The loop, p.21
The Loop, page 21
Another day. Still here, despite these motherfuckers.
Still not meat.
She tightened her grip on the utility knife in her hand until she felt its sharpness as an extension of herself. And though she didn’t allow herself Carol’s sweet delusion that anything could be made right, she did allow her feet to carry her forward into the bright new day.
chapter fourteen MAN ON THE STREET
Steve is our injured baby gazelle.
Whether it was his age, or the events of the day draining his will to live, or a genuine desire to suffer the wrath of what he’d helped to create—maybe even a fun combination of all of the above—Steve was lagging hard. Brewer and Lucy had bolted from the alley and onto Dalton Street first, followed closely by Judah, then Toni, who had kicked off her heels and was probably dying for the cool Converse she must have left at the Boiler Room.
But Steve—he might as well have been out for a casual stroll.
Did one of those spider/octopus things get into him? Is that what’s slowing him down? How long before he starts twitching and running after us?
Lucy didn’t know if she was willing to go back and help him. Why would she put herself at risk for that man? But he seemed to know a ton about the “device” that was infecting Turner Falls’ kids, and he did manage to keep Marisol disconnected from the grid for all that time. He had tried to save that girl. Had really wanted to. And then she thought of all he’d lost, and what they’d done to his wife. His poor daughter. She could imagine their terror.
We have to help him.
This time she knew well enough to start running the other direction before Brewer could stop her.
He’ll save me over someone else, every time. Veer wide.
“Lucy, no.”
Damn it. He saw me.
And then Brewer was in chase, and Judah and Toni made confused faces but did not stop their full-tilt sprint up Dalton Street, and Lucy realized how mad she must look, running back in the direction of the boys who had probably finished mainlining every last ounce of Jake’s suffering into their bodies and would be looking for their next high.
What do I even do when I get to Steve? He’s not fucking Yoda. I can’t just throw him in a backpack and go bolting the other direction.
She looked beyond Steve and saw that she had to reach him soon or it would be the death of them both. Three blood-spattered kids, two boys and a girl, came running around the front side of The Exchange and were headed straight for them, moving faster than usual, their gaits smoothed over by the way they’d used Jake. One carried a machete, the blade now darkened, while the other two appeared to have done their wet work with bare hands.
Steve looked back and saw the hunt had found him, and some basic switch in his mind must have flipped to “flight,” because he finally picked up the pace.
Still too slow, though. What if he’s our only chance to survive or even escape this?
Lucy imagined the machete slicing Steve’s back, opening up flesh and fat and muscle and exposing his ribs and spine to the morning sun. She wondered if the kids would take turns swinging after Steve had been felled. Would they prolong his suffering, avoiding a fatal blow?
Stay away from his neck. He’s got four good limbs. You pull on his hand while I swing.
The kids closed the distance faster than Lucy could. The boy raised his machete.
Too late. Always too late.
At least, that’s what Lucy thought before she saw the beat-up 1985 Cadillac Eldorado round the corner onto Dalton, banking so hard two of the wheels smoked as they spun against the wheel wells.
More of them? One of us?
The hideous, trembling children in pursuit must have assumed the latter because they didn’t look back, even when the driver gunned it and the engine rumbled so loudly Lucy felt it in her guts.
There was a wrongness to what was about to happen—Lucy knew that. The exact same event happening only two days prior would have been an emotionally devastating tragedy for the entire town. Three of Turner Falls’ best and brightest, mowed down by a hulking Caddy with an out-of-state custom license plate reading “VER1TAS.”
But on this particularly broken morning, the exact same occurrence was not tragedy but triumph. And at that exact moment in time there was a feeling in Lucy’s heart, and though she chose not to name or acknowledge it, it was surely joy ascendant.
The boy on the right was pulled under the car first, his left shoe snagged by the front wheel, his body dragged and compressed beneath the burning undercarriage. The second boy bounced from the hood and was sent airborne before he hit the brick wall of Anderson’s Optics and nearly bisected himself at the waist with his own machete. The girl was slightly ahead and looked back in time to see the car and try to leap safely to the side. She was too late—the grille caught her legs, and the impact sent her swirling across the asphalt, spinning so quickly the street stripped away her face like a belt sander.
