Inside I froze. The station was dead empty except for two people at the front counter. Sheriff Cummings spoke to a tall, lean man in his sixties with black slacks and a black-and-white checkered shirt trying not to look like a picnic blanket, long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A faded cowboy hat sat atop thin, greasy white hair pulled back in a ponytail. He turned to examine us, a pair of muddy green eyes narrowing as they scanned us down and up. Dammit, this was him. I sensed it. Cassie’s papa, my grandpa.
The corners of his mouth twitched into a slight grin. In a voice low and crisp like burnt honey he said, “That you, Cassie-Jo?”
An airy squeak escaped her. Her hand shook in mine. I squeezed her fingers so tight I had to be hurting her, but I didn’t dare relax my grip and let her slip away from me in a panic.
Sheriff Cummings shifted his weight with his hands on his hips and looked at his shoes, smacking his Nicorette gum.
“And you must be Eustace ‘John Doe’ Kelly.” The old man walked around us in a slow circle. I felt his eyes on me in a way that made my skin crawl. When he came round to face me again, he stuck out a rough-looking hand. “Earl Lyons. Chief executive of the Thistleville Mining District.”
I glared at him a long time, refusing to take his hand. “Cassie-Jo don’t wanna talk to you none, sir. What did you do to her?”
“What makes you think I did something to her?”
I didn’t bother answering. Maybe it was the wolfish gleam in his eye. Or the fact that he knew my full name, or that he wasn’t shocked to see her unchanged in nineteen years.
He retracted his hand and folded his arms, stroking the closely trimmed beard as he narrowed his eyes on me. “You’re a bit of a troublemaker, ain’t you, boy? Seems you’ve had a few run-ins for schoolyard fights, broken windows, violent threats, stealing…” He leaned closer and closer to me until his dill-pickle breath blew right in my face. “Unless you want to add kidnapping the disabled daughter I just learned I had to your juvie, I suggest you let her come with me and be on your way back to Tennessee.”
I glanced at Sheriff Cummings. He watched us now, but he showed no intent to intervene on Ma’s or my behalf.
“What do you want her for?” I asked.
“That’s none of your concern.” He had murder in his eyes. Learning why he hated Ma so much would take prying into his mind that I’d already promised her I wouldn’t do.
“I pulled her out of that mine.”
“For that, I thank you kindly.”
“Tell me about that thing living in your old mine.”
“What makes you think—?”
“There’s a lot of coal in that mine,” I said. “A lot of other stuff, too—artifacts. I’ll bet it’s worth a lot of money.”
He flared his nostrils and stepped back, pacing in front of us. He was pissed, all right. And he didn’t know nothing about me. He somehow hadn’t noticed the resemblance that had been so obvious to the sheriff. He thought I was just another troubled boy who happened to come through town.
I looked at him serious. “You have a bit of a problem, and I’d like to help you out. I like hunting, see. An alien corpse like that’d make a nice trophy. Unless, of course, you’d like it incinerated to make the old creeper leave the town’s consciousness alone for good. In that case…” I let my eyes flicker to Ma, then back to Sheriff Cummings and Mr. Lyons. “I just wanna get this slave bracelet thing off her wrist and elope.”
The old man’s eyes fell to my hand holding Ma’s, where the cuff remained clamped on her skin. His grin widened and the twinkle returned to his eye. That lie about hunting resonated just a little too well with him, and I knew Ma and I were in for some serious shit. We had to run, but I needed to know what the universe wouldn’t tell me straightforward about my Pa—how to kill him—and I had to save the town first. “Well well well, Sheriff, what do we know about the alien in the mine? This here kid wants to kill it for us.” Mr. Lyons whipped out a pistol and pointed it at my chest. “I think he knows a little bit too much. What do you think?”
“You ain’t gonna off your own boy right here in my office now, are you?” Sheriff Cummings settled his weight onto one leg, gum smacking, hands still on his hips as he spoke.
Mr. Lyons said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Take a good look at him, Earl. I bet if you took a paternity test right now, you’d come up positive.”
