by Joseph Fink
“These wouldn’t be useful, huh?” Luisa said. “Take that!”
The centipede veered again, going for its tormentor, who ran in front of it, tossing her potatoes behind her.
“Look at what my potatoes are doing! I’m so proud of them. For the first time, I’m proud of them. This ruins my entire experiment.” The potatoes were admirable at keeping the centipede’s attention, but did not stop the margin between Luisa and its mouth from decreasing quickly.
“It’s ready,” Nilanjana said. She loaded the large black capsule onto a sled on the ground.
“Great, let’s do it. Whatever it is,” said Darryl.
“There’s just one step, and it’s both simple and difficult,” Nilanjana said. “We have to get the centipede to eat this.”
“What will happen then?”
“I’m running out of potatoes! So any other plans you have, now would be great. But also I’m still so proud of my potatoes!”
Nilanjana shrugged. And despite their short time together, Darryl was surprised to find himself able to understand everything she was communicating with that shrug.
“You’re going to kill the Smiling God?” he said.
Luisa had stopped yelling about potatoes and was now yelling incoherently. The ground was being devoured only steps behind her.
“What else can we do?” Nilanjana said. “Or do you want to watch people die today?”
Darryl watched Luisa run, and looked up at the centipede, an insect vacancy to its face as it swallowed and swallowed. He frowned.
“You’re right. I don’t want to watch people die.” He took the handle of the capsule and started pulling it on its sled across the sand.
“What are you doing?”
“We caused this problem. My church did this. And now I’m going to fix it.” He waved his arms, yelling.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Over here.” He lifted his fist and spun it around. “I believe in a Smiling God. And I am ready for You to devour me.”
The centipede slowed, but it seemed done with switching targets and continued toward Luisa, who was now yelling something about burying her with her potatoes.
“I’ve devoted my entire life to you,” shouted Darryl. “You don’t just get to ignore me. ‘Joyfully It Devours.’ Well, I am joyful. See?” He showed his teeth, stretching his lips as far as they would go. “Now DEVOUR ME.”
At that, the centipede turned toward him, moving faster than ever before, tired perhaps of this game and wanting to finally eat something. Darryl watched it charge. Nilanjana couldn’t watch, hiding her eyes, but then she felt that if this was the last time she would see him, then she should actually see him. That she owed him that. That she owed herself that.
The mouth was upon him. Sand fell around him. He pushed the sled forward at the avalanche and jumped back. The capsule was gone, eaten. But in his leap, his foot caught on the edge of the mouth, and he landed sideways, dragged along as the centipede barreled forward.
His face skidded across the sand painfully. He tried to pull free but was only able to push his leg in farther. He grabbed at the centipede, trying to wrench his way out. But he couldn’t get enough of a grip on the creature’s face to detach himself.
He was caught, and rapidly slipping in farther, his head pounding against the earth, his nose and throat filling with sand.
He could hardly breathe. He would be torn away and crushed, or suffocate, or slip fully into the centipede and be digested. And maybe that was as it should be. At least he had done the right thing before the end.
But then he saw something extraordinary, something he could not have imagined just a few weeks ago. Nilanjana, beautiful and determined, running toward him, running directly at the mouth of the centipede, and diving forward. Diving forward and extending a hand. Grabbing his arm with that hand, and pulling. His foot came free and the two of them rolled away from the centipede, who had too much momentum to turn in time and thundered past.
They were both panting and sweating, sand sticking to them. She had never looked better. His eyes were watering, partly from her bravery, but mostly from the sand. His lungs were on fire. He had never felt better.
“You’re amazing,” he said.
She kissed him, a dry kiss full of the grit that covered both of them. It was uncomfortable and awkward and the best kiss they ever had.
“You did a pretty good thing too,” she said.
There was a dull pop, heard through several layers of the insect.
“There went the capsule,” she said. Gallons of powerful pesticide were released in its stomach. Years of distillation of bacteria by-products and testing. This was it. The creature slowed down, and then jittered and thrashed, sending columns of sand hundreds of feet into the air. Finally it stopped, only its antennae still swaying.
“You killed it!” Mark said.
“Wait, you killed it?” Jamillah said.
“I think I killed it,” said Nilanjana.
One of the towering legs twitched. Then skittered a few feet. More legs skittered and lurched. The vast bulk of its body dragged forward again.
“I don’t think you did,” said Luisa.
It turned toward them. The clatter of its legs became louder and louder.
“What now?” said Darryl.
“I don’t know what now,” Nilanjana said. “I don’t have any other ideas. That was my entire research project I exploded inside that bug. That should have killed a hundred centipedes its size. I think maybe now we die.”
The centipede lowered its mouth, preparing to swallow the van and the machine and all of the people around it. Nilanjana grabbed Darryl and pulled him close. But the centipede did not reach them. It stopped again. It noticed for the first time, as the sun had finished its descent below the apocryphal mountains along the horizon, the warm glow of Night Vale’s low skyline down the road behind them. A hive of activity and movement, overshadowing the few people standing in the desert.
