Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  The Twins wailed again and this time, the Criminal crept forward. Jesse looked across the street to Tom, who was sitting up in the grass. The shotgun was already pointed at it.

  The statue followed Jesse’s gaze to Tom and its deadly, measured movements changed course. Tom fired and the slug blew through the statue’s head. The mask around it bloomed outward like a flower but the statue didn’t slow. It dropped to all fours and galloped full-speed at Tom.

  Tom shot it again, this time blazing a trail straight through the dip between its neck and shoulder. It kept coming. Tom jumped to his feet and had just enough time to dive out of the way again before the Criminal leapt mid-air and landed in the space where Tom had been shooting at it. It turned and stalked toward Tom again.

  Jesse felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down. Caitlyn stood there, eyes shining with tears. She handed him a broken bottle. Behind her, Nadia patted her shoulder.

  “Go help him kill that thing,” she said through clenched teeth.

  He took the bottle and nodded, then turned to see the Criminal swat at Tom and knock him over. Tom grunted, the shotgun held tight in his hands. He blasted a hole straight through the statue’s chest, and then the statue was on top of him, the neat hole ringing the barrel of his gun. Jesse bolted across the street. The Criminal raised its hand, the one that held the liver, and held it high overhead, ready to smash it down on Tom’s skull.

  Jesse tackled it, knocking it off of Tom. He rolled over and over with it, coming to a stop with the mangled thing on top of him. He stopped struggling. The statue above him didn’t move. For a moment, the hand holding the broken bottle felt cold, then hot, then cold. He looked down as best he could, praying that whatever was wet on his fingers was nothing like what killed Carpenter.

  It wasn’t. The stench of the wetness smelled terrible, but there they were, all five fingers, still clutching the neck of the broken bottle. The jagged end was stuck deep in the meaty bulk of the Criminal’s liver, and the stone hand around it was limp. With effort, Jesse pushed the statue off him.

  “Thanks, man,” Tom said between ragged breaths. He turned away, turned toward the Twins, which were cutting a direct path to the girls. Nadia screamed, ushering Caitlyn and Mia toward the guys, and Jesse stood up. Glancing around, he saw a piece of support beam that had skittered away from the broken piece of house and snatched it up. It was heavy and unwieldy, but it would have to do.

  Tom pumped the shotgun and aimed it at the dual figures, clutching each other and their prized fleshy lung tissue close to their fluttering black robes. The gaunt features retained their terrible expressions, one of maniacal glee and the other of seething hate. The intensity of emotion threatened to run the faces right off their skulls in the opposite directions. The marble tendrils of their heads, pulled tight behind them in the fervent pressing of their movements, added to the idea that their faces were loose and sliding.

  The Twins leaned in toward the girls as they ran by and growled. Caitlyn cowered against Mia, who did her best to shelter the girl from the blast of sound. Tom’s shotgun slug tore into the robed body of the first, just shy of the lung itself. Its frozen joker smile hung unaffected, but a scream of pain issued forth that hurt their ears. Tom swore.

  Jesse got between the girls and the Twins and swung the beam. It connected heavily with the weaker Twin and stopped their progression, but otherwise it didn’t seem to affect them. Their next exhale was inky and black, a noxious cloud that smelled like rotting flowers. It settled on the wood of the beam and began dissolving it. Jesse dropped it quickly and backed away.

  They roared into the sky and the awning of a nearby house crumbled.

  “Back up!” Jesse yelled to the girls. “Back way up! Its breath—”

  The Twins exhaled again, and heavy streams of black leaked from their mouths and intertwined over their heads. The cloud moved forward toward them, looking for something to settle on, some fleshy thing to eat into. It moved toward the girls.

  Nadia’s eyes grew wide as she saw it. Mia scooped Caitlyn up in an embrace and the three made it across the street, taking cover behind Tom. The cloud shifted on some unfelt wind and headed toward them.

  Tom pumped the shotgun and fired again, this time rupturing one of the lungs. The black cloud rewound itself and sank down, vacuumed into the injured lung. Dust and pebbles rushed toward the hole in the lung, too, in one terrifically loud wheeze. Jesse felt the wind. It smacked his clothes around his body and tore at his hair. He threw up an arm to shield his eyes.

