"Not good enough!"
Goodwell swallowed. "We also cleared out the house. Burned every egg."
"There will be more."
"Of course."
"Always more!"
The voice was getting frantic. That scared Goodwell more than if it'd just been furious. "It's the beginning of something, isn't it?"
A pause. Then, finally, "The false queen."
"She's getting stronger?"
"Still weak," the voice said. "But she has servants."
"Mrs Archer saw some of them. Children leaving graffiti. I'll set them straight."
"Only the start," the voice whispered. "Need to cut it off before it gets bigger."
"I understand." Goodwell dared to open one eye a crack. The basement was empty, the candleflame bent sideways by an unfelt wind. He closed his eyes again. "Can we discuss our... arrangement?"
A long silence. He felt the voice buzzing in his ear like a mosquito and fought the urge to shoo it away. "I'm sorry," he said. "I overstepped-"
"Are you unhappy?"
Goodwell licked his lips. "No."
"Are you wanting?"
A strange way to phrase it, but whatever his boss truly was, he supposed it hadn't kept up with modern slang. "I'm not wanting. I just... Well, yes."
"What do you want for?"
"Clarity. I don't know what I'm doing most days, and..." Goodwell's hands tensed into fists in his lap. "I need to know this is all for the... well. You know."
"For the good?"
"Yeah. Because I'm lying to this poor woman, right to her face. It sure doesn't feel good."
"And what would the truth do to her?"
Goodwell hung his head. "I know."
"You're saving her."
"I know."
"You're saving everyone."
"Not everyone."
"They aren't people any more." The voice wrapped around him, cradled him, fizzed in his bones. "You have a job to do."
Then, like a candle being snuffed, the voice vanished. The heat fell away, and Goodwell was left shivering. His hands trembled. He hugged himself, trying to ward off the chill, but it'd worked deep into his guts.
He gathered the candles and the bowl caked black with cooked blood and retreated up the stairs, making sure to lock the door behind him. He left the bowl in the kitchen and kept the candles in his jacket pocket - no telling when he might need a direct line to the boss. Then he flipped his collar up and stepped out into the rain.
It beat down on his forehead, blinding him, running thick over his lips. Every cold splash on his forehead felt like a little piece of the day being washed away.
So many bodies standing at attention. Reaching for him with dead fingers. At first he thought they'd been screaming, their mouths open, tongues hanging over their lips, but he'd quickly realised the truth. They'd been pleading.
And God, the ones that'd still been alive...
The nurse, Bo, must've collected them from the surrounding streets. One a day, sometimes two or three, all the way up to the moment when Goodwell had found the blue pickup and kicked in the door. Torn up and used like incubators and still blinking, still begging.
He was glad he hadn't been the one to make the decisions about how to put them down. And now he had to deal with whatever had been driving Bo.
But first, he thought, the kids. Stop the graffiti, stop the bad thoughts. What was that theory he'd heard just recently? Broken windows led to broken societies. Well, he could nip that one in the bud. Might even earn a pat on the back from the boss if he did it properly.
He held his hands out flat, letting the rain wash the stink from his skin, and tried to forget.
Chapter 17
Funny, how slowly the days passed when she wasn't afraid.
The stranger kept his distance and Kimberly kept hers, but when she woke each morning and heard the thud of footsteps as Peter bottle-fed the baby she no longer felt like throwing up. The tightness in her gut was gone. Her palms didn't sweat. Even the ache of the caesarean had faded into a distant roar, the sort she could breathe through when things got bad.
She didn't hide from him. When he called her down for dinner she ate in the same room, watching him from across the table as she spooned down bad macaroni. He never tried to kiss her, and when they passed each other in the corridor he always stood aside, as if to brush her involuntarily would make her explode.
Kimberly didn't know why, but it almost made her feel bad. As if now Peter was the prisoner in his own house, held hostage by a strange woman who refused to explain where she'd come from or when she was leaving.
