“Thrall...is going to give birth?” Nadia asked. “To that?”
Mia glanced back at Caitlyn, still asleep on the floor. “Oh God. Oh God, not another one.”
“No,” Carpenter said, his face solemn. “Not another one.”
He aimed his gun into the hole and shot the black sack dead center. Nadia flinched as it exploded in a chunky mess of ebony splatter and oily splashes. Almost immediately, a wail reached like a heavy hand from the sky and shook the guardhouse in its anger. Caitlyn jumped up, awake, and ran to her mother. The wail continued, so loud and so intense that for a moment they thought the wood would splinter beneath the force of it.
Then it stopped, and the sound of a thousand hushed voices, urgent and whispering, leaked out of the hole.
“We’ll have to go,” Carpenter said shakily, rising to his feet. His back and knees screamed in agony. “They’ll be coming, and they’ll be angry.”
“Mine will destroy you.”
They all turned to Caitlyn, alarmed. It had been her voice, so little and serious, but it hadn’t really come from her. She looked guilty, like she’d said a bad word.
“I can hear it, Daddy. The town is mad. It says it’s gonna send monsters so we can’t run away. Don’t let it, Daddy! I want to go to the place where there are no monsters. It doesn’t want us to. It’s saying bad things.” Her lower lip trembled as she watched the hole in the floor. “It says you’ll hear the words soon enough, too. And it says ‘Mine will destroy all the little dollies.’ What does that mean? Is it gonna hurt my dolly that I lost?”
Mia took her hand. “No, baby. It just means it’s time to go.”
***
Outside, the sky above them was an oil slick of gray like the patch of flesh under the floor had been. The colors whirled and crashed angrily against each other, thinner now. Hate hung dense like humidity in the air.
They made their way quickly through the park, their eyes adjusting to the pale dawn, such as it was. The gate squealed on its hinges and banged behind the last of them as they took off in a sprint toward the direction of Main Street. They followed Carpenter, speaking the occasional word in strained whispers, their glances darting around for signs of trouble.
They turned onto Main Street and Mia and Caitlyn fell into step with Nadia. “Do you think they’re waiting for us? The organs, I mean?” Mia spoke as if in a library or at a funeral, that hushed tone that seemed both self-conscious and yet fitting.
Nadia glanced down at Caitlyn before answering. What she thought didn’t seem appropriate to voice. What she thought was that they were in for a hell of a storm, and one she wasn’t sure if they could weather. But the tiny boat among them, battered by hopelessly large waves she couldn’t possibly understand....she was the one Nadia found herself most worried about. She was the one Jesse had really come back for, the one he wanted to see to safer shores. He could have come back any time for Mia, but he hadn’t. He’d come back for his little girl. And the realization of this (she knew better than to articulate such a thing) was both somehow satisfying and sad.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
Caitlyn looked up at Nadia. In her eyes, Nadia saw Caitlyn trying to fight back tears, trying to be brave like a big girl. But her knuckles were white where she gripped her mother’s hand.
“When we leave here,” Caitlyn said shakily, “you can come over to my new house. I’m gonna have a new house and Mommy says I can have a new dolly, ’cause I lost mine last week, and crayons, ’cause I can draw pretty good. And maybe I can even go to a movie. You can come, too, Nadia.”
Mia smiled down at her but said nothing.
Nadia replied, “I’d like that, sweetie. I think that would be very nice.”
Ahead of them, Nadia saw Jesse and Tom flank Mr. Carpenter, and she and the other girls jogged to catch up. Jesse glanced back and met her gaze, winking at her before nudging the old man next to him. “Think we can make it straight to the tunnel?”
“Is anything ever that easy, man?” Tom chuckled softly, and the sound seemed lifted and swallowed up by terse currents of wind.
“I can’t tell if we distracted it, or focused its rage,” Mr. Carpenter said. “I’d hoped on the former, but I suspect we might have done both. Thrall is like a wounded animal now, alternating between bouts of anger and clouding pain. You can feel it, can’t you? In the air, the sky, even rumblings in the ground. This may work out for us yet.”
