The loop, p.28
The Loop, page 28
and then a single blinking symbol appeared, the waves of a signal flashing
red
and
red
and then
Green.
She felt her eyes open, a third field of vision. Another layer beyond the room
and the cave
and the knowledge of her body.
“Something’s happening, Lucy.
One of your eyes.
It ain’t blue anymore.
Can you tell me if you’re in there?”
She felt something come rumbling back to life, the growl of a terrible wolf curling in her belly, trying to pull her away, so she
Added another layer to the loop,
Gave them Jake’s face and neck being peeled away, exposing tendon and vein, a scream dying in his throat,
But the growling grew louder,
and Bucket was fading,
the room itself beginning to darken and dissolve,
and the green signal started to blink out
And there was the screwdriver emerging through the skin in Emmett’s neck,
And Steve’s flesh falling away, dripping flames to the ground,
But it wasn’t enough, the hunger of the Oracle insatiable,
The absence never ending,
And even the accident, her parents’ bodies burning, passengers crushed under the bus after it had ejected them and rolled over their bodies, wasn’t going to be enough. But then she thought about the Oracle, and wondered how much power it had at that moment,
divided and invading all
Three.
Of.
Her.
So she extended her mind into the cave and let the anger pour from her and fill what minds it could and she imagined her hands on the Oracle’s precious eggs,
squeezing tight,
Waiting for the perfect moment when the surface would collapse and the blue-black birth fluid inside would run down her arms.
And she believed the things would squeal when they were crushed and the thought gave her such joy that the rush of the impulse extended through the minds she’d entered and a few of the twitching drones realized that they had found
Another way to feel good.
His hands were cold. Sweating. Quaking worse than her own.
But he didn’t let go.
“Are you still…”
There.
She felt less of the thing outside the door. The growling subsided.
The signal light returned to steady green. The rest of the room, including Bucket, disappeared. She walked through silence across blackness, toward the glowing screen.
She reached out with one hand and touched the symbol.
The screen rippled, her finger disturbing the surface of a pond.
The signal light throbbed in time with the beating of her heart,
letting her know they were connected,
and then she felt something cold and simple and without thought pulsing inside her body,
and all it wanted was information.
She gave it everything she knew,
a frenzied rush of death and destruction,
forms of infection and growth,
every shape the Oracle had assumed,
visions of the eggs lying in wait inside the East Bear Caves, stolen from
Another place, where the Oracle had reasserted its dominance,
And any slave who had dared to crush its progeny found themselves being salvaged,
Each birthing a hectocotylus that sought to redeem whatever was left of the meat
that had betrayed it.
And others were being sent, blind with rage, into the light of
The desert, where Lucy and Brewer sat,
facing each other.
Neither knowing yet
If any hope
Remained inside the signal and she realized then that the Oracle had given her
the gift of revisiting all she’d seen,
which included
Steve’s sign.
And she imagined a single screen inside a communications trailer, which had sprung to life,
and she wondered if the static swirled slowly until the black and white pixels separated enough to show them
the truth.
And after the whole of the message had been sent, she allowed herself to see only these words, flashing and repeating ad infinitum:
TACTICAL/TOTAL ERADICATION ONLY OPTION!
And she thought it the strangest prayer she’d ever seen.
“Lucy, they’re coming this way. We gotta go!”
But she couldn’t move, and she wasn’t sure if it was
Her transmission
Or
The Oracle
that held her in place.
She only knew that she had to find some way to sever the connection.
And she reeled back through her memories,
experiencing them as quickly as she could,
though in this space, outside the Oracle’s feedback loop,
they only hurt.
And she thought of poor, half-blind Jake and how the Oracle had rejected him from the hive,
and she thought of Emma’s father saying, “Can you tell them that the Devil needs their eyes to hold their souls?”
And she thought of Ben Brumke, speaking again as a scared child after she plunged a shard of burnt wood into his skull.
And she knew there was a flaw in the interface design.
And she knew what she had to do.
“I’m not here, Brewer. Trapped inside. Even if you carry me, they’ll see. They’ll follow.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“So what the fuck do I—”
“Blind me.”
“Lucy, I don’t know…”
“Trust me. It needs my eyes.”
“Lucy.”
“The knife in my pocket. Set me free. Help me run. Please.”
And she could see herself through the eyes of the hive. Distant but growing closer.
Brewer standing on shaky legs, head hung low, moving behind her.
And she could feel something inside the transmission, a ticking, switching between two tones in rapid succession, some message being sent in return, though she couldn’t tell what it might say.
And then she saw the edge of the razor jutting from the utility knife handle in Brewer’s hand,
the color of the world tainted blue on that side of her vision,
and she felt Brewer’s other hand separate her eyelids,
and he said,
“I trust you. I’m so sorry, baby.”
And there was pressure,
then pain like she’d never known,
and she screamed,
and the suffering was exquisite.
