It was Babyface.
John reminded himself that, under the cloak, the thing was wearing body armor.
John aimed and pulled the trigger a second time, aiming right for that stupid puffy-cheeked face. There was only a dry click.
John tossed the gun aside, ran, and leaped up onto the back of the bus. He tried to wrestle the cloak’s gun out of its hands, face-to-face with its ghoulish infant features and those tiny little rubber teeth.
They tussled and John felt something shoving his feet aside. Giant maggots were boiling out of the rear door of the bus, squirming out in every direction. The cloak took advantage of the distraction and smacked John in the jaw with the butt of his gun. John stumbled back, grabbed the cloak, and both went tumbling into the water.
Me
The larva was pulsing.
The two empty wounds from which I’d extracted the first pellets were now black holes, staring at me like shark eyes, a calculating, gleeful intelligence behind them. I could sense it talking to me, taunting me, making me promises about what awaited once it was free from its shell. Every time the forceps slipped off a projectile, it laughed. So ready to be free, gazing upon our world and seeing a new toy to play with, a helpless thing to torture.
I blinked and tried to concentrate. The two remaining pellets were deep—too deep for the forceps—and I couldn’t get a firm grip on either one because the maggot kept thrashing around. Loretta had been joined by Marconi, both of them failing to keep my “patient” still.
I fumbled with the projectile, the larva howling under me.
I couldn’t get it. I glanced at Loretta, who was watching me, eyes wide. The life of her baby slipping out of my trembling, incompetent hands. She saw the apology in my eyes and I watched her die a little inside.
Desperate, I screamed, “Joy! Get back here!”
She appeared.
“Can you, uh, see what’s going on here? Really see? Not just Maggie, but the…”
She nodded quickly.
“Help me hold her down.”
“Why can’t we roll her over?”
“What good would—”
Instead of explaining, Joy just pushed everyone back and rolled the swollen larva off the sofa and onto the floor, wound-side down.
She slapped the larva twice.
Then she rolled it back, and two smoking little balls were lying there on the floor, cooking the carpet. They had just fallen right out.
Amy
Amy saw John and the cloak tumble into the water. Kids were trying to crawl out of the rear door of the bus, climbing over each other, crying out for their parents.
The shooting had stopped from Ted’s end and Amy could sense from his manner that he had run out of bullets. That infuriated Amy. How could he run out of bullets? Always having lots of bullets was his whole thing. That was like an Internet provider running out of snide indifference.
Ted pulled out a knife and splashed out of the water, advancing on the one remaining cloak who was still on dry land and upright.
Amy moved toward the bus once more. It shifted again under the force of the current, tilting now, almost tossing the escaping children overboard. Could they drown?
She yelled for them to be calm, said she was coming, then there was a gunshot from behind her and Amy swore she felt the bullet whistle by her ear this time. She thought she might have peed her pants a little.
She turned and there was the female agent with the bloody shirt, Amy could no longer remember what name they were calling her.
Amy said, “You can’t hurt me! Remember! It will blow back on you!”
The woman said, “Just step aside, it’s been a long week.”
Slung over her shoulder was the shotgun they’d given to David back at the wellness center, only Amy assumed it was now functional.
Amy said, “This may seem like a weird time to ask, but what’s your name again?”
“Bella.”
“Listen, Bella. Shooting them causes them to hatch. That’s what they want!”
The agent sighed. “And who told you that?”
“I don’t—we figured it out! You have to trust me!”
“So these creatures, whose entire process is based around deception, convinced you that they can’t be harmed, and you don’t see why I’m skeptical of this claim? What exactly is your plan? Long-term, I mean.”
“I DON’T KNOW! I don’t know, okay?”
The look of disdain on Agent Bella’s face burned right through the downpour. The rain had spread her bloodstain down her shirt, fading to pink around the edges. Children were yelling. Nearby, Amy could hear what sounded like Ted stabbing a cloaked figure to death.
The agent brought the shotgun around and marched forward.
Me
We lifted the larva back onto the sofa. The four wounds were no longer smoking, but they also weren’t going away, either. I held a hand over the holes and felt what I thought an astronaut would feel if he found a crack in the ship’s hull while floating in the most desolate, frozen void at the edge of the cosmos. Not just coldness, but darkness and a sense of the vast, inhuman eternity that lay beyond. Was it too late? The larva was swollen, now in the shape of a football, tugging and straining on the gashes in the translucent leathery hide.
I said, “So … I’m not sure how to treat the wounds on this…” I almost said “thing” but Maggie’s mother was right there, and already seemed pretty confused. “… uh, situation.”
Marconi said, “Is there bleeding?”
“Not blood, no.”
Loretta said, “There’s blood everywhere.”
Joy said, “Then treat the wounds.” She looked at Marconi. “Treat the little girl. Same as you would anybody.”
He looked at me. I shrugged. The larva was no longer thrashing around and howling with its piercing wounded bird noises. It just lay there and made a low, squishy moaning sound. In the sand bowl, all four pellets continued to crackle and burn, the stench of brimstone filling the RV.
Marconi dug out packages of gauze from his first-aid kit and went to work.
Outside, I heard gunshots and Amy yelling at someone. I left the larva and its three caretakers behind and ran for the door. When I grasped the handle to open it, I found my hand was sticky. I was surprised to find it was covered in blood.
Maggie’s, I guess?
Whatever.
Just as I was about to step out, I noticed that leaning next to the door was Marconi’s antique spear, wicked chiseled notches in its gleaming obsidian head. I grabbed it and shoved through the door, into the maelstrom.
John
If John and his attacker had fallen on the downstream side of the sinking school bus, he’d no doubt have been whisked down the river, on his way to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead they fell upstream, meaning the current was now crushing their bodies against the side of the bus. There was no ground under John’s feet—the only thing keeping his head above the surface was the current pinning him to the white metal wall and the grip of his left hand, which was clutching a grating next to the bus’s wheel well.
John had lost track of the cloak that had tumbled into the river with him and he had hoped maybe it’d gotten swept away. But then a hand erupted out of the water and clutched John around the throat. The fingers felt thin and sinewy, like the talons on a bird.
Up from the water came the baby-face mask, only blackness behind the blank eye holes.
In a voice that sounded like a colon tumor that had grown a mouth, the cloak said, “Even now, you do not believe you can die. Do you know what awaits you, once you have been plunged into the black swarm? A most profound penetration that will split you wide, a violation without end, your shock their narcotic, your despair their aphrodisiac. How can you not already hear their lustful howls, you who bear the mark of Min?”