“What’re you saying, Roy? You think I…?” He laughed again, a hearty, gut-busting laugh that made veins pop out on his neck. “Well, I’ll be damned! Lock him up. I’ll deal with him after I’ve got that ‘slave bracelet’ someplace—”
Ma’s fist flew up and caught Earl Lyons square in the crook of his throat. The movement was so sharp and swift I jumped. He gagged. Ma slipped from my grasp, screaming and slapping at the gun. It exploded. A cold burn seared up and down some nerve in my arm and I screamed, clutching a bloody hole that went clean through my bicep. She wrenched the gun away from the old man, pointed it at him. Panting. Eyes wide. Jaw clenched tight.
The sick old bastard put his hands up and smiled at her. Laughed at her. “You gonna shoot me, sweetheart? You gonna run away with our baby and make some more babies? I hear if you inbreed enough, they come out faceless.”
“Shut up, Earl. Take an easy, Cassie-Jo.” Sheriff Cummings had his own gun drawn, trained on Ma. His eyes went wide as he glanced to me. “What the hell?”
Too late, I realized I’d begun to molt. Watery mucus dripped off my skin as it changed texture and darkened to a rich blue hue. This time I welcomed the appearance of my claws and tentacled jowls. If either one of those sleazebags got close enough to touch me, or Ma, I’d scramble their brains up good.
Earl’s nasty grin vanished, and he backed away slowly to stand by the sheriff’s side. The two men could sense the deeper shift of atmosphere in the room, the incongruity of my nature with the reality they knew. They glanced at each other, then back at us, like they’d both felt that kind of dissonance before.
“You ain’t his only daddy, Pa,” Ma said in that weirdly distant, almost listless voice. She smiled back and tried to laugh, except her lips quivered too much and she choked instead. In confirmation, three panels of florescent bulbs in the ceiling above us flickered with energetic interference.
I wanted her to shoot the two men, douse them in something foul-smelling and flammable, and burn the whole damn exploitation-of-justice office to the ground.
“Please don’t make me do that,” Ma whispered aloud, gun hand shaking. I didn’t think I could make her do anything, not without touching her, but I was angry and foul enough in my head for her to see and sense it all clearly. “Please just let us go, Sheriff Cummings. You don’t have to kill us. We won’t tell no one about the alien in the mine. Or the others, neither.”
Sheriff Cummings gave that nervous, squeaky laugh back when he decided Cassie-Jo wasn’t lying about her identity. He lowered his gun.
“What are you doing?” Earl growled.
“I’m tired of covering your ass just to cover my own. You helped me off my ex-wife. I helped when you offed yours. The fire in Hell’s been burning hotter and hotter with each body I’ve helped you add to keep things quiet around here about what’s in that damned mine. Now the demon’s come to get us, don’t you see?” He laughed again, a manic, panic-stricken warble that wouldn’t end.
Earl grabbed the sheriff’s gun hand. “Just shoot them!”
Ma kept Earl’s gun pointed at the brawling men. I took Ma’s hand and she gasped. I wasn’t sure if her reaction came from the slime or the energy. I tried to pull her with me, but she wouldn’t budge. “Come on,” I growled.
Sheriff Cummings finally pushed Earl away, stuck the muzzle of the gun inside his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood sprayed the silver-sheen desk, and his body fell backwards to thud against the bone-yellow floor tiles.
Ma dropped the gun from her hand, and I didn’t take the time to retrieve it before we both turned and
bolted out into the morning storm.
***
Warm rain beat down on us, and thunder rumbled beyond the hills surrounding the town. The stitches in my chest burned and oozed. I knew those wounds were bleeding again. The slime-saturated bandages slid off me, falling out from under my shirt as I ran. My legs burned from pumping them so hard, so fast, and I could barely hear anything except the throb and rush of blood in my ears.
We were almost to the motel when a bullet thudded into the back of Ma’s ribs. She fell hard to her knees almost at the motel’s front stoop. I tried to pull her back to her feet, but she hurt too bad.
“Eustace!”
