It looked up and a smile split its face, a bloody nightmare grin of teeth and chitin and shredded meat, and it was Betty. Betty kicking them behind the bathrooms. Nadine bruised and limping after Betty and the others beat her senseless. Betty crawling dazed and blinded as the farmhouse burned. It was impossible, but she was there, and she was smiling at them.
She charged.
Mal got the clip in. They brought the gun up with both hands, the way Felix had shown them. He isn’t dead, they told themself, not daring to look at where John lay not moving in the street. He’s not dead. He’s not. He’s NOT.
They fired.
Shelby scrambled after Felix over loose earth and tumbling shale, clawing her way along the tunnel. She’d lost track of where she was, or where they’d come in. Whatever had happened between the Cuckoo and Lara had left her reeling and disoriented. It was hard to string two thoughts together. She kept seeing things. Pearlescent rooms and corridors full of laughing monsters. A bird’s nest hidden in a crevice in a cliff face. When Felix turned and pushed her down to fire back over her prone body, she went limp with relief. Why run? They’d made a mistake. They’d fought back against the way the world worked, tried to snatch a queer kid from the jaws of its cruel indifference, and they were going to die for it.
Then she looked back under her own arm and saw it coming up the tunnel after them, unfazed by the bullet wounds in its soft bulk. Slowly, like a newborn crowning, Nadine’s face emerged from the loose, flabby folds of foreskin at the end of a serpentine neck it had grown. The folds pulled gradually taut over the dead girl’s skull. Tufts of slimy hair erupted from its flesh to fall over one flashing eye, swinging wet and heavy near the dirt. Sharp canines flashed in a vicious smile. “I miss you, baby,” it whispered in her throaty voice as plump little insect limbs dragged it along. Its left eye’s swollen pupils shrank, met, and collapsed into one inky pinprick. Thick black tongues like condoms full of garbage juice slid slow over its teeth. “My little dumpling.”
“Look at me, Shelby,” shouted Felix, and even as he kept firing he grabbed her hand and squeezed it so tight she thought he might break her fingers, squeezed it hard enough to break the spell of those eyes the thing had stolen, of that smile it was wearing wrong, because Nadine had never smiled at her like that, like she was looking at food. It was just a trick. That’s all the thing was. Tricks and lies, all of them cheap, all of them ugly. They only worked because nobody cared about the truth.
“Don’t look at it,” Felix said, and she curled into him and wept, sobs shaking her so hard that even the boom of the gunshots in the enclosed space barely registered. “I’ve got you.”
Lara had been ready for it since she was a teenager, her mind rewired by Armitage’s nonsense lessons, by the slow breaking down of her young body, by psychedelics and sex and a riot of hormones, and she was ready still. The difference was that now it wasn’t ready for her. As it engulfed her and their bodies flowed together in a molten crucible of fat and flesh and bone, it slowed. One of its mouths began to emit a thin, plaintive keening sound. The eyes dotting the inner surface of its digestive chamber rolled and spun, looking at its own formless mass, staring at each other, at Lara’s dissolving body with the stumps of its legs and her beautiful hair all burned away, and in them she saw a flat, uncomprehending terror, a lack of recognition as its million parts began to dissolve into their own tiny and fractious wholes. She spat blood, smiling. It had eaten about half a pound of ketamine along with her.
Goodbye, you ugly fucking thing, she thought. I hope it hurts.
Flesh boiled over her in a screaming wave. Her skin burned. Coils of muscle seized her throat as keratin pushed messily through pulpy fingertips and clawed hands dug into her scalp. A dreadful weight bore down on her and she felt things give beneath it, felt them pierce her organs in a thought-bleaching rush of chemical anxiety. She could feel Felix and Shelby somewhere close, and Mal and John beyond them, fainter, and fainter still the echo of Jo, who had saved them all as much as Nadine had. Dead now.
