What the Hell Did I Just Read

32. FIVE DAYS LATER

We never saw the bikers or their kids again.

They apparently took the rain with them—we got nothing but sun in the days that followed. The water levels still continued to rise, as Amy had said they would—like all of life’s bullshit, it keeps trickling downhill even after the storm is over—but otherwise all we could do was keep rooting for clear skies. I wondered how many people had bought rain boots just hours before it stopped. Suckers.

The neighborhood around the dildo store was all but impassable, but Amy and I had gotten our stuff and moved into Chastity Payton’s sandbagged trailer. We had no idea where she was, but she was still alive and Amy had saved her number before she left. Chastity agreed to let us squat there in exchange for keeping looters away, as long as we didn’t take the plastic off the furniture or “fart the place up.” Still, she wouldn’t have approved of how much red Mountain Dew I’d stashed in the fridge. I didn’t even enjoy the flavor of it, I think drinking it just reminded me of my early twenties. Back when I enjoyed terrible things.

It was Saturday, the day before Amy’s birthday, when we got a mysterious call telling us to go out to Mine’s Eye and to bring John. We had actually been out there a couple of times since the night all the shit happened, waiting for the whole cycle to start up again. It hadn’t, but the call hadn’t been entirely unexpected—we surely weren’t the only ones monitoring the situation.

We met John out there by the little church, which was surrounded by ladders and scaffolding. The owners were breaking local tradition by actually repairing the place, instead of just letting it rot—they’d already gotten the roof patched up. A black sedan pulled up and I was only mildly surprised when Agent Tasker stepped out, a bandage around her neck where her head had apparently been reattached. I wondered if it leaked when she drank coffee.

John said, “Is your partner coming?”

“No, he called in dead. I’m not here to harm or arrest you, and in fact I do not represent NON. That organization has been dissolved.”

I said, “You mean they just renamed it again.”

“There is a, let’s say, housecleaning taking place. We have ascertained that your judgment on the B3333B breach was in fact correct. We do apologize for any actions taken against you by the previous regime—”

“Meaning you,” interrupted Amy. “When you tried to personally kill all of us, over and over again.”

“But I do want to point out that throughout the process, the information sharing between us was less than ideal, on both ends. That’s something we should look to improve going forward. In terms of B3333B, we are actively monitoring all eleven offspring, and will continue to do so until an alternative course of action is found.”

I said, “Well, problem solved. I’ll just put this whole thing out of mind, then.”

The sun was shining, and the pond below would have been shimmering turquoise … but there was no pond. The whole thing had been filled in with concrete. Crews had started filling it in the very next morning after the ten larvae had emerged. There were workers milling around the area now, dragging thick hoses that snaked down from several trucks that were perched on the hill above.

Tasker said, “As you can see, we’ve already gone to work on obstructing the breeding site.”

I said, “I don’t want to tell you your business, but I one hundred percent do not believe that a bunch of cement is going to keep the Milli—uh, the B3333B from doing its thing.”

“Of course not. But we do have every reason to believe that physical proximity to the pond is a requirement for the process to work. The goal will be to simply keep people away. You wondered what connection there was between Mr. Knoll, Ms. Payton, and the Christ’s Rebellion Motorcycle Club. Well, they all attended a barbecue right here, a month before the children turned up missing. That is, a month before the idea of the children were implanted in the adults, along with the trail of psychological bread crumbs that would lead them back here.”

Amy said, “But people come here all the time. I guess that was just when its breeding cycle started?”

“When we were interviewing members of the gang, we noted one man named Beau Lynch, who bore a striking resemblance to Ted Knoll’s description of Mr. Nymph. This aroused some curiosity in the team, though the man appeared normal and was not otherwise suspicious. During questioning, it became clear that at one point during the cookout, Mr. Lynch and a young woman had sex in the pond.”

This raised dozens of questions in my mind that I actually didn’t want the answers to.

Tasker continued, “By tomorrow, there will be a twelve-foot fence around the hill up here. Those signs will be posted every twenty feet.”

She nodded to where one of the signs was leaned against the church. In urgent red and white it said:

RAW SEWAGE

CONTAMINATION HAZARD

$1500 FINE FOR TRESPASSING

24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE

I shook my head. “It’s not gonna work. People will figure out there’s no sewage here. They’re just going to get curious.”

