What the Hell Did I Just Read

7. THE BATTLE OF JOHN’S LIVING ROOM

John walked into the room carrying a package of cookies. He said, “Hey, do you like Oreos? There’s something I want to try.”

I jumped out of the chair and backed up, toward the kitchen. I looked back and forth from Dead John to Alive John.

I said, “Back the fuck up!”

John gestured toward the corpse with a cookie and said, “He’s not real.”

“What’s the password?”

“It’s ‘bushmaster’ but that doesn’t matter. He knew it, too, and the real Ted is still alive. The password thing doesn’t work, the clones or doppelgangers can imitate that, the same as everything else. I think they can dig into your brain or something.”

I said, “Don’t move.”

I cautiously approached and poked the standing John with a finger, to see if he seemed solid. He did. To be sure, I wrapped my arms around his torso and squeezed, to detect any anomalous reaction. I found none.

“Okay. Yes, it is good that you are not dead. That is a positive. Wait, what’s this about Ted?”

John glanced down at the sofa. “Wait, who do you see there?”

“I see you. Dead from a drug cocktail.”

“Huh. I see Ted. Face blown off. From when I shot him.”

“From when you what?”

John circled back and told me the entire story. I dropped back into the armchair, staring off into the middle distance, trying to make sense of it all.

“First of all, the entire roof of the church didn’t blow off, I was there afterward. It was one corner, a few chunks of roofing and plywood. Second, did you say when you opened the door that doves flew out? Like in a John Woo film? Are you trying to parlay this series of events into a movie deal?”

“What matters is, I find out five minutes later that the real Ted is still alive. I talked to him. It was the exact kind of trick we were expecting. It’s kind of encouraging, I feel like we were ahead of them this time.”

“Wait, now how do you know the alive Ted is the real Ted? If the password thing doesn’t work…”

“What you really mean is, how do you know I’m me and that’s not really me there on the sofa, if the ‘password thing’ doesn’t work.”

“Oh. Shit. Wait, if you were the doppelganger, why would you tell me the password system doesn’t work? You’d have kept that to yourself, to use against me.”

“Maybe I’m stupid.”

“The fucking conversations we have. Okay, how about this—I ask you something that John would know, but that I or a replicant would have no way of knowing. Something we can verify, right now.”

“Like what?”

“Where’s your drug stash?”

“Why Dave, you know that I would never—”

“Goddamnit, John.”

“Owl jar above the toilet. That way if I have to flush it, it’s right there.”

A trip to the bathroom confirmed this was true.

When I returned, John continued, “As for me and Ted, he just showed up out in the middle of nowhere. His car wasn’t there, he just kind of materialized behind me. That’s the thing—it used my state of mind against me. I was in such a panic, the whole flimsiness of the pretext was hidden from me until way later.”

“And then you killed him. Or it. Whatever kind of shape-shifter this is, it can be killed, is my point. And it stays dead.”

“Shot to the face. Pretty straightforward.”

“Yeah, nobody likes that.” I looked over at the corpse on the sofa. “So … what is it? Specifically? I mean, there’s what each of us is seeing and then there’s what it actually is.”

“Something new, maybe? We’ll need to come up with a name for it. It’s my turn.”

“Later.” The naming of new creatures we encounter is something of a contentious issue. “For now, what do we do with it?”

He thought for a moment. “I wish we could get it to Marconi.”

That’s Dr. Albert Marconi. A famous expert in this sort of thing. He rarely returns our calls.

I said, “Sure, let’s just cram it into a box and mail it to him. Wait, how did you get it back here?”

“In the Jeep.”

“Did you throw the corpse in your Jeep and drive it back here after you figured it out it wasn’t Ted Knoll’s body, or before?”

“What was I supposed to do? Leave him out in the rain?”

“But if you thought it was just a dead guy, a guy you shot, shouldn’t you have called the … you know what, forget it.”

John said, “We need Amy’s brain on this. Is she still at work?”

“No, I don’t know where she is.”

