by Chuck Wendig
She changes. The transformation sweeps over her as quickly as a puddle of gasoline catching fire. Mookie leaps for a woman but lands on the back of a monstrous worm, a beast that his arms could never encompass. One of her razor-sharp spines slices through the meat of his forearm and he howls, but he remains undeterred. Before he slides off, he again raises the cleaver and—
Thwack.
—buries it in her meat.
She writhes and thrashes, and turns her body hard. Everything goes slippery and suddenly Mookie is pinned beneath her. Sharp rocks and shells at his back, serpents-flesh at his fore. Seawater all around. The ocean stings his eyes, fills his ears, and a silver flurry of bubbles escapes his lips and slides around her frame. Above, the water lights up and Mookie hears the dull choom choom choom and suddenly the massive god-worm is once more coiling violently, bringing him with it. He’s back up out of the water, gasping, water streaming off his whipping body as he grips the cleaver.
He sees Hrothk standing there, three fingers of smoke drifting from the barrel of his gun-arm. The Trogbody is too slow, though—her tail whips, catches him in the middle and coils around him. It smashes him up, down, around, his cloak whipping and tearing as she thrashes him about, bits of the golem breaking off and flinging into the tide like chipped stone.
Mookie wrenches the cleaver out, and drops back into the water. His heart throbs and a wave of unease and dizziness passes over him like a shadow. But he grits his teeth and bears it, screaming inwardly at his heart to not give up, to keep beating, because Nora needs him. Because the world needs him.
He plants his feet, raises the cleaver, and chops down again. Then brings it up, and down again. Like he’s trying to chop a fucking redwood in twain.
Pelsinde flicks her tail—
And Hrothk sails out of the cenote, into the sea.
Mookie opens a gushing vent in the side of the god-worm, black blood bubbling out, splashing into the water now in great heaving buckets.
The tail whips back the other way.
Its very end catches Mookie across the side of his face.
It’s like getting hit by a tire coming off a big-rig. His head wrenches around and his whole body spins like a top. Unconsciousness pulls at him as he crashes down into the water, his hand closing on a cleaver that’s no longer there—
He chokes down seawater.
Time skips like a flat stone across a still lake.
Everything in fits and starts.
When Mookie opens his eyes again, there she is. Pelsinade. Still the god-worm. Her lamprey mouth opening, fleshy pucker undulating like the arms of a starfish, thousands of teeth clicking and popping. He tries to say something but he can’t find words, can only find meaningless sounds—
A shadow falls upon him.
“Get away from him, you bitch.”
Burnsy. Standing on a rock with the cleaver in hand. Once again, the avenging stuntman. The little burned hot-dog in a dirty jumpsuit.
He leaps for her—
—and is promptly swallowed up. Her mouth flaps close. And press inward with a crunch. Blood wells up around the edges, dribbling down like juice from fresh berries. When the mouth opens again, Burnsy is gone. All that remains of him is the dark stains on her infinite teeth.
Then she brings that mouth down on Mookie.
He cries out. Holds out his arms and kicks out his legs, and suddenly he feels like a man trying to hold up the ceiling. Hercules and Atlas all in one, his muscle-gone-flabby body the only thing keeping her from eating him up too. He holds two of the flaps open while the other two batter at him, tearing into his skin, abrading his meat like he’s being dragged across a bed of hard coral.
He looks down into that pulsing pink pit of her throat.
It’s oblivion. Any time it opens, he sees an endless well of stars. And he hears a song rising up from the deep of her belly—a grotesque chorus of voices calling his name, singing him to doom, chiding him to let her have his skin, to join them in the dark, to find his place in the stinking pit of offal, the abattoir of her charnel-house belly.
The throat flutters like a bladder filling and shrinking. A spasmic agitation.
And then the pink flesh is ripped open.
A face, a human face, emerges from the hole. White teeth. Blood-slick skull. Bone shining beneath. Burnsy screams. A wordless wail.
Then he flings something at Mookie.
The five-colored key.
Pelsinade rears back, lifting Mookie up in this paroxysm of misery—
He clutches the key to his chest and rolls free of her four jaws as they come crushing together—
Mookie falls—
Splash.
Above him, the dark shape lashes about—
The key is warm and wet. Mookie presses his back up against a rough-scrabble rock and jams the key into the hole in his chest.
He feels his innards explode. Everything is color. Bright, dark, gleaming. A knife with many blades spinning inside him. He tastes bitter pennies. Feels rats crawling around his guts. His limbs distend, then shrink. His jaw cranes wide, and his eyes feel like they’ve got someone’s thumbs behind them trying to push them out of his head—
And then it all snaps back, whip-crack. His breathing goes quick, shallow, his body tightly wound. He feels the Red Rage burning through him, but he’s focused like he’s on the Blue stuff. The Green is throttling his heart—fire and steam give him life, motion, madness. He feels here and in a hundred other places, the Ochre again casting him—just his mind, this time—to the deep rifts of the glowdark Expanse, to the skies above them, to the mountains and seas and deserts, to the pits and peaks.
In there, too, is Nora. Her blood. A taste of it on the back of his tongue.
