What the Hell Did I Just Read

by David Wong

  Loretta was offering me panicked, unhelpful suggestions every step of the way. From up front, Joy was yelling something about having caught up to the convoy, and I thought I could hear sirens.

  Finally, I got the first ball tenuously clamped in the forceps, gingerly drew it out, then promptly bumped my hand and dropped the glowing orb on the sofa. It burned right through the cushion, a little tongue of flame licking up from the spot. I quickly dug out the projectile and dropped it in the sand bowl, John rolling the larva out of the way of the burning cushion. Marconi slapped out the fire, whipping it with his suit jacket.

  Three projectiles left. I was shaking. Sweat was stinging my eyes. The larva continued to swell and pulse.

  I said, “What if it’s already too—” and stopped myself. I wanted to ask what if it was already too late, meaning too late to stop the thing from hatching. But Loretta was standing right there and she would definitely interpret that the wrong way.

  I leaned in to start working on the next deepest projectile, then almost toppled over when the RV swerved.

  Joy shouted, “Hang on!”

  The windshield in front of her was a kaleidoscope of flashing red-and-blue lights dancing across streaking beads of rainwater. I could hear sirens and shouts and Harley mufflers.

  We’d driven right into the chaos.

  Amy

  They swerved again and Amy had to brace herself against the wall. She stumbled up to the cockpit. Joy had steered them around the scene of a multivehicle accident turned pitched battle.

  Detective Bowman’s SUV was on its side, blocking the right lane, exposing its mechanical underbelly. Its red lights were still swirling and flashing across the expanse of rain-splattered blacktop. The tailing squad car had then run into it, its snout crumpled between the SUV’s tires. The squad car had on its hood a smoking motorcycle and its enraged rider, the guy having apparently gotten sandwiched between the two police vehicles. The rear tire of the Harley was still spinning, sending sprays of water whizzing across the police car’s windshield.

  Off in the standing water next to the highway was one of the NON trucks, having run off the road. It had a grappling hook and line tangled around one of the front tires. Cloaks were pouring out of it and shooting, pinning down several bikers who had skidded to a stop behind them.

  The RV got clear of the wreck and Amy could hear muffled gunshots—the rest of the convoy was just ahead.

  There were layers to the madness. Directly in front of them was Ted’s camouflage pickup. The RV’s headlights illuminated Ted, crouched in the bed with his assault rifle. His soaked blond hair was matted to his skull, his green jacket flapping in the wind. He was in the middle of reloading the gun and even in the darkness, in a moving vehicle in a howling rainstorm, the reloading process was smooth and fluid. Practiced hands. His fingers did not shake.

  Ahead of him was an undulating swirl of taillights belonging to three Christ’s Rebellion motorcycles that were still in pursuit, weaving back and forth, conducting a running battle with the two remaining NON trucks that were side by side, one of them driving with abandon in the oncoming lane. The bikers were shooting at the trucks, little fists of flame popping from their stubby shotguns. The rear windows of the trucks were scarred with white marks where the shots had landed, to no avail. These were military vehicles, made to withstand this sort of thing. Directly ahead of all that was the school bus, a vehicle that simply was not built for speed and thus couldn’t get any kind of separation from its pursuers.

  Also: it was clear that all of them were driving into the flood.

  They were heading directly toward the river, which meant they were entering neighborhoods that had already been evacuated because their roads were impassable. There was an inch of water over the street and the next sudden movement could send them hydroplaning off in one direction or another, at which point the top-heavy RV would no doubt go tumbling over—wounded little girl and all.

  Not that the vehicles involved in the pursuit ahead seemed to care. As Amy watched, the NON truck ahead and to the left picked up speed to overtake the bus. Once it was alongside, it swerved over and slammed into it, the black truck trying to drive it off the road, into the overflowing drainage ditch. The bus swerved, kicked up a rooster-tail spray of water with its rear tire, then swung back on the street. That driver, Amy thought, could pilot the heck out of a school bus.