Much of the walk after that was in silence. For the time being, they were left alone, but never really felt alone. From the rooftops, the second story windows, the alleys between the houses, they felt things watching them, waiting and biding their time. Deferring, she thought, to the organs themselves. The organs had first dibs.
They had just passed the turnoff for Wainwright when Nadia saw the shapes amidst the beginnings of the Raw. Not quite human but humanoid, projecting a menacing presence that Nadia felt and understood subconsciously before conscious thought identified them.
Oh...oh God no, not now, not so close to the tunnel....
From the corner of her eye, she saw Mia motion for the others to stop. They squinted into the pinkening mists ahead of them.
“There,” Mia whispered, pointing at the figures. “There they are.”
The Raw swirled back. Four silhouettes huddled around a fifth lying on its back across the street. The variegated morning light glanced off the broken eggshell curve of the fifth’s abdomen. It screamed and rocked back and forth from its position on the ground, spewing geysers of a pink stringy mess onto the pavement from the bulbous midsection. Beneath it, clots of purplish ooze seeped up from the asphalt itself. The figure screamed again. Caitlyn covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut. Nadia wanted to do the same, but couldn’t quite manage to look away.
Then the figure grew quiet and lay still. The blood sank back beneath the street until it was as if it had never been there at all.
“The Round Woman.” Mr. Carpenter looked grimly satisfied. He added softly, “That one’s for the babies.”
The statues rose slowly, locking stony gazes on them. One—Nadia remembered Murdock calling it the Criminal—ran off in the other direction. The other three advanced slowly. Their anger was palpable in the air.
“That’s the Giant, right? Thrall’s Stomach?” Nadia asked, her voice breathless.
“The other one’s got to be the Warrior,” Tom said.
“Right, and the woman is probably the Sorceress,” Mia answered. “They’re the only two I’ve never seen.”
“Mommy, we gotta go,” Caitlyn said. “I don’t want these monsters to hurt you.”
“They won’t, baby,” Mia said soothingly. “But we can’t go, yet. We need to take care of this. Now go hide, like I showed you. Let Mommy fight the big monsters, ’kay?”
Caitlyn looked hesitant, then nodded slowly.
“You remember what I told you?”
She nodded again, glancing once at Jesse before reciting, “Don’t come out until you tell me, no matter what happens. Don’t let the monsters see me.”
Mia smiled at her daughter, but Nadia saw sadness behind it, and in her eyes. She kissed Caitlyn’s cheek. “That’s right baby. Now go—quickly, before they see you. Under that porch, there. Go.”
Nadia kissed her fingers and touched the top of Caitlyn’s head, an impulsive gesture she wasn’t sure whether to regret. But Caitlyn threw her arms around Nadia’s waist and hugged her, and Mia smiled at them both. When Caitlyn passed Jesse, she hugged him, too. “Be careful, Daddy. I don’t want the monsters to hurt you, either.” She smiled up at him, then ran quickly to a porch whose trellis had a hole just her size. She peered into the hole and, satisfied that it was safe, wriggled through.
Nadia saw that Jesse had time to glance back at the little form in the shadows beneath the porch, before the statues charged them. Tom pulled out his shotgun and they held their ground.
FIFTEEN
Immediately, the Warri
or pulled ahead of the others. It was easily seven feet tall, its legs thick and powerful, the corded muscles of its neck ridged with tiny spikes. Its head was massive, its jaw wide and square, the crest of its brow and the back of its head fanning out and down like two petals in a fleur de lis. Its eyes, black flints of rock, glared with smoldering, volcanic hate. Massive hands hung low to its bulging calves, the fingers ground to stalactite points. It wore no carved clothing over the nondescript gray stone of its flesh and at the groin, a sizable crystal growth hung as low as its hands.
As it drew closer to Tom, he fired the shotgun, but the slug ricocheted off the broad chest and into the street between them. It glared at Tom and bellowed with rage.
The Sorceress went after the girls. The rock flesh pulsed red beneath a thin smooth crust, its chiseled features unmoving. Its eyes blazed. The reddish abstract cascade of stone hair grew soft and whipped around her head, then cooled and grew hard again. Mia and Nadia exchanged looks.
