John handed the fudge roach back to Joy. It crawled into place and became fingers again.
John said, “Well, that actually makes more sense than any of the other possibilities. At some point during the lost weekend, I learned how to control a flock of fuckroaches. That’s all. Must have learned to train them or something.”
I said, “Is there a, uh, larva in there…”
“No.”
“Why can’t we see through the disguise?”
Joy said, “Because you don’t want to, dummy.”
Amy said, “And you forced them to take the form of a Korean porn star. So you could do what with her, exactly?”
Joy said, “Ew, no. That would not be cool.”
David said, “And we, uh, trust her to drive the bus?”
Joy said, “It’s not that hard. If people aren’t distracting you.”
“That’s actually not what I—”
Maggie howled again and Marconi shouted from the back that he needed their help.
They ran to the back, where Maggie’s mother was trying to hold the little girl still while Marconi tended to her. Blood was everywhere—it covered the narrow sofa and had splattered onto the floor. Amy couldn’t imagine that tiny body even having that much blood in it.
Amy yelled back toward Joy, “You’re taking us to a hospital, right?”
Me
Marconi’s tan suit looked like he’d just gotten home from a double shift in a butcher shop. Beads of sweat covered his forehead.
He said, “We can’t keep her still.”
The squealing maggot was thrashing around … and growing. The goddamned sulfur pellets were still burning through its flesh and I thought that if Hell was a real place, I now knew exactly what it smelled like.
Marconi said to the half-eaten Loretta, “All right. Run into my office, through that door there. On my desk is a large stone bowl. On the shelf to the right of it is a glass jar full of sand. Bring them both to me.”
To John, he said, “Hold her still.” Marconi had a long pair of forceps that he’d been using to try to fish out the sizzling pellets.
To me, he said, “I tried to cut the wound wider to grant us better access, but her skin snapped the blade off the scalpel. Utterly impenetrable. Then I tried to extract the projectiles…”
He shook his head and handed me the forceps.
I said, “What the hell are you doing? No. This is … no.”
“Mr. Wong, I cannot see the patient. I’m seeing a little girl with an abdominal wound.”
“I am not a doctor!”
“You believe a doctor would be more qualified to perform this operation? You’re locating the projectiles and digging them out. They are not difficult to find—they are sizzling and glowing like miniature suns.”
That part was even truer than he knew; the creature’s skin was translucent, it looked like a dirty plastic tarp wrapped tightly around twenty gallons of Vaseline. I could see four pellets, each the size of a pea, burning their way down to various depths. The worst was about two inches down.
Start with the deepest first.
John leaned over the monster with his forearms on either side of the surgical site, trying to at least keep the little patch I was working on stabilized.
Loretta came back with the bowl and the jar. Marconi poured the sand into the bowl and set it next to me—a place to set the burning projectiles where they would not ignite the interior of the RV and create a forty-sixth deadly problem for us to deal with.
I pushed the forceps in and the maggot howled, a noise like a screeching exotic bird being forced through a long section of pipe with a sharp stick. Loretta, watching over my shoulder, gasped and wept. I didn’t want to imagine what she was hearing.
I had to try to force the wound wider to get the forceps around the sizzling projectile. Impossible—the skin was like thick leather, I could change the shape of the wound, but not make it bigger. Then, when I got the instrument deep enough, I found I couldn’t really squeeze the burning ball because the grabby parts at the end of the forceps were the wrong shape to grip a sphere—it kept slipping every time I squeezed, and the maggot howled louder every time I missed.
Loretta was offering me panicked, unhelpful suggestions every step of the way. From up front, Joy was yelling something about having caught up to the convoy, and I thought I could hear sirens.
Finally, I got the first ball tenuously clamped in the forceps, gingerly drew it out, then promptly bumped my hand and dropped the glowing orb on the sofa. It burned right through the cushion, a little tongue of flame licking up from the spot. I quickly dug out the projectile and dropped it in the sand bowl, John rolling the larva out of the way of the burning cushion. Marconi slapped out the fire, whipping it with his suit jacket.
Three projectiles left. I was shaking. Sweat was stinging my eyes. The larva continued to swell and pulse.
I said, “What if it’s already too—” and stopped myself. I wanted to ask what if it was already too late, meaning too late to stop the thing from hatching. But Loretta was standing right there and she would definitely interpret that the wrong way.
I leaned in to start working on the next deepest projectile, then almost toppled over when the RV swerved.
Joy shouted, “Hang on!”
The windshield in front of her was a kaleidoscope of flashing red-and-blue lights dancing across streaking beads of rainwater. I could hear sirens and shouts and Harley mufflers.
We’d driven right into the chaos.
Amy
They swerved again and Amy had to brace herself against the wall. She stumbled up to the cockpit. Joy had steered them around the scene of a multivehicle accident turned pitched battle.
Detective Bowman’s SUV was on its side, blocking the right lane, exposing its mechanical underbelly. Its red lights were still swirling and flashing across the expanse of rain-splattered blacktop. The tailing squad car had then run into it, its snout crumpled between the SUV’s tires. The squad car had on its hood a smoking motorcycle and its enraged rider, the guy having apparently gotten sandwiched between the two police vehicles. The rear tire of the Harley was still spinning, sending sprays of water whizzing across the police car’s windshield.
Off in the standing water next to the highway was one of the NON trucks, having run off the road. It had a grappling hook and line tangled around one of the front tires. Cloaks were pouring out of it and shooting, pinning down several bikers who had skidded to a stop behind them.
The RV got clear of the wreck and Amy could hear muffled gunshots—the rest of the convoy was just ahead.
There were layers to the madness. Directly in front of them was Ted’s camouflage pickup. The RV’s headlights illuminated Ted, crouched in the bed with his assault rifle. His soaked blond hair was matted to his skull, his green jacket flapping in the wind. He was in the middle of reloading the gun and even in the darkness, in a moving vehicle in a howling rainstorm, the reloading process was smooth and fluid. Practiced hands. His fingers did not shake.
Ahead of him was an undulating swirl of taillights belonging to three Christ’s Rebellion motorcycles that were still in pursuit, weaving back and forth, conducting a running battle with the two remaining NON trucks that were side by side, one of them driving with abandon in the oncoming lane. The bikers were shooting at the trucks, little fists of flame popping from their stubby shotguns. The rear windows of the trucks were scarred with white marks where the shots had landed, to no avail. These were military vehicles, made to withstand this sort of thing. Directly ahead of all that was the school bus, a vehicle that simply was not built for speed and thus couldn’t get any kind of separation from its pursuers.