Loretta said, “If he is, well, I guess that would make one of us. The son of a bitch got just what he wanted. A big, heroic sacrifice. Now the rest of us are left to clean up the mess. He probably thought he was being selfless or something. But look what he left behind. What he did, that’s the most selfish thing you can do. I want to find the jerk who convinced males that martyrdom is cool and kick him in the teeth.”
Loretta closed her eyes and pressed her lips together again. Reestablishing control. Then she quietly excused herself and went back to see her child.
Joy looked up from her nails and said, “I wonder if Waffle House is still open.”
I said, “Do you even eat?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Amy sat up, my hand sliding off of her shoulder. She was watching Loretta as she plodded her way back to her monster baby.
She said, “We were wrong, weren’t we? We said the bug things dig up your worst fear to use against you, but it’s not that. Ted got his war. John, well, he got his car chase, right? It’s like…”
She trailed off, watching Loretta disappear around a corner.
From behind us, Marconi said, “I have found that our greatest fears and our greatest desires are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. I have known many who have died before their time, clutching that coin in their fist. Figuratively, of course.” He had come up behind us at some point, now standing with his overcoat draped over a forearm.
I said, “Jesus, you don’t just sneak up behind people and start spouting wisdom at them. Not at this hour.” I turned back to Amy. “So according to him, your proverbial coin is … waffles, I guess?”
I went to put my hand on her shoulder again but she stood up, wandering away like she needed to stretch her legs.
Marconi said, “I’m afraid I must excuse myself, I’ve an early morning production meeting, then it’s off to Minneapolis. Something is digging up graves, or so they tell me.” He glanced at a pocket watch. “I’ll assume any questions I have for you can be answered over e-mail.”
I said, “Wait, what? This isn’t over, Doctor. Do you know what’s gonna happen with the larvae if we all just go back home?”
“No. Do you? The best I can say is that a chick that cannot break free from an egg eventually dies. Or, it doesn’t get fertilized at all and someone scrambles it in a frying pan. All of this supposition is based on some very limited data.”
John said, “And the Millibutt will continue to spit out new ones.”
I said, “I’d have to consult my notes, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t accomplish anything. We literally could have just stayed home and gotten the exact same outcome.”
Marconi said, “I admit that this one will require some massaging at the editing stage.”
“So what’s the story gonna be?”
“Very straightforward, I should think. It’s the cautionary tale of a town in the throes of a panic over a supposed winged creature that witnesses claimed could turn itself into a man. A creature that managed to snatch eleven small children. All of whom were, thank goodness, recovered unharmed, thanks to the noble sacrifice of a brave veteran. But was all of this the work of an unearthly creature of the night? Or a mere human with a deviant mind? Which kind of predator is more terrifying? That, dear viewer, is up to you to decide. Now enjoy this commercial for auto insurance.”
Amy said, “Eleven children? There were twelve. You forgot Mikey.”
“There is nothing to forget.”
She stared into the middle distance and said, “Oh, right.”
I stood up and stretched. “All right. We get a few hours of sleep, then we round up the biker kids and figure out what we need to do to contain this thing. Every minute counts, people.”
32. FIVE DAYS LATER
We never saw the bikers or their kids again.
They apparently took the rain with them—we got nothing but sun in the days that followed. The water levels still continued to rise, as Amy had said they would—like all of life’s bullshit, it keeps trickling downhill even after the storm is over—but otherwise all we could do was keep rooting for clear skies. I wondered how many people had bought rain boots just hours before it stopped. Suckers.
The neighborhood around the dildo store was all but impassable, but Amy and I had gotten our stuff and moved into Chastity Payton’s sandbagged trailer. We had no idea where she was, but she was still alive and Amy had saved her number before she left. Chastity agreed to let us squat there in exchange for keeping looters away, as long as we didn’t take the plastic off the furniture or “fart the place up.” Still, she wouldn’t have approved of how much red Mountain Dew I’d stashed in the fridge. I didn’t even enjoy the flavor of it, I think drinking it just reminded me of my early twenties. Back when I enjoyed terrible things.
It was Saturday, the day before Amy’s birthday, when we got a mysterious call telling us to go out to Mine’s Eye and to bring John. We had actually been out there a couple of times since the night all the shit happened, waiting for the whole cycle to start up again. It hadn’t, but the call hadn’t been entirely unexpected—we surely weren’t the only ones monitoring the situation.
We met John out there by the little church, which was surrounded by ladders and scaffolding. The owners were breaking local tradition by actually repairing the place, instead of just letting it rot—they’d already gotten the roof patched up. A black sedan pulled up and I was only mildly surprised when Agent Tasker stepped out, a bandage around her neck where her head had apparently been reattached. I wondered if it leaked when she drank coffee.
John said, “Is your partner coming?”
“No, he called in dead. I’m not here to harm or arrest you, and in fact I do not represent NON. That organization has been dissolved.”
I said, “You mean they just renamed it again.”
“There is a, let’s say, housecleaning taking place. We have ascertained that your judgment on the B3333B breach was in fact correct. We do apologize for any actions taken against you by the previous regime—”
“Meaning you,” interrupted Amy. “When you tried to personally kill all of us, over and over again.”
“But I do want to point out that throughout the process, the information sharing between us was less than ideal, on both ends. That’s something we should look to improve going forward. In terms of B3333B, we are actively monitoring all eleven offspring, and will continue to do so until an alternative course of action is found.”
I said, “Well, problem solved. I’ll just put this whole thing out of mind, then.”
The sun was shining, and the pond below would have been shimmering turquoise … but there was no pond. The whole thing had been filled in with concrete. Crews had started filling it in the very next morning after the ten larvae had emerged. There were workers milling around the area now, dragging thick hoses that snaked down from several trucks that were perched on the hill above.
Tasker said, “As you can see, we’ve already gone to work on obstructing the breeding site.”
I said, “I don’t want to tell you your business, but I one hundred percent do not believe that a bunch of cement is going to keep the Milli—uh, the B3333B from doing its thing.”
“Of course not. But we do have every reason to believe that physical proximity to the pond is a requirement for the process to work. The goal will be to simply keep people away. You wondered what connection there was between Mr. Knoll, Ms. Payton, and the Christ’s Rebellion Motorcycle Club. Well, they all attended a barbecue right here, a month before the children turned up missing. That is, a month before the idea of the children were implanted in the adults, along with the trail of psychological bread crumbs that would lead them back here.”
Amy said, “But people come here all the time. I guess that was just when its breeding cycle started?”