Just as quickly, the Caddy veered up onto the sidewalk to avoid hitting Steve, plowing through a plastic box of local newsweeklies before it squealed to a stop.
Judah and Toni had finally turned toward the commotion and were running in the direction of the car. Brewer caught up to Lucy, his eyes wide, his head nodding yes again and again, though Lucy didn’t think he even knew it was happening.
Lucy was first to the Cadillac, although she flinched and stepped back when the driver’s-side window started rolling down.
One of their tricks? Another cruelty? Are they feeding on each other now?
There was a man behind the wheel with a tightly shaved head and what appeared to be a bleeding bite mark on his left cheek. Lucy looked him in the eyes.
Not that terrible blue.
One of us.
The man spoke directly to Lucy. “You fucking crazy too?”
And though she was most certainly crazy, she knew what he meant, and so she answered the question with an honest “No.”
“All right, then. Hop in.” He leaned across and unlocked the passenger-side door. Lucy ran around the front and kicked the remnant of a news vending box out of the path of the car. Brewer caught up with her and opened the car door first, sliding into the front seat. Lucy hopped in after him.
A truck engine roared to life in the distance.
The rest of the crew from The Exchange.
Lucy yelled, “Hurry up!” Within moments Judah, Toni, and Steve had piled into the back.
Brewer held up an oversized silver pistol he’d found on the seat of the car.
The man behind the wheel said, “You mind holding that for me, buddy?”
“Sure.”
“Keep your finger outside the trigger guard. Not quite sure how I’m still alive at this point, but it’d be a real shitter if you killed me on accident. Everybody in?”
Nods or “Yeahs” from all.
“Let’s scoot, then. And once we’re clear of this shit, maybe one of you can tell me why some kid with his legs on backward just tried to bite my goddamn face off.”
With that the driver shifted gears and plowed back into the city street, dragging the remains of a fresh kill, dark blood trailing behind.
* * *
“I should have known. I really should have known. I mean, I saw some of the military guys laughing as they let me through the barricade, but I figured that was on account of my working for the Nightwatchman show. Not everybody gets what we do.”
The man reached down by his hip and slid out what appeared to be a self-laminated piece of computer-printed ID. He passed it to Brewer and Lucy. It featured a faded picture of the man in happier, less face-bitten days, along with the words “PRESS PASS, Emmett Grayson—The Nightwatchman. Irrevocable Authority of the Press Hereby Invoked as Granted by the First Amendment of these United States of America.” Lucy handed the pass back to Judah behind her.
“Now I almost wish I would have taken that CNN internship. I mean, the corporate agendas would have driven me crazy, but at least then those brutes at the barricade would know somebody would be following up and checking in on me. But with the Nightwatchman, I think they figured I’m just another loon. ‘Sure, let him through. He won’t make it out. He won’t be missed.’ Jesus.”
Lucy shifted in her seat. Two bottles—an empty Maker’s Mark and the last dregs of some Cuervo—clinked against each other. A half-roasted joint rested in the upright prongs of the ashtray jutting from the dash. Sober or not, he’d rescued them and evaded their pursuers for the moment.
“So they let me through, and there I am, thinking my name is finally preceding me, thinking I might be about to get a serious scoop, and I realize, Holy shit, I’m driving through the desert at night. It’s time. It’s time to go full gonzo. So I pull over, and the night is beautiful, but, man, it is cold, and so I had a little to drink and decided to sharpen up with a few lines and a gummer, and there you go. It’s the dream, right? But then I finally make it into the city, and right away I wished I were playing it straight. I mean, I’m not trying to cover some desert rally, or go flopping around Las Vegas like a libertine, so maybe it was poor timing on my part. Nobody’s dropping acid while they report in Syria, you know? And something feels so wrong once you hit this town. My shitty old radio fried out the second I turned it on, and I couldn’t get a phone signal worth shit to call home base and find out if there was any new info out of the area. And worse, there’s nobody moving around, like even the tumbleweeds left town, and I tried to tell myself, ‘Well, it’s a sleepy little tourist burg.’ but then I passed this school, Mountain Crest or something like that, and there’s a light coming from the gymnasium. When I drove closer, I saw there was a body holding the door open, so of course I parked and jumped out to see if I could help, and also, honestly, I wanted to verify that the whole town hadn’t been evacuated. But then I got closer and this smell came from the gym. Worst thing I ever smelled my entire life, and I grew up by a mushroom farm and worked at a dairy for three years.”