The kind to make you wish for death.
Lucy breathed deep, and screamed again,
and tried to find comfort in the fact that the other two versions of Lucy had completely disappeared,
and the pain was finally
Hers
Alone.
One hand over her punctured eye, the other hand wrapped in Brewer’s, and she felt herself pulled, nearly dragged, stumbling over rocks and brush. She wanted to open the other eye, but something about keeping both closed saved her from dizzying.
The pain wanted her to collapse unconscious, to be carried and treated and placed in a sterile environment. Flowers would be sent.
But she heard sounds behind them—shouting in the distance, voices cruel and cold, wanting her filled with fear before they fell on her, wanting her to understand that her trespass against the Oracle and its children would not be forgiven.
There was another noise, closer—squealing from the “exhaust vent” in her neck.
The Oracle, screaming through its beak, trying to escape a body whose mind it could not possess.
“Brewer, you have to pull it out of me.”
“Not here. We can’t. They’re too close.”
His voice echoed off an object in front of them. The pipeline?
The sound of both the infected and the thing in her neck grew louder.
“I need to know, Lucy. Did you get through? Do they know?” Brewer’s voice sounded desperate.
“I reached something the Oracle had hidden. Something built into the device. Gave it Steve’s message.”
“Did they respond? Are they going to do what they need to do?”
Lucy thought of the simple alternating clicking pattern she’d heard through the transmission in Bucket’s room, and she wondered if she’d imagined all of it, another trick of the Oracle. But then she heard the escalating, thrumming rage of the approaching swarm, the intensity of its desire to send her to oblivion, and she knew she had done something beyond its control. Hurt it in some way. And she also knew that she had found a way to fight against it from inside its own realm, and she’d found a way to escape its possession, and there was nothing magical or special about her that had allowed that to happen. So even if Brewer did what she thought he wanted to do, even if she was entirely wrong about her desperate plea and it was sent to some dead-end server, maybe there was a chance for others like her to stop the thing in the Oracle from controlling their kind.
Maybe.
That was the best you ever got, anyway. She had given up on certainties.
So she said, “They responded. They know.” And as quickly as Brewer heard that he was yelling directions at her, that she had to duck, she had to get on her hands and knees, she had to crawl forward a few feet more, and he guided her by pushing forward on her hips, and she felt cool earth beneath her hands and heard something heavy rushing above her head, and she cried out as she felt the weight of her ruptured eye pulling toward the ground, the blood behind it an immense weight pressing down.
“Okay, you can stand now.”
But she couldn’t, and her legs were jellied again, and she wondered if the Oracle had found a way—despite her destroyed eye—to sink back into her mind. Its squealing had ceased, but she felt it moving beneath the thin skin of her neck.
She felt fresh sun on her arms and opened her remaining eye for a split second.
We’re on the other side of the pipeline.
Pain insisted she close both eyes, showered her vision with fireworks and crystal castles in procession, all of it threatening to fade to black. She tried to stand again, and failed.
Then Brewer was grunting, finishing the crawl beneath the pipe. She felt him next to her, then she heard him moving quickly to another section of the pipeline.
A cacophony of screaming from feet away. The swarm had reached the pipeline. She heard their bodies pressed against it, the scrape and clatter of them climbing and crawling, and still she couldn’t move, couldn’t run, and she wondered if they’d find a way to feed her consciousness to the abyssal absence inside the Oracle, and there was a hand on her ankle, viciously tight.
A voice, ragged and torn from a parasite-swollen throat—“We will have the girl.”
A single gunshot.
The sensation of her body, so heavy. Someone lifting her off the ground, moving as fast as they could.
Then a voice. Brewer. “We’re not gonna make it far enough. Fuckin’ fuse was too—”
Then pressure, and heat. A massive concussion that sent her flying blind through space.
For a moment she believed she’d died, and that the flying sensation would never end. Then gravity brought her tumbling to the ground. She spun, and something snapped in her leg. Static found her again, and blackness followed.
* * *
She woke to the feeling of the razor entering her skin.
“They have been at your wife with knives… and opened her up like a flower in bloom.”
Her instincts told her to spin, to kill whatever was penetrating her, but the throbbing hell of her sliced eye and a new pain radiating from her right leg told her otherwise, and all she could do was moan.
Two more slices through her skin, fast, lighting up her nerves, and then she heard Brewer say, “Let… fucking… go, goddamnit,” and she felt the Oracle pulled from inside her neck, the tissue around the intrusion swollen and sending her a sensory outline of the creature’s squirming shape as it retracted.
“Fucking nasty. God. Damn.”
The Oracle’s squealing reached a fever pitch.
Lucy felt the vibrations of a heavy object slamming into the ground near her, heard something squelching with each thud.
The squealing sputtered, then died off entirely.
