What the Hell Did I Just Read

  David said, “That doesn’t even sound possible.”

  The detective shrugged. “I’m not a geologist. I know most kids are lying sacks of shit. But we got a guy at the scene who says there could be a fissure in the earth or somethin’, leads from the bottom of the pond to somewhere inside the mine. Be hard to see it under the water. But if they’re gonna get the kids out, that’s how. You try to pull out those rocks from the mouth of the mine, all that happens is more rocks fall in. They’d be at that for months.”

  Amy said, “So you’re going in? For the rest of them?”

  Me

  Bowman looked back down at the “pond”—to me, a hundred-foot-wide gaping maw in the rock, wet flaps of pink flesh like tongues twitching and curling at the air, surrounding a two-foot-wide throat flexing and pulsing as if anticipating a meal.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, and nodded toward a blue van that was making its way toward them. “In fact, dive team’s here.”

  Over at the ambulance, the mother hoisted up the squirming maggot, carrying it like a child. Its mandibles latched onto her shoulder and blood poured down her shirt. Bowman trotted over to meet them.

  John looked back and forth from the maggot to the orifice in the ground. He muttered, “Wait. I don’t think that’s its mouth.”

  In a low voice, I said, “We have to do this, and we have to do this fucking now. We have to get the bomb down there, jam it in, blow up the egg sac or birth canal or whatever the fuck part of that thing’s anatomy that is. Before nine more goddamned maggots pop out of it.”

  Amy said, “You see these armed biker guys standing everywhere? They think their kids are still inside that hole, they’ll shoot you to pieces if you blow it up with their children still in it. The police, too.”

  “Well, what we’re hoping is that the moment the blast goes off, the spell will be broken. We sever the Millibutt’s connection to this world, it’ll break the mind control powers of the fuckroaches, everything will go back to the way it was. Memories of the kids will just go poof, there’ll be some confusion but then everyone will agree we’re heroes and give us all free pairs of leather chaps.”

  Amy said, “What evidence do we have that the roaches can’t operate independently of their mother?”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. We have to risk it.”

  She said, “And that’s even assuming the bomb works at all. Remember the shotgun that same lady gave you? Plus, we don’t actually have the bomb, it’s in Ted’s truck.”

  I said, “You see the scuba guys getting ready to go down there? I’m going to give us exactly three minutes to come up with a plan to deal with all that stuff you just mentioned. Then we move.”

  28. A COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL PLAN THAT ENDS THE STORY, THIS IS PROBABLY THE FINAL CHAPTER RIGHT HERE

  Amy

  Amy tried to be casual as she passed the camouflage pickup. The bomb was sitting in the passenger seat inside a camouflage backpack (though a completely different type of camouflage than the truck’s pixel-style paint job—she wondered what the difference was). Ted’s partner, who David had said had a profane nickname, was leaning casually against the passenger side door.

  She kept walking and circled the little church. All of the cops and most of the bikers were down around the pond now, where the action was—she would have relative privacy for her end of the operation. David had actually suggested she use her Taser on Ted’s friend—she had transferred it from her purse to her pocket the moment they arrived—but she knew for a fact that it hurt a whole lot and she also wasn’t sure it even had a charge left. It was a last resort, at best.

  Instead, once she was out of the man’s sight, she sucked in as much breath as she could and screamed her head off.

  Splashy bootsteps stomped her direction. The grizzled ex-soldier arrived with his gun at the ready, eyes wide.

  Amy was pointing at the sky.

  “It’s here! The bat thing! It’s here!”

  He pointed his gun up into the clouds.

  “Where?”

  She made a show of desperately trying to study the sky.

  “I don’t—I just saw it, I saw it plain as day, it went behind those trees. I think? Darn it. It knows we’re messing with its nest.” She turned to look the man in the eye. “It’s going to come back. It wants its prey. Have you seen the video of this thing? When it swoops down, it can snatch a kid into the sky in three seconds. And that’s who it’s going to come for—the little ones. Go talk to whoever’s got guns—tell them we need people watching the skies, and I mean every single minute.”