And in truth, she didn't know the answer either. She thought sometimes of climbing the mountains again, making another desperate break for whatever lay on the far side of the ridge, but something always stopped her before she could cross the threshold and step out into that ceaseless rain.
She dreamed of black things, suckers and pincers and toothless mouths.
Peter didn't ask what she'd seen inside the house, and for that she was grateful. It was as if he'd sealed that part of the week away in a little box marked POLICE BUSINESS, and now he was content just to have her safe behind heavy locks.
If he'd asked, she wouldn't have known what to say. That evening in the house already felt like a stolen memory, a series of flash images belonging to somebody else. Goodwell hadn't returned to take any further statements. She'd flipped on the local news each night and seen nothing but dog shows and controversial urban redevelopments. No mention of Bo, or the countless bodies.
Sometimes she thought about the black thing pulling free of the man's neck and all the golf-ball eggs and wondered whether she'd begun to confuse waking and sleeping. Then she'd rub her wrists and recall the ache of pulling her hands free, the knife sliding deep into Fitch's thumb, and she knew.
She just wished she could pretend otherwise.
It'd been a week since Goodwell had bundled her up and driven her home from the rotten house. Peter had reheated spaghetti bolognaise and allowed her to eat alone. It was almost nightfall, the streetlights casting cold pools of light across the wet macadam. She watched through the lace curtains as sedans pulled up outside normal houses and disgorged normal families, fathers hurrying their children along beneath wide umbrellas.
She'd never wanted a normal family before. She and Alex... Adam? No, Aaron... had discussed it, but that talk concluded with silence. Now she was beginning to wonder.
No. God no. She could've slapped herself. A ring on her finger? Kids? That was the first sign of madness. Cabin fever sinking in. The second she was out on the open road, heading for DC, those bad thoughts would fade away. As soon as she found a tunnel that obeyed basic laws of architecture...
And then, as she washed her plate in the kitchen sink and thought about streetlights sweeping past, she heard something outside that wasn't the rumble of traffic or the light patter of rain. A footstep? A cough? She lifted the curtains, peering out into the darkness.
A shadow behind the elm in the front yard. A shadow she recognised.
Kimberly glanced back towards the living room. Peter was sprawled across the sofa, ensconced in huge padded headphones, nodding in time with his music. The baby was asleep - Peter had fed and changed and burped it while Kimberly hid in the bedroom. It hadn't cried all day.
No time like the present. But this time, for once, she'd take protection.
She hid one of the smaller kitchen knives - a boning blade, short but cruelly sharp - inside her pocket, before slipping into Peter's oversized rainslicker and stepping out into the chill. Fitch nodded to her as she approached, his hands stuffed in his pockets, a band-aid plastered to his jaw. "Hi."
"Evening." She took careful steps, watching the way Fitch's gaze travelled from her feet to her face and back again. "You left me with the cops."
Fitch licked his lips. "Me and them, we aren't too friendly."
"Was it you at the school?"
"You heard about that?" Fitch shrugged
. "I figure it all worked out in the end."
She closed her eyes. After-images of the thing clawing free from Bo's neck danced behind her eyelids. "Why me?"
"You're an event. Biggest thing to hit Rustwood in a long time. And that thing got your scent, too. Never happened before. So I figure there might be a reason. Maybe whatever runs this place is scared of you and I've never seen it scared before. Couldn't let you die, after all that."
Fitch inched closer and Kimberly forced herself not to jump back, to run for the safety of the house. His left hand was still in his pocket. "What've you got? A gun?"
"A pet," Fitch said. "Only thing that'll stand me. Has it started to grow on you yet?"
"What?"
"The town." He showed a grin full of bright teeth. "Funny how you hate it when you first wake up here but after a while you start to figure it's the only place you fit."
"I don't fit," Kimberly whispered. "This isn't even real. It's some trick, a fucking dream, a... a coma fantasy. Or maybe I'm just messed in the head."
Fitch nodded. "We all are. But not like that."
"I just want to wake up."
"We all want that too. Well. Most." His hand wriggled inside his pocket. "I ran too."
