder and found his flesh spongy and yielding. It held the imprint of her fingers even after she withdrew her hand. Her hand? It was a third again as large as she remembered it, though in the warm peace that had descended on her this felt right and good and reassuring, like the name of a close friend she’d forgotten and just now recalled. Her fingers were long and thick, wormlike blue veins crawling along the back of her hand. She sat up, the blanket sliding from her body, and saw herself. A snippet of some stupid shit she’d read in high school rattling through her brain like a beetle’s dead husk.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed.
Except she wasn’t vermin. She was beautiful. Perfect. She pushed Richie off the bed onto the carpet. A little sack of foamlike skin and broken bones, he hardly made a sound. She rose up and stepped over him, and in the doorway the handsome man stood, and he was small now, a head and a half shorter than she was, and smiling, smiling wide, and she thought as she ducked through the doorway of what he’d said about the things that had been the family of someone who had once looked much like him: They will protect me while I change.
“I need something for the road,” she said, her voice hoarse and deep. Her head brushed the ceiling as she made her way toward the stairs. “Meat.”
Meat, whispered the voice of peace.
“It’s in your car,” said the handsome man. “You know, we needn’t talk like this. Not any longer.”
She turned back toward him and found that his face was open, that its fleshy petals had parted and the mandibles and fronds within uncoiled. Her body answered. From her left leg came a questing tendril of pink, dripping flesh that wriggled through a tear in her straining scrubs. Another followed it. Another. Pseudopods grappled and entwined. Slippery flesh deformed. Communion. He gripped her. She him. Thoughts and images melted together like tin under a welder’s torch. Smoke and cunt and the doctors probing at her knee, freezing warts and slicing skin tags, and the Cuckoo dragging itself toward her from the wreckage of the burning house. The eyes. The kiss. Bags of muscle, meat, and suet dragged out of a freezer in the garage and loaded into the truck’s bed. A boy, something like a boy, thrashing frightened in the dark. Malcolm curled around her leg as she stood over him, hands braced against the cabin wall, spittle dangling from her mouth as she drew her foot back for another kick.
The man and Betty broke apart. They smiled.
Cuckoo, said the voice of peace. Cuckoo.
It had seen something. The closer Betty got to its nest, the more she comprehended the finer nuances of the call that had woken her up and drawn her south and west across the map. The sentinel flesh it had placed in telecom and in Silicon Valley had found it quite by accident in their sweeps of email logs and traffic cams and motor vehicle records: a beat-up old Impala, different plates each time but always the same dings and scratches, in twenty-minute proximity to three different youth wilderness programs. A tall, blank-faced Mexican man glimpsed through the dirty windshield. Felix, the voice told her, conjuring a lanky brown girl-child from the haze of memory. Inez.
So, an excess of caution. Betty and a select few others plucked from the thing’s precious reservoir of servants—not its hatchlings, growing year by year in number but occupied in their entirety with grand designs beyond the scope of single minds—and called home for communion with the mother cyst, that huge impacted womb that had reached out to them and found their thoughts young, eager, and aching to be molded. They would defend it with their lives and afterward, the voice of peace had told her, there would be a sweet reward. A kiss. Well done. Good girl.
It was a thought that warmed her as she slept in the truck’s unheated cab at a rest stop a few hours west of Omaha, the limitless void outside the windows blanketed in a thin crust of frozen snow. Barren cornfields. Pig runs full of squealing meat with steam rising from their flanks. It made her wistful, not for places she knew, but for places her flesh remembered. Nautilus spirals of something smooth and shiny, decorative bodies merging and splitting in the pulsating light, wet strands of skin and mucus stretched between them. The chilly existential thrill of communion with rare strains of isolated flesh, alien ideas denuding her neural net. So much excitement in allowing separation to curdle and ferment, to bloom with the fungal growths of differentiation, to allow it—in more senses than one—to culture. Reabsorb and feel it break against the final hegemony that was its own endlessness. Exaltation. Like a crown lowered again and again and again onto your brow.
You are the only way. The only thing.
There were others everywhere. She could feel them. See them in a crowd, as though they emitted some form of secret radiation. Three skinheads at a biker bar in Cascade where she stopped to eat. They fed with her in the alley after closing time, holding down the little dyke she’d pulled. A plain-faced housewife in Lamoine. Her six-year-old son in the back of her car, though not the older girl beside him. Not yet, anyway. A state trooper sitting silent in his car beside Route 5 in Northern California, eyes hidden by mirrored aviators, who watched her blow past going a hundred and five without moving a muscle. It had spread so far in the years since it had come to her. Its children were everywhere, on school boards and on naval bases, in churches and in hospitals. What it loved best, though, was the home.
In a home it could draw the blinds, lock the doors, and do its work in private. It could spread from flesh to flesh, not in the careful way with which it made its cuttings in the desert, but through crude assimilation and replication. A boy went to sleep one night, and the next day a thing wore his face to school. It was the miracle of modern life, the insular nature of the home. Work, church, education could all be satisfied with only the most trivial investment of energy. It let relationships wither. It fell away from extended family, allowed its cuttings’ memberships in clubs and in societies to taper off to nothing, and slowly, meticulously, it created streets, then neighborhoods, then entire counties ruled by a dark and watchful silence.