  Poopbeard nodded. “Affirmative.”

  Me

  I casually walked past the camouflage truck and snatched the bomb bag from the seat. I shuffled quickly down the steep path and along the way texted John:

  prepare the diversion

  We were hoping the blast damage and shrapnel from the bomb would be largely contained in the orifice, but everyone involved in the project was largely unfamiliar with the anatomy at play here (it would be weird if we weren’t). This meant that, on top of making sure nobody interfered with the operation, we needed to get the innocents as far away as possible, all within the next few minutes—that would be John’s job. Someday, he will be remembered as the Michelangelo of loud, baffling distractions.

  Shitbeard shouted for help with the BATMANTIS??? hunt and some of the bikers came trudging up the hill as I descended, but not all of them. I hustled down toward the pond, knowing I had to beat the rescue divers into the hole. I didn’t want to blow the birth canal with a man inside it—that seemed like a super weird way to die—but still, if I couldn’t get there first and it came down to one man versus the world …

  I made it to the bank of what everyone else thought was a pond and waded out into the squishy mass surrounding the orifice, slipping and sliding on slime. The scuba divers were on the opposite shore messing with their gear, Ted was talking to a street cop nearby. No one was looking at me. I pressed on and found myself being resisted by an invisible force, then realized I was wading through a shallow pool of water that I couldn’t actually see.

  But if the water isn’t real …

  Someone shouted at me. Asking what I was doing.

  I said, “Just got to check something! Just be a minute!”

  I trudged forward. I patted John’s lighter in my pocket, making sure it was there—it was Amy who had remembered that I needed one, bless her—and reminded myself to lift it out of the invisible water before attempting to light it, just in case it worked that way. We had three minutes on the fuse, according to Tasker, though it had occurred to me that may have been bullshit and the thing might just blow up in my hands the moment I touched it with the flame.

  The orifice was just ahead, the “water” now up to my waist. I’d have to hold my breath to get the bomb into place. Maybe?

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could sense something as I got closer, a heaviness in the air, kind of like when you walk into the room and can sense that you just missed a bitter argument, or some illicit porking.

  Was it fear? No.

  Power.

  Menace.

  Ravenous appetites and strange desires lurking just below, like I was bobbing on an inner tube in the middle of the ocean while below me swarmed the swift shadows of a vast school of Cthulhus. Despite Marconi’s speech, I had still been thinking of the creature as being physically located inside the mine. But now I understood—this particular spot was just where it interacted with our universe, like the microscopic point where two perfect spheres contact one another. This was where our universe touched a sprawling, putrid nebula of dumb loathing and unfathomable, cruel strength. I thought that if it could be expressed as a physical size, the entity would be large enough to swallow our solar system whole. This thing, I thought, had far more than a thousand butts.

  I found I had stopped walking, my own fear an invisible hand to my chest.

  I shook it off, and pushed myself
forward.

  I squished toward the quivering orifice, now about twenty feet in front of me, and muttered, “I’ve got to get a real fucking job.”

  I pulled out my phone, typed out, “do it now” and just as I was about to hit the send button, I got slammed from behind, thrown face-first onto the squishy pink surface.

  The bomb went rolling away, still in its backpack, the fuse still unlit. I felt water burn into my nostrils. Could I drown in the illusion? I had no idea. I held my breath anyway.

  Ted Knoll stood over me, my shirt in his fists. He lifted me up and I felt myself break the surface of the “pond.”

  Ted said, “What the hell are you doin’?” He was shaking my torso with each word.

  I sputtered, “Ending this! Killing the—closing off the nest.”

  “There’s more kids in there, fuckstick! We got divers here, they’re goin’ in after ’em!”

