by Joseph Fink
But Nilanjana was already on the phone.
“Is this Arnie Goldblum?” she said. “Arnie, I need you to get everyone away from Big Rico’s Pizza, if you didn’t do that already when you saw a giant bug stomping all over town. I need you to get some shovels and start digging up the bottom of the pit. Overturn all of the soil in that pit. Why?”
She thought about how to explain.
“Because you’re going to save Night Vale, that’s why.”
She hung up.
“You think the Smiling God might be into invisible pizza?” said Darryl.
“It’s only devouring areas rich in insects, and especially worms,” she said. “I think, despite its size, it’s basically a normal centipede, and centipedes eat worms. So we’re going to offer it one hell of a tempting meal. But we have to get it to Big Rico’s first. It’s not going to notice the worms from here.”
Already, the monster was turning, its hundreds of legs churning through the asphalt as it moved on toward the library, the opposite direction from Big Rico’s. A Cadillac pulled in front of it. Gordon and Pastor Munn, her homemade hat torn and barely hanging on now, hurried out.
“No!” the pastor said. “Some antireligion science nuts are not going to be devoured before me. We have made ourselves worthy of devouring. Joyfully we are devoured!”
“Eat me!” Gordon said.
They ran at the centipede. It turned to face them, and then stopped, looking down at them with its inhuman face. They fell again to their knees. Gordon dutifully clasped his hands before him.
“What are they doing?” said Darryl.
“You know what they’re doing,” said Jamillah. “They believe. We were without faith. They truly believe.”
The centipede considered the pair.
“I am ready!” the pastor said. “I am—”
The centipede ate them. It was a soft drop of its enormous head, and without a sound the pastor and Gordon were gone.
No one said anything. There wasn’t anything to say. The centipede didn’t pause, didn’t even seem to notice what it had done, just continued skittering toward the library.
“We . . . we need to get it to follow us,” Nilanjana said. She was shaken by what she had seen, but it didn’t change the reality of their plan.
Mark revved the engine.
“If the pastor and Gordon can believe enough to put their lives on the line,” Mark said, “then what am I doing here helping you if I don’t do the same?”
“What are you going to do?” Darryl said, but Mark was already doing it.
He jammed down the accelerator with a roar and a lot of screaming from the others in the back, and sped right into the legs of the centipede, bouncing off with a crack. The monster whirled, a broad arc of its body. It hissed, a searing sound that filled the air around it, and made directly for the van. Mark had to do a three-point turn to get the van going the right direction, and by the time he had done that the centipede was already on their tail, scooping up asphalt as it went.
“I think it’ll follow us now,” he said.
“WHY WOULD YOU NOT WARN US?” said Jamillah, running her drill continuously out of panic.
“That was dangerous. And silly,” said Nilanjana. “And exactly the right thing to do.”
Fortunately the centipede had not gotten to the part of town where Big Rico’s was yet, and so the roads were undamaged. This bit of good luck was mitigated some by the fact that the monster was gaining on them with every mile. Its legs made a constant clicking that was louder even than the van’s engine. Closer and closer.
One last right turn and Big Rico’s was just ahead. A crowd of employees were there, stirring the bottom of the pit with pizza paddles. Nilanjana was on the phone again with Arnie, telling him to get everyone out of the pit immediately. Mark laid on the horn as he sped at them, and they dropped their poles and sprinted out of the way. He turned too late, and the van skidded at the pit. Two of its tires slipped over the edge. There was a horrible grinding as the bottom of the van slid against the asphalt edge. Mark gunned the engine and banked the wheels hard to the left to get leverage. There was a loud thump as the chassis struck the edge of the pit, followed by a squeal as the tires once again made contact. The van lurched upward and bounced violently into the parking lot, narrowly avoiding the steep fall. The force of the van’s leap caused it to pause for a moment on two wheels before falling hard back onto all four.