And again all the memories of her come landing on his beach.
When he opens his eyes, the god-worm is rushing toward him. Mouth once more open. Her song calling to him.
A glint of light ahead of him—
His cleaver, there in the water.
Mookie crouches down, reaches for the cleaver, holds it up, blade out—
He is a rock. An immovable object. A part of the world, not apart from it.
The blade slices into the length of her body. Starting at her mouth. She slides along it, and the cleaver unzips her like a meat-suit. Her insides rain down on him, splashing like chum for sharks. And then her tail passes over him and it’s done. Her body curls in on itself, spasming and shuddering. And then it stops. A gassy, wet wheeze rises from the wound. The whole body sags, the head splashing down in the tide pool. Mookie stands. Panting. The key still jutting out of his chest.
He sees the door.
He rips the key out of his chest.
It’s a horrible feeling. Like being alone. And powerless.
But some of it lives within him still. The shadow of that power is still power.
He moves toward the door—
And a hand catches him on the shoulder.
Hrothk. Looking beaten to hell. Like a road after a long winter, like a sidewalk broken by a jackhammer. “The god-worm?”
Mookie grunts and gestures to the creature coiled around them. Blood and guts pooling in the knee-high waters.
“It is noon,” the golem growls. “We are too late to stop the wedding.”
“She’s still in there,” Mookie says.
“Yes. But now only one outcome exists if the world is to remain.”
“We could kill Owen.”
“Killing a daemon is no easy task.”
“Neither is killing a god-worm. Look around you.”
“We don’t have time!” Hrothk bellows. “Daemons are immortal. Nearly indestructible. It is too much of a risk.”
Mookie remembers: Ernesto Candlefly coming back from the brink of death. Repairing himself like it was nothing at all. Then tormented there in the pit, withered and ruined but never dying. It’s then Mookie says her name because he knows: “Nora.”
“Yes. If she dies before the transi
tion is complete, we may yet be able to save the world. I’ll do it. You don’t have to—”
But he stiffens and snarls. “Bullshit. She’s my daughter. She’s my responsibility. If she’s going to die...” He bites back tears. “Then she does so by my hand.”
He pulls away from Hrothk, and climbs up onto the sagging god-worm corpse, using it as a step stool to reach the door in the wall. Mookie jams the key into the lock.
The door opens, and a wedding awaits.
38.
This is how it ends.
— Day 1 of the War Journal of Persephone
It should be beautiful.
A man at his daughter’s wedding day.
And in such a beautiful place.
Pink stone pillars. Going on endlessly, infinitely, each wound with ivy of endless colors—blues and greens and reds. The light here feels tangible. The air is sweet and shimmers as if alive somehow.
The Interstitium. A place Mookie knows nothing about—only that it is a place between the Great Below and the Infinite Above. Like the space between two floorboards, or the vacancy betwixt walls.
Seats, cast in a semi-circle, like a peacock’s tail. Men and women—daemons, Mookie suspects, sit in the chairs, heads reeling back. Eyes blank, without pupils. Mouths open. All of them singing a single hymn, a mantra, a vibration. They begin to rise out of their seats. The pillars begin to shudder and fracture with gunshot cracks.
He’s too late.
There. Ahead of all the chairs. Between four pillars.
A dais.
On the dais, his daughter. Her toes pointed downward as she floats in the air, hair swimming about her as if trapped in still waters. Owen, also floating, head ratcheted back, dark light shining from his mouth. Her mouth opens and dark light joins it.
As Mookie and the golem make their way to the center of the room, it’s like the wedding stage is a prism—black light suddenly radiates out, like shards of mirrored glass, and it slices into Mookie. He feels it pushing against him, pulling him apart like he’s an old stuffed teddy bear ripping apart at rotten seams. Hrothk steps in front of Mookie to shield him—the golem continues to take the living light full-on. But his flesh is stone, and it is not so neatly pulverized. Bits chip away, streamers of dust, but his form holds. The golem moves toward the dais, and Mookie moves behind him.
He thinks of Skelly, suddenly. Back in New York. Waiting for him.
He knows now he’s not coming back.
He won’t see her again.
He hears their conversation played in his head, again and again...
I’m not a hero.
I know.
You can’t trust me to make the right decisions.
Nobody’s asking you to. You’ll figure it out.
I won’t. I can’t.
You have a plan... you’re not the man anybody would’ve asked for but you’re the man the world is gonna get. Nora needs you.
The pillars begin to break apart. Bits crumbling. One pillar suddenly shatters, tenting inward at a sharp angle like a tree broken in half. Then it crumbles all the way, falling to pieces. Another corkscrews, its pink stone spiraling outward in a spray. Some of it peppers Mookie like shrapnel, and he feels blood welling up from where it stings him, embedding in his thuggish gristle.
All around them, the daemons sing. Blissfully unaware. Unaffected by the rays of dark light. They’re part of this. It won’t destroy them. Mookie sees Candlefly. Aurora. Other Candleflies. He thinks to leave the safety of Hrothk, take his cleaver and take their heads as prizes—but then the dais is beneath them. It’s too late for any of that.
