Motorcycles were rumbling to life above us, some of the gang already heading out, probably to go start packing up so they could all leave this god-forsaken place for good. I briefly wondered if John’s meth supplier was going with them.
Shitbeard had the night-vision binoculars and positioned himself nearby to scan the sky for the BATMANTIS???, his assault rifle at the ready. Ted waded out toward the orifice with the bomb, doing a slow-motion walk, believing he was pushing through water up to his chest.
Even partway up the hill, I felt a tremor. But not in the ground—it was like the sky and the stars were trembling, a shudder in the cosmos.
John gave me a look and I knew he felt it, too.
Whether or not that bomb was actually going to work, I was pretty sure the Millibutt thought it would.
Yet, nothing emerged to stop Ted.
Why? I know you’ve got more tricks up your sleeve, you galactic piece of shit. I’m sure of it. Make your move.
Ted lit the fuse, took a deep breath, and disappeared into the pink hole. The phrase “muff diver” did not come to mind then or at any point after, and I’m not sure why you assumed it would.
John said, “There’s no way it’s going to be that eas—”
Amy said, “Look!”
There was a flash of headlights from above.
An RV pulled in, up by the church. Marconi’s personal white-and-gold tour bus.
It skidded to a stop. Marconi spilled out of the side door, looking frantic. He was breathlessly yammering to us as he ran and tried to avoid tumbling down the steep path.
When he got within earshot, he said, “Thank goodness, you haven’t planted the bomb yet.”
I said, “We haven’t. Ted has. He’s, uh, inside the thing, right now. It’s going to detonate in like two and a half minutes.”
Marconi’s eyes went wide. “No! We have to stop it!”
29. THE DANGER OF ACTING ON INCOMPLETE INFORMATION
“What? Why?”
“I am afraid it will take more than two minutes to explain.”
Joy Park, who we had been told not very long ago was holding Marconi hostage, ran down the path behind him. She shouldered past him and kept running down toward the orifice, yelling, “We have to get it out!”
John, Amy, and I were all rapidly trying to figure out if this was, in fact, the right thing to do. But Marconi was already hustling after Joy, so it was either follow them or watch it happen.
Ted had just emerged from the orifice, covered in slime, yelling for everyone to clear out, saying there was fire in the hole. In response, Joy was waving her arms and screaming like a maniac at Ted, shouting at him to remove the fire from said hole.
Ted looked very, very skeptical. Rather than try to scream a rapid explanation to convince him, Amy had the ingenious thought to simply yell, “WE THINK THERE’S ANOTHER KID IN THERE!”
Ted cursed and dove back in.
We all waited around the orifice, hearing faint squicking sounds from deep inside it. We were well within the blast radius of the device—how much time had passed?
I was just about to suggest we all flee, when Ted squishily emerged from the birth canal for the second time. He was cradling the mucus-covered bomb, which had about two inches of fuse left. He whipped out his combat knife and sawed off the fuse at the root. The next time somebody tried to light that thing, they’d only have seconds.
Marconi nodded and said, “Very good. Thank you. First things first—please call down the dive team, I’ll explain everything. Also, your daughter is up in my tour bus, with her mother. Please go to her, she’s distraught.” He turned to Joy. “Go up and stall the Christ’s Rebellion bus, tell them I need to have a word before they leave with the children. They will be skeptical. Convince them.”
Ted and Joy headed up the path. John said to Marconi, “Okay, what’s the deal? You saying the bomb won’t work? Will it work on the larva up there?”
“It will work. Just not how you think. The brimstone ritual—”
I said, “The what?”
“The burning sulfur, you’re creating literal fire and brimstone. It will in fact pierce the larvae’s skin, as you witnessed for yourself. And that is precisely what it wants. That’s what allows it to hatch. It’s the final stage in its life cycle.”
I said, “Its life cycle depends on us happening to invent a sulfur and thermite dildo gun at exactly the right time?”
“Not exactly that, but yes.”
Amy said, “Oh god, why didn’t I see it? The Mikey larva wasn’t maturing or hatching or anything else until John shot it. It only hatched because we tried to kill it.”
Marconi said, “Think of it like a rash. Have you ever been infected with ringworm? You scratch it, it spreads, the spores attaching to your fingernails. To prevent its spread, you cannot—”
“Scratch the itch,” said John, nodding thoughtfully. He looked at me. “‘Don’t let them scratch the itch.’ That’s what I was trying to write on your asshole.”
I said, “Wait, why would John and I have built that sulfur dildo cannon when we were on the Sauce if it was just going to make the situation worse? We should have been under the sway of profound cosmic insight or whatever.”
John said, “I know exactly what happened. You built the dildo gun, I disagreed with that plan. That’s what we were fighting about when the Sauce wore off. Looks like you owe someone an apology.”
“What? Who?”
Marconi said, “We had assumed the larvae’s camouflage was targeted only at the host parents, that it needed the parents only until it completed some life cycle over the course of time. However, I now believe that death—a violent death—is required for its final emergence. It’s not as if the concept of transcendence to a higher plane of existence via death or martyrdom is unheard of in our mythology.”
I said, “So, why not take some horrific form that people couldn’t resist killing? Why bother looking like adorable kids at all?”
“You have to think of a ritual like a chemical reaction—there are specific elements required in specific amounts at specific stages. The offspring feeds on human will, but requires a particular brew for nourishment. Not mere terror, but love and then betrayal, and the unique brand of fear and hatred that follows that sequence. It’s like how we exploit a chili pepper—it develops harsh chemicals as a survival mechanism to deter insects, but we harvest them as a spice.”
“All right, so what would the consequence be of setting off the bomb in the Millibutt’s larva chute?”
“We have no way of knowing, but I think it is reasonable to say that the possible outcomes range from no effect at all, to an entire egg sac full of unseen larvae hatching simultaneously. What is important is that I have no reason to believe it would actually harm the entity itself.”
“Well, we can’t just let eleven of these bastards out into the world to keep chewing on their parents, so what do we do now?”
“Remember my creed—no action from ignorance. We need data and therefore we need time. So, we keep the larvae in a location in which we can control them and, above all, keep them saf—”
He was interrupted by an eruption of gunshots and screams from above.
Amy
Amy spun toward the chorus of bangs and screaming children from the hilltop. As it turned out, NON hadn’t abandoned Undisclosed to its fate—they apparently just needed some time to regroup. This, Amy thought, would have been fantastic news thirty seconds ago.
The darkness above was illuminated by flashing threads of piercing light, like somebody had dropped a box of fireworks in a campfire. Amy took off up the steep path again and she had the thought that she needed to get her little noodle thighs onto a StairMaster if she was going to do this kind of work.