“Wait, Amy’s missing? Why are we dicking around here then?”

“She’s not missing, she’s out with somebody. They swung by and had breakfast, apparently. I don’t know where they went. Phones were down.”

“Who’s she with?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe she was with you.”

“You’re not worried?”

“It’s not like she was abducted, they ate a meal together.”

“Like she left with somebody she knew, you mean. Or something she thought was someone she knew.”

“Oh … fuck. FUCK!”

I dug out my phone and dialed. It rang through, but she wasn’t answering.

“So help me, John, if all this shit was just a diversion so they could take Amy—”

Something grabbed my wrist.

It was John. The dead one, from the sofa.

Dead John’s mouth opened so wide that his head was about to split in half. Then a second, vertical slit opened from his chin to forehead, his entire face opening like a blooming flower. His skull was hollow, the inside covered in tiny wiggling filaments.

The thing howled with its whole face. The floor shook.

I grabbed at the fingers clutching my arm. Some of the fingers came off, then grew tiny wings and flew away. I was only mildly surprised by that.

Dead John’s body contorted as if it was a clay model that a giant pair of invisible hands had decided to give up on and start over. For the briefest moment, I saw what I thought was a pulsing swarm of small creatures, each about the size of my palm. But then they were gone and so was John. A new figure replaced him.

John screamed, “Nymph!”

Ted had described Nymph as a foppish sexual deviant; John had described him as a sleazy stockbroker type. To me, he looked … like me.

Not exactly me—a fit, tan, healthy version of me, with an expensive haircut. A version of me that hadn’t gone off the rails. Wearing a nice shirt and pants instead of a stained T-shirt and cargo shorts. Yet, I saw my own eyes, and the scar on my cheek.

He said, “Greetings, knucklefuckers!”

John said, “Where’s the little girl? And where’s Amy?”

Nymph smirked and said, “The Master must feed.”

“I don’t care what you named your dick, this shit ends now.”

“Indeed it does!” said Nymph. “Granted, the mere chewing of their flesh takes only sixty-six days. But once consumed, their souls live conscious in the belly forever, for it is their anguish that nourishes the Master. But don’t worry, I will release one of the two, of your choosing. At this moment, I am posing this same dilemma to the mother and father of little Margaret. The four of you are voting. The girl with three votes will be released, the other’s screams will echo through eternity. If no one receives a majority vote, both will be consumed. Someone must vote against their own, to save another. So what will it be? You have one minute to decide.”

I said, “Wait! What if we refuse to vote? What if everyone refuses—”

“Then the Master will gorge on a double portion. Is your vote for your Amy? That is a vote to sentence a child to an eternity of torment. How will your Amy live with that choice, I wonder?”

I said, “Take me instead. Let both of them go, and take me.”

He did that smirking head-tilt thing douchebags do. “Come on, even you must know that your meat is tainted.”

John said, “I vote for both of them to go free!”

I said, “Yeah, me, too!”

“That is not one of the options.” Nymph looked at his wrist. He was not wearing a watch. “Forty-five seconds! Of course, the confounding factor is how little Maggie’s parents will vote. Perhaps, anticipating that you, as selfish assholes, will vote for your Amy, they will as well, knowing that then at least one can be saved.”

John said, “Wait! I vote that the monster eats you.”

I said, “I vote that the monster eats itself!”

“THOSE ARE NOT THE FUCKING CHOICES. Thirty seconds.”

I said, “All right, I’m voting Amy goes free.”

John said, “No, the monster is right, even if Maggie’s parents vote the same, there’s no way Amy can live with herself knowing she’s alive because some other little girl is getting chewed up forever.”

“There’s no way she can live with herself if she’s dead. And you’d be surprised what a person can get over if given enough time to think up rationalizations.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Ten! Nine! Eight!”

I said, “John, you have to vote! Wait, does Diogee get a vote?”

John said, “I vote for—”

My phone rang.

The screen said it was Amy. I answered.

“Amy! Is that you!?!”

Nymph’s mouth snapped shut in mid countdown. He had not been anticipating this.