They all took a moment to breathe, but the centipede was already tearing up the lot, moments from swallowing them. Mark gunned the engine again, but the van faltered, shudders of power with no forward motion. There was no time to get out. The centipede was on them. Darryl closed his eyes and took Nilanjana’s hand. She squeezed his hand, and put her arm around his shoulder, keeping her eyes open.
But the centipede stopped and lifted its head again, dirt and pieces of subterranean pipe falling from its face like crumbs. It swiveled its head, and its long antennae swung back and forth. Then it changed direction and dove into the pit with an absolute and passionless greed. As it fell, its mouth opened, and it burrowed into the sea of worms. For several long seconds the rest of its body followed, leg after leg, until the last of it went into the pit. It was curled in there, digging deeper and deeper into the worms, until it hit the concrete of the world government monitoring bunkers scattered deep beneath Night Vale, and it could go no farther.
“Now what?” Stephanie said as they all scattered out of the van. Luisa held up a potato with a helpful look on her face, but Nilanjana shook her head and Luisa went back to looking disappointed in all of them.
Darryl was tired of being the one who didn’t have the answers. He had the answer.
“We need to trap it,” he said. “Cover the pit.”
“That was my idea,” Jamillah said.
“We need something heavier than what your drill can handle. I don’t know,” he said, deflating. “Nilanjana, how do we trap it?”
“I don’t know either,” she said. And then it truly seemed to them that they were doomed. If Nilanjana didn’t know, then none of them knew, then there was nothing to know. In only moments the centipede would finish its meal and rise back up from the pit.
At least I’m with her, he thought.
At least I’m with him, she thought.
At least we’re together, they signaled with the way they held each other.
“See, I told you the church guy wasn’t bad,” said a voice from high above them. They sprang apart and looked up. A fleet of black helicopters, led by a particular helicopter that was familiar to Nilanjana.
“Hey!” she said, waving. “You were right.”
“I know I was right,” the bullhorn called. “You don’t have to tell me when I’m right, I know it. And my ex-boyfriend said I have ‘no emotional intelligence.’ Ugh. Anyway. STAND ASIDE, CITIZENS.”
The helicopters were carrying between them a heavy black tarp, lined on all sides with weights.
“WE WILL NEUTRALIZE THIS THREAT TO SAFETY.”
The tarp fell heavily around the pit and draped down over the writhing mass of shell and legs within it. It began thrashing against the material, but with the awkward way its body was stuffed into the pit, and with the concrete below it and the tarp caught in its legs, it couldn’t seem to get out.
“Oh my God, I think we trapped it,” said Darryl. “Nilanjana, we did it!” He picked her up for a moment and spun her around, a move that would have made him feel self-conscious in any other context but here came as a pure expression of their mutual joy.
“Yeah sure,” said the helicopter. “‘We’ did it. All of us together, and not just the fleet of helicopters keeping you safe.”
“This is going to take us forever to clean up,” one of the employees of Big Rico’s grumbled.
Soon the entire town was crowded around. Sheriff Sam stood at the front of them, shaking their clasped hands above their head in victory.
“We did it,” they said. “Another clea
r victory for the Secret Police.”
“Ugh,” said the helicopter. “Come on, guys.” The fleet flew away, returning to their endless circling overhead.
“I can’t believe it,” Darryl said. “The Smiling God is real, and here, and we caught It.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nilanjana said. “But we caught the biggest bug I’ve ever seen.”
Pamela Winchell arrived and spoke through her mic and portable amplifier.
“This monster will need to be killed. For the safety of this town. And also for revenge reasons. Mostly for revenge reasons. And safety.”
“No!” Darryl and Nilanjana said together.
“It is sacred,” he said.
“We can’t kill something this scientifically interesting,” she said. With the threat finally neutralized, she saw the vast potential for scientific inquiry.
“We must kill it,” another voice said. Carlos came down the parking lot from the lab. His face was grave and determined.
“But what about all that stuff you said? About science and not killing things we are afraid of?” Nilanjana said.
