by Amy Lukavics
But it was too late.
For June had awakened.
days past
Something had happened to June when she was ten years old, something she had pushed from her mind and never refound, not even all those years later when she awakened in front of the monsters at the ill-fated institution.
Before it happened, she had been a different little girl, one who delighted in the simplest of routine pleasures—coloring at the table while her mother cooked, practicing braiding the hair of her dolls so she’d know how to do her own one day, convincing her older brother to let her sit on his back and ride him around the living room like a horse. She didn’t like scary stories and wasn’t intrigued by darkness or pain like she eventually grew to be.
Everything was how it should have been, unthinking and never ending in its constant state of normal. She was a delight to her parents, to her classmates, to the people at her church. Everyone was always telling Mom and Dad what a sweet, obedient little girl they had raised. And June loved to hear it, loved to have it confirmed for her that she was doing right.
Then one day when she was ten, June woke up with a headache and felt as though an immense amount of time had passed in her mind, but not in the reality of her bedroom, her house, her family, or the planet itself. She’d had an awful, prolonged nightmare but couldn’t remember the details, no matter how desperately she clawed at them. In fact, the more she did, the more they dissipated like smoke.
So June stopped trying to remember. She stopped going on her nightly bike rides to the wooded area that looked over her town, suddenly illogically afraid of the entire area. She went on with her life, grateful to be somewhere secure and safe, grateful to have a stupid brother that made her want to punch him, grateful to have food and shelter and comfort.
But new values grew in her after the mysterious nightmare had scared her straight, new hopes and dreams, things she hadn’t considered before. June now felt lucky to have a life like hers. Suddenly, things that others thought were scary or distasteful were interesting to her, and she felt that exploring such feelings could teach her something useful, something that could help her protect herself from the deadly bliss that her previous ignorance had offered. She felt obligated to turn this knowledge into something important, was desperate to discover whatever fate awaited her in adulthood and work toward it as hard as she could.
But her parents seemed to be bothered by postnightmare June. No matter what she did or how genuinely open she tried to be, they were suddenly and constantly disappointed in her, giving her puzzled looks, raising their eyebrows and whispering behind her back. Strange, she heard them say. Off. They noticed right away that June’s number of friends had dropped significantly.
Then one day, Mom told June that they were going to the doctor. Nothing ever came from the appointment, but what June heard her mother say about her disturbed June so deeply that she decided to ignore that it ever happened, erase it from her mind forever.
“Something’s wrong with my daughter,” Mom told the doctor, who looked unconvinced, as the ten-year-old who sat before him seemed perfectly fine. On the counter in the white and sterile room, there was a newspaper with a headline reporting multiple accounts of an unidentified flying object in local skies. “I don’t know how to explain it, but you’ve got to believe me—she’s changed. It’s like it happened overnight, a little while back.”
June didn’t feel like she had changed, but if she had, it was in a good way.
“You’ll have to be more clear,” the doctor said, obviously irritated at the waste of his time, but what did he care as long as he got paid in the end? “How exactly did she change?”
“It’s the strangest thing, the most bothersome thing. Her entire personality is different,” Mom said, insistent. “It’s almost like my daughter was taken away and replaced with someone who looks exactly like her.”
awake
June sat up from the table, the restraint straps falling to pieces on the floor. She was now able to see everyone in the room: the tiny wrinkled doctor, Nurse Joya with her perfect blond hair and cherry-red lipstick, all five of the other nurses who were like slightly varied versions of their master. They all looked at June with wide eyes. They all kept very, very still.
June realized now that those things—Joya, the doctor, the nurses—were all different appendages of the same beast, one big monster capable of many forms simultaneously. She saw them now like a waving hand of finger puppets, each with a different face.
If she cut off the right head, so to speak, June knew that the rest of them would die, too. She remembered how the doctor had sometimes moved his lips along silently while Joya talked during their sessions. June had a pretty good idea who the head was, but it sure would be fun to test the others just to be sure.
There was no reason to rush things.
“Please,” the doctor whispered, putting his hands up, and with her mind, June made his fingers fold backward like a flower blooming, his bones crunching as they went, and he began to scream. June froze him so that only his throat gurgled, and his wrinkled face reddened, and then she caused his head to explode all over Nurse Joya and the other nurses, a satisfying wet pop! that sent an array of fluids and chunks flying through the air.
The other women tried to run; June made their legs disappear, and blood poured over the concrete floor. Some of them gave in to death immediately, but a few still tried to crawl with their arms toward the plastic sheet. So June made their arms go away, too, and then their eyes, and then their tongues, all within the blink of an eye.
“June,” Joya whispered, the only one who hadn’t moved, shivering and covered with the doctor’s entrails. “Please. There’s still a chance.”
“A chance for what?” June giggled manically, unable to imagine what the answer could possibly be.
“A chance to beat them,” Joya insisted. “You could use their own technology against them! They kept you in the dark, dangled you like a mouse in front of a snake. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Not particularly,” June said. “Especially since the mouse was given sharp enough teeth to chew off the head of the snake.”