Amy said, “Hey, I’ve got a little girl here. She’s fine, but I need you to come and get us.”

“Amy! Listen to me! There’s something after you! You and the little girl both! You need to—”

“I’ve taken care of it, we’re fine, we’re at that church by the old coal mine. Oh, and I need you to stop by Walgreens and pick up my prescription, they said it’s ready. And can you get me a bag of those chocolate-covered pretzels while you’re there?”

John

John heard Dave say, “Amy, is that you?” and felt the world shift on its axis. Nymph, standing there with his Gordon Gekko suit and slicked-back hair, sneered and turned in Dave’s direction. The call had clearly not been part of his plan. John saw his opportunity.

John lunged for one of the chainsaws above the mantel. They were very much not just there for decoration (even if, as decoration, John thought they kicked serious ass)—they were always oiled and gassed up, ready to go. See, one thing John had learned about the various creatures they’d faced over the years was that almost none of them liked being sawed in half by motorized metal teeth. Simple biology, really.

John grabbed the chainsaw and performed a move he had spent hours practicing. In one continuous motion, he started the motor, spun, and swept it through Nymph’s midsection.

He met very little resistance. The whirring blade buzzed horizontally through the man’s belly … and then the top half of him was nowhere to be found. Everything above Nymph’s navel just dispersed. What had been his torso was now a swarm of fist-sized buzzing creatures, whizzing frantically around the room.

John looked back at where Nymph was standing and saw that half of him was still there—everything from the waist down remained where it had been, including the man’s expensive slacks and patent leather shoes. The legs started walking toward John on their own, then one of them whipped upward and kicked the chainsaw from John’s hand.

Disarmed, John lunged forward and grabbed Nymph’s lower body by its belt loops, intending to lift up the legs and chuck them across the room. Then they, too, began to dissolve, from the bottom up—Nymph’s feet dispersed into those flying insects, which still appeared to be made of black polished leather. The ankles were next.

John followed the flight paths and saw that the shape-shifter swarm was swirling toward the far corner of the room. There, they were quickly re-forming into something new.

Something made for fighting.

John saw teeth and claws and spiked armor.

John screamed, “DAVE! GET THE—”

But as usual, Dave was already five seconds ahead of the situation. He had the T-shirt cannon in his hands and was already aiming it at the rapidly assembling creature in the corner. Dave aimed carefully.

One shot, Dave.

The cannon’s payload was not, in fact, a T-shirt. It contained the Shroud of Turin—the legendary piece of cloth that the body of Christ was wrapped in after crucifixion. Experts were divided as to whether or not the shroud was real or a fake produced during the Middle Ages, an era when selling “holy” relics was all the rage. That was probably why John had managed to buy it for just $150 off eBay, which he thought was a good price either way (listing: $$$ ACTUAL SHROUD OF TAURINE—STAINED WITH SWEAT OF JESUZ—GOOD CONDITION—FREE SHIPPING—WOW!! $$$).

John was still uselessly clutching the hips of the rapidly disintegrating Nymph—his legs almost entirely gone now—and watched as Dave fired the shroud. It worked perfectly—the projectile unfurled itself in midair, the white cloth stained with the image of a knife-wielding Christ enveloping the creature.

The monster howled, the contact with the holy artifact burning it and binding it. John, still holding his remaining hunk of Nymph, ran over to it and with a scream of rage, mercilessly beat Nymph with his own ass.

The insect creatures dispersed. The swarm fled toward the open back door.

John dove toward a brass switch on the wall. He flipped it—

Flames roared from the four corners of the door frame. The bugs flew through the blaze and tumbled burning onto the lawn, shriveling up like lit tissues.

John watched them burn, and yelled …

Me

“And don’t make me ass you again!”

Amy made a skeptical noise and I said, “Just … go with it. That’s mostly what happened. It was really confusing.”

Amy said, “I can’t breathe, you’re squeezing me.” I released about 20 percent of the hug but kept my arms around her.

