There was an explosion of pain.
Then, all pain disappeared.
It was replaced by a vague warmth, and I don’t mean the disgusting warmth like when you squeeze a bag of dog shit in your hand. It was warm like a hug, like a shared bed in winter.
And then, it was the weirdest thing.
The center of the universe just … shifted.
In that moment, I was no longer the main character in my story. This thing that was attached to me, it was what mattered. It didn’t hate me, it didn’t hate anyone. It was hungry and cold and scared. In me, it found nourishment and warmth and safety. It not only didn’t wish me harm, it desperately needed me to remain safe and whole, to be the provider. It wanted nothing more than for us to survive, together, in a universe that would just as readily see us die alone and forgotten. In that moment, the creature was no longer afraid, because I was there, I was the rock it could cling to. I think that was the first time in my life I was really proud of myself.
And then the creature recoiled, as if struck, or electrocuted. It unhooked itself, writhed and rolled off onto the floor next to me. I thought that John or Marconi had attacked it, but it had recoiled on its own. It had found that I was not its father, that I was poison, that I had nothing to offer.
It cried out in despair.
No, wait. That was me.
I reached out for it, but I was being dragged from the room. The fuckroaches were getting their act together now, landing on the larva, covering it, recombobulating themselves into some new form. Then I was pulled through the door and John slammed it shut, locking it. Amy was kneeling over me, asking if I was okay, examining my face.
From behind the door came the familiar screech of the maggot. Marconi got a look on his face that made me ask, “Who are you hearing?”
“A boy…”
Amy said, “It’s being Mikey again. Begging us to let him out.”
There was a moment when I could see doubt creep into Marconi’s eyes, the fuckroaches’ voodoo starting to take hold. We quickly ushered him out of the RV, slammed the door, and got some distance away from the vehicle. We stood there in the Walmart parking lot in silence, listening to the rain making army marching sounds on our skulls. We tried to catch our breath.
John said, “Well, it’s Mikey’s bus now. Does that mean he gets to host your show?”
Marconi said, “We gained some crucial information. Specifically, the fact that your ‘Soy Sauce’ does not give you perfect detection. And, more importantly, that the workers have the ability to imitate an inanimate object.”
John said, “We actually already knew that. The first trick we saw one pull after we captured it was to mimic my cell phone. Sorry, I think I forgot to mention that.”
“That would have been useful, yes. To know that not only any person or animal we encounter could in fact be these creatures in disguise, but literally anything in the environment itself. Any object in the universe. The implications of that are almost beyond my comprehension.”
Amy said, “Hey, remember when this was just a missing person’s case?”
I felt bumps on my face where the maggot had bitten me. Itchy, but not painful. That brief feeling of attachment … I felt dirty, just thinking about it. I wasn’t sure why.
I said, “Just out of curiosity, Marconi, where did you think you had gotten a concrete snowman from?”
“It was a supposed haunted artifact from a quaint post-war ice cream parlor in Vermont. I remember the case well, the owner of the establishment was a feisty old Scottish woman named…” He trailed off. “Her face fades even as I try to bring it to mind. Fascinating.”
I said, “That’s one word for it. Well shit, now what?”
John glanced behind him and said, “NON’s here.”
* * *
The agents rolled into the parking lot of the abandoned Walmart in a black sedan. The female agent I knew as Tasker stepped out, looked over Marconi’s TV production RVs, and said, “So when I told you to go home and avoid leaking anything about the case…”
She was accompanied by her recently deceased male partner, Gibson, who was walking with a cane and seemed to be having some difficulty.
John said, “I see you’re up and around.”
He grunted. “Fuck off.”
There was a thump and Amy jumped—Mikey’s face appeared in a window near the rear of the RV. He was crying and clawing at the glass. “Help! That old man lured me into his RV and he made me watch a puppet show he put on with his peepee!”
I said, “Hey, we captured a larva specimen. Need anything else?”
Tasker said, “We already have a vehicle on the way to retrieve it.”
“You do? How did you—”
“You need to come with us. We’re going to have a meeting.”
Marconi said, “Am I invited?”
“No, this is not going to be part of your reality show, Doctor.” She turned back to me. “We’re going to come up with a plan of action, and you’re going to be on board with it and you’re going to stop impeding our every move. We have the exact same goal. There is no reason we can’t work together.”
John said, “Other than the fact that you would literally murder us right now if you could.”
“Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they’d much rather murder. Listen to what we have to say, you’ll find out we’re not the bad guys here.”
22. THE HEROES AGREE TO HELP MURDER A DOZEN CHILDREN
I was hoping we’d get to ride inside one of the NON vehicles—I was curious to see the interior—but apparently that wasn’t allowed for non-NON employees, so we were simply told to follow them to the meeting location. I wasn’t surprised to see that we were being led toward the converted farm supply store that was now calling itself the IAEEAI Lab and Wellness Center.
I wasn’t quite sure what kind of occult temple shit to expect inside the building that NON was apparently using as a field HQ, but it was kind of disappointing. Inside was an open space that had been recently renovated for use as offices and could easily have passed for an insurance company’s customer support call center. Past an unmanned reception desk were cubicles and glassed-in conference rooms. Against the wall to our right was a series of vending machines and that black coffin thing they’d rolled out in the parking lot a couple of days ago—the portable doorway to … wherever. A man in an orange jumpsuit walked over to it and opened the door. On the other side I got a glimpse of what appeared to be a green field on a sunny day. The guy took the last gulp from a Styrofoam coffee cup, tossed the cup through the door, then closed it.
The office area was only half of the building, however, and the insurance company illusion ended abruptly at a concrete wall with a thick sliding steel door in the center. So, probably not a supply closet. There was a row of red warning lights along the wall and below them, large painted letters said:
IF LIGHTS ARE FLASHING PERFORM RITES OF BLACK VEIL
FAILURE = NERVE BURN CYCLE
THIS MEANS YOU!
I thought we’d be taken to the coffin door to hold our “meeting” in some nightmare dimension where the office furniture was alive and the bagels screamed when you bit them. But, no, we were just led to the largest conference room. Inside, one wall featured a single window granting us a view of the misty industrial park. Next to the window was an inspirational poster depicting a bunch of bees crawling over a honeycomb above the words, TEAMWORK KILLS THE WASP. At the center of the long conference table was a phone with speakers snaking out like the arms of a very spindly and fragile robot octopus.
Tasker directed us to sit on the opposite side of the table from her. Agent Gibson shuffled over and sat next to his partner with some difficulty, leaning his cane against the table next to him.