Jesse took these things in but didn’t process them. The Giant, still a good two feet on the other two, was closing the gap between the others and Carpenter. Its horns reflected the more awful hues in the sky, picking out the hot thin strands of color and threading them through its red rock. As it drew closer, the horns seemed to fill from the inside with a black ink. The statue snorted and tossed its elongated chin, its three gut-mouths twisted in vicious snarls. It held the stomach in one hand, laced with black-veined marble thorns. With its free hand, it pushed Jesse to the ground. Then it grabbed Carpenter by the shirt, hoisted him in the air, and dragged him a ways down Wainright Terrace.
“Dammit!” Jesse rose stiffly and followed, running to keep up with its powerful strides. The Giant tossed Carpenter like a doll and he landed heavily on the street, the jagged asphalt scraping his chin. He spit a wad of blood and rolled onto his back. The Giant walked up and kicked him, and with a grunt he rolled farther.
Jesse fired at its head, but the bullets bounced off. The Giant barely paid attention to him or his gun. Its anger was focused on Carpenter. It kicked him again and Jesse glanced around for something to hit it with. He spied an aluminum baseball bat lying on one of the front lawns, and he dove for it. The Giant had dragged Carpenter further down the street, away from the others. Jesse caught up but when he swung at the statue, it caught the bat mid-air. He felt the force of it in his arms. The statue shoved the bat into Jesse’s own stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He went tumbling onto the street. It kicked him once, hard, on the sore side of his ribs. Jesse thought he felt something crack, followed by a stabbing just beneath his lungs. He rolled to catch his breath, wary of the statue.
The Giant had turned its attention, however, back to Carpenter, who was rising slowly and unsteadily, to his feet. The thorns binding its hand fell away. It stuffed the flaccid sac into its mouth and held it there between the teeth. The sac oozed with a black ichor flecked with silver. Like sparkling tar, Jesse thought at first, but amended the idea. It didn’t have enough dimension to be solid like a tar, but rather, it looked like the lack of something, a kind of void in liquid form. For a moment, the Stomach regarded Carpenter in its cold, unseeing gaze. Then it bit down on the sac and vomited the ichor onto Carpenter’s chest with such a violent pitch that Carpenter staggered back. The Giant wheeled around and ran off to join the fray down the street, and Jesse got up to follow it.
“Jesse,” Carpenter said. “I think I’m in trouble.”
It took only a few seconds after that before Carpenter began to scream, and even that was short-lived.
The dark nothingstuff moved very fast, spreading in several directions at once. It wrapped around Carpenter’s body, spread down the length of his stomach and up toward the outcrop of his chin. As it did so, it ate away the matter that was Carpenter’s shirt. At least, that’s what it looked like to Jesse, that every place the blackness ran, it dissolved time and space and solid substance and left a gaping hole that opened into God-only-knew-where. Carpenter clawed at the shirt, trying to pull it off. Clutching his side, Jesse picked up a stick and moved toward him with the intention of scraping the ichor (or the quickly thinning shirt) off his friend’s body. He broke into a jog when he saw blood disappearing beneath the blackness—Carpenter’s blood, as the stomach acid (it seemed to fit) ate into the man’s chest.
But Carpenter waved Jesse back with a sharp, wide sweep of his arm. Then Carpenter screamed again, and the scream crescendoed as the acid surged down over his groin and headed toward his knees. Tiny popping fireworks of color exploded all over his body against the black backdrop of the acid, and then were swallowed up. But Carpenter stopped making sound almost immediately. It was not that he stopped screaming; his mouth still hung open in a shocked “o” of horror. But no vocals accompanied it, on account of the fact that the pink sacs of his lungs appeared then disappeared beneath the blackness. Jesse thought for a moment that Carpenter looked like a hollowed out watermelon shell, the fruit of his insides quickly being devoured by the statue’s acid. Carpenter fell to his knees, or rather, the substance above them became too thin and he collapsed. Jesse moved toward him again, reaching out to him, but the old man lurched back violently.
No, his body said to Jesse. Don’t come near me.
“I’m sorry,” Jesse whispered. His eyes hurt to look at Carpenter, and he squinted. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do....”
