What the Hell Did I Just Read

27. THIS WOMB OF MINE

Outside the front door was waiting a camouflage pickup truck, Ted’s army buddy at the wheel. Ted jogged toward it, making like he was going to leave without saying a word.

John said, “Wait! The woman who was driving your car—who is that? What’s her deal? Or, just, what’s the deal in general?”

“I hope you don’t get offended, buddy, but communication within your chain of command is shit. Joy found me right after I left the cannery, said you sent her. Said Maggie was gonna get taken to this facility and that she had a way into the guard room. Acted like you people had been settin’ it up for a while.” He climbed into the pickup and nodded back toward the bed. “I’ve got the asses.”

In the bed of the truck were the boxes of silicone butts that had been in my apartment.

I said, “Uh, good.”

“Where’s the nest?”

“The what?”

“The nest of the thing. The Batmantis.”

“Oh. Right. Tell you what, I’ll ride with you, I can show you. Speaking of which, where is, uh, Joy taking your daughter?”

“They’re on the way to meet Marconi at the Walmart. Joy said she’d be safe with him.”

“Oh. Yes. Right. Good.”

I felt a pair of small moons roll off my shoulders.

Marconi will know what to do. And maybe we don’t even need to be there to see it.

If, that is, Maggie doesn’t hijack his brain.

Of course, we had no guarantee Joy was actually taking her there, or that she wasn’t in cahoots with the thing in the mine. Or that Maggie wouldn’t hatch on the way.

The pickup had a back seat; I climbed in and John and Amy ran off toward the Jeep. Ted nodded to the man in the passenger seat—the guy was holding the bomb in his lap like he was bringing home a watermelon from the supermarket—and said, “This here is Philip, everybody calls him Shitbeard.”

“Good to meet you.” He did not have a beard. “We’re going to the pond at Mine’s Eye. It’s where we found Maggie. You’re going to turn up here at the—”

“I know where Mine’s Eye is. Been out there before.”

“You have? When—”

My phone rang. It was Marconi.

I answered, “Yes, Doctor.”

“Mr. Wong, I have received a very frightened little girl, her panicked mother, and a Korean woman who insisted I call you right away.”

“Sure. The young girl and her mother are”—I glanced at Ted—“uh, in a similar situation to Mikey. The Korean woman is adult film star Joy Park, you’re surely familiar with her work. Make sure Maggie gets, uh, treatment. Immediately.”

“Treatment?”

“Yes, we were able to treat Mikey, he’s all good now.”

“He is? In what way?”

“Right, right, I’m in the car with Maggie’s father right now. “

Hesitation.

“I see. Loretta Knoll is here in the room with me, in fact.”

“Remember how Amy and I proposed two possible options? They went with my suggestion, not hers. It worked.”

“I see. Our friends discovered a method, I take it?”

“Yes. You know what, call John, he can fill you in. There’s something in the trunk of Joy’s vehicle, it will require some explaining. Quite a bit, in fact.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I just want to be clear that you definitely shouldn’t keep her waiting. In a situation like this, every second counts.”

“Are you and Mr. Knoll heading my way?”

“No. We’re on our way to Mine’s Eye. We’re going to finish this.”

Amy

Night had fallen by the time they arrived at Mine’s Eye. The pond had turned into a popular gathering spot; motorcycles were parked along the hilltops and people were prowling around the cabins and the church, searching for the supposedly missing kids. Amy figured there were two ways to look at it: it was bad news that so many people were in contamination range of what the Millibutt was presumably about to do, but it was good news that they were still searching—it meant the kids hadn’t been “found” yet. John parked a ways away from the church—its lot was full—and she wondered how they were going to deal with all the bystanders.

Ted, David, and Ted’s friend jumped out of their truck and Ted pulled out a pair of futuristic binoculars—Amy figured they were night vision—to scope out the pond and the mouth of the collapsed mine, looking for a giant mantis bat monster.