  The figure holding the deflating lung slumped a little and the other fought to hold it up. Their tragedy-comedy faces never changed, but the wheezing grew louder, higher, and thinner as the statue sucked grass and the occasional fluttering piece of litter toward itself in a desperate gasp. The statue trembled, limping toward Tom, the downturned face of the stronger Twin mottled with red. When it opened its mouth to scream, a soundless spray of purple splattered the ground at Tom’s feet that ate quickly into the ground.

  It inhaled deeply, shuddering, and when it exhaled, that siren sound, mournfully single now, vibrated the houses around them. It was calling for something. Jesse wasn’t sure what, but he knew in his gut that Thrall was hurt, mauled in its soft places, and it was calling for help.

  It turned suddenly to Jesse, as if remembering he was there. The anger in that shrieking face of hatred was palpable. It drew itself taller, inhaling. When it exhaled, a viscous pink, thick with chunks of black, spilled into the air between them, spreading without thinning. It poured out of that frown like a tiny Raw, and Jesse found himself fascinated as it undulated toward him. There were eons in that pink, miniature worlds, words, the past and future, the birth and death of everything. A screaming part of him warned him it was Thrall’s glamour, a trick, but that part was so far away, receding.

  “Jesse, no!” He was vaguely aware in his periphery of Mia handing Caitlyn off to Nadia, of her running toward him, of the scent of her and the rough shove that knocked him off balance. The spell was broken. Jesse shook his head to clear it of the haze and light throb, and looked at Mia.

  But Mia wasn’t there, not all there. He could make out a silhouette, engulfed by the pink, entwined in those threads of black, flailing wildly and screaming. That brought the crispness back into the world, and he lunged at the thickening pink cloud. Without hesitation, he reached into it, expecting pain but indifferent to it. He grabbed at the silhouette and pulled—pulled hard. It was like trying to pull clumps of hair free of gum. A thousand little prickling needles bit into his skin, eating into him. He dove his other arm in, too. From inside the cloud, he felt a thin hand, papery, clutch his arm. Then Nadia was behind him, arms around his waist, pulling, and Tom behind her, pulling too. The surviving Twin howled something that might have been laughter.

  The muscles in his arms burning, his skin raw, he put all his remaining strength into yanking Mia free, and he felt her budge. First he was only able to pull out the arm that clutched him, sheathed in a thin, quivering and vaguely blood-tinged jelly. Then her head emerged, gasping for breath, and the rest of her with a pop.

  The second she was free, Tom raised the gun again at the remaining Twin, who tossed its head back and bellowed into the air. He fired at the other sack. It exploded in a spray of black foam.

  The remaining Twin, seeming stunned, tried to take a step forward, its hatred turned on Tom now. It stumbled and sank to its knees. As the four of them held their ground, Jesse clutching Mia to him, the statue’s breath grew thinner still. Jesse heard the atavistic shallow shudder and realized Mia’s own breathing matched it. He had no doubt that if he ever made it out of that tunnel, he would carry that sound with him into the late hours of morning, where sleep, if it was ever available again on the far side of TV static, would recall it in dreams. The Twin sank to the ground, wheezed, and collapsed in on itself.

  The General threw its horned face to the sky and clenched its fists. The air crackled with that silent energy, that calm b
efore the storm.

  Behind them, wailing on the wind answered the General, and the call put out by the Twins. And beneath that, an undertone, that groan of wood that was becoming all too uncomfortably familiar. Jesse turned slowly, already knowing what he’d see.

  On the horizon, boxy silhouettes rose into the sky. They were buildings. Buildings from all over Thrall, expendable junk and trinkets that Thrall had collected over the years from the unsuspecting life forms that lived and worked and drank and smoked and played and screwed and got lost and got killed on its back for decades. They were buildings.

