by Chloe Gong
“Up there, up there,” Roma said quickly. “Right to the edge of the Bund. Merge into the lane.”
The car came to a halt outside a foreign bank and Roma tumbled out, searching the scene before him for any sign of the monster. It wasn’t here yet. Nor were the protesters.
Good.
Roma aimed his pistol at the sky. He shot: three bullets in succession.
“Evacuate!” he called when the workers by the water glanced over, when the fishermen pulled in their lines, when the men chomping on toothpicks at the helm of their ships peered down at him. “Evacuate now if you want to live. Move north!”
“Hey, come on, enough with the shouting!” A White Flower leaned over his ship railing. “What could possibly be—”
Roma aimed his gun, his stomach twisting hard. He fired, and when the bullet studded itself into the White Flower’s shoulder, the White Flower could only spit out his toothpick, his jaw dropping at Roma. Roma never missed.
“I mean it,” he said coldly. “Get yourself to the hospital. Everyone else—move, or I’ll force you into the nearest hospital too.”
They hurried. He wished they would move faster. He wished it didn’t take the threat of violence for them to do it.
A scream echoed through the Bund.
Roma whirled around, raising his gun immediately. “Get into the buildings!” he roared. All the ladies taking strolls by the Bund, the foreigners with the parasols, they stared at him with wide, frightened eyes, but they did not hesitate. The screaming was a signal of a real threat. Roma’s manner was confirmation of something incoming. The crowds surged inward, away from the water, and Roma searched desperately from where he stood—eyes scanning the multiple streets that fed into the Bund, tensing for the appearance of the monster.
“Move! Move!”
Juliette. He’d recognize her voice anywhere. And it was coming from the far road.
Roma ran, darting right onto the road and signaling for the cars to go backward. It didn’t matter if they honked and narrowly ran him over. He waved his gun and those at the front immediately tried to back up with a loud bang of their engines, creating a block as the cars behind tried to creep forward.
Satisfied with the gridlock, Roma turned his attention elsewhere. There was only one road between the water and the mouth of the intersecting street—one road and one long wharf, depending on which way the monster wanted to run, depending on if it would dive into the shallows where the fishermen’s boats were docked, or if it would move down the wharf toward the deep end. Roma strode backward, coming to a halt at the head of the wharf. Down the street, a blur of movement came barreling along the tram lines, dispersing dots of black wherever it went.
The monster.
“Okay,” he muttered. He lifted his gun. Aimed. Even if bullets did not penetrate its back, its front was still soft in the way humans were. “Enough is enough.”
Roma pulled the trigger.
The gun kicked back… but nothing came out.
He had no bullets left.
“Dammit!”
Roma tossed the gun aside, reaching into his jacket for his spare. A flash of movement to his side. Before he could retrieve anything, Roma turned just in time to sight Paul Dexter with his pistol raised.
On pure instinct, Roma ducked fast, barely avoiding a bullet to the head. He pressed his palms into the hard ground, looking around his immediate surroundings.
“Give up,” Paul hissed. In one hand he had his weapon, and in the other, a briefcase.
Roma didn’t humor him. He swooped for the nearest object—a wooden box—and threw it, aiming right for the face. With a yelp, Paul was forced to drop his briefcase, forced to almost lose his grip on his pistol. By the time he recovered, Roma had already reached into his jacket and pulled out his second gun.
Roma’s finger hovered on the trigger. He would have shot Paul, then and there, if the ground had not started trembling. If the world around him hadn’t suddenly started teeming with a flood of deadly specks rushing toward him en masse.
“No,” Roma whispered.
The monster had arrived.
* * *
“Move, move!”
Juliette pushed the woman down, narrowly saving her from the arc of insects that crawled by her food cart, panting hard. A group of people not three steps away collapsed in unison. The woman whimpered, her eyes wide.
“Stay there,” Juliette snapped. “Stay low, keep your eyes on the ground, and move when you see the insects, understood?”
The woman nodded, the motion fitful. Juliette bolted back up, searching for the monster once again. They had almost neared the Huangpu River, neared the final destruction that marked the end of a bloody, gruesome trail—or at least what Juliette hoped would be the end. The Bund was right ahead, upon the next intersection.
“No.” Juliette’s eyes landed on two figures right by the water, grappling with each other. Her eyes tracked the monster, tracked its trailing insects as they whipped in the direction of any victim it could find.
“Roma!” she screamed. “Roma, get down!”
Roma whirled around, his eyes wide. He acted immediately, throwing himself away from the monster as it thundered upon the wharf, avoiding a clump of insects as they fell upon the ground and ran along Paul’s shoes before dispersing. Paul did not need to move. He was immune.
Juliette supposed that was why he was not at all worried when the monster dove into the water.
A loud, loud splash echoed through the near silent Bund.
She shouldn’t have asked Roma to get to the river first. She should have switched roles with him.
“Roma, run!” she screamed, sprinting as fast as she could. “It’s going to—”
An eruption. Just as Juliette finally arrived by the wharf, the water burst with spots of black, rocketing ten feet into the air before descending upon the ports. The insects skittered far and wide, finding every nook to burrow into, every surface to latch upon. There was no time to take cover. They rained down—on Paul, on Juliette, on Roma.
