I turned back toward the hall, feeling an odd sense of relief, trying to quickly put together my last words to Amy. It wouldn’t need to be anything too profound (why start now?).
I met her eyes, and it took me a moment to realize there was no glass between us—she was standing in the open door to the cell.
She screamed, “COME ON!” at the exact moment Agent Gibson arrived to try to wrestle her away from the door.
Nymph flew toward the open door, trying to blow past me. I threw my body at him and slammed him onto the floor, and I couldn’t tell if I was feeling the flesh-and-bone body of a dude in a business suit, or the squishy, pulsing mass of the fuckroaches. I think I was feeling them both, at the same time.
The shotgun skidded across the floor, bounced off the wall, and skipped back toward me. I crawled over Nymph, grabbed the gun, and shoved the barrel into the back of his head.
I yanked the trigger.
Click
I pumped it and pulled the trigger again and again, nothing.
Tasker had sabotaged it. Pulled out the firing pin, probably.
That bitch.
Nymph flung me aside and bowled past Amy into the hall. I followed.
Alarms were sounding. Black cloaks were flowing into the hall from wherever they’d been hiding. I yelled for John, but couldn’t find him in the pandemonium. The cloaks aimed their strange weapons at both me and Nymph.
Tasker said, “Don’t harm the specimen!”
I said, “You just said you were going to kill it!”
“That was a test!”
Nymph said, “Hold on, so now is it better for me to be the specimen or David?”
Amy pushed herself away from Gibson and pointed to me. “This is the human. Unfortunately.”
The black cloaks moved in on Nymph, so I guess they believed her? He raised his right hand. Everything from the elbow down disintegrated into a flock of about ten fuckroaches. They flew toward the nearest cloak, who was wearing a rubber mask that gave him the slack face of an elderly woman. The insects landed on various points of its body, then quickly burrowed through the cloak and body armor. The thing in the cloak screamed an inhuman scream, and then exploded, as if the fuckroaches had pulled it apart from the inside. Grayish-blue hunks of meat landed everywhere—it had the texture of a vegetarian recipe for imitation human tissue. The rest of the cloaks recoiled but again didn’t fire—they were waiting for the order. Though at least they now knew which one was me.
Nymph gave me a smug look and said, “You cannot comprehend the suffering that is about to occur, Mr. Wong. You said you don’t give a fuck, and I believe you. You think none of it matters, that it’s all a big joke. But I assure you, Mr. Wong, right now, no one is laughing.”
There was a commotion from behind Nymph and I heard John, screaming, “FART DILDOS, COMING THROUGH!”
There was a mechanical noise like air brakes. A projectile hit Nymph and filled the hall with sizzling sparks. Nymph went to the floor, a smoldering hole in his back, hunks of metal burning brightly in the wound. The smell of sulfur filled the hall.
John was holding a homemade weapon. The barrel was PVC pipe, leading to a complex mechanism like the cylinder on a revolver. Only instead of bullets, each chamber contained one sex toy. On his back was a tank of compressed gas.
John fired again. A pink projectile whizzed through the air, made impact with Nymph, and exploded in that shower of pungent fire.
The fuckroaches scattered. The black cloaks unleashed their strange weapons on the bugs, vaporizing them in midair, with orange beams that radiated ungodly amounts of heat. I wondered if they ever accidentally fired their weapons on the wrong setting.
Then, all that remained was the larva, writhing in pain on the floor, shed of its disguise. The burning chunks of thermite and sulfur were eating through its skin.
It seemed to be pulsing, swelling.
John cocked his dildo cannon and fired again. The maggot squealed and thrashed, but it was still not dead. The smoldering embers of sulfur ate through its husk … and still it seemed to get bigger.
I said, “Where the hell did you get that thing?”
“It was in the back of the Jeep! We must have built it while we were on the Sauce. The memory hit me all at once. Want me to shoot it again?”
Amy said, “Look!”
A split had formed in the maggot’s thick outer skin, where the sulfur had finally burned through. The larva was now nearly twice its former size, it skin stretching and pulling like a bratwurst on a grill.
From within the wound, a sheer blackness seemed to leak out like steam. And from it, I sensed an infinite coldness that defied all reason.
We’re too late.
John said, “Is it dying?”
Amy shook her head. “No. It’s hatching.”
25. WELL, THEY CERTAINLY FUCKED THAT UP, DIDN’T THEY?
I said, “How do we stop it?!?”
Tasker, thinking quickly, said, “Get it out of the cell block! To the front!”
I grabbed the maggot—it was unsettlingly warm—and tried to drag it. Its skin was slick but tough, hard to get a grasp on it. I twisted it in my fists and pulled. Like dragging a bag of wet cement.
I screamed for John. He tossed his dildo cannon aside and tried to grab on. We screamed for one of the cloaked guards to pitch in, but they didn’t seem to recognize the command. The dark, foot-long fissure in the larva’s hide grew wider. A dim rumble came from inside, low enough to shake the floor. Or maybe I was imagining that part. Agent Gibson came hobbling along and tried to help.
John said, “Roll it! Like a barrel!”
The three of us did just that, making slow progress up the hall, through the cell block door, and toward the open steel door to the office area. This would force us to roll it past Maggie’s cell and I expected to hear Loretta start screaming at the sight of us, but someone had apparently hustled her back into the STAFF ONLY area, getting her out of the way.
We made it past Maggie’s cell—the larva inside shrieking and thrashing at the sight of us—and through the thick steel door. I was sweating with the effort—the thing seemed to gain mass with every step. We were leaving a trail of ooze behind us.
Tasker was waiting by the black coffin device to our left—the portal to other worlds. She waved us that way and we had to again do an awkward 90-degree turn with the pulsing grub.
Tasker pulled open the door and beyond was that vast green field I’d glimpsed earlier. Scattered around the other side was various trash—coffee cups, chip bags, at least one dirty diaper.
The maggot was too long to fit through the door now; all five of us—Amy included—had to wrestle it through lengthwise. It thudded on the other side of the door and Tasker yelled for us to push it farther in, to get it away from the portal so the offspring couldn’t jump through if it hatched at exactly the wrong moment.
I said, “You go through first, sweetheart! We’re not going through only to have you close the door behind us.”
To her credit, she didn’t hesitate. She jumped through and pulled as we pushed, shoving the larva across the field and down what turned out to be a grassy hill in some other time and place and universe.
The moment our hands were off of it, the husk of the maggot split along its body, its skin falling aside. For a moment, there was only a blotch of blackness there and all five of us stared at it, transfixed. Tasker held up her phone to get video, eyes wide in amazement. This was once-in-a-lifetime data. I noted she had a pistol in her other hand, until she glanced down at it and realized that what emerged from this thing would not even find her bullets particularly annoying.