  Something caught Joy’s attention in the side mirror and she cursed.

  Headlights—the black sedan of the NON agent, racing up from behind.

  The car sped up past the RV in the left lane, then passed Ted’s truck before he had time to register it.

  The three bikers, focused on trying to peel the NON trucks away from the bus full of their precious children, hadn’t been expecting an assault from the rear. The sedan swept into their lane and slammed into the rear wheels of two bikes, sending both careening off the road, flipping and splashing into the standing water.

  Ted tried to bring his assault rifle around to get a clear shot at the sedan. He fired into its side window. The sedan swerved over, smacking into the pickup and sending Ted tumbling over. The pickup slammed on its brakes, causing it to jerk into the third motorcycle, flipping the driver into the side of the truck and then onto the pavement.

  Joy yanked the wheel and the RV swerved to avoid running over the tumbling body of the biker. When she swerved back, they ran over a pair of orange street signs now lying flat in the middle of the road, their stands knocked aside. They both said in all-caps:

  BRIDGE OUT.

  Me

  The Maggie larva was now about 50 percent bigger than when we started. I could feel puffs of frozen dread pouring from the wound. It was a unique sensation; the best comparison I can offer is if you opened your fridge to realize something was rotten in there, then when you opened the cheese drawer, you found a photo of your mother fucking a Dalmatian.

  This swelling effect did have the benefit of stretching the wounds slightly, though the pellets were getting deeper by the second. My plan to go for the deepest one first had been idiotic, the idea had been to extract them in order of threat level but in the time it took to dig it out, the other three had burrowed down just as far.

  Still, I had the second burning pellet out and clinched in the forceps when the RV slammed to a halt. We all went lurching forward like the crew of the Enterprise when a torpedo hits. I came this close to dropping the pellet right back into the goddamned wound. People were shouting up in the cockpit.

  John yelled, “What’s happening?”

  Joy said, “Bridge is out!”

  Amy, sounding frantic, said, “They’re in the water! They’re getting swept away!”

  “Who’s in the water?”

  “Everyone! The cloaks are going after them!”

  I heard the RV door open. John turned and yelled, “Amy! Wait!”

  Amy was gone, having run out into the storm to do god knows what.

  John got up and ran after her. The larva started thrashing under me, John no longer there to restrain it. I screamed after both of them. Neither returned.

  Two pellets continued to scorch their way into the husk of the larva. The creature squealed and sucked and chittered. Loretta ran over and tried to hold it still, putting her hands in all the wrong places, whispering to the thing that it would be okay, that everything would be okay.

  From the darkness in the wounds, I thought I could hear voices, calling my name.

  I blinked sweat out of my eyes and went back to work.

  Amy

  The bus was sinking. The children were screaming.

  The bridge that was out was in fact the same bridge they had stood on a few weeks ago, when they were pursued to it from the other direction. This was the spot where she had chucked the Soy Sauce vial into a current that at the time had already been just feet below the rusty junk bridge that should have been replaced decades ago. Now, the river had overwhelmed the bridge and rolled it aside, rusty beams juttin
g out of the rushing whitewater rapids to Amy’s right. Directly in front of her was the rear bumper and emergency door of the white and red bus, now tipped up toward the sky at a 45-degree angle, the front end submerged in the dark current. The rear wheels were still rolling helplessly in the air.

  Amy had watched the Christ’s Rebellion bus try to stop, but it was a lumbering, clumsy beast skidding through a few inches of standing water—it hadn’t even been close. The bus had splashed face-first into the rushing current and Ted’s pickup had soon followed. Ted’s friend behind the wheel had tried to swerve around the bus wreck to the other lane, only to see the pavement vanish from under him.

  So now there was Ted, upstream to Amy’s left, standing on the bed of his sinking pickup and smashing at the rear window with the butt of his rifle so the driver could climb out. It wasn’t working. Amy had the thought that the guy had probably already drowned. Meanwhile, tiny hands were slapping and clawing at the rear windows of the school bus, children and panicked biker moms screaming from within.

