John did.
Chastity said, “I had a ‘go bag’ in the trailer, now I’m kickin’ myself for not grabbing it when all this started. Too risky to go back there, assume the Range Rover is a loss, too…”
She was muttering all of this to herself, working through it. It was pretty clear she wasn’t asking our advice.
I said, “You’re leaving town?”
“You’re not?”
Amy said, “We have to stay and see this through.”
“And what does that entail, exactly? Seein’ it through?”
“Well for one thing,” said Amy. “We have to warn Ted.”
I said, “About what?”
“About Maggie.”
“Why would—oh, fuck. You think she’s like Mikey? Like she never even existed?”
John scrunched up his brow. “Wait, no. They had a photo. Remember? Ted pulled it out of his wallet, looked like a picture you’d have taken at Sears.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No … but, you know, just because Mikey was one doesn’t mean Maggie is.”
Chastity said, “If she is what Mikey was, then you’ve got to take it out. And I’m guessing the parents are still under the spell, thinkin’ it’s their kid. So good luck with that.”
Amy said, “If they are still ‘under its spell,’ why did it work on them but not you?”
“I got a theory about that. See, I think it’d work on you, too, but it wouldn’t work on your man there. John, I don’t know him well enough. Could go either way. You, well, you seem like the kind of girl who’d wake a guy up at three in the morning just because you forgot to say goodnight.”
“I guess I don’t get it.”
Chastity shrugged. “People can either feel unconditional love, or they can’t. Depends on what you had growin’ up, I think.” To me she said, “I expect your parents weren’t in the picture, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Mine, neither. Grow up thinkin’ love is somethin’ you earn based on performance, and you dole it out just the same.” She said to Amy, “I bet when you and your man fight, you get madder and madder, while he just gets quiet, and kind of dead inside. You get more and more upset because you’ve got that love for him that can’t be undone, no matter what, and that strain pressing against it tears you up. David there, I bet he just gets cold. Same as me. Can’t fake that shit. Well, with that unconditional love comes blind spots. That’s what they depend on. So, Mikey started acting all crazy, my memories of him got all jumbled up, it didn’t take too much to sever that connection. But a lot of moms, they’d die first. That love, that unquestioning love that pours out of some people, just wipes out all the wrongs. Make you overlook anything.”
I said, “It’s using it as a survival adaptation.”
“You could say humans do the same. One thing we do know—they’re real eager to get us to go to that mine. I assume something big and nasty is gonna jump outta there if somebody clears those rocks, right?”
John said, “That would probably be the best-case scenario.”
“Well,” said Chastity, “I do wish you luck. I’m gonna go someplace peaceful, and try to remember who I was before a monster rewrote the last eight years of my life.”
Amy said, “You don’t even feel the slightest urge to stay and help?”
“Sometimes the best ‘help’ you can offer is to get your own self to safety and not add to the pile of victims somebody else has got to clean up. Problem isn’t that there’s not enough heroes in the world, problem is too many dumb people assume they are one.”
I said, “Wait, one last thing. What was your connection to the motel, back there? How did you know the Christ’s Rebellion people?”
“Did some business with Lemmy, he owes me a favor or three. And no, it wasn’t drugs or whores, nothin’ like that. I repair motorcycles, that’s one of my several jobs. Why?”
Amy said, “The Knolls had connections there, too. Trying to figure out what it means.”
“You could ask Lemmy, but I’m thinkin’ he didn’t survive getting splattered across the parking lot back there.”
John was turning the Soy Sauce vial over in his hands.
Chastity said, “What’s that?”
I said, “That there is the Soy Sauce. The container that Amy chucked into the river a few weeks ago. Found it on the ground in the parking lot of the Roach Motel, six inches from my feet.”
“Well, that don’t sound like luck.”
I said, “In this town, it’s not just good and evil. Behind the scenes, it’s all these competing agendas. Those agents, the ones you rescued us from, they were convinced there’s something that wants us to win.”
Chastity scoffed and shook her head. “You people are cutting wires on the bomb and hoping you got the right ones. Promise me you’ll give me a couple hours to get out of town before you blow it up.”
John said, “That’s why we have to take the Sauce. We need to understand what’s happening.”
“Uh-huh. And this isn’t the kind of ‘understanding’ you get from peyote? Where you sit there and stare at the wallpaper and think it holds all the secrets of the universe, drool runnin’ from your lower lip?”
I said, “Well … not usually.” It’s actually hard to succinctly describe the effects of Soy Sauce, in the sense that it’s hard to succinctly describe the effect of a gorilla on a child’s birthday party—it can go several ways. I said, “You ever play video games? Probably not. Anyway, one time, John and I were playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games, and our character glitched through the floor and wound up in some foggy netherworld full of floating random objects and distorted characters locked in these broken, looping animations. I think Soy Sauce is kind of like that—it reveals the nature of the game by breaking it.”
“And you’re going to try to convince me to take some?”
I said, “No, I’m pretty sure it would kill you immediately. Amy, too. With John and I, it, uh, isn’t exactly pleasant, but once we come down we usually have a clearer idea of what needs done. Here’s all I ask. Stay here with Amy while we take the Sauce, when we come back, we might just know something that will help you, too. Even if your plan is to run.”
She watched the window. “One hour. If I see them coming before that, I’m gone. So what you’re gonna do, do it now.”
John was already twisting the cap off the Soy Sauce vial. You might have noticed that no one who examined the vial before now noted a cap, but that’s how it works—it opens when it wants to be opened. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure that a group of guys with a diamond saw, a jackhammer, and that huge green laser from the Death Star wouldn’t so much as smudge it.
John tilted the bottle toward his mouth. A single drop of pure black goo formed at the lip of the vial, dripped, then swerved as it fell. It completely avoided his face and splattered directly onto his crotch.
“Son of a—”
The Sauce ate a hole in John’s pants. He slapped at it as Chastity looked on, bewildered. The Sauce vial tumbled out of his hand and landed on the tiled floor. John spasmed into a fetal position, clutching his groin. Then, a few seconds later, he stopped struggling.
The Soy Sauce took him.
John stood up, nodded thoughtfully, and said, “Okay, they are going to find out we’re here in thirty-seven minutes, twenty-four seconds. Unless we take measures. Yes. Measures.”
Then he sprinted across the room toward a window and dove through the glass.
We ran after him, arriving at the shattered window to see John running across the parking lot below.
Amy yelled after him, but I said, “Just let him go.”
I walked back and kneeled down to grab the vial. A thin little stream of the Sauce ran out onto the tiles, inching toward me. No … crawling toward me. Like a little thread-thin worm. Acting with intent.