by David Wong
He didn’t reply, but I knew I was right.
“Okay, so you got some serious motivation to keep her safe, right? Now get us the fuck out of here.”
John said, “You better hurry, too.”
______
TWO ROOMS AWAY, an inch of ash fell from a rolled cigarette crammed into a poo-smeared dog biscuit. A faint ember of orange light smoldered away at the remaining two inches.
JOHN SAID TO me, “We have” —he thought for a moment— “five minutes, thirteen seconds before biscuit time.”
I set my watch. I couldn’t find the countdown feature, managed to change the date and the time zone both before I got it set, then had to adjust for the time lost.
4:48.
We burst out of the door, me with my arm around Largeman’s neck, holding the lighter to his cheek.
“Nobody move, or I’ll light his fucking face on fire!” I meant it, too.
Either they took this threat seriously or Largeman was giving them instructions to back off. We pushed him down the hall and he pointed us to an elevator.
4:12.
We climbed inside another giant spider, much to Amy’s horror, and took an agonizingly long, slow ride down. Amy was having trouble standing, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms around her gut.
Something’s growing in there. Oh, shit, shit, shit.
Down and down and down. These people built their skyscrapers upside down.
1:32.
Finally, it stopped. We emerged in a round, tube-like hallway. We passed through one thick, round door after another.
:58.
We entered an enormous chamber. Organic machines and clear tubes and huge, egg-shaped pods that thrummed with power. I barely noticed any of it. What caught my attention was an enormous creature in the center of the room, shaped something like a huge, elephant-sized toad. It squatted in the center of the room and at the soundless command of Largeman, it opened its enormous mouth wide.
Blackness. Inside this creature was the same swirling darkness we saw in the dark column in the mall complex. I squinted and with concentration I could see light, shapes, a room. A moving figure . . .
:36.
Largeman stepped aside and pointed us toward the mouth.
“Go. Now.”
I said, “Where does it go? I mean, specifically, where will we come out?”
“Theoretically? You should not emerge far from where you went in. But it is difficult to predict.”
“Amy survived going through. She’ll survive going back?”
No answer. I stepped up to the dark portal and as I got closer I realized I could see faintly through it. There did seem to be a small room on the other side, barely visible. I held my breath and stepped into the mouth of the beast, felt again that disconnected, time-lost feeling of an unexpected nap. I was pitched forward and landed on a hardwood floor. I looked up and saw I was in a hallway, turned and saw an open doorway with a VNV Nation poster on it.
I stood and realized I was looking through the Irish elevator door in the Sullivan house, only instead of open air I was looking into the toad room I had just come from. The door stood open next to me, as if it had been flung open when I fell in.
:22.
Molly leapt through and trotted past me. John pushed Amy through and she tumbled onto the floor and instantly went into a fetal position, face twisted in pain. There was a commotion in the other room now. I could see a dozen of the Beastments in there, wreaking havoc. There was a crowd of naked humanity as word seemed to have spread that things were about to go terribly wrong.
Largeman had ahold of John as they had apparently either changed their mind or had decided to keep him as a souvenir. There was a struggle of flailing arms and kicking feet and John grabbed Largeman’s face and came away with a leathery bundle—the man’s mask.
John froze. The man’s back was to me so I couldn’t see what John saw, but the look in John’s eyes was a sort of sudden blankness. He didn’t scream or puke or react at all; it was like his brain suddenly crashed like Windows.
I heard footsteps in the hall of the Sullivan house. I spun and saw Robert North jogging toward me from the stairwell, wearing a long, tan woman’s overcoat and an enormous feathery hat.
“Hey!” I shouted. “We made it! She’s sick, she has—look, get me some, uh . . . a cross or some holy water or . . . oh, get the Jesus picture! We’ll rub it on her.”
:11.
I turned and saw that the man had snatched the mask from John’s hand and was sticking it back on his face. I opened my mouth to scream to John, then wondered if sound would even travel through the rift. Then that question was answered when—
:00.
—a deep, heavy THOOMPH like a sonic boom hammered the world on the other side of the door. The crowd in the room flew into a frenzy. John kicked his way to his feet and ran my direction. He threw himself through, fell into the hallway. I went to close the door, but North calmly strode over. He reached out a hand, stopped the door, and looked in at Largeman. The two stared at each other across worlds and the man on the other side mouthed something that seemed like a bitter insult. Though I couldn’t hear it and I knew neither of these men, the meaning was clear. I should have known you were behind this.
Amy’s skin was bulging and swelling in places. I grabbed her hand and wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled her close, whispered that it was going to be okay, that we would get her fixed right up, that—
BANG!
There was suddenly warm blood all over me and a ragged hole appeared in Amy’s temple. She went limp in my arms.
Standing a few feet away, was North.
He was holding a little silver gun.
A woman’s gun.
A thread of smoke drifting up from the barrel.
EVERYTHING INSIDE MY head turned black as deep space. I just sat there, shirt and arms flecked with red, just looking at her, at her slack face, her mouth hanging half open. And suddenly her body was being pulled from my arms and North was pulling her, dragging Amy by her feet like a rag doll. John just stood there, he just fucking stood there while all this happened and I found I had no strength to stand.