  The hulking black NON trucks had in fact gotten stopped in time, and were now parked on either side of Amy. They were disgorging the black cloaks all around her, ready to finish the job. Behind her was the RV, headlights casting shadows across the chaos in the river. She could hear John shouting something from back there.

  Then, two more headlights joined the party—the sedan of the unkillable female NON agent.

  There was a scraping and a groaning noise from the bus, and it lurched to Amy’s right. The current was grabbing at it, trying to yank it downstream, to swallow it up, to drown everyone on board.

  Amy ran toward the rear of the bus, yelling, “Cover me!” in Ted’s direction. No idea if he could hear her—all she could hear were screams and the thundering stampede of angry water. She would have to jump to climb up on the rear bumper …

  The air exploded around her, and she tumbled down to the pavement.

  She heard shouts—Ted yelling strategy commands that meant nothing to her. He was crouched on the bank of the river, water breaking and spraying around his legs, shooting in her direction. Not at her, but at the black cloaks that were now right on top of her. The cloaks fired back at Ted, leaving orange afterimages in Amy’s vision like fiery claw marks.

  She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the bus once more. It lurched and scraped again, getting pulled along the bank. She tried to jump up onto the bumper but at the last moment, a strong, bony hand seized her by the arm, yanked her back, and tossed her. She went face-first into the flooded area along the riverbank, nostrils burning as she inhaled water. She lost her glasses. She sputtered and tried to get to her feet. She heard screams and turned—a black cloak climbed up on the bus, ripping open the rear door.

  John

  The cloak was about to start pumping brimstone down onto the larvae and John knew he only had a window of about two seconds to do something about it.

  He hadn’t brought a weapon. Fortunately, the universe quickly granted him one: Ted, firing from the riverbank, nailed one of the cloaks between John and the bus, the thing’s strange shotgun flipping into the air and right into John’s hands.

  John aimed and pulled the trigger. Yellow threads of fire laced through the air.

  He hit the cloak right in the back. It stumbled forward, almost falling down into the bus, then turned to face him.

  It was Babyface.

  John reminded himself that, under the cloak, the thing was wearing body armor.

  John aimed and pulled the trigger a second time, aiming right for that stupid puffy-cheeked face. There was only a dry click.

  John tossed the gun aside, ran, and leaped up onto the back of the bus. He tried to wrestle the cloak’s gun out of its hands, face-to-face with its ghoulish infant features and those tiny little rubber teeth.

  They tussled and John felt something shoving his feet aside. Giant maggots were boiling out of the rear door of the bus, squirming out in every direction. The cloak took advantage of the distraction and smacked John in the jaw with the butt of his gun. John stumbled back, grabbed the cloak, and both went tumbling into the water.

  Me

  The larva was pulsing.

  The two empty wounds from which I’d extracted the first pellets were now black holes, staring at me like shark eyes, a calculating, gleeful intelligence behind them. I could sense it talking to me, taunting me, making me promises about what awaited once it was free from its shell. Every time the forceps slipped off a projectile, it laughed. So ready to be free, gazing upon our world and seeing a new toy to play with, a helpless thing to torture.

  I blinked and tried to concentrate. The two remaining pellets were deep—too deep for the forceps—and I couldn’t get a firm grip on either one because the maggot kept thrashing around. Loretta had been joined by Marconi, both of them failing to keep my “patient” still.

  I fumbled with the projectile, the larva howling under me.

  I couldn’t get it. I glanced at Loretta, who was watching me, eyes wide. The life of her baby slipping out of my trembling, incompetent hands. She saw the apology in my eyes and I watched her die a little inside.

  Desperate, I screamed, “Joy! Get back here!”

  She appeared.

  “Can you, uh, see what’s going on here? Really see? Not just Maggie, but the…”

  She nodded quickly.

  “Help me hold her down.”

