Doll Face

54

“LEX!” Ramona cried when she saw him facing off against something that her mind could not even begin to categorize. “LEX!”

The thing that had been coming for him paused, its segments flexing and gnashing. It hovered there, bleeding steam and breathing out smoke, drops of fluid dripping from its underside.

Now it turned and started in her direction.

Its appearance made her take a step back and she tripped over a drainage pipe and went promptly on her ass, but she did not let go of the flashlight or her axe.

It’s Mother Crow, Ramona! She’s coming to get you!

But what she saw in that dizzying, hallucinogenic moment was not Mother Crow or the mutant mechanism she indeed had become, a hybrid of flesh and iron, but hordes of doll people stiff-walking in her direction. They were white-faced mannequins in black cloaks, evil clown puppets sprouting writhing red hair like wriggling rubber worms, blow-up dolls and marionettes with vicious sucking mouths, fanged moppets and razor-wielding baby dolls, kewpies with too many limbs and nightmare Raggedy Anns brandishing meat cleavers. Some dark toy chest had been opened, some closet unbolted, and out they came to maim and mutilate.

Leading the pack was something like a wizened, corpse-faced hag in a ragged gray gunnysack dress that hobbled on a peg-leg. Her face was a sutured gray bag that looked like it had been peeled from a corpse in sections, then stitched back together in a living pelt. Her eyes were huge gaping holes, her mouth shriveled back from gums and teeth. Ramona saw she carried a giggling mannequin head in one hand, swinging it back and forth by lustrous black hair, and there was no doubt it was Soo-Lee.

“RAMONA!” a voice shouted. “RAMONA! SNAP OUT OF IT!”

It might have ended there but for the voice.

She blinked her eyes and cleared her head and saw that Lex was busy. He was in action. He had some great wrench in his hands and he was smashing it into the machinery and tearing hoses from couplings. With each blow, she noticed, there were fewer doll people and the factory itself seemed to tremble with rage or pain and possibly both.

By then, the peg-leg woman was closing in. There was blood running from her empty eye sockets and more of it misting from her stitched mouth. It ran down the leathery mask of her face. Her gait was more uneven than ever, determined but almost drunken. She reached up a withered claw and Ramona saw three fingers drop from it.

She was damaged.

This whole place was damaged.

Lex was killing it.

“DESTROY IT ALL!” he cried out. “WRECK IT! TRASH IT! BREAK IT!”

But Ramona already knew that. Mother Crow was the machine and the machine was Mother Crow. They existed in some abhorrent, deranged symbiosis and one could not live without the other. Each blow struck to the machinery was a blow struck to her.

The peg-leg woman was mere feet away by the time Ramona found her feet. The stitching of her face was coming apart and blood that was dark like runny ink spilled freely from numerous gaps and tears. Howling, she clawed out at Ramona with bloodstained fingers, but Ramona easily sidestepped the foundering automaton.

“Cunt!” the woman growled with a guttural sound. “Interfering do-gooding cunt! I HAD HIM AND I’LL HAVE YOU! DO YOU HEAR ME?”

One of her hands grabbed Ramona’s wrist and it was burning hot as if she was blazing inside. Puffs of smoke were beginning to churn from every orifice and split seam. Ramona yanked her arm free and three of the peg-leg woman’s fingers came away with it.

She was beginning to crumble, to decay and dissolute.

Ramona brought the axe around in a savage arc and the blade sheared right into the woman’s face, which cracked open like a snail shell, something moist and pink inside drawing away from the intrusion of light. She stumbled back, tripped over her own peg and hit the floor with a cloud of dust and fragments, a viscid yellow ooze draining from her ruined head.

She moved no more.

The axe still in her hand, Ramona swung it again, shearing a couple of hydraulic lines that gurgled out copious amounts of red blood. It wasn’t possible, but she saw it spill over the tops of her shoes. She smashed a control panel and sheared the couplings of a huge spring, then gashed open a power box that went with a blinding blue flash that should have knocked her on her ass but didn’t.

Lex was in a wild frenzy, doing the same thing.

They were winning.

They were winning, by God.

The factory around them was sputtering and grinding, things clanging that should have moved with oiled smoothness. There was a groaning of metal fatigue and the sound of leaking fluid. The air was hot and stinking, everything backlit by an irregular flickering like a dying fluorescent.

This was the pivotal moment.