  I scrambled for a story. I briefly considered the truth. Over Ted’s shoulder, I saw Amy up at the top of the path, looking down, hugging herself in the rain. I tried to think of a way to signal to her, but all that came to mind was screaming, “TELL JOHN TO START THE DIVERSION,” which I figured would defeat the purpose of a diversion.

  I said, “You say you can spot a liar? Well, watch my face real close—there are no children in there.”

  “What? Why would the kid lie?”

  “It’s a trick. It’s an ambush. What comes out of there—ain’t nobody gonna survive it, Ted. We’ve got to close it, and we’ve got to close it now.”

  Ted let me get to my feet. He then gathered up the bomb, slinging it over his shoulder.

  “You look like you’re lyin’, all the time, no matter what you say. Maybe you’re right about this, but if so, it’d be the first time since I ran into you. Dive team knows the risks, I’ve told ’em what’s what. If somethin’ hostile comes outta the water, we’ll be ready. But you and your buddies are gonna stay the hell back, up there on the ridge. I see you approach before every one of those kids is free, I’ll boot-stomp your ass into red waffles. Are we clear?”

  I thought I could feel the Millibutt smirking at me, from some cold corner of the universe.

  Ted turned, leaned forward, and “waded” his way out of the invisible pond. “Nine more kids in there. Once the last one is out, then we blow it. Not before.”

  But then, I thought, it will be too late.

  * * *

  Defeated, I met Amy at the top of the path. The two of us didn’t speak as we made our way around to a spot behind the cabin nearest the church. There, John sat on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he’d sneaked out of the church parking lot. He had strapped six silicone butts to various parts of his torso with bungee straps. He was holding Buddha’s mace, which had six pink dildos taped to it.

  I said, “Forget it, we don’t need the diversion. I got intercepted by Ted.”

  John looked crestfallen.

  There were faint cheers from below. We moved back to where we could see the pond just in time to watch a scuba diver crawl up from the twitching pink orifice, a squirming maggot in his hands. Three of them out in the world now, depending on what had happened with Maggie.

  Speaking of which, I tried Marconi once again and felt my whole body seize up when he actually answered.

  He said, “David?”

  “Jesus, finally. Tell me you took care of Maggie.”

  “Not yet. There was a complication.”

  “Goddamnit, Marconi.”

  “Your friend, Joy, began acting strangely.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yes. Not having met her, and knowing our situation, I had suggested she be vetted by our crowdsourced array, as you were.”

  Ah. Yeah, not a bad idea.

  He continued, “As a response, she put a gun to my head. She is still doing it at this very moment.” He sounded only mildly surprised by this turn of events. “You never told me how you know this person…”

  “Let me guess. She doesn’t want you to do away with Maggie.”

  “That would be correct. And, in fact, we are on the move. I am not sure to where, Joy is not forthcoming with answers.”

  I said, “I’m going to bet you’re coming here, and that she intends to stop us from taking out the thing in the mine.”

  I heard Joy say, “Hang up,” and the call disconnected.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, pushed wet hair away from my forehead, and said, “Well, Marconi has fucked up his end. Now what?”

  Amy said, “The good news is, we still know where every single one of the kids are, right? So, there’s that. They’re kind of contained, still.”

  “Yes, we can watch them all hatch right in front of us.”

  John said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’m very disappointed in the Sauce-tripping weekend version of ourselves.”

  I shook my head and let out a long breath. I glanced at the church behind us, and for the first time noticed that on the door, in John’s handwriting, had been scrawled, THIS IS A VAGINAPOND.

  Amy

  The rescue went quickly. There were two scuba divers, alternating trips into the fissure leading inside the old mine. At the moment, the last of the ten children was being hauled from the pond that David insisted was the pulsing birth canal of the Millibutt. The rain had slacked off into a light drizzle, which was as close to no rain as they got these days. Amy thought that soon she was going to wake up covered in mildew.

