American Elsewhere (78 page)

That, she guesses, is probably the bodyguard sent along with the convoy.
So that’s what the children look like
, thinks Mona.
Or one of them, at least.

The balled-up, arthropodan thing stands in the street with its back to her, shuddering. Then, with a sound like someone crinkling wax paper, it begins to unfold.

Mona sees a head that is far less rigid than its body: though it is not facing her, she sees something pendulous and flabby, with scarab-like pincers protruding from the trembling flesh. Four spindly legs tipped with tarsal claws hesitantly reach out and begin tapping the asphalt. But the most horrifying feature of this thing is what emerges from either side of its midsection: two quivering appendages that very distinctly resemble human arms and hands, each one with seven fingers, the first two fingers bearing flagella or antennae that are over a foot long.

Mona doesn’t wait for it to turn around: she puts a round just below the thing’s head, where she thinks its neck should be. There’s a dull thud, like a hammer striking wood, and a spot on its plated back turns a somewhat lighter color. But the shot does not penetrate.

She reloads, fires again. Another
thunk
, another divot in the thing’s
back. It does not seem to notice or care at all: it just keeps unfolding, until it is well over seven feet tall, a shuddering, hunched thing that slowly begins whipping its antennaed fingers about, as if it’s using them to smell the air…

It starts buzzing, making the same nauseating whine that seems to be echoing throughout all of Wink right now. Then it turns around.

It is like nothing Mona has ever seen before: the bottom half is four spider legs, the top half two distended arms with feathery fingers, and there’s an eyeless lump of a head. Its mouth is a gash, a rent, dripping something quite runny that hisses on the asphalt. Swimmerets and feelers and all sorts of tiny appendages line the edges of its underbelly, each squirming like mad.

Mona dimly realizes she is somehow related to this thing, and feels sick.

The thing makes no noise, no hisses or screeches: it simply scutters toward her, its four clawed legs daintily picking their way around the car and over the road. It is such a queerly delicate, teetering thing, like a dancer.

Mona picks what she thinks is a weak spot in its armor—right where its shoulder merges with its underbelly—and fires again. It nicks the creature a little more deeply, but it still does not penetrate. The thing hardly twitches at the shot. It waves its feathered fingers toward her, as if trying to see her.

Mona starts backing away. She tries to draw a bead on its legs, but they move shockingly fast. Does she run? Draw it away from the car, then circle back for her child?

“Oh, goodness,” says Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. “Must I handle this myself?”

The old woman stumps around the hood of the car and toward the scuttering black creature.

“No!” shouts Mona. “Get back, goddamn it!”

“You are mistaken,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “
I
am not the one in over my head here.”

She walks to stand directly in the creature’s path. Its feathered fingers swish in her direction.

The thing pauses. Then, in a move that is blindingly, blindingly fast, it
gallops
toward her, and when it’s mere feet away it rises up on its back two legs, the top two legs shooting forward like giant pincers, and leaps.

Mona ducks down. Yet Mrs. Benjamin is ready: she dodges to the side, grabs one of the pincer-legs, and yanks the thing to the ground. Then she grasps the top of its armor, plants her foot in the small of its back, and pulls.

The thing shrieks, and it is a terribly human sound, like that of many children. There are pops, like stitching popping in a pair of jeans; its many arms and feelers wave wildly, trying to find flesh to tear; one of the segments begins to separate; and then, with a sound like a sewer line breaking, white, creamy intestines spill out of its body to flop onto the ground, where they begin sizzling on the asphalt.

Mrs. Benjamin—and though Mona knows what she is, she can’t help but think of her as “old” and “doddering”—has just torn this horrific monstrosity in half. She holds its top half aloft, as one would a severed head, though this is about the size of a municipal garbage can and God knows how heavy.

The thing is still somewhat alive, however, its arms wheeling back and forth and its dollop of a head thrashing about in its carapace, and one of its feathered index fingers just happens to whip around and catch the slightest bit of Mrs. Benjamin’s neck…

The spray of blood is obscene, spurting nearly seven feet. Mrs. Benjamin angrily shouts, “Oh!” as if she’s just stubbed her toe. She drops the top half of the creature, which curls up on the ground like a wood louse. Then she staggers back a few feet and falls on her ass, blood spurting arrhythmically from just under her jawline. She holds her hand to the tiny nick—which must be just on her jugular, or something just as important—before taking it away and looking at it: her hand is coated in blood.

