What the Hell Did I Just Read

26. GRAPPLING HOOKS AREN’T CHEAP, YOU GUYS

John

Everyone ran back out of the cell block, into the office area they’d just vacated. Ted Knoll and his comrade were disconnecting the ropes they’d used to swing through the conference room windows from the roof. They whipped assault rifles around to their shoulders and moved out among the cubicles.

A half dozen of the NON cloaks swarmed out to meet them. Ted and his partner fired exactly six shots. All six targets flopped onto the floor. Not a word had been uttered.

Ted pointed his assault rifle at Dave and said in a surprisingly calm voice, “Where is she?”

John said, “You don’t want to do this, Ted. Because of the … radiation? It’s just, everywhere. We’re all radioactive.”

“Drop the cover. She told me everything.”

She? John wasn’t sure who he was talking about there. Was it Chastity? Maybe she’d come back to help.

Loretta appeared in the doorway to the cell block, yelling her husband’s name, asking him what in the world was happening. Ted ran that direction, shouldered past her, and found Maggie’s cell—the only glass wall that was smeared with the cloudy film from where the larva had been crawling over it. John, Dave, and Amy followed him in, Dave ineffectually telling him to wait, to listen.

Ted told Maggie to hang on, then to no one in particular said, “Open the cell door.”

The agent Dave called Tasker but whose name was actually Pussnado sauntered up and said, “I will not be doing that, and I assure you, I have very good reasons.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” Ted touched an earpiece and said, “Are you reading me? I need that cell door opened, now.”

The door slid open, the monstrous writhing maggot beyond it squealing and chittering in response. Ted reached down, clutched it to his chest, and shouted commands to his friend to cover their exit.

Dave said, “Mr. Knoll, you need to listen very, very carefully. You take her out that front door, everybody dies. Everything dies. I can’t even explain the degree to which shit will go wrong.”

Now it was Ted’s turn to look confused, which quickly turned to annoyance. He seemed to think the two of them were still playing a part, maybe for NON’s benefit.

In a tone that was only somewhat convincing, he said, “Buddy, you can either stand aside and let me take my daughter outta here, or you can lay dead on the floor while I take my daughter outta here.” Playing along, giving Dave an out.

Dave looked pleadingly at John. What could they do? Ted and his partner were armed to the teeth and apparently ex Special Forces. John had nothing but his car keys in his pocket—he doubted he could kill more than one of them before the other took him down.

Ted brushed past him and moved toward the front entrance of the wellness center, his partner covering the extraction, Loretta right behind them. John, Amy, and Dave watched as the larva passed out of the facility and back into the rain-lashed world.

From behind John, Amy said, “Guys, is this part of what you set up? Over the weekend, I mean?”

John said, “Maybe? Damn it, Dave, you should have let me finish explaining it on your ass.”

But Dave was already moving, running after the dildo launcher John had discarded on the floor. John saw no good ending to Dave trying to fling flaming vibrators at this enraged soldier’s little girl, but he didn’t respond when John told him to forget it.

John turned and chased after Ted, pushing through the front door in time to see Ted’s Impala skid to a stop, spraying rainwater from all four tires.

The passenger side window rolled down.

Korean adult website star Joy Park said, “Get her in! Move! Move!”

Dave ran up behind John with the dildo launcher, looked at Joy, then looked at John, bewildered. John just shook his head.

Ted gently handed the squirming larva to Loretta, who climbed into the back seat with it. Ted told them to get to the safe house, that he would meet them there.

Instead of raining dildo hellfire down upon Ted’s family, Dave said, “Wait,” and told them to pop the trunk. He threw the launcher in and told Ted they may need it. Which was true, but how in the hell they would figure it out in time—if it wasn’t already too late—was anyone’s guess. When Maggie hatched, John figured they’d have a brief moment to register the strange darkness … and then would know nothing at all.

Dave slammed the trunk and the car tore out of the parking lot. Ted—steadfastly ignoring John, Dave, and Amy—stormed back into the building with his soldier companion in tow.

Agents Pussnado and Cocksman were standing there, looking annoyed. John had expected a hundred of those black cloaks to come flying out from various doors to wipe out Ted’s two-man crew, but the building seemed to have emptied. For a moment, John was amused by the thought of them just giving up on their field office at the first sign of trouble, then it occurred to him that NON may very well have given an evacuation order for all of their staff in the facility. Hell, maybe the entire planet. John imagined all of them fleeing to some other dimension, marking this one down as a loss.

Cocksman shifted his weight on his cane and said, “Mr. Knoll, I understand what you think you’re doing, but you need to—”

Ted shot the man in the forehead, spraying blood and brain matter on his partner’s blazer.

Amy gasped.

The man slumped to the ground and Ted said to the female agent, “Lie flat on the floor, put your hands behind your head. You and I are going to have a conversation.”

She obeyed. Ted took her gun from under her jacket and kicked it across the floor. He then slung his assault rifle behind his back and pulled out a black, military-issue knife.

