“Okay,” he said, stepping out from behind the petrified tree trunk. “Let’s go.”
Shelby rose and followed him, holding Lara’s hand as tightly as she could.
They hit the thing going fifty and he went up over the hood, cracking the windshield on his way. Jo twisted in her seat just in time to see him spin through the air and smack into the ground a tangled, bleeding mess. With numb, fumbling fingers she stuffed the booze-soaked rag into the next bottle’s neck and touched the lighter to its edge. It smoldered. Caught. She flung it by the neck as John slowed and watched breathlessly as it arced over the house’s front lawn and smashed through the window. The red drapes caught at once, and by the time they reached the street corner the whole facade was blazing, black smoke pouring out like a thunderhead that had lost its way and wound up trapped in a suburban living room.
She’d missed a few at first, but even then most of the grass in Cook Canyon was dry and dead, and it caught readily. There were fires all over town, and they were spreading. The streets behind them were flooding with panicked things. Some of them were burning. Others had lacked time to compose their faces so that loose flesh hung in veils from their skulls, obscuring their features. She caught a glimpse of Felix’s car at the next intersection, Mal behind the wheel, and bent to snatch another fifth of vodka from the car floor. She unscrewed the cap and forced a rag into place, unable to stop herself from looking back over her shoulder to where the crowd was thickening, its leading edge racing after them on all fours like a pack of dogs with the faces of middle-aged homeowners and teachers and teenagers and weather-burnt gas station attendants. It was like one of the dreams she’d had during high school, where she was shuffling along the sidewalk in the city when suddenly she noticed everyone was looking at her, their eyes following her labored steps. Then they stopped walking. Then they started to give chase, and no matter how she strained she moved as though through syrup until finally—
There were trucks full of men parked at the next intersection. The barrels of shotguns and rifles tracked them. Jo stared, her lighter flickering in her hand, the bottle’s contents forming a shimmering slope as John took the corner hard. She thought of Oji showing her his faded old photographs of Yoshi, the most beautiful man he’d ever seen, of how tenderly his gnarled and shaking fingers had brushed the photo’s torn and curling edge.
The men in the trucks opened fire.
Up the porch and into the house. Lara could feel it below them, frightened and angry. She stepped over the bodies and past the threshold of the swinging front door with its blood spatter and its splintered bullet hole. The front room was bare. Plastic tarps hung between raw pine framing. A kitchen—an old Coleman refrigerator and a stainless steel sink piled high with dirty dishes. An overflowing plastic trash can. There were things on the gouged and splintered butcher’s block countertops, little scraps and ends of raw pink meat tinged grayish green around the edges. Lara could smell it from the doorway. She could feel something in it. Tears. Snot. Hard hands and crushing pressure. Mommy, mommy.
They searched. An office full of steel filing cabinets and loose paperwork. Scorched and smoke-damaged photo albums stuffed with pictures of children standing in front of the admin trailer at Camp Resolution and digging postholes in the Utah desert. A wet room, the floorboards spongy with rot, fungus blooming up between them. Bathroom unfinished. A hole in the floor. And then, finally, her room. Mrs. Glover lay wheezing on the soiled sheets, her oxygen mask fogged by her erratic breathing. What Lara could see of her withered body was hideously burned, her skin waxy and livid, her left eye little more than a swollen slit. At her bedside sat a woman in her early twenties, slim and fair-haired, dressed modestly in a pale pink button-up and cream cardigan. Without hesitation she came over the bed at a four-legged run, her face opening, sawtooth jawbones trailing spittle and slime.
Felix drew his handgun and shot the thing. He kept firing as it crashed to the floor with an otherworldly shriek, limbs lashing out at random. Mrs. Glover tried to move, but she lacked the strength to leave her bed and fell back on the sweat-damp pillow after a single convulsive attempt to push herself up onto her elbows. Her breath fogged her oxygen mask. Felix ejected the little automatic’s magazine and slapped another into place. He shot the thrashing thing again and it curled in on itself and was still.
Lara went to the bedside and plucked the mask gently from Mrs. Glover’s face. She slid the band over the older woman’s peeling scalp with its wisps of brittle hair. Mrs. Glover pawed at her arm with a fleshless hand, her touch like the caress of dried flower petals. “N … no,” she moaned. Her lips were already colorless. Her good eye was wide with panic. A tear leaked from its corner and made its way down her sunken cheek, silvery and clean as she reached with a burn-scarred hand toward the dead thing bleeding on the floor. “Fuh … fuh…”
Lara bent down until her lips were almost touching the old woman’s ear. “This is for Eddie,” she whispered, not quite knowing why, knowing that the man had been a coward and a weakling and a hypocrite, but knowing he’d been one of theirs, and he’d died for it. “The real one. He’s waiting for you in Hell.”
“Is she dead?” asked Shelby.