The ground beneath it collapsed again. A gap in what was real. The centipede dove headfirst into this gap, disappeared into some other reality, first its face and then leg after leg, until all of its body was gone, and the portal resolved into a shallow pit.
They all took a moment, coming to terms with the continuing existence of their bodies.
“Is that it?” Stephanie finally managed. “Are we safe?”
“We are,” said Nilanjana, looking over Stephanie’s shoulder. “But Night Vale isn’t.”
There, from right in the middle of all the fragile lives of Night Vale, came a distant familiar clatter, like high-pitched thunder, and every helicopter in the sky began converging on a single point at the center of town.
34
“In, in, in,” Nilanjana shouted as the others scrambled for seats in the van, and then they were tearing back along the road toward town. While she understood on some level that the church would have summoned this monster eventually, and that in summoning it themselves they were only doing their best to protect the city, she still felt like any violence from here on out was on them.
Driving through the outskirts of town, all seemed normal. They passed the Brown Stone Spire, which was humming the latest electropop hit by Buddy Holly to itself. They passed the Ralphs, where shoppers were gathering with paddles since the store had recently moved to an auction-based grocery shopping experience. They passed the vacant lot out back of the Ralphs, where a group of figures draped in tattered and filthy cloth huddled together.
Sometimes it is these normal, everyday things, these things that would ordinarily bring us comfort, that, against the backdrop of calamity, only heighten the fear and the chaos, Nilanjana thought. How could things so ordinary as these exist in the same world as the horrible devouring god that might even now be rising in the heart of the town?
As they approached the source of the noise, she stopped watching the helicopters. She didn’t need to follow them to the source of the disturbance. She knew exactly where it was coming from.
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The house that doesn’t exist was shaking, as though experiencing a localized earthquake. But there was no earthquake scheduled for this part of town, and anyway, in emergency situations like this, all municipally planned earthquakes would have been canceled. From deep within its windows, beyond the visible living room, there was a bright, white light that made Nilanjana’s teeth hurt. A black sedan pulled up across the street. The window rolled down, and an agent with one of the vague yet menacing government agencies began snapping pictures.
Neighbors, used to the weirdness of living next to a house that doesn’t exist, came out to their back porches, standing on the concrete slabs set into their dry lawns, and watched their plastic furniture vibrate.
“Should we be worried about this?” one of them, a woman in a flower print dress, shouted at Nilanjana.
“I think so,” Nilanjana shouted back.
“Should we?” the woman shouted at the agent in the black sedan.
The agent’s eyes went wide, and he frantically rolled up his window and screamed, “We’ve been spotted! We’ve been spotted!” Once the window was up, he went back to taking pictures through the tinted glass. The driver never looked up through all of this, just continued filling in a crossword puzzle.
The woman shrugged at Nilanjana.
“I think we’re fine,” the woman said. “Usually anything weird with that house resolves itself.”
Another car arrived. A Cadillac, driven by a familiar man, with a familiar woman in the passenger seat.
“I knew it,” Pastor Munn shouted, hopping out of the car. A long yellow hat hung lopsided on her head, a hypotenuse waiting for the rest of its triangle. It wasn’t her normal hat, as Stephanie had stolen that for the ritual. It was some cardboard boxes taped together and spray-painted yellow. “I knew it,” she said again. She had not known it. She was completely surprised.
“We knew it,” shouted Gordon, circling the car to stand behind her, too angry to keep his arms crossed. He was waving them around to an effect he hoped was threatening but made him look like he was warming up for a baseball game.
“I knew you were betraying your church, your congregation, your community.” Pastor Munn spat at them. Even Nilanjana found the force of the pastor’s rage frightening.
Stephanie sank down into her seat, and Darryl felt an urge to join her. But now that he had seen and touched the physical reality of the Smiling God, the pastor and Gordon no longer had the same power as before. He recognized them for what they were: humans, who were right about some things and wrong about other things and certain about everything. Shouting humans who didn’t know any more than he did.
“I’m sorry,” Darryl said. “It had to be like this.” Two separate thoughts.
The pastor shook her head, more surprise than disapproval.
“It doesn’t even matter,” she said. “You don’t matter. Only the Smiling God matters. And the Smiling God has come to devour the world. You couldn’t stop It, any more than you could stop the sun from making a racket every morning.”
“The sun is loud!” Gordon agreed. He hadn’t agreed with the right part, but agreeing was the important thing.
Before the conversation could continue, the door of the house blew open. First, a gust of hot air, like the out-of-place suddenness of walking by a restaurant heating vent on a cold day. And then, for the first time since Carlos’s return from the otherworld, something emerged from the house that doesn’t exist.
First came two thin black wires, springing out. The wires bent and elongated, continuing to emerge from the door. They wrapped back around the house, gripping the stucco sides, cracked the picture window, which is when Nilanjana realized she was looking at legs. Using the leverage of the legs, a black insect face, a monolith of vacuous hunger, squeezed out through the door. The smell of a forest floor after months of rot. Liquid dripped from its face. Once the head came through, the rest of the legs followed. More black wires, shooting out from the door, and pulling along the endless squishy tube of its body. The centipede emerged like a train from a tunnel, more and more legs and segments rushing out from the door, and yet the shape of the door never got bigger, the frame never broke, the house was still a house, albeit one that did not exist.
