by Louis Evans
But these days Miss Bulletproof is a mama and thinks differently about matters. With a grunt she drops down, pivots her hips, and brings her shoulder right up into the god’s sternum. It topples and Miss Bulletproof goes for the piledriver and grapple.
This is a huge fucking mistake, of course. Miss Bulletproof is a boxer, not a wrestler, and you’d better believe a backstabber’s god knows a full nelson. One second she’s in control and the next it is, and it flips her across the floor just as neat and easy as Kara flips hotcakes at the diner, one two three.
Once the flipping stops and Miss Bulletproof no longer feels like a load of washing, she finds herself held by arms that coil like too many snakes. A spare hand--gods and their extra appendages--yanks off her left boot and rips a hole in her nearly-new, thick woolen sock. Miss Bulletproof has a sudden bloody vision of her ever-expanding KMart shopping list and her enraged spasm is nearly strong enough to break Et Tu’s grip.
Nearly, but not quite. Those serpentine fingers reestablish their grip on her and now Miss Bulletproof is hoisted toward the slumped form of One Finger Makes a Fist and her surviving outstretched pinky.
Miss Bulletproof doesn’t let it show but she is getting pretty fucking terrified. There are not a lot of things on this Earth that can put a hole into Miss Bulletproof, not even One Finger’s thumb, pointer, middle, and ring fingers, but that final pinky of her erstwhile colleague can drive right through her and out the other side.
“Listen,” says Miss Bulletproof. She has never begged for her life before, but Rose and Alice are more important than pride. “Don’t kill me.”
The fact that she regards this sentence and its deadpan delivery as begging for her life is remarkably revealing of Miss Bulletproof’s character.
The god chuckles. Miss Bulletproof begs some more.
“What One Finger and I did to you in Cleveland was just business. I’m out of the business. I’ve got kids, now.”
The god’s chuckle subsides but the mirth in its voice doesn’t go anywhere.
“I’m not going to kill you, you pea-brained juggernaut,” it says. “I’m going to deify you.”
Talk about your fates worse than death.
See, some gods are born. But most gods are made. They’re made from the shell of a person, someone who’s been cut open and whose insides have been scooped out just like a jack-o-lantern. Not just meat, bone and muscle and fat. But also hopes and loves and fears and memories.
Miss Bulletproof saw it, once. Deification. Back down near Jacksonville, where she grew up, there was a woman she loved, who loved her--a girl, really. Miss Bulletproof was a girl in those days too. And one day, one deal gone terribly wrong, Miss Bulletproof saw a god poke a hole in her girlfriend and suck her soul out in a slurry of viscera, and when Cassie stood back up there was nothing left of her but a scrap of skin--half of Cassie’s cheek, a sliver of eyebrow--and a god who wore that skin as a mask.
Sick shit. Miss Bulletproof can’t bear the thought of some thing loose in the world that wears her skin but doesn’t know her kids. She fights like hell. But outclassed is outclassed and, inch by squirming inch, Et Tu brings her closer to the lancet pinky.
Inch by squirming inch. Miss Bulletproof is swearing up a storm but that just gives Et Tu the giggles. And then contact.
At first it doesn’t hurt at all and then it hurts worse than anything Miss Bulletproof has ever imagined. She clamps down on it, bears into the pain with every ounce of stoicism and heroism and butchness and stiff upper lip in her body and for about a second it works. And then Miss Bulletproof screams in pain.
It’s not a loud scream but it’s a scream alright. It bounces around the walls of Tiki Tommy’s and out into the night and it spreads out over the hills and the trees and the swirling leaves of autumn and maybe two minutes later, attenuated to inaudibility, it enters the house Miss Bulletproof lives in with her family, it enters the bedroom she shares with her wife, and it resounds into her sleeping wife’s ear.
Don’t Call Me Til Morning is a lovely, tenderhearted woman, and there is nothing uncanny or supernatural about her--provided she wakes up of her own accord, in her own time. Otherwise it’s another situation entirely.
Now, Don’t Call Me Til Morning can sleep through car alarms and late-night telemarketers and alarm clocks of all stripes without difficulty, and with some practice she has trained herself to sleep through her daughters’ ordinary midnight crying. But she is married to Miss Bulletproof, who is physically invulnerable and also the most stoic bitch south of the Great Lakes, and that means Don’t Call Me Til Morning has never acclimated herself to the sound of her wife’s pain.
The faintest most distant echo of that shriek of agony bounces around the master bedroom and into her ear, and Don’t Call Me Til Morning’s eyes snap open. They are the precise color of the sun in the instant before it permanently blinds you.
Don’t Call Me Til Morning levitates six inches into the air, and she turns inside out, just exactly like a reversible vest. What’s on the inside looks like the unauthorized offspring of a bull hippopotamus and an atom bomb explosion. She leaves via the side of the house and is moving so quickly that she doesn’t even vaporize the wall as she goes, just scorches the windows black with the heat of her passing.