He shook his head. “For the sake of our families, for the sake of our town. It has to die.” He met her eyes and she could see how deeply he was shaken. “It almost took Janice,” he whispered. He pulled a large tank of gasoline out of the backseat of his car, pushed one edge of the tarp until it fell into the pit, creating an opening, and began to pour the gas into the pit. The giant thing continued to buck against the tarp, more violently as the liquid pooled around it. Then Carlos pulled out a flare, lit it, and tossed it in.
The Smiling God screamed as it died. No one thought a centipede could scream, but it did. It screamed for a long time.
35
Nilanjana nursed her headache with a twenty-ounce coffee. She had stayed up late celebrating. One or two beers to clink and smile over turned into three or four to laugh and swoon over turned into maybe five or six. She couldn’t remember.
She did remember that they killed a giant centipede. They killed a religious figure. And before that, it had eaten the leaders of the Joyous Congregation. She hadn’t had a conversation with Carlos about the implications of murdering a rare earthly creature. She hadn’t talked to Darryl about the death of his god and pastor. She thought about Carlos, whom she trusted above anyone else, and what she would feel if he died or, worse, turned out to be as dangerous to Night Vale as the pastor had. Last night, everyone had been first too wired, and then too exhausted to talk. They just drank and smiled and got sleepy. Darryl stayed at her apartment, and they made love and fell asleep against one another, naked and elaborately entwined: legs over legs, arms across chests, lips against necks, as much skin touching skin as possible.
He was still asleep when she got up. She wanted to get back to work, partially because she liked work, partially because she couldn’t fall back asleep, and partially (mostly) because she didn’t want to have a conversation yet of deep spiritual implications with Darryl. Nilanjana knew once what they had done the day before—before the drinking and the reveling and the kissing and the cuddling—had set in, he would have a lot of questions to deal with. So would she.
Later. They could sort through those questions later.
Whatever the implications, the bright side of it all was that Carlos was free to continue his experiments, unhindered. The creature causing the incidents was dead. There would be no more rumblings, no more pits. They were not the work of the City Council, but of the church and of a monster. The city had done no more than harass and follow them, which was common governmental behavior in Night Vale, especially toward a group of people as troublemaking as scientists. Besides, they had been working to protect Night Vale from the Smiling God, which wouldn’t be an issue anymore. Carlos would receive more visits from Pamela with her strange aphorisms shouted through her amplifier, but Pamela wouldn’t provide an actual threat, only scrunched faces, fists on hips, and surveillance vans.
Nilanjana drove to work and carried her coffee and heavy head into Carlos’s office. He was sitting in front of a wall-size computer, flipping metal switches, and tapping a monochrome screen filled with long strings of numbers and codes.
“Back at it already?” she asked, smiling. Or she felt like she was smiling, but her face muscles were hungover too, so she was actually scowling. “You don’t even look tired.”
“Oh, I only had an orangemilk with a splash of club soda last night. I was too excited about getting back to work this morning.” Carlos flipped five adjacent switches in quick succession. “Ever since I escaped that otherworld, I have been trying to understand it and protect us from it. I’m so close now.” He smiled at her, but the smile wasn’t exactly from happiness. There were so many feelings and he didn’t know how to order them and put them in sensible, logical words. “I’m so close now” was all he could manage to explain. There was a deep whirring from the machine. Nilanjana’s head felt cold. Her body felt warm, but her head was freezing. She pressed her hand to her nose, and her fingers were warm to the touch.
Must be from holding the coffee, she thought.
“So you’re back to taking readings from the house that doesn’t exist?” she said.
“Sort of. I’m trying something new. I’m going to direct the device to the middle of town first, taking readings on that. Then I’ll go in concentric circles outward, taking baseline readings of the entire area. Once I have all of that, I will have some control data from which to compare unusual spots, like the house that doesn’t exist, or the Dog Park, or—”
"Don’t forget the rec center. There were those pteranodons that appeared from a portal there way back when.”
