The mother cried back, word for word, weakly, fading. The sound sent chills through me, as did the sight of the baby ripping open her shirt and biting into her breast.
“Amanda!”
Mike walked into plain view, toward his daughter, who, I saw now, was hidden in the midst of a cluster of women at the farthest end of the shed.
Her head turned at his voice. She smiled as though she was happy to see him, though her eyes were blank.
Other heads also turned at the sound of his voice. The baby lifted its weirdly disfigured crown and screeched. The mass of worms on the ground wriggled and pulsed in his direction. The three men left the side of the woman and ran toward him.
Mike aimed his gun, and with short controlled bursts, dropped the old man and the ghost. Three-piece fell down, but rose again, blood pouring from his side and from the defensive wounds in his outstretched arms.
My teeth were chattering but I stepped around the tank with the shotgun raised. I was screaming curse words, the same words, over and over and over.
Still I couldn’t bring myself to shoot.
Mike took a step back and shot Three-piece again, dropping him for good. The women in the shed keened and flapped their arms like a flock of frightened birds. Answering calls came from the fields and the houses.
I grabbed Mike by the arm. “We have to get out of here!”
“Amanda,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”
She pressed forward, smiling at the sound of his voice: but she echoed the keening cry of the other women, and began to flail her arms.
He shot her in the head, knocking her back and leaving a hole in the wall of bodies.
There were more men coming from the fringes of the farm, out of the house and the cornfield. I had my fist in Mike’s jacket, dragging him backward toward the road. He pulled away from me long enough to light one of the Molotov cocktails he had brought along. The flaming bottle arched through the air and landed in the dry straw of the shed.
The flames raced across the stalls like a golden retriever running to greet its master. The women seemed unable to flee the shed. As they jerked and struggled in the flames, their screams sounded more and more human. The men running out of the cornfields went right past Mike and me, throwing themselves into the flames to try to rescue the most pregnant of the women.
I was retreating, trying to pull Mike along. He was emptying his gun into the screaming bodies, screaming along with them, their voices merged into a single wall of sound that threatened to overwhelm and drown me.
Only the baby escaped the inferno. It had dropped from its mother’s breast at the first roar of the flame, and now it ran, bloody-mouthed, on all fours with its little lizard’s gait toward us.
Mike pointed his gun at the monster, but the trigger clicked on an empty chamber.
The creature stretched out its clawed hand to Mike’s leg, while he tripped, staggering backward, fumbling to switch magazines.
I stepped forward with my shotgun. Raising it over my head, I slammed the butt down on the baby’s head. I hit it over and over, until the stock cracked and flew off, and then I beat at it with the barrel, until the head was pulp pounded into the dirt. I couldn’t even see what I was doing, my eyes were so blurry with tears, my vision red with fury.
Mike pulled me away and I threw the barrel on the monster and yelled at it. My elbow was bleeding, where the gun had gone off and grazed me with the shot. I didn’t even notice when it happened.
As we drove away, the flames reflected in the window of his truck. It felt like the whole world was on fire.
When we were in the car, driving back to our camps, I kept thinking about the way Mike had shot his daughter rather than see her like that. I wanted to be like Mike. If I had to be, I wanted to be strong like he was. I didn’t want to see my children suffer.
Before we went back to the deer blind, Mike made me wash up so I wouldn’t scare Josh with all the blood on me. He talked a lot, more than usual for him-self-recriminations, how he should have extended his perimeter, taken out that bang earlier; talk about teaching Josh how to shoot, heading north for colder country.
We looked into the blind, and I saw that Josh had taken off his belt and tied himself to one of the corner posts.
“What’s up, big man?” I said, trying to sound light-hearted.
He was shaking, sitting on his hands to keep them still. His voice was very low.
“It was only one, Dad. There was only one that got on my face, that’s it, only one. I didn’t know what it was. Nick was saying how they tickled-how it was dandelion seeds but they tickled.”
I looked over at Nick, sitting catatonic in the corner. The Jif peanut butter jar had fallen out of his pocket; it was filled with a dozen squirming worms, setting off tiny blue sparks like little fireflies. The J had peeled off the label, leaving a glowing, brightly colored jar of if.
Josh saw me see it, and his face went sick. He gritted his teeth, put on his meanest face, and said nothing, trying not to shake.
Mike said, “Good work, Joshua. Smart. I need to talk to your dad for a second.”
We stepped away from the blind. Mike put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
I was shaking my head, rubbing my eyes.
He said, “It’s all right. I’ll take care of it. You had my back at the bang, I got yours here.”
I swallowed deep, knowing he was right, wishing that I had known him before everything went so bad, wishing that we could have been friends, that Amanda and Josh could have grown up together. I took a deep, loud breath, and willed my chest to stillness.
Looking him in the eye, I said, “Thanks. Thanks. But I can do it. I need to do this myself.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure.”
He nodded approval, and I found myself wanting his approval as he reached into my pocket and pulled out the revolver. He flipped it open, checked the bullets, and pressed it into my hand.
“After this, we’re going to go kill all those fucking alien monster bastards,” he said. “All right?”
“All right.”
“Dad?” Josh said uncertainly.
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
Mike patted me on the back. The revolver felt heavy in my hand, like an anchor keeping me in harbor during a storm.
I raised the gun and shot Mike in the face.
He toppled backward, and lay on the ground, his head a bloody wound that lay open to the sky.
“Dad!” Josh cried.
“I’m right here.”
I went into the blind. Josh’s teeth were chattering. He was pale and shaking, and his eyes had already started to take on the glazed look. He saw the gun in my hand.
“I don’t want it to hurt,” he whispered. “Don’t let it hurt.”
“I won’t.”
The thing is this: even with the alien taking over, some part of us remains in them, some essential piece of our DNA remains unchanged. I have to believe that. I thought of the way Amanda turned her head at the sound of her father’s voice. Her tongue was inhuman, but her face was full of joy.
So I put down my gun. Untying Josh’s bonds, I say, “Come here,” and I take him in my arms. He squeezes me tight. I look at Nick, who’s already somewhere else, and I pull him onto my lap. I reach down and pick up the peanut butter jar full of rapeworms.
I unscrew the lid and pull one out. Pinched between my thumb and finger, it writhes, cilia twitching and setting off tiny blue sparks.
Josh buries his face against my shoulder, torn between clinging to me and pushing away so he can follow the siren call of the worm in his brain. His voice is weak, not hardly his own voice any more. “Dad, I’m scared.”