It was afraid. It was so terribly, terribly afraid, alone in a way it had never been before, on fire with the ecstatic terror of it. Their minds were burning in the same molten light and she could feel its shrieking misery as it came apart into the things that it had eaten, stolen, raped and digested and shat out. It was trying to hide. It was trying to find something to imitate. Its huge body boiled with deformed likenesses. Campers and counselors and somewhere in among the gnashing jaws and empty eye sockets were what was left of Nadine, and Pastor Eddie. In there somewhere were the coyote cubs that it had stolen from their packs’ dens and the birds whose nests it had raided and the grinning masks of Smith and Brady and fat, lovely Candace who had smiled at her and blushed.
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
Lara let go. She began to drift, lines of red and purple light flaring wild in the void. She felt what was left of her crushed beneath a massive thrashing weight, and the fire of her mind flared bright, and things were falling away, layer after layer of skin peeling back as she rose up like a plucked note hanging in the air, shedding everything, and thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Be good.
The Cuckoo let out a low moan of pain and confusion and suddenly the head of Manny Vargas was just flopping meat, expressionless and dead. Its limbs slid from Felix’s body, the tongue that had coiled around Shelby’s leg falling slack to the ground as it undulated backward down the tunnel, heaving its huge mass along faster and faster, throwing itself against the tunnel walls until earth showered down on them and Felix felt sure it would collapse and bury both of them, and then they were out, they were staggering after it into the great chamber with its stream where something that looked horribly like Lara lay dead half in the water and half on the stony bank, her cheek pillowed on grit and rock, its flank—where she must have spilled from it—split open and puckered like the world’s biggest mouth had just sucked on a lemon.
“Felix,” Shelby sobbed.
Felix limped after her, tearing out the hasty stitching where he’d sewn part of the ketamine stash into his jacket. He slit it partway open with his knife, fumbling a little with his missing fingers, and flung the packet at the Cuckoo. Its wings flapped out of sync as it listed and stumbled. Pale bluish powder sparkled in midair. The packet hit its side, spilling more of the drug onto gnashing mouths and heaving gills. He helped Shelby cut her own share free of her sweatshirt and tossed it after his before sinking down to sit beside her, watching the thing tear itself apart.
The great bulk reared up, splitting like a lightning-struck tree, and two serpentine heads took form, teeth pushing out through bloody gums as jawbones slid into place to give structure to flopping, sleevelike mouths. Tentacles unfurled from its heaving flanks, leaving furrows in the flesh into which molten fat poured like hot lead into a mold. The left head struck at the right, viper-quick. Tentacles coiled around one another, tugging and squeezing, sprouting spiral rows of serrated yellow teeth, and in the space of a few seconds the entirety of it was at war with itself in a dissociative fugue, unable to recognize its own amorphous horror. The drugs had worked. Arms still slick with thick white discharge grappled within collapsing tents of skin and cartilage. Effluvium spouted from puckered blowholes as bear-trap jaws crushed bone, tore flesh. Felix led Shelby around it as it ripped itself apart. They lifted Lara between them. Even with his maimed hand it wasn’t hard; she was so light. Her legs were gone. Much of her skin had dissolved.
They were most of the way back to the exit when its convulsions brought the cave roof crashing down on it. The sound was astronomical, a physical presence pushing them along in a hail of dust and grit as they toiled up that last dark stretch and up the basement steps and left the house by the bloody, bullet-scarred front door, carrying Lara with them.
The Betty-thing drew back from Mal so suddenly that they assumed it meant those anvil fists would come rushing down to crush their head. Instead, the thing that had once been Betty Cleaver started screaming. She lurched back and forth across the street, smashing through a telephone pole and upending a station wagon with a convulsive heave. Live wires showered the pavement in sparks.
“It hurts!” she shrieked, and her voice was horribly normal, a worn-out woman’s hoarse, strained cry of pain.
All around them other screams rose from the mouths of the townsfolk as they reeled through the streets. Mal scrambled to their feet and ran. John lay on his face at the corner, covered in blood, glass protruding from his arms and side. They dropped to their knees at his side, struggling to roll him over.
“John,” they begged. “John, honey. Please answer me. Wake up. Please, I can’t—I can’t.”
Behind them, Betty clawed at her own face and bone and flesh gave way under her gnarled fingers, her bottom jaw swinging loose by a flap of discolored skin, blood pouring out onto her throat and chest. She drew back a massive fist and punched herself, hard, in the face. Her nose caved in. Her cheekbones were distorted, snapped like matchsticks. She seized one of the townsfolk crawling near her on hands and knees and tore him in half, lifting his thrashing legs to what remained of her mouth and biting ineffectually at it. Strings of flesh stretched between it and her teeth. It put out tendrils, flailing limbs, and brushed her face with awful gentleness in the moment before she fell to one knee and vomited up a tide of half-digested meat. There was a girl in it. Parts of a girl. Mal threw up with her, then, leaning away from John to do it.