“Yes, of course.” Carlos sprang up and wrote “Pteranodons!!!” on the whiteboard and drew a big heart around the word. “Excellent science, Nilanjana.” He drew a second heart around the first heart, and then gave her a thumbs-up. She felt the warmth of approval from a man she respected more than any other person in the world. She also felt warmth through the bottoms of her feet. They were hot. It wasn’t scalding, but it was like forgetting your shoes on a hot day on a sandy beach.
“Is it hot in here, Carlos?”
“Oh yeah, I’m sweating,” he said. “I need to improve ventilation on the machine.”
“My feet are on fire.”
Carlos looked at her feet, as if they might literally be on fire, and then, seeing that they were not, turned his attention back to the switches and monitor. In the whirring of the machine, Nilanjana could also hear and feel a deep rumbling. It’s just the machine, she told herself, still a bit traumatized from recent experiences with hot feet and subterranean rumbles from gigantic bug gods.
She heard a sudden startling bang and a crash and then saw a bright flash from the main lab.
“Shit! My invention!” Mark shouted, running toward his device, which had fallen off the tabletop and split open across the floor. Plastic and glass shards spilled out. Some of the plastic looked like it was melting.
Luisa hopped up too.
“Are your feet burning?” Nilanjana called toward Luisa.
“No. Yes. But . . . come look at this.” Luisa had gone to the window and pointed out.
Nilanjana followed her and saw a swirling cloud of sand and smoke above downtown Night Vale, several blocks away. And then they heard the muffled boom. Then another distant cloud, but slightly closer, followed by a less muffled boom. Then another cloud, another boom, each one closer than the last, louder than the last. The sights and sounds were getting closer together. The three of them stared in disbelief. It was easy to disbelieve, because they had no idea what they were seeing.
“Ow, god, my feet,” Mark said. “Ow, god, my hands,” as he picked the broken parts of his machine up off the floor.
All three were alternately lifting and lowering each foot against the heat. It was darkly comical, and Luisa even smiled a rare smile seeing the three of them engaged in such a silly, necessary dance. Then the window shattered. Th
ey all dove aside. Shelves and tables toppled over. Luisa watched as her potatoes bounced and rolled across the floor, inches from her face.
“I’m disappointed in that,” she said.
From the floor, Nilanjana felt the rumbling coming from deep within the ground. Her body vibrated. Her teeth rattled briefly, and then it subsided. She crawled back to the window and pulled herself up in time to see over half of the Roasted Beans Strip Mall (“It’s an entire mall, but just for coffee!”) across the street from the lab collapse into a large pit.
Carlos sprinted into the lab.
“Is everyone okay?”
They didn’t say anything, only stared through the splintered shards that were once a window. He stepped over to them and looked for himself.
“But it’s dead,” he said. “We killed it. I killed it.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the only one,” Luisa said. “I mean, consider potatoes. There are lots of potatoes. Literally tons of them in this world. So maybe there is more than one giant centipede.”
“We see potatoes all the time,” Nilanjana said, “but we’ve never seen a centipede like that.”
“Correlation is not causation,” Mark said. Nilanjana wanted to stomp all over what remained of his banging, flashing device and then kick Luisa’s potatoes through the broken window.
“No, it’s not a second or third centipede. It’s something else,” she said instead.
“Mark’s technically right, Nilanjana,” Carlos said, “but I think I agree with you.”
“So what’s causing this, then?”
“The city.” Carlos’s eyes were dark. “They’re still trying to keep me from investigating that otherworld. It was never the centipede doing any of this. It was Pamela and the City Council.”
“They’d destroy Night Vale rather than let us find out anything about the house that doesn’t exist?”
Carlos nodded slowly. Everyone was quiet while they thought through the implications of that. None of the implications were good.
“They lied to us, Nils,” he said. “I don’t know why I thought I could trust this place—a city that has secret police and vague, menacing agencies, helicopters in every corner of the sky, a dog park that doesn’t even allow dogs into it. It’s been the city this whole time, destroying itself and its people, placing its secrecy above our safety, pretending it’s trying to protect us. It’s a betrayal.”