Dave said, “Ted, we should get outta here. Whatever you’re about to do, it’s not worth—”

Ted slapped Dave across the face with his dick, proverbially, via a stern facial expression. To the woman on the floor, he said, “Do you know what I did in Iraq?”

“I do.”

“Say it.”

“You were an interrogator. Among other things.”

“Huh. Not many people got access to those records. How did I know you people would? Point is, I know how to spot a lie. And I got a short, short fuse for liars. You read about that, too, didn’t you? Even though it was kept quiet, that whole incident.”

“I am aware of your … issues.”

Ted nodded. “Good. You know what it’s like, being in a war zone?”

“Mr. Knoll, I can help y—”

“It’s like wakin’ up from a dream. I don’t mean comin’ back home is like that, I mean the war, being in the suck, it’s like wakin’ up. See, because that’s when you figure out your old life—the barbecues and Monday Night Football and trips to Disneyland—that shit was the dream and this is real. Iraq was fucked and getting it unfucked meant killing a certain number of people and if it didn’t get unfucked then they would kill a certain number of us and the future of the world would all depend on who killed who. Simple as that. Same as there’s no woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers no more, same as how we’re all fancy monkeys instead of smart dinosaurs. And aaaall that other bullshit, the steak dinners and Christmas mornings and beer commercials, it’s all a dream we’re havin’, something to pass the time until somebody comes and wakes us up to the real world, where either you’re gonna die, or you’re gonna make somebody else die, so you can pass on your way of life to your kids. I’m sayin’ all of this because I think part of what you’re depending on here is me being unwilling to do what I need to do in order to find out what I need to know. So I’m letting you know, from one awake person to another, that the sight of your tears and the sound of your screams won’t melt my heart.”

She said, “Duly noted.”

“Knowing that I can spot a liar, even one with her face pressed to the floor, I ask you—were you, or were you not, about to kill my daughter?”

“We were not about to kill your daughter.”

This, John noted, was 100 percent true. Ted seemed to recognize that fact.

Amy said, “Mr. Knoll, we can actually explain—”

He ignored her, continuing his interrogation. “Do you, or do you not, know where to find the thing that’s taking the children? The Batmantis?”

Pussnado hesitated, then chose her words carefully. “We believe we know where to find the creature that is behind all of this, yes. We believe we know how to kill it.”

Also true.

“Why did you take Maggie?”

Again, she chose her words carefully. “You are aware, Mr. Knoll, that the enemy is a shape-shifter—a being that has perfected camouflage. Examining Maggie was the only reasonable course of action, and there was no way to convey this without alarming her mother.”

Ted stared, trying not to show any change in expression. He swallowed. “And?”

“We found that Maggie had not been replaced by a doppelganger.”

Again, technically true.

Ted nodded. “See? That wasn’t so hard. So, how do we kill it? The thing that’s behind all this?”

“We just finished a device. It’s in the back, in the armory. Take it to the creature’s nest—those three know where it is—and set it off. And when I use the word ‘nest,’ I want you to understand that this nest contains larvae. That is, this creature is about to multiply. At any moment.”

Ted said, “Outstanding. You’re going to take us to the armory.”

He handed John a heavy white plastic zip tie and said, “Bind her hands behind her back, and lift her to her feet.”

John had no idea if the agent was planning an ambush here or if the device she spoke of was even real. He could read the same doubt on Dave’s face. Amy, on the other hand, was just staring at the dead man on the floor. The look on her face said something different:

It’s all falling apart.

Blood-splattered NON agent Josaline Pussnado led them past the cells, through the STAFF ONLY door and through another enormous steel door that she apparently opened with her mind. Inside, among five hundred objects that looked like spare parts for Satan’s robot army, was a ribbed stainless steel box the size of a steamer trunk.

Pussnado said, “It’s inside. Spherical casing, explosively formed penetrators all around the outer shell, at the moment of detonation it will throw waves of molten metal over a hundred yard radius—thermite and sulfur. No remote detonator, you’ve got three minutes on the fuse.”

She nodded to John to open the case, making him wonder if it was booby-trapped. John considered making her open it, but he supposed that would mean untying her hands and for all they knew, the box was full of weird guns she’d whip out at them. John looked for a latch, but found none—there was just a hole at the front of the lid, about big enough to get two fingers into.

The agent said, “You need a special tool to open it. On the lid you’ll see a hole about two inches wide. It leads to a shaft about eight inches deep. You need to insert a rigid object to depress the latch.”

John said, “Don’t worry, I have just the thing …

Me

“Here,” I said, “we’ll use this broomstick I found.”

I unlatched the lid and inside was the bomb—a flat black sphere the size of a basketball, a thick foot-long fuse sticking out of the top. Along the front in white letters was stamped the word BOMB.

Ted yelled for his army buddy, who came and scooped up the device, then jogged off with it.

Ted pointed his gun at Tasker and said, “One last question. If I leave you here, can you guarantee that neither you or your people will come after Maggie?”

She paused, but not out of fear. Steeling her resolve.

“Mr. Knoll, I can guarantee that we will come after her. I’m sorry, but we don’t have a cho—”

He shot her right in the heart.