Below us, one of the crew members shouted a signal. Then there was a sputtering noise and a gush of raw sewage sprayed out of the hose. The stench reached us a moment later.

Amy wrinkled her nose and said, “That’s … wow.”

“Okay,” John said, “just to get this straight, in the meantime, these parents have to spend the next however many days or months or years raising these fake monster children? How is that not going to end horribly for everybody?”

Tasker shrugged. “That is simply the way of the world. All they know is that they love their children very much. Love is not always a two-way street, sometimes you pour your energy into something that never gives back. Like people who keep lizards as pets. Is that worse than being alone, or without purpose?”

I said, “Way worse.”

Tasker glanced at her watch and said, “Well, if you have any suggestions, you know where to find me.”

I watched her duck into her car and pull away. I imagined her turning her neck too quickly the next time she went to back up and her head just toppling off her shoulders.

Amy said, “So, we need to resume the conversation we were having.”

“Which one? About whether or not a plane could take off if it was sitting on a giant treadmill? We decided it would take right off, the wheels have nothing to do with it. Nothing to discuss.”

“No, the one we were having at John’s house. About your sadness demon? And you said that wasn’t the time to have the discussion? Well, that time has arrived. I’ve got a number for you to call, I know for a fact they can get you in early next week.”

“We can talk about it later.”

“No. We can’t.”

She looked at John, like this was his cue to jump in. They’d planned this.

John, looking like he’d rather be chewed up in the belly of a shark than standing here having this conversation, said, “She has a bag, at my house. Clothes and stuff. A little money. Friends ready to come and get her. She’d made the decision to go, is what I’m trying to say. I talked her out of it. Told her that if you knew, if you really knew what this was doing to her, you’d fight it.”

That black pool of shame bubbled up in my head again. Then, a spark came along and set it alight. The choice between feeling the toxic ooze of self-loathing and the fire of mindless rage is no choice at all.

I turned on her. “You know what? If you want to go, why don’t you—”

John stepped in front of me. “Can we just skip this part, Dave? The part where you have this knee-jerk anger reflex over being given an ultimatum? Because it’s not an ultimatum and nobody is trying to push you around. I’ve been here a million times, you know I have, and that anger, it’s the rage of a kid getting dragged out of a warm bed on a cold morning. That’s all it is. Because that depression, it’s the most comfy bed in the world and you will say whatever you have to say to stay in it for one more minute. But there’s people out here who love you a lot, telling you that there’s a truck heading for that bed. And if you can’t work up any concern for your own life, then think of it like this. Somebody Amy and I care about a whole lot is about to get hit by that truck and only you can save them. The person we need you to save just happens to be you. Also, the truck is filled with shit, I don’t know if I mentioned that.”

“I just assumed.”

I sighed and carefully studied the patch of nothing in front of my face. “I am ninety-nine percent sure this is just the way I am. Been like this as long as I can remember.”

Amy looked at me like I was an idiot. “Of course it’s the way you are. But having really hairy legs is the way I am, and I still shave them regularly. In our natural state, we’re all smelly, sticky, angry creatures nobody would even pay to look at in a zoo. We’re all at war with that awful, primitive version of ourselves, every day. You’re scared. I get it. You’re scared you’re going to get cured and suddenly be this corny, boring person. Well, I have good news—there is no cure. You just wake up another day and fight it, day after day, until that’s who you become. A fighter. Look, it’s up to you. Only you can do this. But I’m not going to spend the rest of my life watching you slowly rot to pieces, stuck to the sofa like some kind of an airplane that is totally unable to take off from a treadmill, due to the laws of physics.”

“If nothing else,” said John, “remember that people depend on you. The next crisis is always right around the corner.”

We stood there and watched the shit-flooding operation for a while.

I gestured toward the crews below us and said, “I don’t like this.”

Amy said, “Well, it’s gross on like thirty-six levels.”

“No, I mean, in general. We’re basically being asked to turn a blind eye. Living our lives, knowing this is here. Like an—”

“An itch you can’t scratch?”

John flicked a cigarette butt and turned to go. He put his hand on my back, as if to lead me away.

“Forget it, Dave. It’s Vaginap—”