I scrambled for a story. I briefly considered the truth. Over Ted’s shoulder, I saw Amy up at the top of the path, looking down, hugging herself in the rain. I tried to think of a way to signal to her, but all that came to mind was screaming, “TELL JOHN TO START THE DIVERSION,” which I figured would defeat the purpose of a diversion.
I said, “You say you can spot a liar? Well, watch my face real close—there are no children in there.”
“What? Why would the kid lie?”
“It’s a trick. It’s an ambush. What comes out of there—ain’t nobody gonna survive it, Ted. We’ve got to close it, and we’ve got to close it now.”
Ted let me get to my feet. He then gathered up the bomb, slinging it over his shoulder.
“You look like you’re lyin’, all the time, no matter what you say. Maybe you’re right about this, but if so, it’d be the first time since I ran into you. Dive team knows the risks, I’ve told ’em what’s what. If somethin’ hostile comes outta the water, we’ll be ready. But you and your buddies are gonna stay the hell back, up there on the ridge. I see you approach before every one of those kids is free, I’ll boot-stomp your ass into red waffles. Are we clear?”
I thought I could feel the Millibutt smirking at me, from some cold corner of the universe.
Ted turned, leaned forward, and “waded” his way out of the invisible pond. “Nine more kids in there. Once the last one is out, then we blow it. Not before.”
But then, I thought, it will be too late.
* * *
Defeated, I met Amy at the top of the path. The two of us didn’t speak as we made our way around to a spot behind the cabin nearest the church. There, John sat on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he’d sneaked out of the church parking lot. He had strapped six silicone butts to various parts of his torso with bungee straps. He was holding Buddha’s mace, which had six pink dildos taped to it.
I said, “Forget it, we don’t need the diversion. I got intercepted by Ted.”
John looked crestfallen.
There were faint cheers from below. We moved back to where we could see the pond just in time to watch a scuba diver crawl up from the twitching pink orifice, a squirming maggot in his hands. Three of them out in the world now, depending on what had happened with Maggie.
Speaking of which, I tried Marconi once again and felt my whole body seize up when he actually answered.
He said, “David?”
“Jesus, finally. Tell me you took care of Maggie.”
“Not yet. There was a complication.”
“Goddamnit, Marconi.”
“Your friend, Joy, began acting strangely.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yes. Not having met her, and knowing our situation, I had suggested she be vetted by our crowdsourced array, as you were.”
Ah. Yeah, not a bad idea.
He continued, “As a response, she put a gun to my head. She is still doing it at this very moment.” He sounded only mildly surprised by this turn of events. “You never told me how you know this person…”
“Let me guess. She doesn’t want you to do away with Maggie.”
“That would be correct. And, in fact, we are on the move. I am not sure to where, Joy is not forthcoming with answers.”
I said, “I’m going to bet you’re coming here, and that she intends to stop us from taking out the thing in the mine.”
I heard Joy say, “Hang up,” and the call disconnected.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushed wet hair away from my forehead, and said, “Well, Marconi has fucked up his end. Now what?”
Amy said, “The good news is, we still know where every single one of the kids are, right? So, there’s that. They’re kind of contained, still.”
“Yes, we can watch them all hatch right in front of us.”
John said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’m very disappointed in the Sauce-tripping weekend version of ourselves.”
I shook my head and let out a long breath. I glanced at the church behind us, and for the first time noticed that on the door, in John’s handwriting, had been scrawled, THIS IS A VAGINAPOND.
Amy
The rescue went quickly. There were two scuba divers, alternating trips into the fissure leading inside the old mine. At the moment, the last of the ten children was being hauled from the pond that David insisted was the pulsing birth canal of the Millibutt. The rain had slacked off into a light drizzle, which was as close to no rain as they got these days. Amy thought that soon she was going to wake up covered in mildew.
The kids were being loaded into a modified Christ’s Rebellion school bus at the top of the hill. It was white and covered in red Bible slogans (WHERE THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS, THERE IS LIBERTY) and at least one image of a cartoon policeman getting run over by a motorcycle. Amy could see the cops talking to the surviving leadership of the biker clan, clearly trying to convince them to bring the kids in to give statements and get checked out at the hospital. She could only hear muffled conversation, but Amy got the sense that the bikers weren’t having it. No, these people were done with all that. They were, Amy assumed, done with Undisclosed. They just wanted to hit the road and feel the wind of the Lord’s liberty on their rough cheeks until they arrived in a better place.
If I change … go. Just, go …
Amy watched as the kids boarded the bus, one by one, guided by biker moms. She had expected—or hoped—the kids would look like perfect Children of the Damned characters. You know—clones. Maggie had been a cute little blond girl and Mikey had looked like a big-cheeked black kid from an eighties sitcom. But these looked like, well, biker kids. Rough haircuts done at home—one boy had a shaved head, another had a mullet down to the middle of his back. Hand-me-down T-shirts, at least one ten-year-old girl wearing a tank top covered in cartoon cannabis leaves. One kid had a splint on his finger, like he’d broken it at some point, maybe trying to catch a baseball. Another had a red birthmark that covered half his face. A chubby little girl had a nasty rash crawling up her neck.
Every stitch of clothing, every Band-Aid, every blemish with its own backstory.
She tried not to look at them.
Me
I saw Amy staring at the bus and then making a determined effort to look elsewhere. The vehicle was now stuffed full of the larvae, they were squirming all over the windows. The female driver sat behind the wheel smoking a cigarette while a maggot munched on her scalp from behind. Blood ran down her face. She just blithely puffed away, waiting for the last of her cargo to board so she could head out.
If just one of them gets out into the world, we’re fucked. Plain and simple.
The last of the “children” was now free from the “mine” and Ted didn’t waste any time moving onto the bomb phase of the operation. He and Shitbeard approached the orifice, the former with the bomb backpack slung over his shoulder.
Ted had threatened to murder us, or at least me, if we got too close but we risked moving partway down the path to get a better vantage point. I was very confident the Millibutt wasn’t just going to let Ted jam a bomb up in there, and I was 90 percent sure that whatever trick the creature pulled, it would require John and me to run down, rip the bomb from Ted’s hands, and finish the job ourselves.
I was also curious to see how Ted and Shitbeard operated. I was specifically wondering how they would disperse the bystanders—Detective Bowman and his partner were standing right there on the pond’s bank/meat flaps. But Ted just gave the cops a hand signal and both of them started directing people up and away from the blast site. So, he’d just discussed it with them and they had agreed it was a good idea. Why not, if the kids were safe? Must be weird to actually have authority figures on your side sometimes.