Mona, keeping a safe distance from the twitching thing on the ground (which does not appear to be mortally wounded as much as disabled; but then, Mona remembers, killing in Wink is not allowed), circles around to her. Mrs. Benjamin looks up—she is already paler—and hoarsely says, “Tell me—is this fixable?”

Mona looks at the flow of blood, which is extreme. She shakes her head. “I doubt it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Damn,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “I… I quite liked being an old woman. No one asked you… to do much. Left you alone.”

“You can… come back, right? As someone else?”

She shrugs. “Though that does mean… killing another person in Wink, and taking their place. But I suppose… that’s the way things are.”

“Will I see you again?” Mona asks.

“Oh, probably,” she says wearily. “I expect everyone… will be seeing… quite a lot of you, dear.”

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Benjamin coughs and sits forward a little. One hand plays with the string of pearls around her neck, smearing them with red. She says, “Oh… how I wish it were… night.”

“Night?”

“Yes. Liked the look… of the stars.”

She sits forward a little more, then a little more.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, goodness.”

The flow of blood trickles away, and she is still. And somewhere in the distance, there is thunder.

“Is she dead?” asks Gracie, emerging from behind the Charger.

“Yeah,” says Mona. “As dead as her kind can get, I guess.”
My kind
, she thinks.
I wonder if I’ll be loaded into someone’s body if I snuff it… probably not.
“You okay, Gracie?”

“I think so.”

“Didn’t hit your head or anything? You can move your arms and legs okay?”

“Yes, I—”

She stops. There is a sound over the buzzing: a tiny, croaky sound, like someone working the rusted hinges of a door.

Crying. A baby, crying.

“Oh my God,” says Mona. She stands and runs to the Lincoln.

She can see there is something in the center of the backseat, wrapped in sheets and twitching.

She dives in and pulls the sheets aside. She expects it to be wounded, because Mona’s never done these things right and it can’t have gone right can it, it just can’t have, but then…

The little girl pulls the sheets aside herself. She is not, Mona sees with some surprise, a newborn. She looks about six or seven months old. And when she sees Mona she reacts with obvious relief, and throws her arms out to her and cries.

Mona slides her fingers underneath the baby (and Jesus
Christ
she is
small
) and picks her up. The baby is not at all weak or limp, and she sits forward in Mona’s grasp and haltingly puts her arms around Mona’s neck for (Mona cannot believe this) an embrace.

She is hugging her. Her baby is hugging her.

She thinks I’m her mom.

I
am
her mom.

Mona tells the voices in her head to shut up, but she cannot stop laughing and crying at the same time.

Gracie tentatively approaches the car. “What’s that?” she asks in a hushed voice.

“It’s my baby,” says Mona. And as she says it, it finally seems to become real. “It’s my little girl. My own little girl.”

“How?” asks Gracie, positively flummoxed.

And Mona can hardly answer.

“Is she hurt?” asks Gracie.

“No, I think she’s just scared. It’s not her blood.”

Gracie looks at the whimpering baby, concerned. “I thought you said you lost your baby, or… something like that.”

“I did.”

“Then how can she be your baby?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. She just… is.”

The baby warily peers around Mona’s head at Gracie. “She definitely
seems to think you’re her mom,” says Gracie. “Listen, I don’t think this is the issue right now. Those… those
things
are getting closer.”

Mona peers out the car door: the rivers of those horrors are about halfway down the mountain now. She has no idea what they plan to do when they get to Wink, but she does not want to be here for it.

“We got to go,” says Mona. “That’s what we have to do.”

“Leave Wink?”

“Yep.”

“But we can’t! No one ever gets out of Wink!”

