Hide(75)
But Mack, staring at death, lets herself finally try to remember her father. And when she does, she laughs.
He had a beer belly. His arms and legs were thin, the hair there so sparse in some areas it wore right off. He couldn’t grow a beard. His eyes were like hers, too big, wide set, so that he gave the impression of always being distracted or slightly puzzled. The fastest way to set off his explosive temper—which was never a difficult task—was to ask if he was paying attention. That lost him most jobs.
He’d always tried to fix plumbing issues, would swear and rage and declare he was taking a break, at which point he would go out to a bar. Mack’s mother would quietly step in and finish the job so that when he got back, he could smugly explain he must have done it right, it just needed a few minutes to settle.
He yelled at his favorite television programs as though his feelings had any bearing on what might be happening on the screen.
He made pancakes with chocolate chip smiley faces, and whistled with the clearest, purest notes.
He hit their mother, and he hit them, not because he was strong, but because he wasn’t. No one who is strong hits a child. No one who is strong does anything he did.
And Mack has no questions about that: He chose to do what he did. He looked at the world and felt it owed him more than he had, and when that didn’t materialize, he took himself out along with everyone who had tried to love him, who might have been happier without him.
Finally, at last, Mack can form him in her mind as small, impotent, poisonously angry. Not a monster at all, but the most pathetically human of men.
The monster in front of her is not human at all, but there are traces in its hands. It doesn’t have claws so much as thick, grooved nails that have never been trimmed, broken and growing and broken again into jagged edges. It shuffles toward her on legs that bend backward at the knee, like a cow’s. At the end of those legs, covered in dense, matted fur tinged green with moss, heavy hooves fall on the ground not with cheerful clopping, but with careful padding.
Its shoulders are broad, too broad, rippling with power on either side of a massive chest, but its waist narrows to an almost delicate taper before turning into hips not designed for upright walking. It has no genitalia at all, just more of that matted, green-tinged fur. It hunches, head parallel to the ground. Atop a short, broad neck, its face is a flat expanse with two nostrils, flaring as the monster breathes in deeply, searching. The terrible scarring where they put out its eyes balances between incongruously delicate ears, velvet soft, sloping on either side of the head beneath the long, sensuously curving crown of horns.
They look heavy. She wonders if they make its neck ache after a day of hunting.
Unlike her father, there is nothing pathetically human about this monster, but it strikes her as pathetic nonetheless as it shuffles closer, bringing with it the scent of death and decay and rot to assault her senses, warning her that this is the end.
And even though this thing, this abomination, destroyed so many people and would consume her, too, she can’t hate it. Whatever those families did to summon it, to make their deal, she can’t imagine it agreed. It doesn’t seem to have the capacity for consent.
It exists to consume. Who can blame it for following its terrible course, for being in a place it does not belong, for being forced into wretched existence and sustained and fed merely to keep existing?
Mack takes the sharp edge of Rosiee’s silver heart pendant, rescued from the carousel, and drags it along her wrist. Blood beads along the line, the scrape enough to break the skin but not make her gush freely.
The monster stops mid-step, head snapping in Mack’s direction, nostrils flaring wide.
Her task is to make sure the monster is where they want it to be, when they want it to be there. But instead of turning and running, Mack watches. She can’t look away. She missed death the first time it came for her, and she was ready—maybe even eager—for it here. For that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her. Not her father, not her guilt or her shame, not hunger or fear or want.
The monster unseals the thin line of its lips and a spittle of drool drops down. But there are no teeth there. In its mouth, oblivion. A velvet black so deep and complete she has never seen its like, never will. And beyond the black, a hint of something burning. Not warm, hungry, orange fire, but the cold white pulse of a distant star.
Mack takes a step toward the gravity-drag of that promise.
Several shots fire somewhere in the distance, and Mack remembers herself. She remembers her own self, super-compacted, pushed down so deep all she had was the pull of her own misery, the terrible weight of her lonely shame.
But her shell cracked, and it didn’t end her. She didn’t burn up, or burst. She’s not alone anymore, and she won’t leave her friends, just as she knows—has seen, has felt, and would believe even without that evidence—that her friends, her Ava, won’t leave her.
Mack turns and runs, and death follows quickly, drawn by the scent of her blood and the need for more.
* * *
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Ava’s going too slowly. She knows she is. But even her tremendous will can’t make her body move faster. The generator, named PREDATOR with absolutely no irony on the part of the company, weighs nearly two hundred pounds. She’s glad it weighs that much, because that means it still has gas in the tank. But it also means she can barely manage a shuffle, much less the brisk pace she had planned on.