Lara stepped out onto the access road. The forest was only a forest. The only things in it were deer and rabbits, mice and foxes. Things that knew to fear people. The others were asleep against the side of John’s car, their breath smoking in the cold, their bodies curled together, and for a moment she remembered how it had felt to give herself to them, how beside the grave of their childhoods they’d become, in some confused and frightened way, adults. It would have been nice to feel that again, too. Carefully, trying her best not to wake them, she knelt and wriggled between John and Felix. John shifted, draping his arm over her, and she burrowed into his reassuring warmth. Mal lay dreaming fitfully on his other side.
At least it was almost over.
The next day Felix had them take the Impala farther in along the logging road to where the forest gave way to a scar of clear-cut land, crumbling earth and gray, dead stumps. Mal hadn’t wanted to wake up, hadn’t been quite ready to leave the warmth and safety of John’s arms, but Felix insisted they get in a day of target practice before crossing over into Nevada. John, who had taught himself to shoot years ago, had gone into Boise to talk to a liquidator they’d found in the phonebook. Felix wanted him to check out stock at some local folded department stores. There were things they’d need for their trip to Cook Canyon.
Waiting for their turn with the rifle, which Jo was currently firing at cans of Sprite Felix had set up on a stump fifty yards away, Mal sat slumped in the Impala’s driver’s seat and listened with mounting dread to a spotty, crackling radio broadcast.
“Sixteen dead in what Boise chief of police Franklin Gerhardt called the worst mass shooting in Idaho history at a press conference this morning. Between three and five unknown gunmen converged on a local motel, where they opened fire without warning on guests and motorists. A fire claimed the lives of a further—”
They turned it off. It was their fault. Someone had been waiting for them to make a mistake, and they’d walked right into it and gotten every one of those people killed. The boom of the assault rifle firing sounded like a church bell tolling, calling in the townsfolk to see the traitor hanged. Mal deserved to die. They’d thought about it while the others were setting up, and while Felix explained basic gun safety. It was funny to watch Lara choke up on a shotgun, her acrylics catching on the trigger guard, but nothing could pull them away from the pit that had formed in their stomach as they drove away from that burning motel.
People are dead because of me.
They should never have answered Felix’s call. They should have stayed with Charlie, let him keep grinding them down into a squeaking little nub afraid of its own shadow. It was what they deserved. Oblivion. Emptiness. And beneath that, deep down, a little voice—their mother’s, though they were no longer conscious of this—said guiltily that it would be a relief, too. Not just for their friends and loved ones, who had to live with their disgusting burden, but for themself. A relief to let the engine of their mind, grinding white-hot metal on metal for years now, finally flame out.
The passenger door opened. Felix slid into the seat. Outside, Lara blasted a can of Sprite into flying metal shreds. Jo and Shelby cheered. Mal tried their best not to act like a wounded animal. They didn’t deserve to be pathetic. They weren’t going to let that be their family’s last memory of them.
“I’m sorry,” said Felix.
“You don’t owe me an apology,” Mal said woodenly. “I did it. I killed them.”
Felix didn’t contradict them, but after a few moments he reached over the console and took their hand. His grip was strong and warm. “What are you going to do now?”
Mal started to cry. The tears came softly, their shoulders shaking just a little. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?”
Felix squeezed their hand. “Maybe,” he said. “But we’ll take it with us, if we can.”
“And Nadine’s sister?”
“If some of us live, we’ll do our best for her. Like Akira did for us.”
“I miss him,” said Mal, their voice wavering.
“Me too.” Felix pulled him into a one-armed hug, then got out of the car and walked over to help Shelby load the rifle. Mal wiped their eyes on the sleeve of their cardigan. They inhaled sharply, closing their eyes.
I’m sorry.
XXIII JABBERWOCKY
The three of them made the trek from the rest stop off of I-80 in just under two days, picking their way over broken stone and bare earth and down canyons choked with shale and drifted sand until they emerged in the shadow of the rock wall to the north of Cook Canyon. It had been weeks since Felix had done laundry and his shirt was grimy and soaked under the armpits, the bridge of his ill-fitting gas station sunglasses digging into his sunburned and peeling nose. A quarter mile or so down the gritty slope, set back from the winding hillside road at the end of a long dirt drive, a two-story hacienda squatted like a tortoise under its shell of red clay tiles. Two well-used Ford pickups and a mid-century Cadillac in the shade of gold only old people seemed to buy were parked out front, and things that looked like men loitered on the porch, some smoking, others face-to-face as though embracing lovers, their skin knitted together and roiling with alien muscles.
“What if it got them?” Shelby whispered. She was crouched beside him behind the fallen petrified tree he’d chosen as their blind, her sweaty hair tied back in a loose knot, Lara beside her with her eyes closed and her back to the trunk. “What if they didn’t make it in?”
“Then we’ll try our best,” said Felix.