Rather less than two seconds later she arrives at the twilit shell of Tiki Tommy’s and lights it up like a late-night sunrise. And when she goes through the wall, moving at only about the speed of an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway, it knows it’s been hit.
Miss Bulletproof has just finished up her first scream of pain and is biting down hard on the second when half of the building goes up in a sheet of flame. And then there’s a smile on her face, because Miss Bulletproof can recognize her wife anywhere.
Et Tu pauses in its torture of Miss Bulletproof and it turns its rusted-bayonet face up towards the rampant flames. Now, Miss Bulletproof is tough and she is mean and a forklift couldn’t drive a hypodermic needle a quarter inch into her skin if it tried. But after all that, she’s basically a human woman, and Et Tu can pretty reliably get the drop on her. The nightmare sunbeast that is Don’t Call Me Til Morning is something else altogether. It’s no wonder Et Tu is scared shitless. Shock loosens its grip just a hair and Miss Bulletproof wrenches herself free from its coiled fingers, dropping to the floor. Et Tu grabs at her but she scrambles just like her girls had when they first learned to crawl, faster than you would expect.
Et Tu leaps for her but a roar from behind makes it snap its terrified head a full two hundred degrees around on its neck. Don’t Call Me bounds forward and gets him in jaws of flame that look like they belong to Truckasaurus’s big sister. If you’ve ever seen a labrador retriever pick up a little green army man and just worry it to death you’ve got the right idea. Except Don’t Call Me is hot enough to melt godflesh, and the god’s face bulges and drips right off. Limbs and molten droplets fly in all directions, and when Miss Bulletproof’s wife is done there’s neither hide nor hair of the god left.
Miss Bulletproof breathes a great big sigh of relief, and then starts panting. “Hi, baby,” she says.
Don’t Call Me Til Morning drifts gently downward, incinerating wicker chairs beneath her, until her coronal glory is maybe half an inch above the ground-level rubble in the ruins of Tiki Tommy’s. Then with a pop like a quiet champagne cork, she turns back inside out. Miss Bulletproof’s wife is standing in the ashes in her pajamas and socks. Her hair is sticking up at odd angles and it’s still catching the highlights of a distant sun.
She crosses the floor over to Miss Bulletproof in five quick strides and grabs her shoulders, tight and protective. Her face is fierce and angry and loving by turns, but Tillie is a smart one and knows when to forgo words.
Don’t Call Me Til Morning kisses Miss Bulletproof under a canopy that’s half stars and half hollowed-out Hawaiian restaurant. She kisses her hard and it’s nothing like when they first met; it is a different kiss, mother to mother, wife to wife. She
kisses Miss Bulletproof until all the heat from her inside-out form leaks out of the restaurant and into the icy Michigan wind.
Tillie shivers, suddenly cold in nothing but cotton pajamas. Miss Bulletproof tries to give her the poofy jacket but her wife is having none of her shit.
“You’re hurt,” says Tillie. “Don’t scare me like that again.”
Miss Bulletproof tries for a nonchalant shrug. The wince at the end spoils the effect a little. Tillie offers her the sleeve of her pajamas, and Miss Bulletproof tears off a wide strip, which Tillie uses to bandage the hole in her foot. It’s a neat piece of work--Tillie took first aid classes when she was pregnant with Rosalie--and Miss Bulletproof, still wincing, slips back into her discarded shoe. She pats her pockets and feels the reassuringly plump bulk of the envelope of cash. Half pay is better than none, Miss Bulletproof knows this, but it still cuts her to be shortchanged.
Together Miss Bulletproof and her wife untie One Finger Makes a Fist. Her breath is hoarse but regular and the betrayal god even did a pretty good job bandaging her cut fingers. They hoist One Finger up, and between the two of them--Miss Bulletproof tall, broad and limping, Tillie short and rock-steady--they get her out to the car and lay her down in the back.
“We can drop One Finger at Pleasant Peninsula Hospital,” says Miss Bulletproof. Tillie nods. “And then right back to the kids,” she says. It’s not a question.
Usually Miss Bulletproof drives, but this time Tillie climbs right in the driver’s seat and leaves her with shotgun. Tillie starts the car just once, because, as she always says, with a wife like Miss Bulletproof and kids like theirs, she’s got all the luck in the world.
And as they pull out of the parking lot on a route that will take them to Rosalie and Alice tucked into bed, and as Tille’s right hand slips from the gear shift into her wife’s palm, just holding each other, Miss Bulletproof is inclined to agree.
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Copyright 2020 Louis Evans
Louis Evans dreams of Saurosapien civilizations: therapod cities along the Pierre Seaway; feathered astronauts’ tridactyl bootprints on Mars’s red sands. His work has been published in Analog, Interzone, Escape Pod, and other markets. He is a member of the Clarion West class of the plague year. His Twitter handle is @louisevanswrite.
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Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.
http://giganotosaurus.org