It got Felix’s gun hand while he was reloading. Nadine’s jaws crushed his fingers. Tore them loose. In the confines of the dead-end tunnel there was nowhere to retreat, nothing to do but scream and beat at it as its limbs grasped at his clothes, his crotch, his hand where it gripped Shelby’s tightly. It had her, too. It was dragging her back down the shallow slope toward a huge, drooling maw that gaped beneath the neck it had grown. He stumbled after her, jerked along as it bit his thumb in half and lunged to sink its teeth into his forearm. There was so much blood. He felt little teeth gnawing at his right ear. Snip. The lobe gone, more blood sheeting down his neck. It was pushing inside him now, and he beat his head against its pliable softness, trying to hurt it, trying to make his hatred for it mean something.
“I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and he bit it back, its taste unspeakably foul on his tongue, like spoiled meat and lukewarm vomit blended together and seasoned with just a touch of fecal decay. He didn’t care. He bit at the limb coiled around his throat. He bit and tore and spat as its bulk surged over him, bearing him down to the dirt, as its eyes split like doubled yolks and its mouths grinned with indecent delight. Slowly, with great deliberation, the rough shape of his father’s face emerged from its putrid mass just above Felix’s. Bull neck, hooded eyes, the dark mustache and jutting chin. It smiled at him. It bent.
Don’t worry.
It kissed him on the mouth.
I’m here with you.
Bullets tore at Betty’s side, but each impact felt like a gentle caress. She sprinted toward the thing that had been Malcolm. The world shook with her every footstep. All around them the people of Cook Canyon, who were not really people at all, watched in delighted silence, smiles on the masks of their faces. It was watching through them, she knew, and it made her heart burn with pride.
She bore down on Malcolm and swiped at him, her arm bubbling like boiling water, bones parting as muscle and sinew stretched. The limb smashed through the pavement where he’d stood a moment before and tore a furrow clean across the road before bringing down the facade of a burning split-level. Dust rose. Masonry and wood spilled out with a thundering roar.
Betty whirled, her arm humping back up against her shoulder, and shrieked at the sight of Malcolm vanishing behind John’s burning car. She lashed out again, upending the wreck of the car and sending the fat man, dead or unconscious, rolling over the broken street. The car flipped twice in the air and crashed into the storefront of a pharmacy. Malcolm scrambled backward away from her on his ass. He looked ridiculous, little breasts pushing at his T-shirt, inner thighs crosshatched with neat, precise little scars, like hating himself was a job he’d clocked into and out of on a schedule.
She padded toward him and crouched down, pushing him effortlessly to the pavement, grinding his face into the dirt and loose granules of road. “I told you what I’d do if I found you sneaking around again,” she snarled, and with hundreds of mouths the Cuckoo laughed and clapped appreciatively, a sitcom audience plucked out of a rancid wet nightmare.
“Kill him!” it shrieked with one mouth. “Make him eat his cock!” it screamed with another.
Betty thought of Athena stroking her hair as she died. She brushed her own thumb over Malcolm’s braids. Something felt wrong. Something in the air had shifted.
“Kill him!” the crowd chanted. “Kill him! Kill him!”
Betty bent low. She felt tired. Sick, somehow.
“I’ll make it quick,” she whispered.
“Fuck yourself,” Malcolm snarled back.
Lara fell into herself, and as her consciousness began to come apart she thought of her half sister, Celia, who had been so beautiful at seventeen as she read “Jabberwocky” out loud from where she lay draped on the window seat in their kitchen. Ashen hair and pale, pale freckles and those long, thin hands and delicate wrists which then had made Lara feel a burning, needy jealousy, a species of devotion that had only faded when Celia left for college and stopped talking to their father.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
She reached out with the fire that it had woken in her by pure accident, and she thrust herself as deep into the Cuckoo’s roiling mind as she could go, tearing and clawing and smashing everything she found, ripping at the alien wiring of its dirty baby-snatching mind, kicking and spitting and crushing even as its oneness, its unity began to calve chunks of random traits and memory like a glacier melting in nuclear fire. It ran wailing from her and she chased it, squeezing its frightened giblets to death in her soul’s grip, or her mind’s, or whatever it was that had made her crazy and alone and a fantastic fucking dominatrix.
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
