Also: it was clear that all of them were driving into the flood.
They were heading directly toward the river, which meant they were entering neighborhoods that had already been evacuated because their roads were impassable. There was an inch of water over the street and the next sudden movement could send them hydroplaning off in one direction or another, at which point the top-heavy RV would no doubt go tumbling over—wounded little girl and all.
Not that the vehicles involved in the pursuit ahead seemed to care. As Amy watched, the NON truck ahead and to the left picked up speed to overtake the bus. Once it was alongside, it swerved over and slammed into it, the black truck trying to drive it off the road, into the overflowing drainage ditch. The bus swerved, kicked up a rooster-tail spray of water with its rear tire, then swung back on the street. That driver, Amy thought, could pilot the heck out of a school bus.
Something caught Joy’s attention in the side mirror and she cursed.
Headlights—the black sedan of the NON agent, racing up from behind.
The car sped up past the RV in the left lane, then passed Ted’s truck before he had time to register it.
The three bikers, focused on trying to peel the NON trucks away from the bus full of their precious children, hadn’t been expecting an assault from the rear. The sedan swept into their lane and slammed into the rear wheels of two bikes, sending both careening off the road, flipping and splashing into the standing water.
Ted tried to bring his assault rifle around to get a clear shot at the sedan. He fired into its side window. The sedan swerved over, smacking into the pickup and sending Ted tumbling over. The pickup slammed on its brakes, causing it to jerk into the third motorcycle, flipping the driver into the side of the truck and then onto the pavement.
Joy yanked the wheel and the RV swerved to avoid running over the tumbling body of the biker. When she swerved back, they ran over a pair of orange street signs now lying flat in the middle of the road, their stands knocked aside. They both said in all-caps:
BRIDGE OUT.
Me
The Maggie larva was now about 50 percent bigger than when we started. I could feel puffs of frozen dread pouring from the wound. It was a unique sensation; the best comparison I can offer is if you opened your fridge to realize something was rotten in there, then when you opened the cheese drawer, you found a photo of your mother fucking a Dalmatian.
This swelling effect did have the benefit of stretching the wounds slightly, though the pellets were getting deeper by the second. My plan to go for the deepest one first had been idiotic, the idea had been to extract them in order of threat level but in the time it took to dig it out, the other three had burrowed down just as far.
Still, I had the second burning pellet out and clinched in the forceps when the RV slammed to a halt. We all went lurching forward like the crew of the Enterprise when a torpedo hits. I came this close to dropping the pellet right back into the goddamned wound. People were shouting up in the cockpit.
John yelled, “What’s happening?”
Joy said, “Bridge is out!”
Amy, sounding frantic, said, “They’re in the water! They’re getting swept away!”
“Who’s in the water?”
“Everyone! The cloaks are going after them!”
I heard the RV door open. John turned and yelled, “Amy! Wait!”
Amy was gone, having run out into the storm to do god knows what.
John got up and ran after her. The larva started thrashing under me, John no longer there to restrain it. I screamed after both of them. Neither returned.
Two pellets continued to scorch their way into the husk of the larva. The creature squealed and sucked and chittered. Loretta ran over and tried to hold it still, putting her hands in all the wrong places, whispering to the thing that it would be okay, that everything would be okay.
From the darkness in the wounds, I thought I could hear voices, calling my name.
I blinked sweat out of my eyes and went back to work.
Amy
The bus was sinking. The children were screaming.
The bridge that was out was in fact the same bridge they had stood on a few weeks ago, when they were pursued to it from the other direction. This was the spot where she had chucked the Soy Sauce vial into a current that at the time had already been just feet below the rusty junk bridge that should have been replaced decades ago. Now, the river had overwhelmed the bridge and rolled it aside, rusty beams jutting out of the rushing whitewater rapids to Amy’s right. Directly in front of her was the rear bumper and emergency door of the white and red bus, now tipped up toward the sky at a 45-degree angle, the front end submerged in the dark current. The rear wheels were still rolling helplessly in the air.
Amy had watched the Christ’s Rebellion bus try to stop, but it was a lumbering, clumsy beast skidding through a few inches of standing water—it hadn’t even been close. The bus had splashed face-first into the rushing current and Ted’s pickup had soon followed. Ted’s friend behind the wheel had tried to swerve around the bus wreck to the other lane, only to see the pavement vanish from under him.
So now there was Ted, upstream to Amy’s left, standing on the bed of his sinking pickup and smashing at the rear window with the butt of his rifle so the driver could climb out. It wasn’t working. Amy had the thought that the guy had probably already drowned. Meanwhile, tiny hands were slapping and clawing at the rear windows of the school bus, children and panicked biker moms screaming from within.
The hulking black NON trucks had in fact gotten stopped in time, and were now parked on either side of Amy. They were disgorging the black cloaks all around her, ready to finish the job. Behind her was the RV, headlights casting shadows across the chaos in the river. She could hear John shouting something from back there.
Then, two more headlights joined the party—the sedan of the unkillable female NON agent.
There was a scraping and a groaning noise from the bus, and it lurched to Amy’s right. The current was grabbing at it, trying to yank it downstream, to swallow it up, to drown everyone on board.
Amy ran toward the rear of the bus, yelling, “Cover me!” in Ted’s direction. No idea if he could hear her—all she could hear were screams and the thundering stampede of angry water. She would have to jump to climb up on the rear bumper …
The air exploded around her, and she tumbled down to the pavement.
She heard shouts—Ted yelling strategy commands that meant nothing to her. He was crouched on the bank of the river, water breaking and spraying around his legs, shooting in her direction. Not at her, but at the black cloaks that were now right on top of her. The cloaks fired back at Ted, leaving orange afterimages in Amy’s vision like fiery claw marks.
She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the bus once more. It lurched and scraped again, getting pulled along the bank. She tried to jump up onto the bumper but at the last moment, a strong, bony hand seized her by the arm, yanked her back, and tossed her. She went face-first into the flooded area along the riverbank, nostrils burning as she inhaled water. She lost her glasses. She sputtered and tried to get to her feet. She heard screams and turned—a black cloak climbed up on the bus, ripping open the rear door.
John
The cloak was about to start pumping brimstone down onto the larvae and John knew he only had a window of about two seconds to do something about it.
He hadn’t brought a weapon. Fortunately, the universe quickly granted him one: Ted, firing from the riverbank, nailed one of the cloaks between John and the bus, the thing’s strange shotgun flipping into the air and right into John’s hands.
John aimed and pulled the trigger. Yellow threads of fire laced through the air.
He hit the cloak right in the back. It stumbled forward, almost falling down into the bus, then turned to face him.