“We have to kill it, Amy.”
“You’re going to kill Maggie in front of her mother? You’d have to kill Loretta, too.”
“No. I guess we’d have to get her away from here…”
“Kidnap her, you mean. As in, the thing you were accused of doing in the first place. Will you listen to yourself?”
“Amy, it’s a larva. That means it’s going to grow into something, right? We can’t let some monster hatch and go on a rampage through the city. Again.”
“Okay, let me ask you this. You see one thing, me and Loretta see another. How do we know your version is right?”
“Is this like some kind of Socratic thought experiment? We already know it’s a monster. I mean, you see a girl but it’s actually a monster.”
“But I talked to her.”
“So?”
“She was able to think and express feelings. Fear, affection, all that. Why doesn’t she qualify for all the same protections we’d afford to a human who can do the same thing?”
John said, “You didn’t see what we saw. That thing is killing Loretta. Eating away at her. Like, taking literal bites from her flesh. I don’t even know how she’s still walking around.”
“She looked fine to me. Looked exhausted, but relieved.”
I said, “All right, this is exactly what you were afraid would happen. Do you need us to slap sense into you now? Just know that I intend to do the slapping on your butt. Slowly.”
“If I’m not thinking clearly, show me where I’m wrong, I’ll listen. In Loretta’s mind, it absolutely is her daughter. Did you see the look on her face? That love, it was real. You kill Maggie, that loss she’ll feel, that’ll be real, too. Same as if you actually killed her kid.”
I said, “Maybe after the thing dies, the spell will be broken, like it was with Mikey. Let’s put it to a vote.”
Amy said, “My vote is that I’m not going to let you do it no matter how you vote.”
“That’s not how democracy wo—”
John’s phone chimed an e-mail notification.
“Oh, hey, it’s Marconi. He says he got the specimen and wants to talk about it. Wants to know if we can do a Skype call.”
“What specimen?”
John shrugged. “I guess we sent him something? While we were tripping?”
“That doesn’t sound like something we’d do. And by that I mean it sounds like a really good idea.”
Amy said, “That settles it. We go back to my laptop and talk to Dr. Marconi and we do that instead of murdering this child.”
I said, “For now. But if in the interim Maggie hatches and eats an orphanage, it’s on you.”
Amy
They were several blocks from Loretta Knoll’s modest rental house before Amy felt her guts start to loosen up just a little.
This whole thing was giving her flashbacks.
After the car accident that killed her parents and mangled her left hand, Amy had stayed with her Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty for three long, nightmarish years. The couple’s marriage had always been a tire fire and Amy could feel the tension crackling in the air every time she walked in the door. The two of them hated each other. They devoted all of their energy to inventing reasons to be outraged, each desperate to be the wronged party at any given moment, as if they were both keeping track on a scoreboard they kept under the bed. Adding Amy to the mix had been the proverbial bottle rocket to the hornet’s nest. The aunt was the blood relative, Amy’s mother’s sister, and it had been her decision to take Amy in. Aunt Betty then kept insinuating that Uncle Bill had sexual urges for their fourteen-year-old houseguest. Betty had known it wasn’t true, it was just the worst thing she could think to accuse him of. That’s how it worked.
Still, this meant that Amy couldn’t just stay out of their vicious arguments, because she was now a party to them. She was also the only one of the three who didn’t seem to thoroughly enjoy the conflict. The tension made her physically ill. She wasn’t used to it. Her parents had been best friends, her father an enormous man with smiling eyes who had once spent six hours driving a young Amy from store to store trying to find a copy of Final Fantasy II for the SNES. His little princess.
But at Bill and Betty’s, if there was ever to be peace for an evening, it would only be because Amy had devoted all of her energy to maintaining it, moment to moment. She would see signs of conflict on the horizon—say, noticing Aunt Betty had bought Wonder Bread instead of Bunny, Bill’s preferred brand—and 100 percent of the burden for smoothing it over would fall on her. The bread-brand controversy had once resulted in Bill smashing a plate against a table and slicing his hand open on one of the shards. Amy remembered on one occasion throwing on her coat in the middle of winter and walking to a grocery store five blocks away, seeing they didn’t have a loaf of Bunny Bread on the shelf, and bursting into tears right there in the aisle. The next morning she had stood there in the kitchen with a ball of heavy acid in her guts as she watched Uncle Bill go to make toast. He uttered a sarcastic grunt when he noticed the brand … and that was it, he just proceeded to make breakfast like normal.
On another day, that’d have been cause to punch the wall and scream the c-word over and over, to sneer to himself and tell Amy about the time he had sneaked into the bathroom at night and put his own bodily fluids in his wife’s face cream. The uncertainty was what made it terrifying—if the outbursts had been constant, she could have started to brace herself in advance, to turn it into some kind of routine. Instead, the periods of peace would last just long enough that the explosions would be jarring again when they came.
To this day, she gets this little thrill of fear up her spine when she passes a bread aisle. Every. Single. Time.
Amy was getting that sick feeling today, the sense that she was going to have to play referee in a fight that was just around the corner. But even that wasn’t right—a referee at least has rules to fall back on. This was more like throwing yourself between two speeding trucks in hopes your squishy organs will be enough to blunt the impact. They don’t make movies or video games about that person, do they? The nervous, muttering thing tasked with convincing the knight and the dragon that there’s more than just the one kind of courage?
She reached up between the front seats and squeezed David’s hand.
Me
Academic, man of the cloth, author, adventurer, and reality show host Dr. Albert Marconi’s most recent book mentions me several times and each time makes me look like an asshole. So, he’s good with research. He does specials for the Discovery Channel about strange phenomena and his production company has sent crews to Undisclosed at least half a dozen times. But Marconi himself has only shown up once in person and in general, he only returns our calls when our situation sounds like something he could parlay into another book. Kind of like a doctor who’ll only take your appointment if your symptoms sound like some kind of horrific undiscovered tropical disease that he can name after himself.
We were back at Fort Beanie Wienie, and Amy was dicking around with Skype (if you’re reading this in the future and Skype is no longer a thing, it was just a piece of video-calling software people used back then. Or back now. Whatever).
I said to John, “You stuck the fuckroach in the mail? There was no concern that the thing would brainwash every postal employee who came within a hundred feet of it between here and wherever the hell Marconi is?”
“The memory is still fuzzy, but when I was on the Sauce, I think I figured out a precaution. I don’t remember what exactly it was, but I know it involved throwing a handful of sulfur inside the container, surrounding the interior with small mirrors, and then wrapping the whole thing in a dozen layers of aluminum foil. I also had thrown a couple of Oreos in with the creature but I can’t remember if that was part of the precautions or if I just wanted to give it something to eat during the trip.”