Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Almost simultaneously, a wail thundered across the sky, shaking the buildings. For a moment, Jesse thought they’d all topple into the street.

  “Jesse,” Tom said, glancing up. “I think you made it mad.”

  It took the other two statues a moment to recover before their shrieks in unison mingled with the cry above. One ran so low that it vibrated beneath their feet. The other stabbed at their ears with its high pitch. Squinting against the pain, Jesse took aim and fired at a patch just above the Warrior’s groin that had grown soft and Raw-pink. The bass rumble beneath hiccuped and became a war cry as the bullet tore into the meat of the statue. The Warrior turned fully toward Jesse. Its massive fists clenched and unclenched. The groin itself grew mottled and pink for just a moment, and Jesse fired again just before it closed up beneath stone.

  Jesse held his breath, afraid he had fired too late, but the statue’s groin exploded in a milky white spray that splattered the pavement at Jesse’s feet, causing lashing tendons to grow up out of the street and swipe at him. He jumped back. They grabbed the remnants of the statue instead and pulled it into the ground.

  The Sorceress screeched when it saw the Warrior fall. Its skin alternated heating and cooling—live organ, dead rock, back and forth. The heart in its hand did the same. Soft tissue, hard marble, soft tissue, hard marble. The change was rhythmic, and the pulse quickened as the Sorceress’ fury increased. Wild coils of reddish stone flowed molten then cooled, then glowed with heat again. It backhanded Nadia with the hand that held Thrall’s heart. Nadia stumbled backwards, tripped against the curb and fell flat on her ass on the sidewalk. Then it swung at Mia and connected with her stomach. She crumpled and fell on the spot. Caitlyn cried out, reaching a tiny hand through the hole in the trellis, but Mia held up a hand for her to stay put. She crawled away from the statue toward Nadia.

  The Sorceress no longer seemed to care about the girls, though. It spun around toward Jesse, whipping long tresses of fire out behind it that froze mid-air.

  Tom fired but the Sorceress caught the slug with a pulse from her palm. It shattered and sprinkled to the ground in a glitter of silver. It held up the palm at Jesse. Another pulse of energy burst forth from it that knocked him onto his back. Pain shot up his elbow. He winced as he raised the gun. If he could get one clear shot at the heart on a downbeat, one shot when it was soft and vulnerable....

  A sound like a siren rose up from its throat, and its mouth elongated to an abyss. In the endless black of its gullet, Jesse saw supernovas exploding far beyond the capacity of the statue’s depth or breadth, a plunge headlong into time and space. The gun dropped to his side. Jesse was mesmerized. The Sorceress squeezed its fist.

  Shooting pain in his head and chest and mostly in his ribs snapped him out of it. Before him, the world was growing white and fuzzy. He couldn’t breathe.

  Then it went away. The pain, the near faint, it all went away.

  It came back, more intense this time, and he plunged back into the fuzzy white. He couldn’t get the air into his lungs.

  Then it all went away again. And it stayed away.

  But the siren sound continued—lingered like an echo for a time after the Sorceress sank to the ground. Nadia backed away, and Jesse saw the jagged piece of wood she’d rammed into the heart itself. The wood glowed briefly, then turned to ash beneath the lava that poured out from around it, engulfing the Sorceress. The siren sound even continued after the canyon of a mouth disappeared beneath the glow. Then the gold faded to an ambery red, and then to black. The statue fell over. It steamed for a short time after that.

  Tom grabbed one of Jesse’s arms and hoisted him to his feet. Jesse groaned as the pain in his ribs jabbed his lung. Nadia stepped around the cooling rock with Mia clutching her stomach. They limped to Caitlyn, who crawled out from under the porch and embraced them both. They rejoined Jesse and Tom.

  “Where’s Mr. Carpenter?” Nadia asked. There were tears in her eyes. “Jesse? What happened?”

  Jesse couldn’t speak. He didn’t have words for what had happened. He barely understood the words that Carpenter had given him. He just shook his head.

  Tom swore in a whisper, his head bowed. The tears spilled freely from Nadia’s eyes, and Mia’s misted, too. Seeing them cry, Caitlyn sniffled, her eyes wet and shining.