David walked up, pulled her and John out of earshot and muttered, “You talk to Marconi?”

“Yeah.”

“And just to be clear, that is Joy Park, right? We heard people call her that.”

“It appears so?”

Amy said, “Remind me who Joy Park is, again?”

David said, “A porn star we saw on the Internet who we don’t know and who doesn’t live anywhere near here.”

Amy said, “Is that who was living at John’s place?”

John scrunched up his face in thought. “Maybe?”

David said, “I don’t … I mean, is she real? If so, do we even know where she’s from? Or how she could get here? Like, does she actually live in Korea? Does she work for the Millibutt? Is she going to—”

John nudged him to stop talking. Ted was approaching.

David said to him, “See anything down there?”

“No sign of the target, but there’s a gaggle-fuck of bikers wanderin’ around, in the way.”

Amy said, “Do you see any of the missing kids?”

Ted shook his head.

John asked for the binoculars and studied the area below. He gave a start, as if he saw something, but quickly stifled his reaction.

He feigned disinterest and said, “I can’t make out anything. Let’s go down,” in a way that made it clear to Amy that he had seen something, but for some reason couldn’t let Ted in on it. She supposed she’d have to be surprised right alongside him.

So, they headed down the winding path, hunched over in their jackets while cold raindrops popped on their shoulders. Ted and his partner were going to pack up the bomb and bring it down after them—they had needed to get it inside something, as in its present state Amy agreed that it was fairly recognizable as a bomb. On the way down, they passed four guys in biker gear heading up the other way, looking like exhausted, tensed-up coils of rage. Near the bottom was a pair of leather-clad women comforting a third, who was convulsing with sobs.

An entire community, having lost their young. Or so they thought.

If it had been a clearer day and the pool had had time to settle to its usual dazzling shades of blue and green, Amy would have seen right away. But the rain and the gloom meant it wasn’t until they were on the shore that she saw him.

A little boy, lying facedown in the water.

She knew what it was. Of course she knew.

And, still, she ran into the pond, after the drowned or drowning child. Stomping through the chilled water, tossing aside her raincoat. She couldn’t swim. She didn’t care.

David screamed and ran after her. He roughly put an arm around her chest and yanked her back.

“NO! AMY!”

He dragged her back out of the water, frantic, and she saw John looking terrified, keeping his distance on the bank. Not even risking putting a toe into the water, not even to help her and David. That’s how scared he was of what he was seeing in there, what his eyes saw instead of the endangered boy.

John yelled to her, “What do you see?”

She tried to breathe. “A boy,” she gasped. He had black hair, a dark complexion. “We have to get him out of there! We’ll work out what’s happening later but we have to get him out, he’s face-down in the water. He can’t breathe, David.”

John said, “No. Amy. Trust us.”

She said, “What do you see?”

David said, “A mouth.”

“The boy looks like a mouth? How?”

“No. The whole pond. It’s a mouth. The boy, what you’re seeing as the boy, it’s just a lure. Nothing more.”

Amy watched as a few tiny bubbles floated up from the child’s submerged face.

He’s still alive.

Amy said, “What if I want to risk it? If I die trying to save a kid then maybe that’s how I want to go. You see one thing, I see another.”

David said, “Amy, I can’t make this any clearer—that is the point of the trap. Of all this. You’re being played.”

“But it’s my choi—”

At that moment, a man sprinted past them, apparently having run down the hill while they were arguing. It was, of course, Ted.

He flung aside his jacket, ripped off his shirt, and dove into the water.

John and David both yelled warnings at him, but even if he could hear them, he had no reason to listen. Even if they could convince Ted the boy was bait, that wouldn’t justify letting him drown. Why couldn’t they see that?

Then came the sound of more footsteps stomping toward them from behind—three of the bikers, shouting for everyone to follow, to call an ambulance.