  “Why can’t we roll her over?”

  “What good would—”

  Instead of explaining, Joy just pushed everyone back and rolled the swollen larva off the sofa and onto the floor, wound-side down.

  She slapped the larva twice.

  Then she rolled it back, and two smoking little balls were lying there on the floor, cooking the carpet. They had just fallen right out.

  Amy

  Amy saw John and the cloak tumble into the water. Kids were trying to crawl out of the rear door of the bus, climbing over each other, crying out for their parents.

  The shooting had stopped from Ted’s end and Amy could sense from his manner that he had run out of bullets. That infuriated Amy. How could he run out of bullets? Always having lots of bullets was his whole thing. That was like an Internet provider running out of snide indifference.

  Ted pulled out a knife and splashed out of the water, advancing on the one remaining cloak who was still on dry land and upright.

  Amy moved toward the bus once more. It shifted again under the force of the current, tilting now, almost tossing the escaping children overboard. Could they drown?

  She yelled for them to be calm, said she was coming, then there was a gunshot from behind her and Amy swore she felt the bullet whistle by her ear this time. She thought she might have peed her pants a little.

  She turned and there was the female agent with the bloody shirt, Amy could no longer remember what name they were calling her.

  Amy said, “You can’t hurt me! Remember! It will blow back on you!”

  The woman said, “Just step aside, it’s been a long week.”

  Slung over her shoulder was the shotgun they’d given to David back at the wellness center, only Amy assumed it was now functional.

  Amy said, “This may seem like a weird time to ask, but what’s your name again?”

  “Bella.”

  “Listen, Bella. Shooting them causes them to hatch. That’s what they want!”

  The agent sighed. “And who told you that?”

  “I don’t—we figured it out! You have to trust me!”

  “So these creatures, whose entire process is based around deception, convinced you that they can’t be harmed, and you don’t see why I’m skeptical of this claim? What exactly is your plan? Long-term, I mean.”

  “I DON’T KNOW! I don’t know, okay?”

  The look of disdain on Agent Bella’s face burned right through the downpour. The rain had spread her bloodstain down her shirt, fading to pink around the edges. Children were yelling. Nearby, Amy could hear wha
t sounded like Ted stabbing a cloaked figure to death.

  The agent brought the shotgun around and marched forward.

  Me

  We lifted the larva back onto the sofa. The four wounds were no longer smoking, but they also weren’t going away, either. I held a hand over the holes and felt what I thought an astronaut would feel if he found a crack in the ship’s hull while floating in the most desolate, frozen void at the edge of the cosmos. Not just coldness, but darkness and a sense of the vast, inhuman eternity that lay beyond. Was it too late? The larva was swollen, now in the shape of a football, tugging and straining on the gashes in the translucent leathery hide.

  I said, “So … I’m not sure how to treat the wounds on this…” I almost said “thing” but Maggie’s mother was right there, and already seemed pretty confused. “… uh, situation.”

  Marconi said, “Is there bleeding?”

  “Not blood, no.”

  Loretta said, “There’s blood everywhere.”

  Joy said, “Then treat the wounds.” She looked at Marconi. “Treat the little girl. Same as you would anybody.”

  He looked at me. I shrugged. The larva was no longer thrashing around and howling with its piercing wounded bird noises. It just lay there and made a low, squishy moaning sound. In the sand bowl, all four pellets continued to crackle and burn, the stench of brimstone filling the RV.

  Marconi dug out packages of gauze from his first-aid kit and went to work.

  Outside, I heard gunshots and Amy yelling at someone. I left the larva and its three caretakers behind and ran for the door. When I grasped the handle to open it, I found my hand was sticky. I was surprised to find it was covered in blood.

  Maggie’s, I guess?

  Whatever.

  Just as I was about to step out, I noticed that leaning next to the door was Marconi’s antique spear, wicked chiseled notches in its gleaming obsidian head. I grabbed it and shoved through the door, into the maelstrom.