Betty toppled with a crash that shook glass from the traffic lights and nearby windows. She was mouthing something to herself, her eyes glassy, her huge frame shuddering. Blood pumped from her bullet wounds and the gashes and scrapes she’d given herself at an alarming rate, until it slowed to a trickle, and then a seep. And then it stopped. The townsfolk started falling, too. They were keeling in the streets and running into their burning houses. They were screaming until their eyes popped like rotten grapes and blood poured from their mouths.
After a long time had passed, it was quiet except for the sound of fire. Mal sobbed as they bandaged the long gash that ran from John’s shoulder to the top of his belly with strips torn from his bloodied shirt. Betty had clawed and cut him in a dozen places, or he’d been hurt in the crash. It was impossible to tell. They cleaned his wounds with water from their canteen and touched his face and looked at him, and tried not to look at Jo’s body where it sat in the still-burning wreck.
After a while, John’s eyes flickered open. He cleared his throat and looked at them. “Am I dead?” he whispered hoarsely.
“No,” Mal sobbed, and then they bent and kissed him, still crying, and he took them in his good arm and kissed them back, and that was how Felix and Shelby found them.
At a fenced-in camp in the desert a half hour’s drive outside the town, Shelby stepped out of the minivan Felix had hotwired and found twenty-odd confused and angry teenagers staring at her through the chain-link fence. She felt suddenly absurd and monstrous, every bit the playground predator TERFs shrieked about in their think pieces and blog posts. Here she was rescuing a teenager who didn’t know who she was or that she existed at all.
She cleared her throat. “Abby Donovan?”
The little crowd milled, kids exchanging sideways glances, until at last a short, chubby girl—how could any mother have looked at this child and not seen her for a girl?—stepped forward. “Where are the counselors?” Abby asked, her voice small and frightened. Her head had been shaved recently, and tawny peach fuzz the same color as Nadine’s grew from her scalp. “What’s happening? What are you going to do to us?”
“It’s okay,” said Shelby. She fished the keys she’d taken from Mrs. Glover’s room out of her pocket and unlocked the fence. “It’s over. I’m getting you out of here. All of you.”
The girl was crying now. Some of the other kids drew back as Shelby opened the gate, but Abby stayed where she was. “Who are you? What’s happening?”
“I knew Nadine—knew your sister,” Shelby said, a lump in her throat as she remembered that long-ago bathroom and the dry heat of the stall where they’d first kissed. “A long time ago.”
PRIDE
San Francisco, California
2018
Sometimes Abby couldn’t believe Margo wanted her. The other girl was so beautiful, so tall and graceful and stylish in her shimmering silver tank top and her glittery eyeliner, bleached hair falling pin-straight to her shoulders. At first it had made her afraid that one day Margo would wake up and realize she was dating a chubby little nobody, plain and shy and boring, a weirdo raised by broke oddballs in a succession of awful apartments, who at twenty-one was still finishing her GED. Then, slowly, as day after day began with that sleepy smile, those painted nails tracing the curve of her cheek, it began to make her feel beautiful.
The real story had never come out. A cult. A mass suicide. Someone had cleaned up in Cook Canyon, or someone had been high up enough to make the nightmare wreckage disappear, but the things she’d seen at Integrity still haunted Abby’s dreams. Those first months with John in the hospital, the rest of them sleeping in cars and stealing to eat, the other kids and their parents giving fringe radio interviews about torture and brainwashing and Satanic rituals until one by one they gradually went dark. “We’ll take you home, if that’s what you want,” Felix had told her a hundred times. “All you have to do is ask.”
What would have happened if she had? Her mother’s love and desperation had been equally cloying, her father’s disinterest painful and his white-hot rage at her transition terrifying. Maybe they would have learned their lesson the second time. Maybe she would have wound up in another camp. The four of them, Felix and John and Shelby and Mal, had done their best for her. They had wanted her the way she was. Lara and Jo, who she’d never known, had died trying to get her out of that place.
She would never have met Margo, who one sweaty, sun-drenched afternoon two years ago in Punta Gorda had seen Abby coming off her shift at the Daily Scoop ice cream shop and screamed from across the street, “I’d like a scoop of that!” Her drunken apology had become a half-sober invitation to dinner, had become electric sex at her cramped and cluttered apartment, full of books on Python and C++ and particle physics, had become coffee mugs of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast and a long, rambling discussion about Kurt Russell and trans drama and their favorite smells. Little things.
She would never have found herself here, walking down the street shoulder to shoulder with half a million gays for Pride. It was easy to feel hot at the march, even if the organizers had allowed corporations to join in again. At least they’d kept cops out this year. An older cis dyke had checked Abby out near the water station at the corner of Main and Desmond, her eyes sliding over Abby’s ass and down her bare legs. It felt good to be wanted like that. She’d kissed a few friends, giddy with the sunlight and the glitter and the last slow, soothing waves of last night’s edible. Now she was hand in hand with Margo in the thick of the parade, the late afternoon sun bathing them in its warm red-orange glow, the group of big, hairy men ahead of them marching with a sign that read THE B STANDS FOR BEARS, glistening beautifully with sweat in their vests and chaps. Before they’d left, Margo had put on phosphate-red lipstick and planted a kiss on Abby’s cheek in front of the hall mirror.
So everyone will know you’re mine.