“She will be soon,” said Lara, and she ran her fingers through the shriveled woman’s hair. Mrs. Glover stared at her, mouth open, eye still leaking. Lara straightened up and turned away. “Let’s go.”
Gunfire blew in the rest of the rear windshield, glass cascading over the back seat as they fishtailed through the intersection past a movie theater—The Sound of Music up on the marquee, but all the ticket booths papered over and the front doors locked with a length of rusty chain—and what looked like some kind of town hall, and the men in the trucks shooting guns at them. “Hold on!” John screamed. Something grazed his cheek and left a line of white-hot pain sketched smooth and clean across it before punching a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield.
He looked back as they straightened out. Jo lay slumped against her window, blood dribbling from a hole in her throat. The expression of surprise she wore slowly went slack. Her hand slipped from the wound and fell into her lap, bloody fingers twitching. John couldn’t seem to breathe. There was blood in his mouth. He looked away from the scene and took the next turn fast, still floating in the airless moment, still trying to make his thoughts connect to some kind of world that made sense, because he was seventeen and Jo and Shelby were showing him Prince of Darkness after a bad breakup and he was nineteen and Jo was vomiting in the sink while he held her hair and he was twenty-five and so angry with her and loaning her money again and this couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t be real, he would turn back again and she’d be crouched in the broken glass and firing at the things still chasing them, because it couldn’t—
He never saw the third truck, which barreled into his stolen rental doing what must have been sixty. The world caved in. It screamed. Glass in his arms. In his legs. Huge shards standing out and Louise sinking onto the stool in the little dive where he tended bar like a big beautiful scoop of ice cream just starting to melt. Her sequins flashing. Glitter. Sharp little red fingernails. He flew through the air. Pavement. Sky. A burning building. White-hot pain as his shoulder hit the street. A swath of skin torn off like an old Band-Aid.
Who’s a girl have to do to get a drink around here?
Crawling. Car on fire. Jo’s Molotov cocktails. Flames pouring from the doors. Dripping to the pavement. Fire like the night Nadine died. He crawled toward it, fumbled the AK from the well of the driver’s seat, tearing its bandolier where it caught on something. He stood and his head did a kind of wriggling belly flop, the world swaying and spinning all around him. There was blood. He thought of Mal, of their first night together. Please, I want you on top of me. Their fights. Limping around the burning wreck to where something was hauling itself from the truck, its bony scythes digging furrows in the softened pavement, torn clothes hanging from its muscular, amorphous bulk. Human arms hanging like useless sleeves of meat from what looked like a chest. Breasts weeping black discharge. Its matted, greasy ginger hair made a sort of ruff along its spine and its skin was peeling and sunburned, dusted with constellations of freckles. Weirdly beautiful. He brought the rifle up, though it hurt to raise his arms. He had at least one broken rib, and probably more, and his bloody finger slipped from the trigger twice before he managed to fire.
The thing screamed, rocked back against the truck, and rose up like a grizzly bear half-covered in chitinous armor plates. When it turned toward him, its repulsively human face twisting into a deranged snarl of pain and hatred, its lower jaw splitting in half to reveal a gnashing hell of slick black mouthparts, John saw that it was Betty Cleaver.
Lara led the others down the basement steps. No false partition this time, just a hole in the foundation wall leading into a braced dirt tunnel that sloped down and into darkness, out of sight. Wherever they worked their campers half to death now, it wasn’t here. She drew her gun with shaking fingers and with her free hand felt for the baggies of ketamine she’d sewn into her old army surplus jacket. More in her pockets. Thousands of dollars’ worth, which was funny now that she thought of it.
They had to crouch to get into the tunnel. Felix pushed past her, but gently, and took the lead. She followed the beam of his flashlight as he crept along. He was so handsome, she thought. His olive skin and little mustache. His dark hair, always so effortlessly rumpled in the morning. She’d had a crush on him for a long time when they were young.
The smell wafting up to them was terrible. She remembered it, and smelled it in her nightmares still. They came out into a larger chamber, cut and blasted stone and packed earth making up the walls, and dark, glistening things hung above them, mucoid sacs like the chrysalises of huge caterpillars turning slowly into chemical soup that dreamed of flying. Lara didn’t want to know what was in them, but she knew. She started to cry.
There were other chambers branching off the first. Chambers overgrown with fungus and chambers opening onto brackish aquifers and chambers full of the hairy, womblike membranes in which it gestated its cuttings, some with dark forms curled within, others deflated and dried. Everywhere were psoriatic drifts of pale, dead skin and clumps of wet black hair. There were bones, too. The bones of cows, and of burrowing things, and of children. Lara followed Felix in a daze, Shelby close by her side. Little voices whispered in her ear. Little fingers plucked at her sleeves. They came at last into a massive stone cavern split by a shallow stream flowing swift and clear on into the darkness. Across it, picked out faintly by Felix’s flashlight, an archway of stone slabs yawned like a mouth, and—like a tide of vomit—it was already coming through.