Lucy had a sense of what Emmett was about to tell them. She had worried about it before, but swept it from her mind. Mountain Crest was one of the Community Emergency Hubs. Folks were supposed to meet by the open-air basketball courts, away from structures in case the emergency was an earthquake, but she could picture all the tired families who’d somehow managed to dodge the initial Handsome Valley transmission gathering there by default after their lines of communication broke down, paradoxically pulled from their homes by the endless parade of sirens in the city streets. They’d be confused, still wearing pajamas. Little ones crying, alarmed by all the loud noises, sensing their parents’ fear. Those same parents wondering why they’d heard screams in the street/why their phones weren’t working/why the cops wouldn’t even stop in the street when you waved them down. Was that an explosion in the distance? Why was there so much smoke in the air? Was it really coming from downtown? Maybe someone from the school opened the gym so those gathered could warm up and congregate until someone who knew what the hell was going on showed up to guide them. Someone must have the answers, right? Someone must know what we’re supposed to do when reality breaks down.
Instead of answers, the children had come, familiar at first, greeted by smiles until their twitching bodies and bright blue eyes told the adults something was terribly wrong. But by then, it would have been too late.
Lucy said, “It was a slaughterhouse.”
Emmett said, “Yeah. I think so. There were cars parked around the school. Toppled strollers in the playground. But I didn’t see anyone. And once that smell hit, I was almost too scared to get any closer. Thought I was going to retch. But my duty to the truth comes first, right? It has to, or what am I doing?”
No one answered. Lucy wondered if the ideas of “duty” and “truth” felt as abstract to everyone else as they did to her. They seemed fancy, ornate, positioned somewhere high up on a tower, absurdities compared to the reality of her known world. She wondered at how fast the idea of values could disappear from your mind when your classmates started scraping open people’s faces against cave walls.
“I’m guessing it was a blessing in disguise now,” said Emmett, “but I never got to see what happened in that gym. I was about ten feet out from the light in the entrance when the body holding open the door started to crawl toward me. It looked like they’d been attacked. They were bleeding from a puncture wound in the back of their neck. I yelled to them to stop moving. Said I was coming to help. When I finally got to them, I saw it was a man, and his hands were covered in blood. I crouched, and he lifted his head, and that’s when I realized things were even worse off than I’d thought.”
“Weird blue eyes?” Lucy asked.
“No. I wish, almost. No eyes.” Emmett paused a moment. “I mean, he had them, but they’d been pulled out of the sockets, and then, uh… they’d been crushed. There was something clear seeping from them onto the man’s face. I was shocked. I popped up and swiveled, in case whoever had done that to the guy was coming for me next, but then I didn’t see motion coming from anywhere, and I realized I should try to help him. I told him to lie still, that I’d find a way to get an ambulance out to help him, but then he rolled onto his back and started talking, and that was the worst part. I’m not sure I can remember everything right, so… listen to this.”