  “He told me,” Jesse said, his voice hoarse, “to kill it. To kill Thrall. We took out its stomach, its heart, and its genitals. It can’t breed, and it’s got to be hurt, if not dying.” The statues had fallen from direct blows to their representative parts, but only when those parts were in the midst of change. Jesse’s throat felt very dry. What had Carpenter said about hurt and dying animals? It was possible that Thrall would be more dangerous now than ever.

  Tom nodded. “Carpenter wanted us to kill it, so we’ll kill it. Then we’ll get the hell out of here. Everything he did for us—all of it—will be for nothing if we don’t get out of here.”

  One by one, the girls started down Main Street. Tom followed. “You coming, man?”

  Jesse took a final look at Wainright Terrace. Whoever Celeste had been, she’d been important to Carpenter. Important enough for him to have come back to Thrall. Important enough for him to have wanted Jesse to succeed in finding his daughter. Jesse nodded at Tom. “Damn straight I am.”

  ***

  Beyond the town center, the hub of Thrall’s sparse business district, the classic suburbia of Main Street’s final stretch waited. Along the side streets, picket fences shuddered in anticipation, while ranch and bi-level houses hunkered down against Thrall’s anger. Overhead, breaks in the pink revealed a sky churning with thin threads of color, but a Raw bank was rolling in heavier now. Soon the oily gray of the sky would be eclipsed by pink.

  But Jesse only peripherally noticed. A part of him was busy turning over a new understanding of that wild abandon that seemed so prevalent in the survivors of Thrall. Grief does that to people, Jesse thought. It made people like Tom, people like Carpenter and Murdock. There was a kind of peace in it, a kind of serene belief that the length of one’s life was really, simply, in one’s own hands and that the clock ran out when the hands dropped the ball, and not the other way around.

  He thought the others must have felt it, too. The long walk down Main Street was accompanied by an hour or so of subdued silence, each lost in his or her own inner eulogies of one kind or another. So much taken away. Jesse thought about Carpenter, about Murdock and Carolyn and Mrs. Steitler. He thought about Tom and Madelyne, Nadia and her busted knee, Mia and Caitlyn and Mia’s parents.

  So much guilt, too. Jesse had done his best by all of them, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he made up for leaving them in the first place?

  It occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, it had never really been his responsibility to stay. Maybe only by leaving them would he have ever had the chance of getting them back. When a guy was trying to rescue his buddies from drowning, it didn’t make much sense for him to jump in the deep water with them, did it? That little voice in his head told him he was justifying abandoning them, nothing more, but Jesse chose to ignore it. They were going to reach that tunnel and Jesse was going to make it right by all of them.

  “Hey, there it is! Daddy, there it is!”

  Jesse could see the tunnel from where they were, two, maybe three blocks away. It was so close. Giggling and shouting, the girls broke into a run, and Jesse and Tom followed. The sight of that tunnel had never been so beautiful.

  Jesse clutched his side. Arrows of pain zinged the tissue of his lungs, but he didn’t care. He kept running. So close. They were so close....

  Tom suddenly slowed to a quick walk. “Hey, uh, out there—”

  Jesse slowed, too. “Huh? What’s wrong?”

  Tom wiped the sweat and blood off his face with his forearm, then shook his head. His voice came in shallow breaths. “The outside world. The ‘from here on out.’ Normal living and normal people.” Tom shook his head. “Christ, Jesse, what’s been going on out there f
or the last four years?”

  “Why don’t you find out?”

  Tom’s eyes fixed on the tunnel. Something uncharacteristically soft crossed his face, and Jesse realized that Tom was scared, genuinely scared for the first time since Jesse had come back to Thrall.

  “Tom, your entire life for the last four years has been steeped in mortal danger. You thrive on it. You get a head rush from brushes with death. And you’re afraid of what? Bill paying? Bar-hopping? Grocery shopping? Mowing lawns and shuffling papers?”

  “No, I can handle all that. I did have something like a normal life once before all this shit. It’s just...the end of a purpose, I guess. I thought I was a lifer here—a fighter. I don’t really have anything else to offer.” He eyed the tunnel with an almost vulnerable kind of unease. “If all you’re really good at is surviving and saving asses, what do you do with yourself when you don’t have to survive and save asses any more?”