The Cuckoo dragged its raw, slimy bulk through the arch, sprouting new limbs to brace itself against the stone. It slobbered and shrieked as it came, its unintelligible cries overlapping wetly as mouths formed, bubbled, and burst on pseudopods and nodding skin-draped skulls like sped-up footage of necrosis in action. Features Lara still recognized, even fifteen years later. Dana’s nose, an unmistakable point. The plump, pouty lips of a girl whose name she had never been able to remember. Celine’s big, bulging eyes. Pruny, soft-nailed fingers groping blindly from the side of its wattled throat as vaginal slits discharged thick streams of yellowish slime. At the center of its thrusting foremost segment, a black oval of chitin like a caterpillar’s head gazed eyelessly out at them, mouthparts moving like inscrutable machinery.
More little limbs formed and collapsed as it pulled itself toward them. It reared up, a bloated serpentine arch dotted with grasping cilia and filmy eyes, rolls of slack flesh bunching where its bulk overlapped, dirty feathers bristling from its bedraggled, stunted wings. A bloom of fronds and tendrils erupted from its back all at once, bioluminescence flashing among rags of filmy skin torn by its transformation. The air seemed to flex and throb. It fixed its empty stare on Lara.
A migraine split her head like an ax, a flash of dirty white and then a world, a marble of mottled browns and blues and greens hanging fat and webbed with constellations of electric light upon the depthless black. World in blacklight, skull coming apart in her hands. Closer. Lightning splitting fat pink trees and clouds of oily feathered seeds erupting to be swept up by the sulfur-smelling wind and borne down from the foothills of a great peak honeycombed with pits and quarries and fans of broken scree to the valley below where they met the sluggish flows of streams and rivulets and then were vomited into the broad green sewer of a river flowing down over tiers of broken stone where fat, ulcerated silos with mouths lined with spirals of baleen stood in the waterfalls, their broad backs and stumpy legs aswarm with biting parasites, and on until the flow broadened, slackened, drooled into endless marshland separated into grids by lines of glowing buoys where the low meat—the subjugated flesh—toiled endlessly with hands bent into scoops and huge, pale eyes to peer through murky water for the mollusks—or something like mollusks, fat and pale and fleshy in broken toroidal shells—which they heaved over their shoulders into sacks of woven grass.
From time to time a part of the laboring flesh would fail, overworked or sun-stricken or poisoned by polluted silt or bitten by one of the flat, rubbery creatures that lurked in the mud of the paddies, and its fellows would bear it on their shoulders to a temple of the flesh to be drained and strained and reprocessed into something new, a little turd of barely sentient biomass pinched off a great and greedy whole and set again to toiling, or sometimes discarded, too overworked and riddled with the tumorous scourge of the remaking sickness to be of use. It is of the body, Lara thought nonsensically, but it is not the body.
The things they harvest are loaded up in vats of bog water and pushed through the great gills of something else, another dull automaton of meat which on a thousand sturdy legs conveys its sinuous bulk along a trampled earthen track, guts bulging heavy with the harvests of a dozen terroirs. It thunders on through swamps and valleys and passes blasted through great berms of rock to a city where a thousand, thousand other paths converge, a city like a great emphysemic lung, heaving, straining, never satisfied no matter how it pants and wheezes, and more meat unloads the meat the meat has harvested and it is pickled, sauteed, seared, and fried and fed into the billion, billion mouths of the high flesh, of the one that is many, the changing seed from which all thinking life on this world now grows. It splits and changes and experiences reunion, calving and melding, sloughing off outré manifestations and mashing itselves together like the Play-Doh figures of some monstrous cosmic toddler, thoughts and lives spun off to dance and mug a little before reabsorption, the thing entertaining itself as it dines on the fruits of a world it has devoured and excreted a hundred times over, a world of acid soil and vast, dead oceans where the sky—Oh, God, the sky—is a roiling hellscape of thunderstorms caught in atmospheric gyres where the planet’s gravity well dips and deforms, storms within storms, lightning stitching clouds together and through the occasional gap a sickly green sun poisoning the skin it touches, blistering, sewing tumors like seeds in the changeable dermis.