Despite that, June still had a few questions.
“How were you so stupid that you couldn’t figure out I had the key the moment you saw me in that tunnel?” June went on. “I created the path to get in there myself, as I’m sure you knew. You deserve to lose.”
“I thought we caused that!” Joya cried out, pressing her back harder against the wall in her panic as if she could somehow disappear through it. No such luck. “We knew you were powerful. We only wanted to harness that to help us find the real key. Those other girls, they had powers, too—maybe not like yours but it all came from the same source—and we found them so much earlier than you. We thought your role would be...different.”
“Different how?” June was still sitting on the awful table they’d strapped her to. She used her mind to keep Joya from running away.
“A scribe of some kind,” Joya explained, softly, as though doing so might somehow save her life. “We weren’t alerted to your potential until you started writing your story. From the moment you typed the first word, we were able to smell you, smell where you’d been, just like we’d smelled it on Adie and Simpson and Cassy and Jessica.”
June didn’t miss that she’d artfully left out mention of Eleanor. An attempt not to pour gasoline on the fire, June assumed.
“The Others,” Nurse Joya said. “The ones that took you-all at one point or the other...they have a very distinct odor.” Her nose scrunched. “Our kind is hypersensitive to the stink.”
June knew the smell well, like warm salt water and formaldehyde.
“We began watching you, secretly,” Joya continued. “We started noticing that the story was causing a decline in you. And it was riddled with clues. We thought you were the one capable of finding the
key, we just didn’t know you were carrying it yourself. We didn’t even know what we were looking for or what it would do—we just knew that they were coming for us and that there was a way to stop them. We thought having captured you-all was a victory in itself.”
Joya paused, and her face reddened in her rage over her own failure. “We thought we were being clever when we set you up to get admitted. We didn’t know that those disgusting things were one step ahead of us all along. We figured that having you admit that you’d killed that man with your mind, facing that impossible reality, would enable you to remember whatever it was they’d made you forget. Little did we know they were still in control. They always were. Your story wasn’t a side effect of you processing your trauma. It was just bait, plain and simple. And we took it.”
So that was why Nurse Joya and the doctor had been so fixated on the night of Stewart’s death in June’s sessions. They knew they were looking to make something click, they just had no idea what they were really messing with. They had no idea of the true nature of the key that would be used to destroy them. And they made the mistake of taking the repercussions for the other girls more seriously than hers.
Eleanor. Eleanor’s gift had been to pass along important messages through Simpson from the land of the dead. The other girls had played different roles at different points that had led to this. June wasn’t sure exactly how, but she remembered how Lauren had claimed to be able to see through anyone’s eyes she chose. How Cassy had spoken of past lives. How Adie had heard things nobody else could. How Jessica had made sculptures of things that didn’t look like humans.
Despite it all, June hadn’t been quick enough to figure it all out before Simpson was killed and Eleanor was taken away from her. It was unfair. Each and every one of these monsters deserved to die. June didn’t want to disappoint her makers.
“Come with me,” June said softly as she swung her legs over the side of the table, her newfound power creating an incredible and terrifying calm within her. There were many things left to do. “Follow.”
June didn’t have to look to make sure the nurse was listening: she knew it’d be so. In an effort not to slip, she stepped barefoot over the scattered bodies and through the surprisingly hot fluids that had spilled onto and flooded the floor. She stopped in front of a mirror, looked without reaction at the reflection of the blood-smeared face she still just recognized. The top of her head was still missing, her brain still exposed.
There, toward the front part of the pulsating gray matter, closer to her eyes, June could see a single gleaming piece of metal attached to the tissue. A tiny green light on it flashed. The key. June smiled and stepped away from the mirror. The monsters hadn’t been wrong per se. The code word had always worked. June knew now that it had simply never been activated in the right conditions: with the brain chip from outer space exposed, rather than hidden beneath layers of scalp and bone.
The gift of the stars, indeed. The beings had always known that the monsters would do it to themselves, go to any extreme in order to beat their foes. They had always known that June would be cut open like a cadaver. The key had worked exactly as intended. Everything had gone according to plan.
“Let me free,” Joya screeched from behind her, so for now June silenced the monster in a nurse costume. All she had to do was think something to make it happen, and it was wonderful.
Together they walked through the laboratory, through the elaborate office with the trippy carpet and the heavy furniture, into the hallway of rooms where the rest of the patients slept or cried into the night. June’s mouth twitched, and all of the doors flew open.
“Run,” she whispered, and suddenly girls and women emerged from the open doorways, running to the front of the building, running to their freedom. June spotted Jessica and Cassy, willed them to look at her and raised a hand in farewell. They gaped at her, disbelief painting their faces, and June hoped that they’d remember her in a fond way, hoped they knew how much she had gone through to free them, hoped they understood how much had been lost to bring them all to this point.
June led Joya to stand directly before the nurses’ station. The uniformed women inside looked panicked at the sight of June, her brain still exposed, and Joya standing immobile beside her. They rushed to lock the doors, but—those silly nurses!—June had no need for something as minor as a door.