Carpenter’s head seemed to sink into the dark where his neck had been. His lips pressed together as the blackness spread over his chin and up his jaw line. But he fought the onset of death. In his eyes, still clear, Jesse saw that Carpenter understood. Just like Gavin Hardley, Carpenter somehow now knew it all.
The old man’s gaze turned to the direction in which the stomach statue had gone as if to tell Jesse to go. Go to Nadia and Tom. Kill the statues. Destroy what they’re holding—the real organs of the town. Kill Thrall. These thoughts came very fast to Jesse and everything that followed came faster still. Jesse heard them as if they had been played out loud on some high-speed reel. He understood some but missed more. There was affection for him and his friends, a whirlwind of names and places and phrases he didn’t understand (someone named Celeste and something called Self Portrait Truth About God), and pain so intense it was soul-numbing. But there was no fear.
Carpenter’s eyes finally glazed over and were quickly submerged in black. The shell of his body pitched forward onto the ground.
“God,” Jesse sucked in a breath. “I...Carpenter, I—” The stick fell from his fingers.
The ground slurped the last drops of the nothingstuff off the spot where Carpenter had stood and drew them into the ground. Carpenter—all of him—was gone.
There was a pang of loss, a pain he felt all under his skin. Then anger rippled across Jesse’s features, changing them in its wake.
He turned and began walking after the statue, ignoring the ache in his ribs. Then, he broke into a run.
***
Thrall’s stomach moved quickly, Jesse thought, for seven feet of marble. He resisted the urge to run up and tackle it from behind. The acid in that sac was deadly, too deadly to take a chance with. Something else stuck in Jesse’s head from Carpenter’s transferred thoughts: sudden movements meant sudden death. And that would be a real biter, whatever that meant.
Jesse could see Tom ahead, pulling back to ram the butt of his shotgun into the Warrior’s midsection. The gun made jarring contact with a plate that was still more marble than tissue and bounced off. The Warrior let out a roar that shook the valley between the houses. The wind whistled around its fist as it connected with Tom’s right shoulder and sent him flying across the street. Tom landed hard on his side and groaned from the sidewalk. Reaching for the shotgun on the overgrown lawn behind him, he rolled over and pulled himself to his feet. Blood trickled from a cheekbone cut just beneath his eye. He glared at the statue and limped back toward the street.
Jesse kept an even pace, closing the distance between him and the brawl bef
ore him.
In front of him now, Nadia picked up the broken remains of a street sign post and swung it in a clumsy arc toward the Sorceress. The statue caught it and pulled it from her hands. Mia shouted something unintelligible at it and jumped away as the Sorceress swung the post at her. Mia’s eyes, all the while, remained fixed on the stony face of the statue.
As he got closer, Jesse saw Caitlyn still watching from the broken hole in the trellis beneath the porch of the house behind them. The statues hadn’t seen her.
His movement caught Nadia’s attention. “Jesse!” she called when she saw him, but said no more than that. From the corner of his eye, he noticed her frowning at his expression. He glanced at Tom, who shot him a questioning look. He didn’t return an answer. The anger seared the air around the corners of Jesse’s eyes. His teeth ground painfully in his mouth. Carpenter had believed there was a narrow window, while they were flesh. A possible chance to kill them, like they had killed the spawn.
The other statues grew slow in their movements, turning away from Nadia and Tom as if they’d ceased to be important and refocusing their attention on Jesse for the moment. They sensed his anger. The stomach stopped too, turning slowly to face him.
Jesse held the gun leveled at the Giant’s face. “It killed Carpenter.”
A single moment followed that no sound seemed able to penetrate, a moment caught and dragged under by time. Jesse broke it with a gunshot to the soft sac in the Giant’s mouth. The thin marble-turned-tissue popped, and the muck inside ran down the chin and chest and gaping maws of the stomach statue.
Then the Giant froze.
The nothingstuff dissolved a canyon down the front of it and it writhed where it stood, lashing out at Jesse, digging its claws into the nothing as if to fling it off. The blackness oozed up over the arms and the statue fell to the ground, thrashing fiercely. From within the hollowed shell of the statue, Jesse could hear strange snapping sounds that reminded him of pop rocks. The face, caught in agonized distortion, caved into the neck. The ichor surged over what remained like a wave, seemed to eat itself, and shrank to nothing.
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