Emmett swiped away an image of the Nightwatchman podcast logo on his phone, then pulled up an audio recording. Lucy heard an older man’s voice, harried, rambling like a madman:
“It’s too late for me. Help Emma. Please. Is she still here? The demons have her. They sprang from her mouth. They tried to enter my spirit, and I felt them taking my eyes from within. But I called on the Lord, and He guided me. He showed me the way to return to His light. It was a small sacrifice, nothing compared to what He’s given. But the Devil showed me his world first, before I could pluck my eyes. I saw too much. You must know!… Warn the others. There are mothers, like Lilith, growing beneath us, protecting their dark children in caverns. More of the creatures are growing. They will rise soon. There was a vision, inside my head, inside my spirit. Two girls. They looked like friends of my Emma, maybe Amy and Jennifer, but that couldn’t be. Something was terribly wrong with them. They were swollen, naked, and trembling. Bloated and holding their bellies—another of the Devil’s mockeries, that they held themselves like the Virgin Mother. They were scared and screaming. Their skin tore and softened and sloughed away in places, and beneath that was something shiny and sticky and it bubbled over their muscles and the black sacs that had become their wombs. They lay on the ground of the Devil’s realm, though their faces said they wanted nothing more than to leave, and they cried, ‘Why, god?’ and found no answers and then they moved by the Devil’s hand and their bodies began to slide up the very walls, oozing like slugs until they hung heavy from the roof of their rocky hell. Then they slid together at the top and their bodies seemed to merge and their bellies peeled farther back and left something heavy and shining and black hanging from the roof. And still, they screamed, until the Devil peeled the skin from their chests as if they were flaps and they slid over their faces and grew dark and I could see nothing more than the shape of what they’d birthed above me, shimmering. The Devil wanted me to see all that. To know what was coming. To give myself over to his powers. But I felt god in my hands, and I was strong, and now I am saved. But what of my Emma? What of my sweet Marjorie? I called for them both, but for a long time there were only cries and moans, and then nothing. Can you find them, please? Surely it is His divine guidance that brought you to me. Can you help me save them? Can you tell them that the Devil needs their eyes to hold their souls? Please. Please.”
The recording reached its end. Everyone stared ahead for a moment, feeling the rumble of the Eldorado beneath them as Emmett navigated side streets and incessantly checked his rearview for signs of pursuit. Lucy and Brewer shared a glance—even if Emma’s father delivered the confirmation like a mentally ill street preacher, Brewer had seen eggs on the roof of East Bear.
Emmett continued. “What do you even say to that? How do you respond? I wanted to believe he’d lost his mind, but he was so sincere. I grabbed him one of those metallic space blankets from my emergency kit in the trunk, and I laid it over him, and I told him I’d do as he asked. I said, ‘I’ll find Emma. I’ll tell her about the eyes.’ Guy didn’t have long, I could tell. Even without his trauma, there was some kind of bruising and swelling inside his throat. Blood crusted around some hole in the back of his neck. Pale as a ghost. I figured it was the least I could do.”
He paused again, but it seemed to Lucy it was only so he could take another breath and resume talking. She wondered at his ability to keep speaking without any input from the folks around him until she remembered what he’d said about “a few lines and a gummer.” She imagined a headline: “COKEHEAD JOURNALIST HAS BIG NIGHT, WON’T SHUT UP ABOUT IT.” But then she realized she only resented him because everything he’d just told her and the sad, scared voice on his recording threatened to destroy the tiny remnants of hope that flickered through her heart and kept her moving.
Those poor girls. What did Jason Ward do to them?
Emmett said, “Then I got back in my car, wishing I’d brought an old-school paper map instead of depending on this piece of shit for everything.” He gestured to his phone in its holder on the dash. “Because I realized that—scoop or not—it might be time to get the hell out of town. I thought maybe I could find an old logging road, get by the military blockades. If I’m being honest, I was looking for a real map right before I found you guys. I went into that Oregon Only shop downtown, but all I found were chocolate-covered hazelnuts and smoked salmon and novelty mugs, and when I turned to leave the store, I got pulled to the fucking ground and some shaky teenager with a scraped-up face and his legs twisted the wrong way ’round was climbing up my body. Even all messed up like that, he was so fast, and strong, and before I could fend him off he had pulled himself up to my torso. I was dazed from my head slamming into the tile, and then I smelled burnt calamari and I saw a mouthful of half-shattered teeth coming at my eye and I moved and started to push back, but he managed to do this shit…” Emmett pointed to the swollen, circular bite mark on his cheek. “I barely got the guy off me, and that’s when I decided, Screw a map, and realized I was going to wing it out of here on a hope and a prayer before I got pulled any deeper into whatever is happening to this goddamn town. Because, honestly—and I’m far from a religious guy—it kind of feels like somebody opened up the gates of hell and we’d all be better off if somebody just dropped a goddamn nuke and wiped Turner Falls off the fucking map.”