They ascend. One step, two step, three steps.
“We have no time,” Hrothk roars.
Mookie steps out from behind the golem. Now unshielded.
The light emanates from Nora and Owen. Mookie feels it like a hurricane-force wind. It’s shaking him apart. His bones hurt. His heart, squeezed as if in a vice.
He hears Hrothk in his ear. Do it. Do it. Now!
He unclips the cleaver. Holds it steady.
Nora’s head turns toward him. Eyes glistening even as spears of light shine from them like spotlights. A small smile turns at the corner of her lips and she mouths two words to him: Kill. Me.
Mookie hesitates.
Pillars break into dust.
The floor begins to split. Daemons hover, their song growing louder.
Hrothk raises his gun-arm. Points it at Nora.
Mookie mouths three words of his own to Nora.
Then he brings the cleaver down.
He gives it everything. He has to. He channels whatever of the Pigments are left inside his heart up through his spine, to his shoulder, down the length of his arm like a whipping bolt of lightning—
The cleaver cuts through Hrothk’s arm at the elbow.
The golem’s quartz eyes flash with fear and betrayal.
Mookie catches the gun-arm. He turns toward the golem and says that he’s sorry. Hrothk roars, rears back with his fist, but it’s too late. Mookie spins the gun-arm around and jerks back on the mineral-crusted trigger.
A hole appears in the center of his head.
Out the back of his skull, glowing geode bits explode, caught in the spires of dark light before disappearing. A gush of steam, then the golem drops.
Mookie spins around. He reaches for his daughter’s hand and takes it—
I’m not the world’s hero. I’m her hero.
Their fingers enmesh, and he is pulled apart by her light.
Epilogue.
The world I knew is gone. As my father would’ve said, “It shit the bed bloody.” Survivors use the silly word “topsy-turvy” because it sounds nicer than what really happened: the clouds rained blood, earthquakes tore through everything, tornadoes scooped up houses and cars and dogs and children, and a volcano opened up in the middle the country, belching black death into the skies.
That was during the day.
Then night came. And Hell opened its doors.
Goblins spilled out. Snakefaces whipping them like sled-dogs. Reaper-cloaks hovering above it all, standing vigil as the god-worms burst free.
Human survivors met those new horrors that night. They thought the worst of it had hit them when the earth swallowed up towns, when corkscrew winds took their loved ones away and threw them ten miles off, broken like dolls in some field. They didn’t think monsters would be next. Monsters who wanted to eat them. Or use them. Or just play with them the way a cat plays with a baby rabbit.
And even those of us who knew what might be coming were surprised. New horrors rose up. Things never before seen or described. The long-limbed things we call Spider-Maidens. The wailing, twisting nightjars. The ghouls and orcus, the blood-singers and soul-pickers. And other singular things that have no names that we yet know.
The daemons are already carving up territory, too. For them it’s open war now. Which family will reign supreme? The Glasstowers are falling. The Candleflies are rising. The rest better pick sides.
Whatever. Fuck it. Here we are.
The day of the wedding. Carried to the place in the mouth of a god-worm—a monster I learned later met a gory end thanks to my father, Mookie Pearl. I’ll talk more about that day later. About how Owen tried to warn me, but it was too late. About how that evening, after the first earthquake, I walked Hollywood Boulevard and met John Atticus Oakes there at an intersection—the Skinless King, my new number one enemy.
What I want to write about today is my father.
My father fucked up. He made a mistake.
He should’ve killed me, and he didn’t, and now all of this is on his shoulders.
And I love him for it. I have never loved him more. My memory of him is as pure as the snow I’ll probably never see again. My last memory is him holding my hand as I watched him... break apart. It was like when, as a kid, you’d take your thumb and press it against the garden hose, then aim it at the ground—the dirt and the mud clods would just break apart, p
ull away, go runny and wet before disappearing. He just fell apart. Carried away by the shining mirror-light that came off me.
My second-to-last memory of him was the three words he said to me.
“I choose you.”
I knew what he meant the moment he said those words. I asked him to kill me, but he didn’t. He chose me over the world. He chose to be my hero, not your hero.
You probably hate him for that, if you’re someone who knows what happened there that day. And I get that. I do. But I don’t hate him and I hope you’ll decide not to hate him, either. Because all my life I was convinced he chose everything else above me, but just this once, right at the end, he chose me above everything and everyone in the world. I have never felt more special as a daughter. And I like feeling special.
Just the same, he gave me a favor, and now I’m going to pass along the favor to you. I have power now. The things I can do—it’s really something.
I’m going to put all the snakes back in the can. I’m going to unbreak what was broken. Somehow, someway, I’m going to save this hell-fucked world.
I’m going to send them all back down into the dark.
Just you wait and see.
— Day 30 of the War Journal of Persephone
About the Author
CHUCK WENDIG is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns series, the Heartland series, and Zer0es, alongside numerous other works across books, comics, games, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
terribleminds.com
Table of Contents
Title page
Praise for Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds
Praise for Chuck Wendig’s Zer0es
By the Same Author
The Hellsblood Bride
Copyright © Chuck Wendig 2015
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PART ONE
1
2