Chico’s outskirts weren’t yet part of that hidden country dug deep into the sclerotic corpse of America, but its day was coming. There were houses with red curtains. Strange plants growing in neglected lots. The sewers swarmed with things that were no longer rats. On a hill overlooking a vacant lot where locals dumped used batteries and broken electronics among the rusted hulks of vintage cars, a line of stucco row houses kept a lonely vigil. In one of these lived a man named Charles Sutter, and in Charles Sutter’s phone, the voice had determined, was a way to find the people who might mean it harm.
For decades it had ignored all attempts to expose it, hiding in plain sight in an ocean of incoherent conspiracy theories. There were YouTube videos—not many, but no longer very few, either—in which people spoke with terror and heartbreak of loved ones going blank and empty, of mothers disappearing from their lives, of children going through life’s motions with no sign of their former spirit. Whole families irreparably ruptured by sudden changes in a loved one. They were dismissed as cranks. Laughed at. Scorned. It could fool most doctors ably enough, and in America it was not so unusual to avoid a physician’s office for years or even decades.
These people were different. They had injured it. They had escaped it. They had eluded it ever since, vanishing for a decade and a half, until Vargas gave himself away by surveilling the Cuckoo’s lair. From there a complex web of facial recognition software and digital necromancy led its cuttings to old emails, now inactive but preserved in the bloated wasteware of corporate code at Google and in the shell of America Online, and in the contacts of those accounts were a few precious phone numbers, long since abandoned but which led in turn to other numbers. Current numbers. Charles Sutter’s was one of them, and his social media overflowed with pictures of a tall, gangly Black lover whose whimpers Betty could still call to mind. Malcolm, now Mal.
She parked across the street from Sutter’s building and waited for night to fall.
XX GABRIEL
It felt strange to Felix to be around the rest of them again, even just Lara and Shelby, after so many years apart. They drove and slept in shifts as desert gave way to farmland, farmland to flat prairie, and prairie to deep forests and clear rivers. Traces of snow became frozen lakes and icebound marshes became strip malls with four-foot drifts plowed up against the raised beds sectioning their parking lots. They didn’t talk much. Lara’s iPod had a little adapter that connected to the Impala’s tape deck and sometimes they’d listen to her music: Goldfrapp and Bauhaus and other art-goth white-person stuff. Other times she’d spend minutes on end paging through his nylon binder of CDs, briefly unselfconscious as she read the little tracklist stickers Tucker, his ex, had used to label all his mixes. She smiled a little when she saw the one he’d made, FOR TUCKER on the torn sticker, and he fought the urge to look away from her, to hunch and shield himself instead of watching the road.
The meeting with Rashad in Vegas had gone smoothly. He didn’t bat an eye at Lara’s seventy-three thousand in cash—bundled up in newspaper and grocery bags and spirited nervously from the local Bank of America branch to the sun-drenched apartment on West Bonita where Felix had stood feeling awkward while the beautiful man he’d once fucked weighed a brick of special k for them and made small talk with Shelby. He gave them a tote, like they’d just donated to a PBS pledge drive, and threw in a few ampules of Narcan. Lara looked just the way a tasteful buyer should, immaculate in her peach slacks and blazer, button-down open at the top to show her collarbones. It made Felix feel dirty next to her, a grubby nobody in unwashed work clothes that felt suddenly constricting, itchy and coarse against his skin.
It’s not me. It’s you.
Was this really what a decade and a half’s obsession had led him to? Speeding through Idaho in a car full of ketamine and unregistered guns with people he hardly knew anymore. It felt so inadequate. It should have been a bomber wing and twelve platoons of the National Guard. It should have been tanks and artillery and all the clean-cut men in uniform the movies said would save you, but nobody cared, and no one was coming. He’d tried so many different ways to make them see.
It had started snowing. The wind picked up as they drove through Boise in the gathering dark, old redbrick mill buildings slowly vanishing into the blowing white across the river, the lights in their windows sharp and fragile. Vaporous wisps of powder blew across the surface of the highway. It glittered in the headlights of the other cars—compacts creeping along through the slush and trucks with shoulder-high grilles thundering past—and swirled pale and ghostly in their wakes as they vanished into the gray void ahead. Lara slept in the back seat, her dark hair falling across her face, her cheek pancaked against the window. She always looked so inelegant asleep; it made him smile.
“We can switch at the next exit,” said Shelby. “You’ve been driving for, like, eight hours.”
“I’m fine.”
She smiled. Felix had never really been interested in women, and the two of them hadn’t gotten along particularly well when they were younger, but she looked beautiful in the dark, all soft and smooth with that deep, shadowed dimple in her left cheek. Her voice was a little smokier than he remembered, her dark hair falling in waves over her rounded shoulders. “You really haven’t changed that much, have you?”
He shrugged, vaguely irritated. “Been busy.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Just … it’s good to see you again. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done.”
Everything he’d done. What a small way to talk about ten years spent glued to screens reading posts by people who wanted him dead and breaking into locked dumpsters to rifle through stained and dissolving paperwork, ten years of cruising through the middles of a dozen nowheres and watching kids go through what they had, bullied and fucked with and raped by the adults to whom their irritated parents had thrown them. All his years of stealing to eat, of siphoning gas with a cheap rubber hose until just the sight of a filler cap put the taste of it in his mouth.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He felt embarrassed as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his resentment curdling at the back of his throat. Who’d asked him to throw his life away chasing their shared bogeyman across the country? They’d come, at least, when he called them. They’d stopped acting like it had never happened.
“You’re right,” Shelby said after a while. “I don’t.”
Waves of ghostly white slithered across the highway. The headlights of other cars cut tunnels through the squall. It had been a long time since he’d come this far north.