  Beneath them, a mass of shapes moved together, slithering and flapping and stalking, snake tails and tentacles and sinewy legs, bladed arms, thin-skinned leathery heads, and no doubt many, many teeth and claws. It was the remainder of Thrall’s parasites, the monsters not tethered to their locations, the few left that Thrall had not devoured to keep up its strength as its organs were systematically shut down.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tom muttered. “Jesse, do you see that?”

  “Yeah, man, I do.” Something in Jesse’s gut rolled over. The bitter taste in his mouth felt heavy on his tongue, and it was hard to form words around it.

  The General roared, then threw punches in their direction—left hook, right hook, left hook, right hook—and one by one, the buildings sailed overhead toward them.

  “Run,” Tom said, then louder, “Run!” The five of them took off toward the woods.

  Moira Malone’s, a local bar, pulled ahead of the others. Light bulbs, barstools, and tiles left a deafening breadcrumb trail behind it. The General made a slam-dunk motion and the bar dropped on the street behind them, launching a sliver of metal that sailed just over Jesse’s shoulder and sheared the Main Street sign in half. Another bouncing girder skidded in a fountain of sparks past Nadia and speared straight through a rusted out car. She screamed, holding Caitlyn tighter and pumping her legs to keep up.

  Jesse grabbed her arm. “Look out!” He yanked her and Caitlyn away from a waterfall of rotted school desks spilling from the tilted Thrall Middle School riding up behind the bar. The pain in Jesse’s ribs was now a screeching siren of agony, but he ran faster, holding onto Nadia’s arm and tugging Mia’s slackening form from the waist.

  “Get them under the tree,” Tom shouted over the din. “Go now. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “What’re you going to do?” Jesse shouted back. “Tom, what are you going to do?” He led the girls just beyond the edge of the woods back to the very large pine tree, then crawled out.

  Tom stood a hundred feet or so from the General. A movie rental place was closing the distance behind him. Tapes and DVDs fell like hail, denting the cars and exploding in chips of black and rainbow. Behind the movie rental place was a nail salon, its neon manicured hand flickering wildly in some kind of spastic electric wave, and a furniture store that bombed Main Street with bursting couches, armoires, dining tables, and chairs. A table leg impacted with the pavement and, like a guided missile, shot across the side of Tom’s leg. He winced, pumped the shotgun, and fired. The bullet sailed wide.

  The movie rental place hovered a moment in the air. The two lunged for the grass and rolled away from the street just as it made a decision to evacuate itself onto the pavement.

  On the heels of the shattered building, the nail salon rained tiny bottles of lacquer onto the street. They exploded and bled rainbows. Stools crashed down from the doorway. The General made a shaking motion and the counter came loose and fell. An errant metal file found the meat of Jesse’s forearm and stuck there. He cried out.

  “Tom, what the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get—”

  Tom tugged him to his feet and away from the street, closer to the General, as the salon crashed down, and they ducked just seconds before a metal bar, crumpled into a boomerang shape, spun over them. It connected with one of the amorphous shapes from the mass of monsters, something that reminded Jesse very much of a jellyfish, and the creature broke apart. The monsters advanced toward them, spreading out to surround them, oblivious to their numbers falling with wet, meaty thunks on the occasions when fallout hit them as well.

  “We’ve got to kill it,” Tom told Jesse breathlessly. “We’ve got to put a slug in the brain.”

  Jesse nodded. “What I wouldn’t kill for dynamite. Or a rocket launcher.”

  Tom chuckled. “You and me both, buddy. Thrall set them off during those fires. Places went up like the fourth of July.” Jesse tugged him out of the way of a splintered table leg, launched from impact with the pavement, that would have sheared off his knee. Tom nodded his thanks.

  Another explosion made them duck and crouch. Tom and Jesse crawled across the lawn toward a small ranch house, covering their heads as best they could while powdered glass, concrete, plastic, wood, and steel fireworked around them. Jesse felt the occasional nick across his back and held his breath. Inches from his hand, a steel pipe stabbed the earth. A lamp bounced across their path. A porch swing touched down in front of Tom and rolled over before coming to a stop in front of the house.

  They stood. Much closer to the General now. It held its ground, watching them, unperturbed. From the shelter of their tree, unintelligible girl-sounds, cries of concern and encouragement, floated in between the chaos.