Juliette had never been so disgusted in her entire life. Hundreds of legs were crawling over her, burrowing into the lines of her clothes and taking bites of her pores as they tested where to land. Her skin had never itched to this extent; she had never experienced such repugnance that she wanted to throw up at the sensation.
But the insects, even as they landed upon her, slid off within seconds. The insects rained from the water then glided right off the arms that Juliette and Paul had thrown into the air, for the vaccine ran blue in their veins, fending off the attack.
The last of the eruption hit the ground. The air cleared. The insects skittered outward on the pavement.
Juliette, gasping, lowered her arms.
“Roma,” she cried.
Thirty-Six
Roma’s hands launched to his throat.
Thirty-Seven
The madness would not have come so quickly upon ordinary victims, who received only one insect to begin the infection. One would turn to ten over time, and ten to a hundred, until enough had multiplied within the victim to take control. But Roma—Roma was receiving them all at once, and at once they were overriding his nerves, driving him to gouge for blood.
Juliette furiously brushed the few stubborn insects off her arms and steadied her grip on her pistol. There was only one way to save him, only one way to put a stop to this all. She ran up to the end of the wharf and searched for the monster, thinking of nothing except finding the blasted thing and—
She should have paid more attention to the danger behind.
Her head slammed into the wooden boards of the wharf.
“I really cannot let you do that, Juliette.” Paul grunted. “Why don’t we just…?”
Before Juliette could get her bearings, could even think to get back up and aim again, Paul kicked her hard in the stomach. Juliette fell off the main wharf, her whole body slamming onto the smaller platform below, which floated right above water. Her lu
ngs rattled. With laborious effort, she tried to raise her weapon, tried to push past her spinning head, but then Paul jumped and landed on his feet beside her and kicked the gun out of her hands with a pitiful flop.
“I’m sorry, Juliette.”
He grabbed a fistful of her hair and stuck her head into the water.
Juliette nearly gasped, except opening her mouth meant swallowing the dirty river water, so she kept her lips pinched tightly together. She struggled to writhe out of Paul’s grip, forcing herself to keep her eyes open even as the water swirled with the horrendous black of swimming insects. Paul’s grip was far stronger than his lanky frame would let on. His fingers upon her head were a steel claw.
“This is for the best.” Juliette could barely hear him though he was kneeling by her side. Her ears were blocked with water, with merciless insects. “I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve given me no choice. I tried to save you, Juliette. I really tried.”
Juliette bucked and kicked, harder and harder to no avail. She should have shot Paul when she had the chance. He was not only trying to kill her now, but he was trying to kill her slowly, so she would die with the knowledge that Roma had been within saving. So she would die with the knowledge that she had failed. Roma was strong, but he couldn’t stay in control forever.
Perhaps he had succumbed, digging his fingers into his neck. Perhaps he was already dead.
Her struggling was useless. Paul’s blue vial had saved her from a death to the madness. Now Paul had decided that she was to be discarded anyway, into a watery grave.
The blue vial, Juliette suddenly remembered. Paul had had another in his coat pocket. And if he had a blue vial in there, was there a chance that he kept around another syringe too?
Juliette reached her hand out, groping blindly for the edges of Paul’s coat. It was almost laughable how easily she found it—how easily her hand shoved right into the wide opening of his pocket.
Frantic, on the very last gasp of air in her lungs, Juliette pulled the syringe out, and stabbed the needle into Paul’s wrist.
With a roar, Paul loosened his grip, his hand flexing in pain. Juliette sat up quickly, gasping for breath, barely pausing to get ahold of herself, barely pausing to glance up at the wharf and cry at the sight of Roma struggling against his own hands as they dug deeper into his throat. She was scrambling onto her knees, diving for Paul before he could secure his grip on his gun, tackling him around the waist and pushing both of them into the water.
The river hit her with a shock, but Juliette was the one in control now. Juliette was the one hovering above Paul as they sank deeper, one of her arms still looped around his waist, the other firmly on his wrist, and as the foam around them cleared, as Paul’s eyes snapped open to find Juliette hovering before him like some vengeful demigod, she plucked the gun from his hand.
No, his mouth formed. There was utter horror in his expression. Juliette.
She kicked him in the chest; he flailed backward. She put both her hands around the gun, pointed to his forehead, and merely inches away, she pulled the trigger.
The water muffled most of the sound. The water did not muffle the blood.
Paul Dexter went into death with three eyes open—the third eye a weeping bullet wound. The water turned red and Juliette surged up, coughing as she broke to the surface, her gaze wild as she searched for her next order of business.
She found the monster immediately, for he had already returned upon the main wharf.
Yet he was not quite a monster anymore. He was transforming back, the process incomplete. His face had returned, but the lower half of his body was still strange and changed and green, and as the old man knelt there, it seemed he had already given up.
Juliette pulled herself up onto the smaller platform. Then, the pistol in her hands, she scrambled back onto the wharf.