North wrestled with Amy’s body and threw the legs into the doorway, then came around and lifted the shoulders and pushed them through. The crowd in the other world, in the toad room, seemed completely confused by this, a dead body forcing its own way through the portal. But Largeman got it and he screamed. He screamed so loud I could hear it on the other side and soon the people around him understood it and bedlam ensued.
It was too late. Amy’s body ruptured, spilling out a cloud of the swirling white insects. The flying parasites saw a room full of hosts and poured forth into the naked crowd. A stampede ensued. The rest of Amy’s body exploded, bits of blood and bone flying back into the hallway. I heard a metallic tinkling sound like a coin hitting the floor, just as North slammed the door shut. He opened it again and saw only the Undisclosed night sky and a downpour of snow.
I started to stand but North spun and put the pistol on me.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said.
“And you are wrong.”
He started to say something else but at that moment John came up behind him and punched him in the kidneys. North arched his back and suddenly I saw the metallic object I had heard hit the floor. It was a shiny, curved bit of steel, flecked with red. Something a surgeon would use to brace a broken spine.
I picked up the piece of metal and jabbed it into the wrist of North’s gun hand. I felt it go in, punching through skin and popping between the two bones of his forearm. North shrieked and the gun clattered to the floor.
I grabbed the gun, pointed it at North’s heart, and watched him melt. Literally. He fell into a puddle of goo and, from it, emerged a creature not unlike a jellyfish.
A man-of-war, actually . . .
It floated up, just as we had seen it do a couple of days ago. I squeezed the trigger and sent shot after sho
t at the thing, chips of wood flecking off the walls. The jellyfish barely noticed. It floated downstairs and Molly ran barking after it.
We never saw it again.
There was a puddle of marbled goo on the floor that seemed to be steaming, dissolving. North’s leftovers.
I took a step forward and yanked open the door, just as North had. A blast of cold air and a dusting of snow blew in; the Sullivans’ backyard lay ten feet below. I was amazed that there was still light outside. The whole thing had only taken an hour or so. I sat down on the hardwood floor, sticky dots of blood drying on my face, snowflakes melting on my knees. I couldn’t think of a single reason to ever stand up again.
WE WENT OUT to my truck, then remembered that my truck was not at this house but was at the mall about a mile away. I also had lost my keys at some point but couldn’t remember when. We set out wading through the storm, not sure if a person could walk that far in ankle-deep snow without getting frostbite. We didn’t care. We plowed through it, not talking. The afternoon was fast fading to evening and what would happen after darkness fell and the shadows grew, we didn’t know. A few minutes into our trip, during which we made depressingly little progress and lost feeling in all twenty of our toes, a pickup came grinding up behind us, pulling over just ahead. The driver leaned out, a young guy with a red baseball cap.
“Yo!” he said, looking over the dusting of snow on our coats. “What’s up? Want a ride?”
We did.
The guy had bucket seats so John climbed into the bed and rode it out back there. I asked the guy if he was going by the old mall, he said he wasn’t, I asked him if he was going south close to my neighborhood, he said he was. I looked around for Molly, saw she hadn’t followed us, and climbed in. We drove.
“This be some snowy shit, yo!” he said. He had a little triangle of hair under his bottom lip. A soul patch, they call it. I said, “Yep.”
“It’s been hella slick drivin’ in this shit. I’m swervin’ and gettin’ stuck here and there. All the other drivers be hatin’ on me.”
I stared at the man.
“Are you Fred Durst? Of the band Limp Bizkit?”
He smirked and concentrated on the road.
Eventually he said, “Gettin’ hella dark out here. I’m thinkin’ you two don’t wanna be around when it gets fully dark, yo. Things be movin’ and suckin’ and hatin’ on everything. But you know that, am I right?”
I said, “And you’re saying that you’re not one of them?” I glanced in the rearview mirror at John, huddled against the wind in the truck bed. I gauged whether or not I could get the wheel away from this guy and shove him out if he should try to eat me or whatever.
Fred Durst said, “Well, I ain’t Fred Durst. You’ll see what you wanna see. If John were in here, he’d see somebody else. But the point is there’s darkness, yeah, but there’s light and it all balances out. Like them yin and yang fishes, forever bitin’ each other’s tails. You know how it be.”
I studied his blue eyes, said, “Why don’t you tell me who you really are before I punch you in the face?”
“Yo, I told you. You just didn’t listen. But I’m on your side. I been watching you. In fact, you could say that I’ve been ‘dogging’ you the whole time.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about and I’m in no mood to be riddled. Talk straight or shut the fuck up. Are you the good witch? Some kind of angel? Are you Jesus, Fred Durst?”
“It don’t matter. You had a job to do and you did it, even if you didn’t know you had a job to do or that you were doin’ it. The blade that cuts out the colon cancer’s got an ugly job, right? I guess it’s gotta have faith in the surgeon to get it through while its head’s bein’ sliced through blood and impacted shit.”
