Oh shit.
Bertram was a nut job, but he was my friend, and all this time I’d
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been banking on the fact that he wouldn’t go along with something that would do me real harm. But the commander knew that too. So they’d lied to Bertram. And they’d made sure he wasn’t along on our little walk in the woods.
I stopped in the road, head down, fighting a wave of nausea. The men behind us pointed their flashlights at our feet. “You said—you said you weren’t going to—”
“You can’t let fear rule this moment,” the commander said. “I know what you’re going through. I was possessed twice when I was not much older than yourself, and I spent years dealing with the sense of helplessness, the loss of control. You have an opportunity here, an opportunity to change the world. If the GedankenKinder dies in its cage, we’ve removed one of the overlords that rule this planet. We’ve taken a huge step toward freeing mankind.”
“But I can help,” I said. “I can teach you what I do. It’s a skill Dr. Aaron taught me, it’s like a mental firewall—”
The commander was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Del. We can’t risk it. There’s no other way.”
He was right. There was no other way. I’d known it when I picked up the gun in the cabin. The only difference between me and the commander was that he could pull the trigger. One of the lights illuminating our feet suddenly flicked away. From behind us I heard the snap of a tree branch, and the sound of something heavy crashing through the brush.
I stood up, looked behind us. One of the men behind us was gone. The other man swept the beam of his flashlight across the trees at the edge of the road. “Jared, you okay?” he said. The Human Leaguer in front of us cast around until his beam picked up his colleague behind us. He stared into the light, blinking.
“Sir, I think Jared fell down.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” the commander said, disgusted. “Mr. Torrence!” he called. “Back in position! Mr. Torrence!”
There was no answer. The man behind us raked his light over the trees.
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Something dark crashed through the bushes farther back. Both flashlight beams swung toward it.
A man in a black helmet stumbled into the road. “Sorry, sir!” he said. “There was a ditch alongside the road I didn’t see, and then I—”
“Never mind,” the commander said. “Just get your light on and catch up.”
The commander fastened a hand on my neck. All the flashlight beams were focused away from me, and I’d glanced toward the trees to my left, judging the odds of losing them with my hands tied behind me . . . but somehow he’d seen the movement and anticipated my plan. “Courage, Del,” the commander said. “You can do this.”
“There’s something I should tell you,” I said. “It’s not safe to be out at this time of night.”
The second flashlight came on, then went off. The commander looked back, and I followed his gaze. There was only one man in the road. Jared Torrence had disappeared again.
“Where in the world did he go now?” the commander said. And louder: “Mr. Harp, please help Mr. Torrence—”
Something hit the dirt near my feet and I jumped back. It was black and shiny, with a frayed tail. One of the helmets, its cable snapped.
The commander stared at it for a second, then nudged the helmet with his boot. It rolled over, lopsided. Mr. Torrence’s head was still inside it.
“Oh, Jared,” the commander said sadly.
I ran. The leading soldier jerked his light toward me, raised the hand that held the Taser. I ducked and barreled into him. My shoulder struck him in the gut, and we both went down. I twisted as I hit the ground, and my elbow jolted painfully. I kept rolling, got my knees under me, lurched to my feet again. The guard was on his back, his flashlight several feet away on the ground, pointing away from me, illuminating a wedge of road and forest. Somewhere behind us one of the other soldiers—Mr. Harp?—screamed.
I ran again, bent over and wobbling. The last cabin was in front of
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me, a slab of pitch black against the slightly lighter sky. I dodged right, remembering that the path started just behind the cabin. I threw myself forward, spinning to avoid trees that materialized out of the dark, inches from my face.
Something crashed through the bushes next to me. I stifled my own scream and leaped away from it. My right foot came down on something slick—log, moss-covered rock?—and I went down again, off balance. I came down backward. The battery pack hit first, wedging into my spine, and then my head whipped back and struck a rock with a sound like a hammer going through ice. The impact stunned me, but I wasn’t dead. The helmet had saved my life. A shape appeared above me. Arms grabbed my shirt, hauled me to a sitting position.
“Are you doing this, Del?” the commander hissed. “Are you doing this?”
You’re making a terrible mistake, O’Connell had told Stoltz. I tried to shake my head, but my neck muscles wouldn’t respond.
“Passover,” I said.
“What?”
“Blood over the door.”
The commander pulled me erect, and dragged me onto the wooden pier. The soldier I’d slammed into ran toward us out of the woods. He hadn’t picked up his flashlight, but the Taser was in his hand, swinging wildly.
“Shoot it!” the commander told the man.
The soldier leaped onto the pier, stopped. “Shoot what?”
The commander pointed toward the shore. “Anything!” The soldier obediently turned and dropped to one knee. He held his little Star Trek gun with both hands, aiming down the length of the pier. I should be safe. Louise had made the sacrifice for me, hadn’t she?
Put the blood over the door. But the Human League had no such protection. Their rooms hadn’t been made up. They were intruders here.
“Toby protects this place,” I said.
“Who’s Toby?” the commander said.