“I did, once. When I went to Coburn through the back way. I had to walk out of town, then back into it.” She leverages herself up and out of the car, clutching the baby to her chest. “Get back in the Charger. We’ll just head to—”

A new sound joins the buzzing reverberating through Wink. It is incredibly,
incredibly
loud, so loud it feels like it reaches past her eardrums and vibrates her brain directly. It sounds like someone is slapping a bass string miles long, or maybe as if some vast engine is trying to turn over, gears guttering and cranking…

It sounds, Mona thinks, a little like the buzzing coming from the necks of all the people in Wink, only much, much larger.

“What is that?” asks Gracie.

“I don’t know.”

Then Mona sees something in the landscape. It is so vague it is hard to pinpoint it, but she finds herself looking to the south, where she first entered the valley and passed the sign with the antenna on the mesa. She stares at one of the mountaintops there, and then she sees it.

No way
, she thinks.

“What?” asks Gracie.

“Shh,” says Mona. She raises a hand.

Gracie comes to stand beside her. “What?” she asks, more softly.

The river of children is thinning out. Mona guesses that must be all of them. But did she see…

It happens again. Gracie sees it too, and gasps.

“Did that just… did the mountain just
move
?” she asks.

“Yes,” says Mona slowly. “Yes, it did.”

The movement is so large it dupes the eye into thinking it impossible, but it is really happening: they watch as the entire top half of the mountain rises just a little bit, then falls back down again. The motion is uneven, lopsided: the left side of the mountaintop teeters and slides away more than the right. Trees are uprooted and go tumbling down the mountain like sticks. Huge clouds of dust go roiling up, filling the sky.

“Is it an earthquake?” asks Gracie.

“No,” says Mona. “No, I don’t think so.”

It happens again, harder. Mona is reminded of someone kicking blindly at a door, trying to break through any way they can, and then…

The mountain does not burst, as Mona expects: there is no eruption, no explosion. At one point the mountain lifts up again, but it just keeps lifting; or actually it
pivots
, like the peak is the top to a hinged box that is slowly being opened; yet as it pivots more and more, the entire mountain is sloughed away, tons and tons of rock and earth sliding off. Dust fills the air, rushes down to the town in a tidal wave. It is as if all the topography was resting on a carpet someone has just started ripping up.

No. No, that’s not right—it’s not ripped up. It’s being
pushed
up. There’s something underneath the mountain, as if the whole of it is resting on something’s back…

Mona can see it now, just barely: a dark, bent form lost in the mushroom cloud of dust. It is not
just
big: the mere glimpse of it forces her to redefine all her preconceptions about the concept of “big.”

It stands. There is so much of it, it seems to take forever. And the buzzing sounds around them increase, as if an audience applauding.

“Oh, my
God
,” says Gracie.

It takes up the whole sky, the whole horizon. It keeps standing until it blocks out the sun, its shadow stabbing forward to swallow the entire town, and then it lifts its arms from the cloud of dust and stretches them out, buzzing horribly, a deep, abysmal voice that makes the very skies shake as it glories in its newfound freedom…

“Yeah,” says Mona.

Mona has seen this thing only once before, in a vision of the mesa north of Wink, long ago. On that occasion she did not get a very good look at it, but now she has a chance to review.

It looks somewhat like a person: it has legs and arms and a torso, but it is far too huge, far too bulky, a massive, cyclopean person easily over six hundred feet tall. Its skin is dark and pockmarked like that of a humpback whale, something used to lightless submersion. It is covered in veins and black, sinewy muscle. Its shoulders and arms and deltoids are huge and swollen, its thigh muscles are mammoth, rippled tumors. Its belly sags down over its groin in a spill of collops and rolls that quiver with each motion.

And its head… the head is tiny in comparison to the body. It is a grayish, gleaming little pearl atop the vast mountain of shoulders and biceps and belly. It has no mouth: just a section at its neck where it becomes a dripping patch of baleen and pinkish flesh.

But its eyes are the worst part. They are so huge and round, and they glow like lighthouses, the golden light blooming through the dust…

But though Mona registers this form as an abomination, a total violation of every concept of beauty and symmetry and biology she possesses, it also
registers
with her, somehow. This image, this form is imprinted in her, as if etched into the space right between her eyes. This thing has been with Mona her entire life, casting its immense shadow over every second, every moment of her consciousness.