“They drove Jana and Lev mad. I know they don’t like knives. What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice high and desperate. In that moment, the newborn Gift Horse sounded terribly young. “I-I can’t remember. I didn’t even really remember it was you, until I saw you. Everything here is different.”
The high-pitched giggling of the DOG began to resound through the factory, building to a manic chorus as it drew nearer. I pulled Zarya and Vassily into another doorway. We emerged into a loading room, filled with stacks of film-wrapped pallets waiting for transport. The smell in the room was alkaline and earthy. I looked around wildly for an exit that led out: the far wall had three truck loading doors.
“Go.” I pushed Zarya towards it, looking over the stacks of crates. “Go, open it. Take Vassily. Save him, if you can.”
“Alexi!”
“GO.” I barely raised my voice, but the word carried emphatically.
She stared at me petulantly for a moment, but she obeyed, scooping Vassily up in her arms and carrying him away. I crossed to one of the stacks. Near one of them, I found a roll of plastic wrapping and a box cutter. A knife. My heart thumped. I took the box cutter and hacked at the plastic over one of the stacks, trying to see what was inside. It parted to reveal eggs, hundreds of them, resting in foam-lined open cartons.
I heard the screech of metal from the direction of the DOG.
I drew a deep breath, exhaled. I could do this. The deflection in Jana’s room had worked. I’d stopped Carmine from blowing my head off. It was possible.
With a steady hand, I extended the blade of the cutter and pulled it across the flesh of my forearm. The world turned white, then red, as pain filled my mouth with pressure. I daubed my fingers in the blood that sprang forth and drew the symbol of Mars on the remaining plastic. The blood beaded on contact. The pallets weren’t going to kill it, but they might incapacitate it long enough for me to stab it.
Through the archway slunk the DOG, oozing on each step. Its tendrils reached forward and almost delicately parted the plastic flaps ahead of it as it padded into the room. It was a mockery of living things—huge and hulking, chaotic, and foul.
“Deliciousdelicious smells delicious heeheeehee,” it babbled deliriously with thirty maws, lurching on every step. Pseudopods burst into pincers at the end of each tendril, chomping black needle teeth as they loomed and darted over its back. Its flesh was melting and dripping, running down its bones and crawling back up. Human bones. They had been broken and reset to make a crude skeleton. “Deliciousoh it does… so brave bravebrave heeheehee…”
A sac of fluid erupted from the DOG’s back and burst, and the air of the room seemed to sag around us. Vassily choked wetly, and as he collapsed, Zarya went down with him. I heard the scuffling, the thump, and Zarya’s cry of alarm and terror but couldn’t turn around to look. The DOG filled the room with the smell of rotten flesh, like dead whores preserved in sugar, the needles still in their veins. I licked my bloody arm as Kutkha gathered within and around me in a rising wave of pressure.
“I’ll eat him and fuck the body,” one mouth hissed in a syrupy baritone, lewd and slow. “Hear that? He’s having a heart attack just thinking about it.”
“Eateateateat!” shrilled another.
I could hear: the frothing, the thumping, Vassily’s throat clicking as the foul miasma accelerated his condition and pitched him into cardiac arrest. Zarya was sobbing, but she was rotting away in the presence of the DOG, writhing where she had fallen. I was alone.
“Fuck you.” I lowered my face, nostrils flaring. My voice was thick, the air around me building power and volume. “
The DOG laughed, sounding like Lev, Jana, and Yuri all at once, and as it built to a run and leaped, it converged into spiny, gaping rows of teeth—a huge bone-splintered orifice that came down to swallow me whole.
Chapter 23
I spat blood and roared wordlessly in the DOG’s face. The pressure built to a maelstrom as magic caught and tore through the room, lifting my hair, my clothing. It was anger and grief: anger was the wind that snapped the sails taut, fueled by rage and grief so deep that it ripped something out of me. The pallets I’d marked lifted and flung forward, into the descending DOG. They struck it in the flanks, and it laughed as the pallets simply passed through and its body burst into ropes of tar that splattered across the floor, walls, and me.
The stuff burned through my clothes and gloves to my skin, and deeper. I screamed as pain worse than anything I’d ever known wracked my body, collapsing and convulsing as I futilely clawed at the wormlike stuff burrowing into my flesh. White needles of agony pushed through the roof of my mouth and up behind my eyes as the pallets smashed violently to the floor around me, building on the shrieking, yarping howls of the DOG. I heard the plastic hiss and rip. The eggs exploded, and I was covered in those, too—and then the acidic stuff eating into my arms writhed off to flop and squirm on the ground.
The pieces of the DOG jumped and hopped, baying in a clamor of alien sounds as it frantically contorted and squirmed to evade the wave of sticky albumen and yolk that now covered the floor. It grew legs and tried to skitter, which failed when they broke; then it tried to make wings, contortions of bone and slime that flapped uselessly against the floor. I tried to shake off enough of the pain to move and couldn’t. I flinched when something sailed past my head. An egg. It hit the flapping, congealing form of the DOG and broke across it, pitching it back to the floor with a wail.
I heard Zarya’s ragged, consumptive breathing intensify as she hefted again. Another egg flew by, and it hit. The DOG screeched, scrabbling and falling to the floor. It was a quarter of its previous size now, smoking and bubbling whenever it touched the mess of egg and shell. Whenever it slipped, it lost pieces of itself. NOthing was powerless when it was exposed to something that embodied potential life.
I heaved, choking back bile, and forced myself up to one knee. The wounds the DOG had left were burning cold, itching and running freely with watery blood. I touched the edge of one and gasped: the pain made my vision blur. The DOG had nearly taken my arms, chest, and shoulder down to the bone. I felt around until I found an unbroken egg and threw it at the parts of the struggling, snarling demon closest to me. It collapsed and then fell apart to fleshy gobbets that thrashed under their coating of egg, falling still as they shrank, then disappeared. Nothing was left, not even the bones of the fallen men it had consumed. Even the stench of it was clearing, while around me, the remaining albumen boiled and dried.
“Wh– wh–” I tried to speak, failed, and licked my chapped lips to moisten them before giving up on the attempt. I turned to find Zarya sprawling on the floor next to Vassily, who was gaping soundlessly. Agonal gasps.
The bottom fell out of me as I crawled across to them and tried to turn him on his side, pawing at his neck to turn his head and clear his airway. I tried to do chest compressions, but my arms buckled. I fell over his chest, struggled up, and knew that this was the end.
“No! NO!” I gathered him in my arms. Nothing. Fluid drained from his mouth, but he hung limp, convulsing in fits and starts. I’ve seen a lot of men die. I knew the signs: the fluttering eyes, the false breaths that never reached the lungs. Sure enough, his head lolled and he choked out foam and spittle onto the floor, but there was no response. His heart had already stopped. “You can’t, Vassily, you can’t…”
Zarya rasped beside me, her lungs full of phlegm. Bent over Vassily’s body and heaving with dry, wracking sobs, I hardly heard her. No, dammit, no. I clutched him close and rocked. Back and forth, back and forth. No. Everything. Everyone. I’d lost everything.