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A slab of white flesh launched from the water beside the pier, rose in a spray of water. Blacksmith arms thrown wide, goggled eyes black and glinting. His mouth stretched open, inhumanly long, loosehinged as an orca’s. The soldier didn’t have time to move. He was struck and carried over the side of the pier before he could even scream. The two of them splashed into the black water and disappeared.
“Toby,” I said. But it wasn’t. Not now. “The Shu’garath,” I said. The commander looked at me, aghast. The copper wires stitched into his face caught the moonlight. “See?” he said. “See?”
He grabbed the cables attached to the back of my helmet and yanked, pulling me off my feet. The battery pack banged again into my lower back. He dragged me backward toward the end of the pier, splinters slicing into my forearms and wrists. I screamed, swore, shouted, my voice high and keening like a toddler throwing a tantrum. I kicked my legs, trying to dig my heels into the planks, but he yanked me along without difficulty.
“It never ends,” he said. “The terror never ends. We can’t live like this, Del. We can’t live with these monsters.”
Behind us, at the midpoint of the pier, a white hand gripped the edge, and the Shug pulled itself effortlessly up. It turned, opened its mouth, and roared.
“Stop!” I screamed. But I didn’t know who I was screaming to. Both of them. Everyone.
“I’m sorry, Del,” the commander said. “We can’t live like this.”
He jerked me to my feet, and tossed me backward over his leg. For a moment I was airborne, looking back: the commander on the edge of the pier, bent with the effort of his throw, his eyes on me. And behind him, the huge figure of the Shug, slouching toward the commander, mouth agape. I struck the water. Icy water engulfed me and I grunted in shock, coughing air. I thrashed, trying to bring my arms out from behind me, but the plastic cuffs were unyielding. The
weight of the battery pack pulled me down, reeling me into the dark.
. . .
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I could see nothing but black, feel nothing but cold. Terror was a white noise, a static roar. I tried to drown it out with inner shouts, chants of Oh fuck Oh fuck and then The Shug will save me The Shug will save me . . .
I touched bottom, ass first, and then the bottom gave way. I sank into mud, silky and unknowably deep. Fresh panic coursed through me. I twisted, trying to bring my feet up, and then slid onto my chest. My face pressed into the mud, and I recoiled in horror. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t die suffocating in mud.
I convulsed like a fish, finally ended on my side, in mud as deep as my breastbone. I lifted my helmeted head, shook it to clear the mud from my eyes.
I opened my eyes but there was nothing, black in all directions. And silence.
No splash in the water above me, no cloud of white as Toby came for me through the silty water. Toby wasn’t coming. The Shug wasn’t going to save me.
The Shug is a monster. That’s its job. Terrorize people, kill them, enforce the rituals. It doesn’t rescue people. It doesn’t retrieve cats from trees, fight fires, show up for potlucks. That’s not part of the bargain, no matter how many fish you nail to the door. The deal is, if you make the sign, the angel of death passes by your house. The angel of death doesn’t pull you out of the pool, or cut through the steel of your car door and carry you out of the ravine. It’s the fucking angel of death. My chest burned; my ears pounded. It took all my strength to keep my lips clamped shut. I searched the water for some sign of movement—if not the Shug, then Lew, somehow escaped from the Human Leaguers. Come on, Lew. You’re running through the forest, you’re at the pier, you’re diving . . .
There. Floating in the middle distance, a quavering circle of deeper black.
The black well.
As I watched, it blossomed, rushed toward me, filled my vision. The hole was bottomless, a twisting tunnel that branched and split into an infinite number of side shafts, but there was something waiting 1 6 0
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at the end of each of them. The mouth hovered above me, or I hovered over it, ready to fall, the gravity sucking at me like a whirlpool. It was a door, a gate—to something. Death, or the Hellion’s cage inside my head, or some false paradise generated by my oxygen-starved brain. I didn’t care, as long as it was somewhere else. I let go, and fell.
10
Oh my God, did you shoot him? The commander didn’t say to—
Shut the fuck up, Bertram, I didn’t fucking touch him!
For God’s sake just get him up, pull the chair up—
I don’t understand. Del never said his brother was epileptic . . . Everyone shut up! It’s a trick, dammit. Don’t fucking go near him!
It’s not a seizure.
—please, at least hold his head so he won’t—
What’d she say, “say-zure?”
I could feel him. There, in the dark, I reached for him. I reached and I grabbed—
Light.
An expanse of braided carpet, stretching like a plain. Voices: O’Connell, Louise, Bertram, other men. I’m telling you, don’t go near him!
Black boots appear, large as houses. A giant’s hand. Another male voice, closer: If this is a trick, we’re going to Taser you, do you understand? Can you talk?
I—
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Lew’s voice. Resonating oddly, a microphone turned too loud in a small room.
I’m drowning, the voice said.
He struggled, trying to throw me off, and I clamped down tighter, tighter still, like the bear hugs he always used against me to end our wrestling matches.
His arms were stretched backward, wrists touching, bound in hard plastic.
Flex.
Lew’s arms flexed.