“Holy hell, girl! How the fuck did you put that thing on your neck?”
She heard him settle to the ground near her, grunting then moaning in pain.
What if I’m only hallucinating him? How are either of us alive?
She opened her good eye.
He was really there, but at the sight of him she had her doubts he’d be alive much longer. His face and shoulders and neck were a map of scattered lacerations, all of them bleeding fresh. A jagged chunk of black PVC penetrated the meat of his left arm, which hung loose, the hand stark white.
Wait. Still alive. They’ll know.
“They’re coming for us. We have to keep going.”
Brewer laughed.
“All right, one, we ain’t exactly in ‘going’ condition. I mean, I probably look great, but the day’s been pretty rough on you. I don’t want to freak you out, but something’s at a weird angle in your leg. And two, they’re not coming. Not right now.”
He must have read the confusion on her face.
“Here. You gotta see this, if you can. Look down this little hill a pinch. Can I move you?”
She wasn’t sure there was any way she could move that wouldn’t hurt like hell, but she said, “Yes.”
“I’ll try to be gentle, okay?”
And he was, and they both had to move in miniature, each shift triggering new jolts of pain and involuntary screams. But soon she was back where she’d been at the pipeline, sitting between his legs, leaning against his shrapnel-torn chest. She tried to ignore how little warmth moved between their bodies now, and the way that Brewer shook against her.
“You see that? Rodney built a hell of a bomb.”
Lucy heard the pain in Brewer’s voice, mixed with an odd sense of admiration.
She squinted, let her remaining eye focus. They were maybe thirty yards from the pipeline, on a slight rise. Below them was a charnel house, a mess of torn limbs and viscera that had once been the swarm that followed them.
And down the center of the territory they’d blown to high heaven, between two blood-soaked swaths of soil, ran the new river they’d created.
The eggs. They’ll spread now.
“This was what they wanted,” she said.
“That’s probably what they’re thinking right now, whatever’s left of ’em. But it ain’t what they’re getting.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was dragging us up here, I heard a plane. First plane I’ve heard since all this shit went down. What are the odds of that? No—they came to our coordinates. Your message got through like you said.”
Lucy wanted so deeply to believe him, to allow herself the joy that might bring. But she’d also noticed he was bleeding from both ears, so Brewer saying he’d “heard a plane” didn’t mean he’d heard their plane, the one that would take the truth back to the bastards at the border and force them to end their experiment.
He might not have heard anything at all.
But what if he had?
Lucy decided to let it stand as the truth. She’d given others kind lies before they died. Didn’t she deserve this?
They heard my message.
The joy fell to low tide, eclipsed by the pain in her eye and neck and leg and, well, everywhere. Still, she felt it, and was glad to have had it.
“So what do we do now?”
“ ‘Do’? Come on, Lucy. You’re looking at it. And who knows for how long? So will you sit here with me?”
She nodded.
Brewer leaned forward a bit and reached out his one good hand. Lucy curled her fingers into his, closed her eye, and thought of what Chris Carmichael had said on the last day of school.
“This makes it stop.”
“This is real.”
…
Poor Chris.
And she wanted to say so much to Brewer, to find a way to make his heart full, to thank him for saving her from the swarm, to thank him for pulling the Oracle from her neck, to tell him he’d been good like his grandma had taught him, to say, “Worst. Date. Ever,” and know that he would laugh, to tell him he was kind and strong and that she truly loved him in a way she’d never loved another human being.
But there was something perfect in the quiet, and the way their bodies rested together, destroyed and finally free to stop fighting, so she let the silence stand and tried to block out the pain and feel only his breathing and the faint beating of his heart.
When Brewer’s hand grew colder and his body fell back, she allowed herself to fall with him, and she kept her eye closed. She stayed in that darkness with him and listened to the wind and the sky, and it might have been minutes or hours after that when her ears captured a beautiful new sound—something with engines soaring far above them.
A plane.
Huge and powerful and directly over their stretch of ravaged desert.
She grabbed his hand tighter then and thought, You were right. You heard it.
Brewer.
Brewer.
We did it.
She squeezed his hand tighter still.
I love you.
Then came the flash, so bright it was daylight inside her mind, and Brewer’s hand was warm again, and she felt their bodies lifting into the air before the sound of the explosion moved through her, and she knew that she and Brewer would soon be dust, swirling together, undone and freed from the world, and she thought, We are all going to be okay, and for the first time in forever it felt like the truth.
acknowledgments
Immeasurable thanks, first and always, to my wife, Jessica, for holding down the fort while I disappeared into various hotels and camp trailers to write this novel (and further thanks to her parents for letting me crash in their trailer for days, only to emerge pale and sunblind, clutching my manuscript and hissing at anything moving). And thanks to my kid for being a cool customer while I was gone, and welcoming me back with hugs, pranks, and chocolate chip pumpkin bread.