I snapped my head around and saw a stout little lady, four-foot-eight, with a bob of bottle-blonde hair showing gray roots. Good Lord, it was Margot Polyston, the woman who’d raised me on a troubled boys farm down in Karns for eight of my twelve years in foster care. She stood in the threshold of the open door to the room where Ma and I had slept the night.
She whistled and screamed at me with one hand cupped around her mouth, the other clutching a rifle, “Get your ass in here quick!”
I wrapped my arm around Ma’s waist and pulled her up, forcing her to run with me to the welcoming reprieve of the dank little room.
Margot cocked the rifle and aimed it at the old man. “Stop right there! Why’re you shooting at these kids? Hey! I asked you a question! Where do you think you’re going?”
I couldn’t hear Earl’s reply, if he gave one. I took Ma into the bathroom to get her as far away as I could manage from the window and the gun in Earl’s hand. I let her sink to the floor, propped up against the wall. She choked and spluttered, coughing up blood. She clutched the front of her left side while a chocolate-brown spot seeped into the back of her hospital scrubs.
Margot slammed the room door shut and I heard two bolts click into place. Her footsteps stomped back to us. “How bad is she hit?”
“Bad,” I called back. “She hurts real bad.”
Ma’s eyes were wide, her face streaked with tears, blood dribbling down her chin as she continued to cough and gulp air, one shocking breath at a time.
Margot cursed. I turned my head to see her standing outside the bathroom with her phone pressed to her ear.
“Who you calling?” I asked.
“Ambulance and the police.”
“Wait—”
“Now’s no time to worry about your molting. She’s bleeding to death.”
“That old man chased us out of the police station. He and the sheriff were going to kidnap us, right before the sheriff shot himself.”
Margot’s eyes widened. “What?”
“You can’t trust the police in this town to stop that cuss, and you don’t need to call an ambulance.” I gestured to Cassie-Jo. “She’s different. If you just give us a minute, she’ll be fine.”
Margot stared hard at me. She looked at her phone and dialed a different number before turning away to watch out the window, rifle in hand.
I took both of Ma’s hands in mine and whispered, “You want me to hold it off until it heals?”
She nodded, and I did my thing. I went into her mind where she processed physical sensations, where it hurt, and numbed the pain. She didn’t quit wheezing, but her body relaxed, her eyelids drooped in that half-conscious stupor that was her norm. I moved one hand to her shoulder to keep her from slumping over on her side. It took about thirty seconds for her punctured lung to reinflate, and two minutes more before I heard the clink of metal on linoleum as her body expelled the bullet.
Margot’s anxious growl rumbled in the background. She’d gotten through to somebody on the phone, and her tone was fierce and animated. Then she cursed. Then silence.
When the hole in Ma’s skin and insides was nearly closed, I pulled out of her thoughts as far as I could and let go. Her mind remained blank a moment, and I was terrified I’d broken her until I heard her thoughts whispering to themselves again.
I picked the crumpled bullet off the floor and looked it over in my palm before tossing it in the garbage.
Margot had returned to check on us. She stared at me, brows furrowed. “What you do to fix her?”
“It wasn’t me.” I held up Ma’s arm to show off the strange cuff. “It’s this thing. Came from the aliens.” I let Ma’s arm fall back in her lap and refrained from touching her so she could return to the few senses she had undisturbed. “Ambulance coming?”
“Couldn’t get through. I called Bryan at home long enough to explain that some crazy fella shot at you and hit the girl that was with you, then I got cut off. It’s like somebody’s using a signal jammer.” Phone out of sight, she waved her arm, sighed, and put her hand on her hip. “Eustace, what the hell is going on?”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
I took a deep breath. “This here is Cassie-Jo. She’s my Ma. She’s been stuck in the mine with my Pa—the alien—a long time. Or at least I thought he, it, was…” I finally had the time to process what Earl Lyons and Roy Cummings had said. And I’d thought the world I lived in couldn’t get any more shocking. My mind reeled, numb. Ma had never had another boy. I knew because her mind had cried out to me every time that futile cycle of birthing, expulsion, and re-insemination had come to a peak. Her ill-fated spawn with the Elder Thing had always been female. Until now I’d chalked it up to statistics. It had never occurred to me I’d begun life with a complete template of human genes.