  The kids were being loaded into a modified Christ’s Rebellion school bus at the top of the hill. It was white and covered in red Bible slogans (WHERE THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS, THERE IS LIBERTY) and at least one image of a cartoon policeman getting run over by a motorcycle. Amy could see the cops talking to the surviving leadership of the biker clan, clearly trying to convince them to bring the kids in to give statements and get checked out at the hospital. She could only hear muffled conversation, but Amy got the sense that the bikers weren’t having it. No, these people were done with all that. They were, Amy assumed, done with Undisclosed. They just wanted to hit the road and feel the wind of the Lord’s liberty on their rough cheeks until they arrived in a better place.

  If I change … go. Just, go …

  Amy watched as the kids boarded the bus, one by one, guided by biker moms. She had expected—or hoped—the kids would look like perfect Children of the Damned characters. You know—clones. Maggie had been a cute little blond girl and Mikey had looked like a big-cheeked black kid from an eighties sitcom. But these looked like, well, biker kids. Rough haircuts done at home—one boy had a shaved head, another had a mullet down to the middle of his back. Hand-me-down T-shirts, at least one ten-year-old girl wearing a tank top covered in cartoon cannabis leaves. One kid had a splint on his finger, like he’d broken it at some point, maybe trying to catch a baseball. Another had a red birthmark that covered half his face. A chubby little girl had a nasty rash crawling up her neck.

  Every stitch of clothing, every Band-Aid, every blemish with its own backstory.

  She tried not to look at them.

  Me

  I saw Amy staring at the bus and then making a determined effort to look elsewhere. The vehicle was now stuffed full of the larvae, they were squirming all over the windows. The female driver sat behind the wheel smoking a cigarette while a maggot munched on her scalp from behind. Blood ran down her face. She just blithely puffed away, waiting for the last of her cargo to board so she could head out.

  If just one of them gets out into the world, we’re fucked. Plain and simple.

  The last of the “children” was now free from the “mine” and Ted didn’t waste any time moving onto the bomb phase of the operation. He and Shitbeard approached the orifice, the former with the bomb backpack slung over his shoulder.

  Ted had threatened to murder us, or at least me, if we got too close but we risked moving partway down the path to get a better vantage point. I was very confident the Millibutt wasn’t just going to let Ted jam a bomb up in there, and I was
90 percent sure that whatever trick the creature pulled, it would require John and me to run down, rip the bomb from Ted’s hands, and finish the job ourselves.

  I was also curious to see how Ted and Shitbeard operated. I was specifically wondering how they would disperse the bystanders—Detective Bowman and his partner were standing right there on the pond’s bank/meat flaps. But Ted just gave the cops a hand signal and both of them started directing people up and away from the blast site. So, he’d just discussed it with them and they had agreed it was a good idea. Why not, if the kids were safe? Must be weird to actually have authority figures on your side sometimes.

  Motorcycles were rumbling to life above us, some of the gang already heading out, probably to go start packing up so they could all leave this god-forsaken place for good. I briefly wondered if John’s meth supplier was going with them.

  Shitbeard had the night-vision binoculars and positioned himself nearby to scan the sky for the BATMANTIS???, his assault rifle at the ready. Ted waded out toward the orifice with the bomb, doing a slow-motion walk, believing he was pushing through water up to his chest.

  Even partway up the hill, I felt a tremor. But not in the ground—it was like the sky and the stars were trembling, a shudder in the cosmos.

  John gave me a look and I knew he felt it, too.

  Whether or not that bomb was actually going to work, I was pretty sure the Millibutt thought it would.

  Yet, nothing emerged to stop Ted.

  Why? I know you’ve got more tricks up your sleeve, you galactic piece of shit. I’m sure of it. Make your move.

  Ted lit the fuse, took a deep breath, and disappeared into the pink hole. The phrase “muff diver” did not come to mind then or at any point after, and I’m not sure why you assumed it would.

  John said, “There’s no way it’s going to be that eas—”

  Amy said, “Look!”

  There was a flash of headlights from above.

  An RV pulled in, up by the church. Marconi’s personal white-and-gold tour bus.