The centipede turned as it burrowed out, and it slammed into the house to the left. The woman screamed and stumbled back as her house was carried away. Long, spindly legs whipped past her.
“The Smiling God!” the pastor said and sank to her knees. Gordon said nothing. He stared, his mouth open, in too much shock to echo the pastor’s words.
Cars began arriving, the Sheriff’s Secret Police responding to the call. They piled out, shouting frantic orders at each other, and pointing their guns in all directions. The sheriff themself moved to the front of the group, wearing their cape and bandoliers. They took a moment to assess the situation.
“That’s a great big monster,” Sheriff Sam shouted. “Let’s try shooting it.”
They tried shooting it. The sudden cacophony of gunshots did not make the glistening black tube coming from the front door of the house any less terrifying. Luisa crouched in the van with Mark, Stephanie, and Jamillah, and Nilanjana joined Darryl behind one of the wheels.
The pastor and Gordon did not move. They seemed undisturbed by the shooting, already confident that bullets could not harm a deity.
“This is going poorly,” said Luisa. She watched the chaos around her with a look of pointed disapproval.
Other than the pastor, the only one completely unbothered by the bullets was the centipede. It continued to barrel forward, pieces of neighboring houses stuck to the segments of its body. It opened up its mouth and swallowed an entire lawn with an aboveground pool. The slab of grass slid in without any resistance, and the owner of the house sprinted away. Sensing the movement, the centipede turned and pursued him, mouth hanging empty and open.
“Help me!” the homeowner shouted as he ran. The Secret Police, not knowing how else to help, continued firing. This did not help him. After a short and simple movement by the centipede, he was no longer running or shouting.
The last of the creature came out of the door with a squishy pop, and, fully freed from its source, it swung its blank eyes toward downtown Night Vale, demolishing house after house as it went, occasionally dipping its head to swallow whatever was in front of it.
“We can’t just sit here,” Nilanjana said.
“No,” Darryl said.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least,” she said, “we’ll do whatever it is we do next together.” She ran a hand through his hair. He smiled at her, a natural smile, a smile he didn’t even think to go through the necessary steps to make.
“Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”
She stood and started waving.
“STOP SHOOTING,” she shouted at the Secret Police. Gradually they did, mostly because the centipede was out of range. One officer seemed to have really gotten a taste for it and was firing over and over into the ground, until the sheriff took the gun away from him.
“Right, enough of that,” the sheriff said. They turned to Nilanjana. “Well, I’m afraid we’ve tried everything. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it.”
“You only tried shooting it,” she said.
“Yes. As I just said, everything,” they said. “Terrible blow, but it just seems our best efforts aren’t going to be enough. The town had a good run though, eh?”
As they talked, the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, visible down the road, was flattened, its mint green sign sparking wildly against the huge black body of the centipede.
“Hope no one was inside that,” the sheriff said. “All right, we gave this one a good try. Let’s pack it up and see if we can find some crimes.”
“What?” said Nilanjana. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She had found herself struggling with belief quite a bit in the last couple weeks, but this was a different kind, a pit-of-the-st
omach astonishment that came when a person well and truly let another person down. Then she let the astonishment pass, and concentrated on what was in front of her. A terrible problem, but also just a problem. She would need to solve this problem.
“Back in the van,” she said. “We need to follow it.”
Mark took over driving, and the others concentrated on tracking the destruction. The road was often torn up and they had to drive on sandy shoulders and over medians to follow the god’s relentless path.
“You know, when they talked about having all your sins devoured by the Smiling God, I never imagined something so physical and violent,” Darryl said. “In concept, as a metaphor, it was quite beautiful. This”—he indicated the sprays of dirt and asphalt outside the car—“isn’t beautiful.”
“Speaking of which, it doesn’t actually seem to be devouring much,” Nilanjana said.
“It’s devouring plenty. Look, it’s doing it again.”
As they neared the centipede, they observed its head dip down and scoop up another lawn.
“It’s devouring a bit,” she said. “But mostly it’s crashing into things. It only eats occasionally. And even then not buildings or people, it’s only interested in . . .”
She slapped the dashboard, causing a tense Mark to steer over a patch of road that had recently had a centipede leg through it.
“Please don’t do that again,” he managed, as he yanked the wheel back around and pulled the van onto more solid earth.
“I know what we have to do,” she said.
“Right?” Mark said. “It’s obvious. My machine could solve this whole thing. It just needs a bigger input. We could startle the centipede so bad it would simply die.”
“I think if I disapproved of it more, like really gave it my sternest face, then it would feel bad enough to leave,” offered Luisa. “Did you see how good my potatoes did after years of my disappointment?”
Jamillah suggested her power drill by running it for a moment.