“That man chasing us,” I said. “His name’s Earl Lyons. He’s Cassie-Jo’s papa. I just found out he’s my papa too, at least in part.”
“I think Eustace is a… chimera,” Ma whispered. “I think that’s what they’d call that sort of thing. Don’t know for sure, though.”
Margot cocked an eyebrow, but her eyes were too wide, nostrils flaring too much to look skeptical. Her expression was more a kind of mixed sympathy, gut-felt knowing, and disbelief. She’d dealt with a lot of crazy family shit from kids she took care of, though I was probably the craziest. She knew things about me, knew there were things even I didn’t know how to explain. “This the girl you kept saying was in your head?”
I nodded.
Margot nodded slowly in return. “You came here to get her out.”
“Nah.” I glanced at Ma, then back up at Margot. “You remember Bryan ended up in the hospital with a seizure last time I got mad. You know it weren’t natural. He came out all right, no brain damage or anything serious. But…” I swallowed and rubbed my palms on my knees. I hated apologizing for something I wasn’t sure I’d done. But I knew I’d hurt Margot worse if I tried to deny the terrible power of the thing inside me I couldn’t always control, the thing that had gotten stronger and stronger over the years. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt you two, leastways. You’ve been fair to me, taught me how to survive shit, how to get along with people and feel good about working hard.”
The bathroom light flickered. Margot looked up at it, then let her gaze fall back on me. “Think I know what’s jamming my phone signal.” She sighed and looked hard at Cassie-Jo. “You affecting her too? She doesn’t look quite…”
“All there?” I shrugged and looked at Ma. “The alien’s affecting her worse. It’s the cuff, see. It…” I didn’t know how to explain exactly what it did. Wasn’t sure how well I could sense and comprehend everything about it if I tried. I shook my head.
“The man you say shot himself,” said Margot, face tight. “You make him do it?”
“I wasn’t touching him.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. Wasn’t trying to.”
Margot turned away, pressing her fist to her mouth. The silence stretched on long enough I knew my guardian hurt as much as she was shocked and bewildered. She was afraid. Afraid for us. Afraid of us. “What am I supposed to do with you, Eustace Kelly? I came out here to talk some sense into you and bring you home. But this…” She waved her han
d in the air once more. I reckoned she wanted to say it was too much, but she didn’t.
Ma’s eyes widened suddenly, and I heard the language of the Elder Thing calling in her head. I cursed and reached for her hand, then pulled my hand back and bit my knuckles, letting my facial tentacles weave and sucker around my fist.
Margot took a reflexive step toward us. “What’s happening?”
I put my hand up to back her off. “The alien in the mine wants its cuff back. He’s weak and needs the energy to leave the darkness, but he hasn’t been able to break her mind in whatever way he needs.”
“Seems like a mighty powerful creature.” Margot dropped her voice to a whisper as though it made her question a little more discreet. “Why hasn’t it killed her?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
Ma gasped, “He’s changing me!” She slid to her side and began convulsing on the floor.
Margot began, “What…?”
“I don’t know what it means,” I said.
The pale blue hue of Ma’s skin deepened to the color of blueberries in a matter of seconds. That’s what my skin looked like right before I slimed myself, what it looked like now. “Holy shit, I think she’s trying to molt.”
Three calm raps at the door made Margot and me both jump. Cursing, she re-cocked the rifle and crept back toward the front of the room. She looked through the peephole, then slowly unbolted the door and left the chain in the top lock. “I’m armed,” she called. “What do you want with these kids?”
“I’m Earl Lyons. The girl’s my disabled daughter.”
“If she’s your daughter, how come you shot her?”
“I was aiming for the boy. He’s trying to kidnap her. I just want to take my girl to the hospital and turn the boy over to the authorities.”
I left Ma to her distress and poked my head out past the bathroom door frame. Margot glanced back at me a second before returning her face to the stranger. “I’m the boy’s guardian. He’s not going anywhere until the police get here.”
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