We had rolled up to the church at Mine’s Eye to find Amy sitting under the portico of the front entrance with Maggie Knoll, both of them looking like they’d just swam up out of the ocean. Maggie seemed sluggish, like she’d been drugged, staring off into space. She was shivering and seemed to know only that she was wet and cold and wanted to go home.

Amy pulled away and said, “She was down there, around the mouth of the mine. Hidden under the water.”

I said, “Really? How did she, you know, breathe?”

“They had an apparatus hooked up.”

John said, “I can see it now—she wasn’t drawing a picture of where she was going to be held. She was drawing a picture of what she would see—the view of the church, as seen from down there, under the water. Maybe she had dreams of it happening in advance or something.”

We were talking about Maggie as if she wasn’t sitting right there, but she made no effort to shed light on the situation. She had this blank look and I had the alarming thought that maybe she had suffered brain damage, from lack of oxygen or god knows what he (or it, or they) had done to her.

John said, “I was so close. Right here where we’re standing.”

I said, “To be fair, when searching for the lair of an unholy creature of the night, who would have ever thought to look around the haunted old coal mine?”

“I would have figured it out! The thing with Nymph got in the way. That’s probably what he was doing, leading me away from her.”

Amy was already walking away with Maggie. “Let’s get her home, her parents are probably worried sick. David, can you drive the Impala?”

“The what?”

I saw she was walking toward Ted Knoll’s cherry-red muscle car, which was parked behind the church—the car he had reported stolen earlier today. Amy climbed into the back seat so she could be there with Maggie for the trip, putting her arm around her and trying to keep her warm. Maggie laid her head on Amy’s chest and closed her eyes.

I slid into the Impala, John went to the Jeep. In the back seat, Amy closed her eyes, like she was just going to doze off back there. As if I didn’t still have a thousand lingering questions about all this.

I said, “So, you figured this out all on your own? How’d you even get out here? Who drove the car?”

She heard me, I know she did, but there was this long moment before she answered. Almost as if, say, she was quickly trying to come up with a cover story on the fly.

She said, “I came home from work, and there was a … thing there. Pretending to be you.”

“Wait, what? Holy shit, Amy.”

“I saw through it right away, it was all wrong. I tried to get away, but it put me in the car and took me out here. Probably was going to stuff me under the water with her and whoever else he collected.”

“Jesus. I … Amy, I should have come right back home, I should have known they would come after you.”

She closed her eyes again and said, “So, I got away and I was able to get her up out of the water and up the hill. Then I called you. That was it. I thought it would come after me but maybe it couldn’t. Maybe the church repels it or something.”

“You ‘got away’?”

She didn’t respond, even though it was clear I was asking for her to complete the story.

I said, “Amy? That’s really all there was to it?”

“Yeah that’s … mostly what happened.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way to the Knoll house, shockingly only about five hours after I had been awakened by the call from John. Now, if John was telling this story, he’d probably say that the moment we arrived, the rain stopped and the clouds parted, as if the weather changed for everyone else just to reflect our personal triumphs and failures. But it didn’t, it was that same drumming rain that had been slowly turning the town into brown gravy for the last month. I wondered if Maggie and her parents were going to have to celebrate her rescue by evacuating to higher ground.

Amy took Maggie by the hand and led her up to the front door. John and I followed. Ted and Loretta both came to the door, for one morning the couple having reconciled in the face of the outside threat. Loretta threw her arms around her daughter and Ted threw his arms around them both.

I said, “Did Nymph appear here? Demanding you and Loretta pick which girl gets saved?”

Ted said, “No,” and Loretta shook her head.

Huh. So that had all been bullshit.

He said, “You get the son of a bitch?”

John said, “Let’s just say he won’t be coming back around. Not after he made such an ass of himself.”

“He what? Is he dead or not?”

“Yeah.”

Ted said to his daughter, “You hear that, honey? He’s all gone. The bad man is gone. You’re safe.”

She pulled away from her father. “No, he’s not! He’s right there!”

Maggie turned and pointed directly at me.