They all exploded at the same time, splattering the glass that separated them with blood and tissue. June carried on toward the hallway that she’d snuck into earlier, where she’d lost any and all hope of succeeding. Despite the feeling of failure that had followed, she had been right to have blind faith earlier. She hadn’t been stupid or foolish. And there was nothing she could have done to save Eleanor while she was in a coerced, drugged sleep in the room they had shared.
They entered the room where Eleanor still sat, mouth open, gazing into forever. June knew what she had come for, but despite everything that had happened and was happening, she felt afraid. Upset. Angry.
She went to Eleanor in the chair, leaned down to kiss her blood-streaked cheek. “I love you,” she whispered, and then she made Eleanor’s body die, as quick as a flash, painless, a mercy. Now there was no more suffering in her already-dead body. There was only June and Nurse Joya in the room now.
“You didn’t care what any of us felt,” June said, turning to the nurse. “What was this place before you became aware of the impending threat? All those women, everyone who came before us...” She reverted Nurse Joya to a state where she could speak again.
“It was our lifeblood,” Joya explained, and June was surprised to see tears welling in the thing’s eyes. “Our infinite food source. Humans had already done such a good job of herding themselves, lobotomizing each other and worse. We simply...took over. We looked like them, lived like them, lived off them.”
“Disgusting,” June said, crossing her arms. “The Others were right. You deserve to be wiped clean from this planet.”
“We were born of this planet!” the nurse snarled, spitting. “It is ours!”
“No more,” June said with a little grin. “Maybe if you had handled things differently, I’d be on your side. This is going to hurt very much, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry!” Joya begged, and June let her drop to her knees. “I’m so sorry! Please, please! I’m sorry—”
“No,” June said impatiently, cutting the nurse off. “There are no apologies now. It’s much too late for that.”
Nurse Joya’s eyes filled with genuine fear as she realized she couldn’t move again. June took a deep breath and began the nurse’s transformation. The holes in her face were forcibly opened, the appendages shivering as they protruded painfully forth from them. Tendons snapped as the monster revealed itself in full, only to have the appendages ripped from their roots, the claws pulled from the fingers, the fangs torn from the mouth.
June let Nurse Joya scream as loud as she wanted. June peeled the skin from the meat, then peeled the meat from the bone, then let the bones crumble and disintegrate until they resembled nothing more than blood-soaked sand. The screaming was long over, but June continued until nothing was left.
When she was through, June walked calmly through the empty institution, hardly processing the sound of the fire alarms, only vaguely realizing that she had started the fire herself with just a look. Burn it all to the ground. Chew the head from the snake to ensure it will never grow back.
June finally found the front desk, also empty, and looked out the window that faced the parking lot. For the first time in months, she saw the morning sun beginning to rise. She stepped out of the Burrow Place Asylum, felt the breeze upon her skin, real and clean, felt it lick her exposed brain tissue, felt the blood that covered her face and neck begin to congeal.
She knew just where to go first.
“I’m coming, sweet husband,” June sang into the morning as she made her way down the w
inding road leading to town. “I’m coming home to you now.”
She walked the whole way, making it so that nobody could see her. When she passed a bus stop crowded with people, nobody even looked up from their newspapers or books, although for fun she let one random young man see the truth. Nobody could seem to figure out what the hysterical man was pointing at, screaming and screaming, and June was ashamed to know that the screams gave her joy. She shivered, her new gift causing her entire body to buzz in pleasure.
It occurred to June that even though she had just acted as a mere cosmic weapon to wipe out the monstrosities of the institution, she didn’t mind one bit. It was nothing like being used by Dad or Mom or Robert or Fred. It didn’t take power away from her but rather provided it in droves, made it flow, washing and warm and wonderful through her every vein. She savored her gift from the land of stars and voids. It’d been her destiny ever since she was ten years old. Out of everybody on the planet, June had been the one who was chosen to carry the key. Imagine what else they are capable of, she thought breathlessly as she walked.
Surely, surely, they only had more greatness planned for June. Surely they would never discard their precious weapon, years in the making, after just one use. Surely their only plan was to cleanse the earth of the monsters, not the humans. They would have done that already...right? June wished she could ask Eleanor.
Eleanor.
June firmly told herself that she didn’t have a place in her current state to think about Eleanor. Not one bit, not now, maybe not ever. If she thought about Eleanor, she might accidentally lose control and cause everything in existence to just...go away. She didn’t care to face the fact that she was unbearably, unspeakably alone.
There were things she wanted to do, needed to do, and only then would she stop and think about what could possibly come next.
June willed herself to know exactly where Robert’s new house was, the one Stewart Dennings had bought as an engagement gift. She made her way to a very well-maintained neighborhood, all lawns and mailboxes and high-end automobiles. Stewart hadn’t gone cheap on his son, had kept the image rolling hard and fast. June was glad that she’d killed him, caught deep in a rare moment of brushing her fingers against the power that was hidden in her mind, a flash of ability that had sparked out as quickly as it’d occurred. Joya and the doctor had been truly stupid to underestimate her potential.