Most of the bikers had now trained their guns on the NON cloaks, with a few seeming to remember that their most urgent task was to free their beloved Lacy. We all stood that way for a moment, getting drenched in the downpour. To me, it seemed like a perfect time to just slip away and let these people fight it out amongst themselves, but there was no way to communicate that to the other three in a way that wouldn’t tip off everyone else.
At the window, “Lacy” screamed, “HE’S COMING! OH GOD, HE’S COMING!”
A muscular arm reached in, grabbed her hair, and yanked her back onto the bed, letting the curtains fall closed.
That did it.
Roach yelled, “Get off her, you sick son of a bitch!” and sprinted toward the door. He pushed past Chastity and blew the doorknob off with his shotgun. He yanked open the door and plunged inside.
Five seconds later, a spray of guts and black leather flew out of the door.
What walked out the door next, was a torso.
“Lacy” only existed down to her waist, which ended in rows of tiny fuckroach feet. She came scooting out of the doorway, the disembodied man’s arm (which ended at the bicep) still clutching her hair.
Chastity said, “Oh, shit!” and shot at the Lacy thing with her revolver. It flinched and pulsed, the fuckroaches giving up their disguise for a split second each time a bullet struck home.
The NON cloaks screamed at Chastity to stop, in their weird pseudohuman voices. Then, Babyface fired a blue beam that was presumably intended to scramble her brain in some way that’d neutralize the threat. It missed, and instead hit a member of Christ’s Rebellion. The man screamed, “VIOLENCE IS WRONG!” He then threw his gun aside and lay down on the soaked pavement, appearing to go to sleep.
The Lacy torso waddled its way toward the bikers, the spell having been thoroughly broken at this point. They opened up on it with their shotguns, blowing off fuckroaches with each blast. Babyface commanded them to stop shooting the specimen, and when the bikers didn’t comply, another blue beam was fired at them. It hit a biker with a glancing blow that just brushed the back of his hair. He blinked, confused, then started firing his gun wildly into the sky screaming, “FUCK YOU, MOON!”
The rest of the bikers were now torn between the disembodied torso monster and the squad of spooky assholes shooting shafts of magic at them. Some turned their shotguns on NON, knocking down black cloaks and making a strategic retreat across the parking lot, toward where their bikes were parked.
Apparently frustrated at being ignored, “Lacy” dispersed completely into a swarm, the creatures whizzing around until they coalesced into a group of six severed heads, each of the same elderly woman, floating a few feet off the ground. The biker nearest to them had time to scream, “GRANDMA, NO!” before they launched themselves at him and started eating his face. The man tumbled to the ground at my feet …
… and onto the pavement rolled the brushed steel canister.
The vial Amy had chucked into the river three weeks ago.
The one that contained the Soy Sauce.
14. A BRIEF HISTORY OF INVASIVE FISH SPECIES IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND THEIR IMPACT ON INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE
After Amy pitched the metal vial into the river, it in fact did not float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, as she had hoped. That would have required a series of remarkable coincidences, considering how many opportunities there are for a floating object to wash ashore or become ensnared in some obstacle along those hundreds of miles of heavily traveled waterway. The object did, however, make it to the Mississippi, where it was promptly swallowed by an eighty-pound Asian carp.
The carp boasted a proud, heroic lineage (though of course it was not aware of this, or anything else aside from a vague sense that being a fish was pretty sweet).
You see, it is well known that the best way to catch catfish in the Mississippi is with cruelty. You simply take a smaller, living fish, ram a hook through its back, and secure the line to a float or an anchor. The terrified, impaled bait will desperately try to swim away until its frantic struggle attracts a catfish that will swallow it whole. In the 1970s, fishermen started using Asian carp for their live bait operations, but the carp quickly turned the tables—they ripped themselves free from their rigs, found mates, started families and, having no natural predators, promptly spread down the Mississippi like a conquering horde.
It was only a few years ago that someone had the bright idea to catch and export Asian carp back to China, where they can still fetch a high price as a delicacy. Thus, the carp that swallowed the vial was caught the next day by a commercial fishing vessel owned by a man named Jon Minchin. The fish, with the vial lodged in its throat, was taken back to port and then crammed alive into a freshwater container along with a hundred other carp just like it. The container was then transferred by forklift into the belly of an airliner. As the carp swam in its cramped, dark prison, it had no idea it was being flown around the world and, in fact, did not even know it lived in a world that could be flown around. It should be noted that four minutes after offloading the fish, a crew member on Minchin’s boat tossed a cigarette that ignited fumes from a leaking fuel line. The ensuing explosion killed two men.
The carp containing the metal vial arrived at a massive fish processing facility in Nantong, 7,370 miles away from where it had been caught. There, a machine designed to lop off the head of the carp smashed into the metal object in its gullet, causing the blade to shatter. This sent a shard flying into the neck of an unfortunate line worker who bled out in forty-three seconds flat. An hour later, the line repair tech, a twenty-three-year-old man named Mǐn, replaced the ruined blade on the fish decapitator and, during cleanup, found the strange metal vial wedged in the works. Recognizing it as some kind of foreign object and not a loose part of any of the machine’s components, Mǐn washed the metal cylinder and marveled at its properties. It felt cold, as if refrigerated from the inside, but was otherwise featureless—no seams where it could be opened, no inscriptions or decorations. It had mangled the teeth of the processor, yet had not a scratch on its surface.
Mǐn decided to take the object home. His young wife suffered from multiple sclerosis and was unable to work a day job. However, she had an artistic streak and had discovered that it was therapeutic for her to make sculptures out of found objects, welding the pieces together and selling the finished products on the Internet (if, that is, it was one of the few pieces she had not grown too attached to). Mǐn thus tried to bring home any items he thought she would find interesting (though regardless of what he brought her, she would always smile and make the same little sound every time, as if gasping with delight).
A week later, the metal vial had become the torso of a sculpture in the shape of a steampunk robot, its joints and limbs made up of springs and gears she had recovered from an old clock. The parts were held together with glue, as she had found the metal of the vial could not be welded or soldered. Still, she had finished the figurine and put it up for sale on the online craft marketplace Etsy. A week later, it sold to a teenager in Spain named Juan Jimenez. Unfortunately, he would never receive the item; the international FedEx flight carrying the parcel crashed into the French countryside, killing everyone on board.
In the name of international cooperation and improving safety standards, the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) frequently sends teams to assist in the investigation of crash sites around the world. The lead investigator, named John Mindelson, discovered the vial when he accidentally kicked it, his attention drawn to this lone unburnt object in a twisted pile of scorched metal that had been roasting in jet fuel for several hours. The vial was clean, the other parts of the sculpture having been blasted neatly off its surface. It seemed impossible that the item could be a factor in the crash, but he kept finding his curiosity drawn to it, particularly the way in which it seemed to always remain about thirty degrees below room temperature.