“This is so fucking insane,” Shelby continued, faster now. “What are we doing here? That thing in Lara’s parents’ house, I can’t see that again, I can’t do this—”
“Shut up,” said Lara, and, mercifully, Shelby did. “They’re all right. I can feel it.”
Felix took off his sunglasses and dropped them in the dirt, then unzipped his rifle case. He fitted the telescopic sight and checked the magazine and chamber. Shelby was right, of course. At any moment the thing under the house might think to check its own backyard, might question the likelihood that its prey and nemeses had decided to drive straight down its gullet without any apparent plan. John and the others might fuck it up. One of the cars might break down. Their phones were bricks out here—it had probably killed the nearest tower—and they’d all agreed walkie-talkies were too big a risk. He squinted down the sights, watching the things on the porch as they milled and smoked and knew each other, faces opening and closing, features swimming in seas of formless skin.
“I can feel it,” Lara said again. Her voice sounded oddly faraway. “They’re close now.”
“How do you know?” Shelby asked.
“I just know.”
Felix let out a long, steady breath and flipped the rifle’s safety off. “Knock wood,” he said, and rapped his knuckles on the dead tree’s trunk.
They were maybe half a mile outside downtown when they saw the roadblock. A pair of beige cruisers with COOK CANYON SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and a big gold star stenciled on their driver’s- side doors sat parked headlights to headlights across the two-lane in front of an empty lot and a shuttered OneWest branch. The dull glint of spike strips shut off the lots to their either side. John could hardly breathe. He couldn’t feel his own hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Now?” Jo whispered from the back seat. She sat beside one of the mannequins they’d picked up at a clearance sale in Fort Marsden and dressed in some of Mal’s dirty clothes, one of Felix’s submachine guns in her lap. John shook his head, slowing.
The cruiser on the left flashed its lights, its siren whoop-whoop-ing, and John nearly wept with relief. It wanted them alive, just like Felix had said. He pulled over ten or fifteen yards from the blockade so that the rental’s passenger side was parallel with the two cars. An officer came toward them, his face expressionless, his mirrored sunglasses shining in the afternoon sunlight as he put his hand on the butt of his gun.
“Now.”
Jo opened fire, her submachine gun jumping and shuddering in her hands, the rental’s rear passenger window exploding outward. The thing walking toward them shrieked in agony, its face and upper body erupting in a writhing mass of feelers and tendrils as the Uzi shredded its uniform and ripped open its throat. The other cop-things ducked behind their cruisers, and by the time they began to straighten, John had Felix’s Kalashnikov braced against his shoulder. The assault rifle thundered, kicking like a mule, and the first cop went down screaming and writhing, dragging its bloody, mangled body across the pavement with a sudden blooming multitude of shapeless limbs. The next ran jerkily in circles like a decapitated chicken, leaping every so often and convulsing in midair until finally he stumbled and collapsed. Rounds punched through steel and plexiglass and one of the cruisers exploded with a sound like a giant bringing its hand down on the world’s biggest blown-up paper bag. Flames engulfed the road. John couldn’t hear. His ears were full of a low, dull roaring as he swept the gun back and forth across the roadblock.
It only cares about staying hidden, Felix had said. It’s not a hunter. It’s not a soldier. I don’t think it has any real firepower, nothing that would draw attention, and most of what it knows about us it learned from the children it’s taken. It might know we’re coming, but it has no idea the kind of shit an American can buy at a gun show.
He stopped firing. His ears were ringing so bad he could hardly hear himself breathe, and the only thing moving was one of the cop-things pulling itself piteously over the blacktop, its own entrails slithering after it. Jo was laughing in the back. She had little cuts on her hands and face where glass from the broken window had caught her, and little pieces of it glittered in her hair, but she was laughing.
“Okay,” said John. “Let’s start some fires.”
The Glover house’s driveway seethed like a kicked anthill. Smoke rose in thick black clouds from the town below, the tile roofs and church steeple of which were just visible from the hillside. Sweating, Shelby watched as counselors and ranch hands thundered down the porch steps and piled into the idling trucks, checking guns and shouting at each other and shivering through grotesque transformations. Claws like skinning knives tore open soft fingers. Mouths split and distended, tongues squirming in vertical slits lined with teeth like fishhooks. They scrambled roachlike over one another into the trucks’ beds and the men at the wheels sped off down the drive, jouncing over every bump and rut. A minute later they were gone into the canyon below, their dust clouds lingering in the air.
Felix fired. The last man left on the porch shot to his feet as though he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod, staggered a few steps, and then collapsed against the railing, his shotgun slipping between the slats to fall to the driveway below. Human, thought Shelby. She didn’t let herself dwell on it. Another man burst out through the front door and Felix fired again. Gore slapped the faded siding. The man’s skull parted, a vertical mouth tearing open from the crown of his head to somewhere below the neckline of his T-shirt, needlelike teeth gnashing mindlessly, and Felix let out a slow, patient breath and shot him again. The third round put him down as he scrambled back toward the door.
