John looked back and forth from the maggot to the orifice in the ground. He muttered, “Wait. I don’t think that’s its mouth.”
In a low voice, I said, “We have to do this, and we have to do this fucking now. We have to get the bomb down there, jam it in, blow up the egg sac or birth canal or whatever the fuck part of that thing’s anatomy that is. Before nine more goddamned maggots pop out of it.”
Amy said, “You see these armed biker guys standing everywhere? They think their kids are still inside that hole, they’ll shoot you to pieces if you blow it up with their children still in it. The police, too.”
“Well, what we’re hoping is that the moment the blast goes off, the spell will be broken. We sever the Millibutt’s connection to this world, it’ll break the mind control powers of the fuckroaches, everything will go back to the way it was. Memories of the kids will just go poof, there’ll be some confusion but then everyone will agree we’re heroes and give us all free pairs of leather chaps.”
Amy said, “What evidence do we have that the roaches can’t operate independently of their mother?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. We have to risk it.”
She said, “And that’s even assuming the bomb works at all. Remember the shotgun that same lady gave you? Plus, we don’t actually have the bomb, it’s in Ted’s truck.”
I said, “You see the scuba guys getting ready to go down there? I’m going to give us exactly three minutes to come up with a plan to deal with all that stuff you just mentioned. Then we move.”
28. A COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL PLAN THAT ENDS THE STORY, THIS IS PROBABLY THE FINAL CHAPTER RIGHT HERE
Amy
Amy tried to be casual as she passed the camouflage pickup. The bomb was sitting in the passenger seat inside a camouflage backpack (though a completely different type of camouflage than the truck’s pixel-style paint job—she wondered what the difference was). Ted’s partner, who David had said had a profane nickname, was leaning casually against the passenger side door.
She kept walking and circled the little church. All of the cops and most of the bikers were down around the pond now, where the action was—she would have relative privacy for her end of the operation. David had actually suggested she use her Taser on Ted’s friend—she had transferred it from her purse to her pocket the moment they arrived—but she knew for a fact that it hurt a whole lot and she also wasn’t sure it even had a charge left. It was a last resort, at best.
Instead, once she was out of the man’s sight, she sucked in as much breath as she could and screamed her head off.
Splashy bootsteps stomped her direction. The grizzled ex-soldier arrived with his gun at the ready, eyes wide.
Amy was pointing at the sky.
“It’s here! The bat thing! It’s here!”
He pointed his gun up into the clouds.
“Where?”
She made a show of desperately trying to study the sky.
“I don’t—I just saw it, I saw it plain as day, it went behind those trees. I think? Darn it. It knows we’re messing with its nest.” She turned to look the man in the eye. “It’s going to come back. It wants its prey. Have you seen the video of this thing? When it swoops down, it can snatch a kid into the sky in three seconds. And that’s who it’s going to come for—the little ones. Go talk to whoever’s got guns—tell them we need people watching the skies, and I mean every single minute.”
Poopbeard nodded. “Affirmative.”
Me
I casually walked past the camouflage truck and snatched the bomb bag from the seat. I shuffled quickly down the steep path and along the way texted John:
prepare the diversion
We were hoping the blast damage and shrapnel from the bomb would be largely contained in the orifice, but everyone involved in the project was largely unfamiliar with the anatomy at play here (it would be weird if we weren’t). This meant that, on top of making sure nobody interfered with the operation, we needed to get the innocents as far away as possible, all within the next few minutes—that would be John’s job. Someday, he will be remembered as the Michelangelo of loud, baffling distractions.
Shitbeard shouted for help with the BATMANTIS??? hunt and some of the bikers came trudging up the hill as I descended, but not all of them. I hustled down toward the pond, knowing I had to beat the rescue divers into the hole. I didn’t want to blow the birth canal with a man inside it—that seemed like a super weird way to die—but still, if I couldn’t get there first and it came down to one man versus the world …
I made it to the bank of what everyone else thought was a pond and waded out into the squishy mass surrounding the orifice, slipping and sliding on slime. The scuba divers were on the opposite shore messing with their gear, Ted was talking to a street cop nearby. No one was looking at me. I pressed on and found myself being resisted by an invisible force, then realized I was wading through a shallow pool of water that I couldn’t actually see.
But if the water isn’t real …
Someone shouted at me. Asking what I was doing.
I said, “Just got to check something! Just be a minute!”
I trudged forward. I patted John’s lighter in my pocket, making sure it was there—it was Amy who had remembered that I needed one, bless her—and reminded myself to lift it out of the invisible water before attempting to light it, just in case it worked that way. We had three minutes on the fuse, according to Tasker, though it had occurred to me that may have been bullshit and the thing might just blow up in my hands the moment I touched it with the flame.
The orifice was just ahead, the “water” now up to my waist. I’d have to hold my breath to get the bomb into place. Maybe?
It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could sense something as I got closer, a heaviness in the air, kind of like when you walk into the room and can sense that you just missed a bitter argument, or some illicit porking.
Was it fear? No.
Power.
Menace.
Ravenous appetites and strange desires lurking just below, like I was bobbing on an inner tube in the middle of the ocean while below me swarmed the swift shadows of a vast school of Cthulhus. Despite Marconi’s speech, I had still been thinking of the creature as being physically located inside the mine. But now I understood—this particular spot was just where it interacted with our universe, like the microscopic point where two perfect spheres contact one another. This was where our universe touched a sprawling, putrid nebula of dumb loathing and unfathomable, cruel strength. I thought that if it could be expressed as a physical size, the entity would be large enough to swallow our solar system whole. This thing, I thought, had far more than a thousand butts.
I found I had stopped walking, my own fear an invisible hand to my chest.
I shook it off, and pushed myself forward.
I squished toward the quivering orifice, now about twenty feet in front of me, and muttered, “I’ve got to get a real fucking job.”
I pulled out my phone, typed out, “do it now” and just as I was about to hit the send button, I got slammed from behind, thrown face-first onto the squishy pink surface.
The bomb went rolling away, still in its backpack, the fuse still unlit. I felt water burn into my nostrils. Could I drown in the illusion? I had no idea. I held my breath anyway.
Ted Knoll stood over me, my shirt in his fists. He lifted me up and I felt myself break the surface of the “pond.”
Ted said, “What the hell are you doin’?” He was shaking my torso with each word.
I sputtered, “Ending this! Killing the—closing off the nest.”
“There’s more kids in there, fuckstick! We got divers here, they’re goin’ in after ’em!”