"Didn't find a way out?"
"I-" Fitch raised his nose to the wind, nostrils flared. "What happened to the clicker?"
Kimberly cocked her head. She couldn't smell anything besides the fresh-cut grass, the soil thick and heady beneath the rains. "The what?"
"Don't have any other name for that thing. Did you kill it?"
Kimberly could only stare. "The fridge-"
"I know you squashed it but I didn't hang around to take a good look. I was already out the damn window." Fitch licked his lips. "One thing I know, the beast downstairs doesn't send anything fragile. It found you once before, you don't think it'd find you again? You need to get a gun or something, a shovel, some fuckin' grenades."
"Are you crazy?" Kimberly glanced back towards the lights of the house, the warmth waiting for her there. "I don't want this. I want to go home, you understand? I want out of here."
"Can't do that if you're in a box."
"Stop talking like I know what you mean! None of this makes sense! The police..." She hugged herself against the chill. "They must've found twenty bodies in there."
"More."
"And then they just drive me home and say, 'We'll be in touch?' That's not normal."
"Funny how they forget, isn't it?" Fitch grinned, showing a neat white smile. "Or is it funny how you remember?"
"I didn't-"
She heard it then. A tick tick tick, like someone rapping insistently on a window, begging to be let in. A hiss like air escaping from a punctured tire. A slow, bone on bone scrape.
Fitch straightened, eyes wide, and drew a flick knife from his pocket. "Fuck."
"You hear-"
"Get inside," he whispered. "Won't follow you. Has to be invited."
"It what?"
"Get inside!" Fitch dashed across the garden, shoving Kimberly back towards the door. "For the love of God, get-"
A flash of shadow on the far side of the road. Streetlights shining slick on tarmac, the light sliding off something that twitched and wriggled, scuttling across the cold macadam like a snake wending over the surface of a steaming jungle bog.
She couldn't scream. Couldn't even move. It was just a dream, a night terror that refused to fade. Impossible. Impossible.
The creature reached the edge of the wet grass. It tasted the air, clapping pincers together in bony applause.
It pounced.
Chapter 18
She barely had time to throw her hands up before the black thing slammed her to the ground. Her teeth clicked together on her tongue as she hit the grass, and she tasted blood as the creature clawed up over her ribs and tried to sink its teeth into her face.
It was a blur of spindle-thin legs and greasy bone. Streetlights flashed across its back, and she caught glimpses claws and teeth between the gaps of her fingers. It was scaled, chitinous. The edges of its carapace cut deep into her palms, and when she tried to throw it off it clamped tighter around her arms, legs like needles slicing into the flesh of her wrists.
It weighed as much as a man, bloated with muscle, its back legs digging into her ankles even as it snapped at her neck. Its breath washed over her cheeks, stinking of old meat and burned hair.
And as it leaned in close...
Jesus, it had a face. It had lips. Feelers with black marble eyes swayed like metronomes but below the feelers was a second set of human eyes, mossy green and wet behind blinking eyelids. Its mouth was a pit of spines and cilia but it was framed with human lips, gently pink, moist and smacking. And in the depths of that maw, behind the feelers and the black spit, were rings of tiny white teeth, molar blunt. Baby teeth.
The terror was an electrical surge that sent her screaming and flailing. "Get it off, get if off!" The creature's mandibles scissored inches from her nose and she grabbed them at the base, close enough to that slick black mouth that the its breath washed over her knuckles. She bent the mandibles back, back, back, but the creature was too heavy and her strength was already failing. "Jesus Christ get it off me!"
Fitch was a blur of shadow above her. He fell on the creature in a tangle of knees and fists. His flickknife flashed against the streetlights. Steel scraped on bone as he brought it down but the blade only glanced off. "Fuck!"
"Just get it-"
The mandibles were closing no matter how she tried to hold them apart. The knife-sharp edges sliced deep into her palms, dipping closer to her neck. They'd open her up, she realised, peel back her throat, and then it'd crawl inside, make a nest of her guts...