  “You’re good for more than that. Come on, Tom, you’ve got to know that.”

  Tom shrugged. “I used to think about this moment all the time, ya know? This one chance—one chance to run and never look back.”

  “Then don’t blow it now.” Jesse was surprised by the tone in his voice. He added more softly, “Don’t gooz-fuck it, Tom. We need you. We wouldn’t have made it this far without you. And we’re still going to need you.”

  Tom turned away, but Jesse could see he was grinning. “No shit.” It sounded like both a question and a statement. “Okay.” Tom burst forth with renewed speed, and Jesse sprinted forward to keep up.

  Up ahead, Caitlyn practically dangled between her mother and Nadia. They were almost there. They were going to make it.

  It was then that Jesse noticed the shape in the sky from the corner of his eye. He looked up. A dark amorphous blot was approaching from a backdrop of swirling, angry pink. Jesse knew what was going to happen about a moment before it actually did. It was like he had been given a glimpse of the secret game plan, or had been let in on the player’s next move. But he didn’t know soon enough to warn Mia.

  The shape was very fast. It swooped down right over Caitlyn’s head and deftly picked Mia up off her feet. Mia let go of Caitlyn’s hand and the thing hoisted her high into the air. Her scream rose both in sound and pitch as it lifted her up. Nadia’s scream joined hers as she wrapped her arms around Caitlyn and pulled her protectively close. She drew both the girl and herself to the edge of the woods, under cover of a dense pine.

  The creature hovered for a moment in the sky as if trying to decide what to do with the struggling waif in its grasp. Its pause gave Jesse a chance to get a good look at it as he drew his gun out of his backpack. The shape of the thing in the sky was familiar to him. He’d seen the Althior bones in the museum basement. The creature’s anglerfish-like head was much more horrible clothed in skin, though—shades of striated blue and gray and terribly smooth, without scales or fur or feathers. Above the legless hips of the creature, long bladed wings flapped the air, stirring up swirls of pink. Beneath its throat, four sets of segmented arms, ending in single talons each, scooped the air in toward gills in the compact underbelly of the thing. The foremost set of arms held Mia tightly. Jesse could see the blood in the soft dents beneath her shoulders soaking through her blouse and down toward her chest. She screamed again, her legs kicking uselessly in the air. Each time, the blood-stains beneath her shoulders spread wider.

  Jesse aimed his gun at the creature’s wing but hesitated. If he missed, he might hit Mia. If he didn’t miss, the thing might drop her and she’d break her back against the street. Mia screamed and kicked, one hand tugging at the talons embedded in her flesh. The other hand reached up above her and pounded the throat and underbelly of the Althior. It didn’t seem to notice. Mia smacked helplessly at her shoulder as the talon sank deeper.

  Jesse had to get her down from there. He had to take that chance. “Hey,” he said quietly. “You can’t have her.” He fired the gun. The bullet grazed the thing’s wing, and it jerked in the air.

  Before he could pull the trigger again, his vision flashed black and hot pain grazed across his hand and through his fingers. He glanced down and saw the blood welling up from one long furrow across the back of his hand. He looked up at the Althior that had dived at him. In its wake, the beast gave off a terrible reek like day-old sweat. Jesse could smell it from where he stood on the ground even as it climbed back into the sky. He thought that stink—and maybe the smell of Mia’s blood, too—was what drew a small swarm of others. They zigzagged now in and out of the pink Raw bank and closed in within a matter of seconds. For a couple of terrifying moments, Jesse lost sight of Mia. But he could hear her. God, he could hear her....

  A shot rang out and ripped through the wing of one of the Althior. The wing exploded in a spray of purple jelly that rained down on the pavement. Jesse looked to see Tom cocking the gun back to get another shot. “Bullets in my backpack, if you need ’em,” he said.

  Jesse nodded and grabbed the backpack that now lay at Tom’s feet. Rummaging inside, he found Tom’s ammunition. His fingers trembled as he reloaded his gun. He steadied the gun with his other hand and aimed it high.