“Qi Ren,” she called.
The unwilling monster of Shanghai turned to face her. The old man had a horror marring his tired features too, but a sort different to the one that had paralyzed Paul in his final moments. This was a horror at himself—at all he had been made to do and all he wanted to be rid of. He nodded at her. Juliette raised the pistol. Her hands were shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Once again, she pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck his heart. The bullet was as loud as the bang at the end of the world.
But Qi Ren’s sigh was soft. His hand came up to his chest gingerly, as if the bullet were nothing but a heartfelt compliment. Rivulets of red ran down his fingers and onto the wharf, tinting his surroundings a deep color.
Juliette inched closer. Qi Ren had become still, but he had not pitched over. Something was happening inside him. Something was moving.
A bulge appeared in his left wrist. Juliette watched it migrate from the veins amid the old man’s forearm to the wiry space between his neck and shoulder. Suddenly his Adam’s apple was the size of a true apple, pushing against thin, capillary-filled skin.
Qi Ren’s throat split down the middle. Just like that, as if a knife had slit him apart, the flaps of his skin burst open and detonated a mess of black-red blood. Qi Ren collapsed immediately. From his throat, an insect as big as Juliette’s fist flew outward, detaching from the veins and tendons it had been living off.
Screeching, Juliette fired the pistol—once, twice, three times. Her mind was panicking into overdrive, her most basic reflexes shaking violently. Two of her bullets flew wide; one grazed the insect, sending it nose-diving onto the wharf. For a moment its circular, flat body scurried about the surface of the wooden panels for something—anything—to hold on to, dozens of tiny legs that resembled microscopic hairs scrambling to meet a body. Then the insect stilled, and when it stopped twitching at last, so too did the other insects in the water.
She could feel the change. It felt like the shroud of death had lifted off this city.
“It’s over,” Juliette whispered. “It’s really over.”
She turned around slowly. She searched for life at the other end of the wharf.
“Roma?”
She was frightened that he would not respond, frightened that all she would be met with was silence. She was frightened that she would not find him at all, that he had long been taken by the waters that ran this city red.
But then her eyes landed upon where he had placed himself, found him in a curled ball up against a parked car in the middle of the wide, wide road. Slowly, he lowered his hands from his throat. Blood trickled down his neck.
She ran up to him, tossing the pistol away. She could hardly breathe even as her hands came upon his shoulders, gripped him hard to make sure he was real, that this was the truth before her and not a hallucination of the broken mind.
“I’m okay,” Roma assured, his voice quavering.
He had nearly gotten there. Ten puncture marks dotted his neck, deep enough to leave his red insides on show.
But he was alive.
Juliette pulled him to her fiercely, locking them in an embrace.
“The monster is dead,” she whispered.
So why did she still feel empty? Why did it feel like their roles weren’t over?
“Did Paul hurt you?” Roma asked. He pulled away and ran his eyes over her to check for wounds, as if his own hands weren’t still running with blood.
Juliette shook her head, and Roma sighed in relief. He glanced to the water, where Paul’s body floated in those green-gray waves.
“He thought he loved you.”
“It wasn’t love,” Juliette whispered.
Roma pressed a kiss to her temple, closing his eyes against the dampness that stuck to her hair.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go wake Alisa.”
Thirty-Eight
One by one, the insects detached from Alisa Montagova.
They writhed and screeched as the mother host bled out, gnashing their microscopic teeth at one another. When the heart that fueled them all stopped beating, they t
oo were forced to go to their death throes, detaching from the tissues they had clutched, unhinging their jaw from the nerve they had selected. In their last moments, they started to emerge. Where their only goal had once been to bury deep, the insects now desperately tried to burrow out, thrashing and thrashing in a tangle of limp blond hair, before at last passing into death and dropping onto the white fabric of the hospital linens.
With a gasp, Alisa awoke. She bolted upright and heaved for fresh air—coughing and coughing until the pipe that had been feeding her flew out of her throat. She had risen just enough to scatter about the dozen arthropod bodies left behind on the pillowcase, already shriveling in their death. She did not dare move any more than that. She inhaled sharply and held the breath in her lungs this time, her eyes almost crossing in her attempt to look upon the barrel of the gun pointed to her forehead.
“It’s okay, Alisa,” someone wheezed from the corner of the room.
Alisa flicked her eyes to the voice. It did more to heighten her panic than it did to ease it: she found Benedikt, her cousin, with his hands up, two guns pointed upon him, and Marshall Seo in a similar predicament near the door.
“Welcome back to the world, Alisa Montagova,” Tyler Cai said. He pressed the hard muzzle of his gun into her skin. “Sorry it has to be in this way.”
* * *
The city streets remained an uproarious parade of commotion as Roma and Juliette made their way through. Everywhere Juliette looked, she saw the corpses of those who had been in the monster’s path of destruction. She saw political chaos—rioters, still intent on making themselves heard even when their fellow workers were lying dead in the gutters. In her hurry, she had lost count of how many near collisions she had made with a protester, how many times she was almost hit with their flaming torches or withering signs blowing with the wind.