Once there were herds and flocks and shoals and schools and the thing that changes was a few thousand clots of thinking flesh propagating itself over tidal forests and through boreal chasm-mazes, leaving its youngest grafts to mature in the lairs and nests of creatures that it learned to imitate, learned to charm and tame to parenthood until the flesh was ready to rejoin the whole, sire and dam sucked dry and discarded. Then the clots began to meet. Some fought. Others fucked. There was little difference, and neuron by neuron it began to recognize itself, began to dew from the collective thinking muscle of the flesh that changes, began to realize its hungers and the things which it despised. Suffering. Tedium. Need. Now everywhere it turns it finds only itself, a starving animal the size of a planet curled in a panicked ball and shitting into its own open mouth to quell its hunger pangs. What happens? it thinks, synapses leaping from body to body, twining tight in glistening braids so that thoughts echo, sync, and join together seamlessly, so that it is never alone, never and always alone with the thoughts that chase it through the labyrinth of its own consciousness, the single thought, What happens when the meat runs out?
And so in a spiral hall dug deep into the earth—the Nythith—the flesh brings itself together in great coral ridges of brain matter, turning its leviathan mind to matters alchemical and scientific, arcane and epistemological. For long and torturous years it plans and frets and does what it most detests—labor—until its self is fractious with rogue impulses, frustration climbing between dendritic webs like a parasite, whispering ghostly in the great machine that this is work for the feet, for the digits, not for the body, until on the verge of cataclysmic egomorphic rupture, the greatest psychotic break the galaxy might have ever seen, it unlocks the object of its search. A door. A wet slit between dimensions which may be wriggled through, which may be traversed by just enough of its noble and cunning matter that on the far side it might feed and grow and reach back to the Nyth across the dark ocean of space to join hands with itself, to become a bridge of braided fat and muscle spanning hundreds of thousands of light-years to secure the only thing that matters.
Fresh meat.
Another sizzling flash of white and the seeing was done, the headache it left behind the filthy, stabbing pain of an infected tooth. Lara doubled over and vomited on the cavern floor. The Cuckoo was all around her. She could hear gunfire, but she couldn’t see the others. The skin of its flank split, reversed, and squirmed over her shoulder to cling to her neck like a thawed chicken cutlet, wet and cold and rubbery. Fingers grew to stroke her chin and cheek, to fumble at the corner of her mouth. Soft nails. Wrinkled knuckles. Its skin tasted of neroli and civet, sugar and cardamom, a nauseating, gluey flavor smeared across her face. Fingers knit together, a hand bubbling up behind them. It pried her mouth open, forcing thumb and forefinger inside. A pinkish membrane slipped over her eyes, veins pulsing in the expanse of fragile skin. Against her ear formed tender lips, a pointed tongue which brushed the fine hairs of her cochlea.
You will never be alone again.
Mal ran sobbing through the streets. The things were chasing them. They’d shot a few, though the submachine gun frightened and disoriented them, but they still came snorting and snuffling on like a pack of bloodhounds, faces trailing flaps of loose skin and delicate tendrils tipped with suction cups and airy fronds and fine, dark hairs. More spilled out of burning buildings. The fire was catching. Mal turned and tore down the narrow gap between two houses, vaulting a low chain-link fence and eating shit on the far side. They scrambled to their feet, spitting dirt, and kept running. Bodies packed the slice of lawn behind them. Runners leapt the fence in graceful arcs. Mal turned and fired into the crowd. The submachine gun kicked and roared. A nearby window exploded outward in a blast of flame.
Onward, sprinting across a stretch of lawn where sparks were already beginning to catch, the grass so dry it crunched under their sneakers. They’d been lucky not to break anything when they crashed Felix’s Impala. Stupid. So fucking stupid. Too fast. Skidding out into a telephone pole. It was nothing like Riverside out here, but they felt like they were running through their hometown, like it was finally rising up all around them to show them what it thought of that loudmouth crazy bitch and her brats. They could see it in the eyes of every faceless thing that boiled out after them into the street.
We were trapped in there with her, and she was trapped in there with us.
The boom of John’s AK tore through the sounds of the spreading fire and the mob on Mal’s heels. They dug deeper, legs pumping, chest on fire and black dots at the edges of their vision as they ran toward the intersection at the street’s end, and suddenly the mob was silent at their back. They looked over their shoulder and saw them halted in among the blazing buildings, filling the street on all fours and in bestial crouches. The things weren’t chasing them.
What?
Another shot. They headed left at the intersection, away from the fires, ducking under the hanging boughs of thorn trees the roots of which had begun to buckle the sidewalk’s concrete slabs. They ran faster. Strength came into them, not as ease but like fuel burning, as though the marrow in their bones was catching fire, and down at the end of the street, beside the wreck of his car and the truck that had T-boned it, John lay in the street with something huge crouched over him. It had his head in one scaled claw, and the great scythe-tipped limbs that rose up from its shoulders were dark and dripping with blood.
“Get the fuck away from him!” they screamed, their voice cracking. Mal staggered to a halt and fumbled with the Uzi’s shoulder strap and safety, trying to eject the mostly empty magazine. Where was the button? Groping in their pocket for another clip. Please. Please. Kill me, not him. Kill me. Kill me. “Look at me, you piece of shit!”