  Mia screamed again as the bullet from Jesse’s gun—a pure luck shot, Jesse knew—tore a hole through the thin filament of the Althior’s wing. It howled in pain and then gibbered angrily, dipping low to the ground. As Tom picked off an Althior that circled close by, Jesse shot again at the creature that held Mia. Again, sheer luck guided the bullet to its mark, this time right through the foremost arm. Mia moaned as the whole limb convulsed, including the talon inside her. Blood sprinkled down from the wound in her shoulder, and Jesse thought her face looked very pale. The thing withdrew its talon and for a moment Jesse thought she was going to fall. She cried out, evidently thinking the same thing, but then the volume of her voice sank and pulsed with the same word, over and over and over. “No no no no.”

  Before it could reposition its grip by skewering her through the ribs, Jesse shot at it again. This time, it did drop Mia, and she fell with a small thud to the ground seconds before the thing itself collapsed next to her. Another of its kind dipped and grabbed at the bigger prey, hoisting the dead Althior in the air. Others swarmed, tearing chunks of meat off their dead comrade and devouring them.

  An Althior swooped for Nadia and Caitlyn, both of whom screamed and shrank further beneath the old tree. Tom’s shot took off most of its head. It landed with a thump and skidded a little on the ground at their feet, and seconds later, two other Althior picked it up to fight over it. Caitlyn buried her face in Nadia’s stomach. Tom ran and ducked in front of the girls as two more dived at the tree. He shot one, pumped the shotgun, and took down the other. They fell in messy wet plops onto the road. Jesse knew all this peripherally without really being aware of taking his eyes off Mia and the Althior that now swarmed her. Jesse opened fire on them. Mia rolled over on her side, her arms protecting her head. Jesse closed in on the things, picking them off until he saw an opening. He grabbed Mia’s hand and yanked her to her feet. She cried out in pain, but rose willingly.

  He shot at the Althior as they withdrew up and further away into the red and pink eddies of the Raw. He kept shooting long after the Raw cover had obscured them. In fact, he kept shooting after Tom had stopped and Jesse’s trigger finger worked uselessly. The empty chamber of the gun clicked in his ears.

  Tom put a hand over his and lowered the gun. “They’re gone, man.” He cleared his throat. “Jesse, man, I need you back here with us, okay? Okay?”

  Jesse looked away. He heard Caitlyn’s muffled crying and Nadia’s too, and saw that Nadia was holding her close, pressing Caitlyn’s face to her chest when she screamed, rocking her back and forth. Mia was hobbling over to them.

  For a moment, the corners of the world grew frayed and he thought he was going to throw up. What surprised him was that he didn’t. Couldn’t. He could only stare dumbly at the tunnel ahead, dark like the stomach’s ichor had b
een, dark like a black hole or the library basement or the galaxy inside the heart statue, a passage to a universe impossibly far away now. At first the darkness was all he could comprehend; he didn’t see what stood sentry at the tunnel’s mouth.

  The last of the guardians had taken their place. Understanding crept up on Jesse like some terrible dawn.

  The General, the Criminal, and the Twins were blocking their way.

  SIXTEEN

  The Twins bellowed loudly, an air raid siren that shook the buildings around them. A porch on one of the nearby houses fell loose of the vinyl siding and collapsed.

  The General pointed to the house and made a yanking gesture with its fist. The front half of the house uprooted itself and came apart. Jesse could see the inside of the house beyond the splintering glass of the windows and the jagged bones of its framework. The General was unmasking it—no, defacing it, Jesse thought—and revealing the muscles and nerves beneath. The house front, including the door, the three small concrete steps leading up to it, and even a tear-away section of the roof, all clung together in a rough cross-section, bound by the same force that had held the police station. Held together, Jesse realized, by the sheer will of Thrall’s mind.

  The Twins stopped abruptly and for a moment after there was silence, the same terrible silence as there had been just before the police station fell. Then Jesse heard the creaking of strained wood and the muted crumbling of sheet rock chunks as they hit the pavement in white powdery clumps.

  The General made a throwing gesture, and the front half of the house hurtled toward Jesse and Tom.

  “Take cover!” Tom shouted and each dove in opposite directions. The front of the house sailed just past Jesse’s shoe. He felt the current of air behind it, and coughed as the dust devils swirled fiberglass powder in the house’s wake. The front of the house arced down and crashed onto Main Street, geysering wood splinters and raining vinyl siding in a spray of blue. The fiberglass rolled away from it, a Raw bank in solid miniature.