Mazie said, “If he wants you so bad, why not just send a bunch of the coerced to get you?”
“Because he has no idea where I am. All he has is Anne’s number in Henry’s cell. He can talk to me, but he can’t find me.”
“Besides,” said Anne, “I doubt Piotr thinks his bags are up to kidnapping Abe. He’s a lot tougher than he looks.”
“Uh, thanks?” I figured that Chuck would make a comment, but instead he just looked thoughtful. He was probably remembering being tossed around back at the hotel. Even strong people have some give to them when you push back, especially if pushed by a guy with Chuck’s size. I don’t, which probably made an impression.
I changed the subject. “In any case, if Piotr is ready for me to follow his hostages to him, then we need to figure out a different way. The worst thing we could do is to come in when and how he expects us. Besides, if I’m right, he can’t do anything without me anyway, so he has no choice but to wait for us to make a move.”
“You hope,” said Mazie.
“I hope.”
“You know,” said Chuck, “there’s no way that Saint Peter is going to let your friends go. Hell, they’re probably loading up on wigglers as we speak.”
“I doubt it. He’s going to need some kind of leverage for when I do actually show up. It’s one thing to lure a bear into your house, it’s another thing entirely to survive the experience.”
35
The soft gray daylight was fading into gloom by the time Greg made it back downstairs. When he entered the kitchen he was wearing that faraway, glassy look that you see on people waiting around in an emergency room with a bloody towel pressed to one of their limbs. Without speaking, he grabbed a glass and a bottle of something clear and brown from under the sink. After a long communion with the glass, he turned to face us.
“I had to agree to bring up food. A lot of it. And she wants me to untie one of her hands so that she can eat it herself.” Another drink. “I think … I think she might die if I do that.”
Anne gently took the glass out of his hand. “Don’t give it all to her, or at least not all at once.”
“She won’t give me any more information unless I do. That’s the deal.”
“She didn’t give you anything at all?” I asked.
“I got something. I wouldn’t agree to bring her the food unless she gave me something I could use. Something really good. I tried to get Peter’s location, but I don’t think she knows it. At first she tried to trade the location for the food, but when I wouldn’t give in without it, she gave up. In the end, she told me where the Mother was. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, I think so. When Peter called me, he said he would give Henry and Leon to the Mother to turn them into bags.” When it hit me, it must have been on my face.
“What?”
“We might not need to rescue the people in the rest of those houses. Anne, do you remember what happened to the other worms when we killed the big one that hurt Leon?”
She nodded. “They went nuts, and then they went all limp.”
“Right. Slow twitching, maybe, but pretty much inert. I think the small worms attach to all the parts of your body, but the orders just come from the mother worm, the single big one that each bag carries.” I was feeling my way around the idea, guided by some instinctive knowledge that I didn’t understand.
Anne shrugged. “I don’t see how that helps with the whole town.”
“What if the small mothers are connected to the big Mother in the same way?”
“So you’re thinking that if we kill the Mother, the worms inside all the bags everywhere will go limp.”
“And all the bags will die, since it’s only the worms that are keeping them alive.”
Mazie had been inspecting her rifle in the corner of the kitchen, but now she thumped it back down and turned to face me. She crossed her arms.
“That doesn’t make any sense. No organism would evolve like that, where you kill one and the whole family tree dies. Best case you’d just stop Peter from being able to infect more people.”
“What if it wasn’t a family, though? What if it was only one creature, and the worms inside each host were just acting as a remote apparatus? The creature stays in one place and sends out infected hosts to hunt. Then it just reels them in when they’re done.”
“Like some kind of psychic colony creature? That’s pretty far out there.”
“Well, I can tell you for sure that killing the main worm inside a bag disables the rest, even if they are several feet apart. And they all go nuts at exactly the same time. So at least at that level, they are in communication. Why not one more level? A predator that had a hundred bodies would be very successful, right?”
“Okay, let’s say that you’re right. Then we absolutely can’t kill the primary Mother. Every coerced victim would die, according to you. We’d be murdering who knows how many innocent people.”
“I don’t think we have a choice, Mazie.”
She slammed her hands down onto the table with a bang. “No! My dad is out there! You’re not murdering my dad!”
I yelled back. “Every bag out there is somebody’s father or mother or sibling, and you guys kill them when you have to, right? How is that different?”
“Because I say it is!” She snatched up her rifle and pointed it at me. The barrel was just as huge and ominous as I remembered, but this time I could also see the panicked face of the young girl behind it. Weeks of stress and fear had worn these people down to nothing.
I slowly raised my hands. “Mazie, listen to me for second, okay? There are a lot of very scared and very innocent people out there who aren’t infected. And they’re all going to die if we can’t throw a pretty big monkey wrench into Piotr’s operation.”
“You don’t understand! My dad is still inside there with the worms. He would talk to me, sometimes. He’s not gone. Not completely.”
“Okay, if you’re right, then killing the worms should free him. Then he would be saved. If he can’t live without the worms, then the damage is already too great and he can’t be saved, no matter what we do, right?”
“We can take him to a hospital, they can remove the worms there and save him.”
“Mazie, I’ve seen what the worms do.”
“Shut up!” I heard the safety click off.
“They eat holes in everything. Even the brain, Mazie. I don’t even know how they keep the host going, but whatever they do is why shooting them in the body doesn’t work.” I could see her finger turn white as she put pressure on the trigger.
“I said shut up!”
“Your dad wouldn’t want all those hostages to die for him, you know that.”
“You shut your fucking mouth!” Mazie screamed. She pulled the trigger.
My eyes never left her finger, and as it jerked back, I tried to twist out of the way. I’m faster than any human being has a right to be, but it wasn’t enough.
Being shot in the chest isn’t a clear, precise feeling. It’s a realization that something terrible and irreversible has happened, followed by a crashing tidal wave of sensation that only resolves into pain after long, bewildering moments.
The world became a series of choppy, disconnected movie frames passing in front of me. I saw the flash. I saw Anne with one hand on the barrel and one hand in a fist, smashing against the side of Mazie’s face. The next image was a view across the kitchen floor, just feet. Then it was feet and Mazie’s face, mouth bloody and eyes rolled back, her cheek flattened out where it was pressed into the linoleum.
Then I stopped seeing anything at all.
36