  “Last slug,” Tom said, cocking the gun. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  “Kill it.”

  Tom aimed. The expression on his face was cool, calm, like a cowboy in an old western, Jesse thought. Showdown in the street. “It’s been a hell of a gooz-fuck, hasn’t it, Jesse?”

  Jesse thought of Carpenter, his parents, Maddy, Murdock, Carolyn. He glanced back at the girls, and his eyes found Caitlyn. A liquor store, a music box of breaking glass and sloshing liquid, hurtled toward them.

  “Kill it,” Jesse said, quieter. “For all of them.”

  Tom fired. Then they ducked as the liquor store exploded against the street in front of them.

  For a moment after, charged silence reigned. Then a deafening crash, a sound like the world coming apart, hit them all at once, rocking the ground, filling them up inside with the roar and its echoes. In the moment of silence that followed, where everything living held its breath, Jesse looked up at the General.

  The gray, slithering mass of lobes and coils in the statue’s hand started to unravel, sliding off its hand in long, curling ropes. The slug had found its mark, the last and most important of all its changing and organic vulnerabilities. Tom had shot Thrall in the brain.

  A lone couch skidded to a halt ten feet away from Tom, whose face, smudged with dirt and blood, still held that utter cool-handed calm.

  Then, everything was silent. It wasn’t an “everything is finished” kind of silence, Jesse thought, but more of a tense silence. A holding of labored breath, a working through the pain. The remaining monsters fell, one by one, where they stood. One, a wounded Althior, hopped toward them, then flopped face-first onto the sidewalk. Thrall wasn’t dead yet, but Jesse was pretty sure it was dying.

  And he didn’t much want to be around for its death throes.

  “Guess that does it, eh?” Tom wiped at the blood on his cheek with his sleeve and stood up. His face was calm, but the hand huddled in the bloody sleeve shook badly.

  Jesse shook dust from his hair and brushed it off his clothes. He held his breath, his eyes fixed on the big pine tree. Even as he and Tom jogged across the street, Nadia was crawling tentatively out from under the tree. Jesse swept her up in a hug that lifted her off her feet. She giggled delightedly and swatted his shoulder. When he put her down, he saw Caitlyn peering out from under the branches.

  She smiled up at him and scurried out, nearly knocking him over with a hug.

  He held her tightly. “I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”

  Mia crawled out last. She shook a little, twitched as if occasionally afflicted by a sudden, terrible draft. Her shoulder had stopped bleeding, and the blood had been wiped away.

&nb
sp; Ahead, the skies rumbled, and whatever was left standing started to fall.

  ***

  Thrall began to cave in on itself. Behind them, the remaining buildings crumpled and fell into the ground. Roofs shot off their houses. Windows burst out in a flurry of glass. Light posts fell and street signs shot like rockets into the air.

  But their focus was dead ahead of them. There was light—the clear, colorless light of normal skies and normal worlds—at the far end of the tunnel. They ran. All around them inside the tunnel, strange bodies, unmoving, littered the sides of the black pathway through. The rumbling behind them grew louder and a crack in the tunnel ceiling raced them overhead. It reached the end first, but they were right behind it. The stones all around them wouldn’t hold together long, but it didn’t matter. That passage to hell couldn’t fall apart fast enough, in Jesse’s estimation.

  At the far end, Jesse saw the trunk of the car, then the car in full view outside the tunnel where Carpenter had parked it. Beyond lay Wexton, and beyond that, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, anywhere. Beyond that lay anywhere but Thrall.

  “Jesse.”

  He stopped at the sound of the voice, so close, so warm. A voice that maybe days ago he thought he’d never hear again. Jesse turned to Mia.

  Mia limped to where he was. “Jesse, wait.”

  Ahead, Nadia took Caitlyn’s hand and ran toward the car, followed close behind by Tom, but Jesse took little notice. His gaze was fixed on the tears held by Mia’s eyelashes.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” Something was wrong. It was there in her eyes, the curve of her mouth, her delicate fists. There too, just under the surface of his consciousness. Something was very wrong.