“You’re not drowning,” the guard said. “You fell over.”
Pull.
The arms yanked away from each other. Plastic snapped. The pain speared up the arms.
Ignore the pain. Grab him.
The hand seized the guard’s ankle, pulled. Small bones popped. The man screamed, hit the ground.
Get up.
The perspective lurched. A Human Leaguer in midnight camo, firing. The Taser dart embedded somewhere out of sight. The leaguer pulled the trigger, pulled it again. His expression changed from anger to confusion.
Punch.
The fist knocked the gunman back into a wall. The framed photographs clattered to the floor, coughing glass. Bertram, still in helmet and pack, seemed to be in shock, his eyes on the man who’d collapsed against the wall. Louise pressed far back into the couch. O’Connell, beside her, wore a tight-lipped expression that could have masked anything: fear, shock, anger.
“And who are you?” O’Connell asked.
Lew’s hands pulled the dart-tipped wire from his chest, tossed it aside.
“I’m dying,” Lew’s voice said.
Run.
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The body knew what to do. It crossed the room in three long strides, pushed through the door, leaped over the steps, and landed in the gravel. Something popped in its right leg. It turned, ran toward Cabin 5.
Faster.
The body obeyed, though it ran jerkily now, its gait thrown off balance by the malfunctioning knee. Lungs heaved oxygen into the bloodstream; the heart forced it down, through clogged arteries, flooding large muscles with oxygen and chemicals. Pain signals traveled up the spine and went unanswered.
The body knew what to do, even though it had never done it so completely, so forcefully.
Trees whipped past. The yellow light of the washhouse illuminated a crumpled body in the middle of the road, one arm missing, the shoulder ending in a pool of blood like a rain puddle. It leaped over the dead man, clearing it by ten feet. Ten more seconds and it reached the last cabin, three more and it was through the trees, onto the wooden pier, and charging toward the water. The Shu’garath squatted at the end of the pier, pulling apart pieces of meat strung together with copper wire, as if deboning a fish. It looked up, white chest slicked with blood. It opened its mouth, and roared a challenge.
Out of my way.
“Out of my way,” Lew’s voice said.
The Shug threw down the loglike chunk it had been worrying and stood to face the running man. A moment before the two big men struck, the Shug melted aside and slipped into the water without a ripple. The running man didn’t break stride. Dive.
The icy water slapped the skin. Lew’s body was buoyant with fat and trapped air, but the big legs kicked and forced it into the dark. Ten feet down, then fifteen feet, the arms plowed into mud. The hands pushed through the silt, overturning rocks, waterlogged sticks, sharp-edged bits of ancient garbage. Eyes opened wide, gathering as much light as possible, but the water was too dim, too silted, to 1 6 4
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see more than a few inches. The body, already depleted of oxygen from the sprint, had to keep kicking to stay close to the bottom. The hands kept moving, fanning through the mud.
The pier. Closer to the pier.
Legs kicked toward the shore. Hands touched the first pylon, then the body swung back, moving low over the lake floor like a manatee. It worked on, commanded to ignore the burning in its chest, the blood trickling from its nose.
Fingers brushed a rubber-covered cable. The hand closed on the cable, traced it to the helmet and backpack, then to the body of the drowned man still attached to them. Both hands grabbed the body under the arms and heaved it out of the muck. The shore.
Lew’s body held on to the man with one arm and beat upward, angling toward land. A few moments more and its head broke the surface, gulped automatically for air. It ducked again and lifted Del’s body out of the water. It strode out of the lake, carrying the drowned man like a bride.
&nbs
p; O’Connell was there at the shoreline, and Bertram appeared a moment later, breathing heavily. He’d removed the helmet and pack, and his bald head was damp with sweat.
“Set him down,” O’Connell said.
Its head tilted down, looked down at the ground. Blood spattered onto the drowned man’s chest. It was Lew’s blood, gushing from his nose. A moment’s concentration stopped the flow.
“Listen to me!” she shouted.
Its head rose again.
O’Connell jumped down a short ledge, her eyes on Lew’s, and began to pull off her jacket. “Set him down. Set the body down. He’s not breathing. Let me help.”
Set it down.
Arms and legs and back muscles coordinated to lay the man on the jacket O’Connell had stretched out. The drowned man’s face
—my face—
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was white and translucent as rice paper, tinged with blue: blue eyelids, blue lips. He wasn’t breathing. O’Connell bent over him, delicately pulled the helmet from his head. She pushed up the soaked sweatshirt and T-shirt to his armpits—his arms were still bound behind him—and laid her cheek on his chest. She stayed in that position for a very long time. “I can’t hear anything,” she said, almost to herself. She tilted his head and ran a finger deep inside his mouth, spooned out a wad of oily black that might have been mud, mucous, blood, or a mix of all those things. She adjusted his head, breathed into him, one hand pinching his nose. Moments later she switched and compressed his chest, three times quickly, then moved back to his face.
“He’s too cold,” she said without pausing. “We’ve got to strip him.”
She gestured at Bertram. “You. Give me that sweater.”
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