“You know what? Fuck you. All this, this whole thing, is bullshit from top to bottom. I don’t even know what I believe but I know we killed some ugliness back there. And Amy’s dead because of it and she never hurt anybody. She’s born and she gets shit on for twenty years and then she dies for no reason and I’m still alive and I should have been killed a long time ago. Hell, I’ve considered killing me several times, as a favor to the world.”
Fred Durst said, “Yo, I know it’s hard. You know there was that boxer, back in the nineties, Evander Holyfield. You know he got to be champion and then he had that heart disease. Ended his career, was gonna end his life. He goes to this televangelist, one of those hairspray-and-polyester dudes. Dude prays and dances over him and Evander goes back to the doctor. Doctor says he didn’t have heart disease no more. Holyfield says it’s a miracle but it turned out they had diagnosed him wrong.”
“That could not have anything less to do with this conversation. You know what you people are like, Fred? You’re like the genie from the bottle in those stories. You get a wish and you wish for a million dollars and then it turns out the million is from an insurance settlement because your best friend died.”
“Yep,” said Fred, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “He neeeever had the heart problem. Ain’t that somethin’? Turned out it was a smudge on his X-rays or some shit. Do you wish you had died instead of Amy? Like, if you could do it over again?”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m asking the question, yo. Would you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“You’d trade your life for hers? So tomorrow David Wong is dead, Amy Sullivan is alive?”
“Stop asking me, Fred. You’re making my head hurt.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, what are you gonna do, shoot me? Shoot me and resurrect Amy? Or tell me that I’ve been dead the whole time like in that shitty Bruce Willis movie?”
“Dude, how would you have gone to work every day if you were—”
“Shut up, Fred. We’re here.”
We rolled to a stop and I saw my little house, all the edges rounded under snow. Fred said, “You know what, don’t be too afraid of the dark, yo. You got a watch on your back now. Okay, dude?”
I had nothing else to say to Fred so I jumped out and trudged to the sidewalk. I heard the truck pull away and John came up behind me. I got halfway to my door and stopped. Footprints. Fresh prints, leading from the front door around back. The back being where the toolshed was.
I had, incredibly, forgotten all about the toolshed and the body within. I went around, following the tracks and finding myself walking slower and slower, shuffling like a man on his way to death row.
I go around that corner, and everything will change. Everything.
I had put it off long enough, though. I should have done this two nights ago. I rounded the corner and saw the toolshed and was unsurprised to see the door was standing wide open. The lock was hanging there, unhooked, and that was no surprise, either. I had put the key back on the nail by the kitchen door and any cop with a warrant could have gotten it. I went to the door, swung it open and saw two things that could not register in my mind.
The first was Amy.
She was standing there, alive, arms wrapped around her parka. She was looking down at the corpse on the floor, seeming totally lost, like something absolutely did not compute. I could sympathize with her. She heard me, looked, had an expression of shock that was almost comical. She looked at me, then at the floor, then back at me.
I said, “It’s me, Amy.”
She didn’t respond. I moved toward her, wanting to squeeze her and take her inside and never let her out of my sight again. She backed away from me, bumping into the shelf full of glass jars. She looked like she was planning her escape. I understood that, too. And that was the second thing:
The body on the floor was me.
I know my own face pretty well, even blue and frozen like a meatsicle as this one was, nestled among the wrinkled tarp that Amy had thrown open. There was a big, bloody hole right in my heart. John stepped in behind me and looked down at the body and then over at Amy, going through the same tangled p
ath of thought I had just tread.
John said to Amy, “Can I see your feet?”
Amy didn’t answer.
John said, “I know you don’t understand this, but you gotta realize that Dave and I saw you get killed not twenty minutes ago. So we got some confusion to sort through.”
Amy nodded and spoke for the first time, saying, “Okay.”
She left the shed and sat on the steps at my back door. With the snow pouring down on her she pulled off her little leather boot and her sock. I watched as John picked up her foot, examined it, then had her do the same with the other one.
He turned to me and said, “They’re clean.”
And with that, everything snapped into place for me. All the pieces of the puzzle. If you figured it out before now, well, go win a Nobel Prize, Mr. Genius.
I said, “They’re stocking the world with their own people, with replacements. Things that can bridge the world between the spiritual and physical, Korrok extending the shadows into our world like fingers, controlling his meat puppets. That’s what they were doing in there, making things that look like people. Monsters, under their control. His control. Like with Drake. So what happened to the real Drake? Dead?”
Amy looked up, eyes wide, understanding where this was going.
John said, “Dunno. Maybe they got him and all the other people locked away somewhere. But I doubt it. You know, these replacements, the copies, they gotta have all the memories of the real people. So who knows how they use the originals.”
I said, “That mark, then, on the foot. That’s their mark. And if we had looked on the other Amy—”
“We’d have seen a mark like the symbol for pi. It’s probably a brand logo.”
“So they made an Amy,” I said. “Probably when they took her. They made a new Amy and infected her—”
“Because they knew if we thought it was her, we would try to bring her back here,” we finished together.
John said, “And that would have been the end. We would have gotten infected when she, uh, hatched, then whoever was nearby when, you know, we hatched . . .”