Ted dragged the boy out of the water and started giving him mouth-to-mouth. David’s eyes went wide, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

The boy sputtered and sucked in breath and came to life. Ted almost wept with joy. So did Amy.

John muttered to David, “Call Marconi.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, the police had pushed most of the civilians back up the hill. The three of them were in front of the church. Nearby, a Hispanic man and woman were babbling and crying and hugging the rescued boy, who sat draped with a blanket on the back bumper of an ambulance. The father was wearing a soaked denim vest with biker patches on the back; he and a street cop were alternately comforting the child and peppering him with questions.

David kept dialing his phone, over and over—trying to get Dr. Marconi. He’d never gotten an answer and was growing more alarmed by the second.

John said, “Look, even if the Maggie situation has gone south, it hasn’t gone too south or else we wouldn’t still be sitting here, right? Maybe he’s just, uh, busy with it.”

From behind them came a voice, saying, “Looks like you geniuses are three for three on finding these kids. How about that.”

It was Detective Bowman.

John said, “Got almost three hundred bucks to show for it. Is the kid talking?”

“He is.”

David said, “Is he saying a bunch of weird, creepy nonsense?”

“No, that’s Spanish he’s speaking. It’s a foreign language, you see.”

“What did he say? Did he say how he wound up in the pond?”

“He said he swam out.”

“Out … to the pond? From where?”

“From inside the mine, through a tunnel, full of water. He said he was taken inside a ‘cave,’ along with the others. He said all of them are in there, nine other kids. Said it was getting hard to breathe, that they’re running out of air. Said he got desperate and dove down into a little pool on the floor of the mine and this is where he popped out.”

David said, “That doesn’t even sound possible.”

The detective shrugged. “I’m not a geologist. I know most kids are lying sacks of shit. But we got a guy at the scene who says there could be a fissure in the earth or somethin’, leads from the bottom of the pond to somewhere inside the mine. Be hard to see it under the water. But if they’re gonna get the kids out, that’s how. You try to pull out those rocks from the mouth of the mine, all that happens is more rocks fall in. They’d be at that for months.”

Amy said, “So you’re going in? For the rest of them?”

Me

Bowman looked back down at the “pond”—to me, a hundred-foot-wide gaping maw in the rock, wet flaps of pink flesh like tongues twitching and curling at the air, surrounding a two-foot-wide throat flexing and pulsing as if anticipating a meal.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and nodded toward a blue van that was making its way toward them. “In fact, dive team’s here.”

Over at the ambulance, the mother hoisted up the squirming maggot, carrying it like a child. Its mandibles latched onto her shoulder and blood poured down her shirt. Bowman trotted over to meet them.

John looked back and forth from the maggot to the orifice in the ground. He muttered, “Wait. I don’t think that’s its mouth.”

In a low voice, I said, “We have to do this, and we have to do this fucking now. We have to get the bomb down there, jam it in, blow up the egg sac or birth canal or whatever the fuck part of that thing’s anatomy that is. Before nine more goddamned maggots pop out of it.”

Amy said, “You see these armed biker guys standing everywhere? They think their kids are still inside that hole, they’ll shoot you to pieces if you blow it up with their children still in it. The police, too.”

“Well, what we’re hoping is that the moment the blast goes off, the spell will be broken. We sever the Millibutt’s connection to this world, it’ll break the mind control powers of the fuckroaches, everything will go back to the way it was. Memories of the kids will just go poof, there’ll be some confusion but then everyone will agree we’re heroes and give us all free pairs of leather chaps.”

Amy said, “What evidence do we have that the roaches can’t operate independently of their mother?”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. We have to risk it.”

She said, “And that’s even assuming the bomb works at all. Remember the shotgun that same lady gave you? Plus, we don’t actually have the bomb, it’s in Ted’s truck.”

I said, “You see the scuba guys getting ready to go down there? I’m going to give us exactly three minutes to come up with a plan to deal with all that stuff you just mentioned. Then we move.”