"Please," she whispered. Her wrists were slick with blood. "Fitch, please-"
Fitch was still straddling the beast, pounding on its back with his fists, but the creature shrugged off every blow. "Bastard! Die, just..." He grabbed the beast's left mandible and hauled back. The pressure on Kimberly's throat eased a fraction and she gulped down air. She could taste the beast's breath on her lips.
"Pull!" Fitch said, and she understood.
She threw every scrap of strength she had behind levering the creature's right mandible away. Sharp bone sliced through her palm, blood welling over her fingers. The creature screeched as they pulled it in two directions, Fitch and Kimberly hauling on opposite blades.
Something had to give. Either the pincer would chop through Kimberly's hand and scatter her fingers across the grass, or the creature would break in half.
She could only hope, and push harder.
There was a high, gunshot crack, and Kimberly's mouth was suddenly full of thick ichor. The creature wailed, its oddly human eyes squeezed shut. It bled black and yellow, two fluids mixing and sizzling on the grass, leaking from the great rent opened in its carapace.
The mandibles relaxed. She might've only had a moment, but that was all she needed.
Kimberly let go, dug deep in her pocket, and found the handle of the kitchen knife. Just as she had days before with Bo, she rammed it up hard into the creature's soft underbelly.
The creature wailed, scissoring, trying to pull away. This time, Kimberly didn't let go. She grit her teeth and jerked the knife, parting muscle and plates of chitin. Her pants were suddenly soaked with gore and slippery coils of guts.
She screamed between her teeth and jerked harder.
Fitch was still hauling back on the thing's pincer like a rodeo rider bringing a bull to heel. There was another deafening crack, and Fitch fell on his ass, the pincer clenched tight in his hands. He stared at it wide-eyed. "Pull it apart! Pull the fucker apart!"
The creature thrashed, its one remaining mandible clawing across Kimberly's cheeks. She pulled the kitchen knife free from its gut and stabbed sideways into the monster's face. There was a low pop as the point of the blade sank deep into its eyeball, and her knuckles were spattered with greasy blood. She lifted the knife and brought
it down. Steel bounced off hard plate. She slammed the knife down again.
The creature whipped around, its black maw opening wide, and enveloped Kimberly's right hand all the way up to the elbow. Blunt baby molars scraped across her wrist. A slick, hot tongue probed her fingers, lapping at her knuckles.
It was about to bite her arm off. Her whole fucking arm.
She twisted the knife as hard as she could, slicing through muscle, angling up into what she hoped was the creature's brain. It shuddered atop her as she drove the blade in deep. The pressure on her hand tightened until she thought her hand would break, and then relaxed. She jerked her hand free, still clutching the kitchen knife tight, gore dripping from her fingers.
The creature's legs tensed, digging deep into Kimberly's ribs, then fell slack. She wriggled back, elbows sinking into the soft turf, kicking the creature away as it twitched and died. Its guts steamed in the rain as it curled in upon itself, legs folding, eyes going dull.
It made a burbling sound like water running down a drain, then went silent.
Kimberly tried to stand but her legs were shaking too hard. "Jesus," she whispered. "Is it-"
Fitch's lips drew back over his teeth as he stamped on the creature's head. Chitin cracked beneath his boot heel. He kicked it again, and again, until his bluejeans were soaked with gore up to the knee.
"Yeah." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sure is now."
It took all the strength Kimberly had to get to her feet. The creature didn't look half so big now that it was dying, rain plinking off its shattered carapace, its guts smeared across the soil. Just a big bug with the wrong face.
Those human lips. Those pleading eyes.
Her heart was pounding so hard she felt faint. Fitch was busy wiping his boots on the grass but he rested one hand on her shoulder when he saw her wobbling. "Did it cut you?"
For once, she didn't want to shrug him away. Fitch's hand was a reassuring pressure, the one thing she was sure was real. "It's not that. It's..." She closed her eyes. "God. Sorry."
"For what?"
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