I held my ground while it bore down on me and hit it at the last second with an uppercut to the jaw as hard as I could. I kept the baton in my fist as I swung, giving me the advantage of the old “roll of quarters” effect.
My fist connected just underneath the bag’s chin with enough force to flip over a car. The impact drove his teeth clean through the extended tentacles and shattered his jaw.
Black blood erupted from the bag’s mouth as it went rigid with shock. I could see its throat bulge and warp as the worm thrashed and twisted in pain.
It was stunned and it was close to me. Game over. I took the baton in both hands, wound up, and swung for the fences with everything I had. The headless corpse fell to the ground.
Nearby, a diesel engine roared to life. The prison bus lurched forward with a painful grinding of gears. Through the windshield I could see an insanely grinning Chuck behind the wheel. Anne stood right next to him, white-knuckled and swaying as she clutched the safety bar next to him. They were alive. The tightness in my chest that I hadn’t been aware of relaxed and let me breathe.
The bus missed the group of captives on the ground by inches as Chuck swerved closer to the edge of the quarry in order to avoid them.
The armored bag watched the bus bear down on it, unable or unwilling to drop the captive he was holding over his head.
There was a sickening thud as the bag disappeared under the bumper, only to encounter the forty-two-inch- tall, foot-wide bus tire coming up behind it. The captive flew over the hood and smashed into the windshield, caving it in.
The impact tore the pale tube out of his throat. That must have been fairly painful for the Mother as well, as she jerked up and back, spilling clear mucus swimming with tiny worms from the torn off end of the tube.
As soon as the bus made contact with the bag, Chuck locked up the brakes, throwing up a cloud of white dust and slamming the bus to a halt between the Mother and the captives. Trapped between the locked wheel of an eighteen-ton bus and the stony ground of the quarry, the bag simply peeled apart like rotten fruit.
Enraged, the Mother wrapped one massive tentacle across the front of the bus, crushing it. The sounds of shattering glass accompanied the squeal of tires as the Mother began to drag the entire bus into the lake.
I raced for the bus as it slid towards the water. The front wheels slipped off of the quarry and the bus chassis dropped onto the ground, scraping and grinding on the rocky ledge.
I arrived just as the back of the bus rose up over my head. The rear emergency door popped open and Anne looked out at me, clutching the bottom edge of the door as the floor of the bus tilted towards the sky.
She held my gaze as she rose into the air. Seconds later, the nose hit the water with a booming splash. The entire bus plunged vertically into the lake.
43
I dove into the water as the rear of the bus slipped out of sight. Faint light filtered down past the surface of the cold water, just enough to paint everything with wavering ripples of silver and shadow.
Anne and Chuck floated out of the rear door and swam for the surface. Behind them the Mother’s tentacles uncurled from the bus like a grotesque flower opening up.
We gasped and coughed as our heads burst into the open air. I grabbed Anne’s waist and shoved her upwards onto the granite ledge that surrounded the lake, pushing myself underwater as I did so. Chuck was already halfway out. I tried not to think of the Mother reaching up through the black water towards me.
I scraped my palms on the rough stone as I hauled myself out of the lake as fast as I could, throwing myself onto the ground to lay on my back, panting. Water hissed and rained down as something huge broke the surface of the water.
“Get up! Get up! We need to get moving!” Anne’s face appeared above me, silhouetted against the clouds, eyes wide as she yanked on my shoulders. Drops fell on my cheeks and lips from the flying ends of her wet hair and also from the tips of the Mother’s mouth tentacles hanging in the air above her, giving her a halo of undulating gray ropes against the churning sea-green backdrop of the sky.
I forced myself to my feet and tried to focus on my surroundings as we ran. I heard cars. A lot of them.
Engines roaring, tires growling against the rocky ground, and slamming car doors all filtered in. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see a steady flow of vehicles piling into the parking lot, mostly just crunching into the nearest stopped vehicle and disgorging its occupants while still running. All of the arrivals seemed to be bags, anything from a single driver to a packed minivan full.
Chuck led us towards the second flight of a rusty iron staircase embedded in the granite face of the quarry, leading up to the working face that loomed high over the water-filled pit below.
“That shrieking that the Mother did earlier?” yelled Anne as we ran. “That wasn’t just for our benefit. She was calling her children home.”
“How many?” We reached the bottom of the stairs and started pounding upwards.
“I don’t know, but from the number of cars I’m guessing that she could be heard for a couple of miles at least.”
We stopped at the top of the quarry face, which was really the crest of a huge granite hill. Two cranes were mounted on the edge up here, one on a sliding track and another, heavier one on a swivel mount bolted into the rock.
Both were scabrous with ancient yellow paint turned dull and pale, flaking off in large brittle chips, revealing patches of dark red rust that wept long streaks down the iron structures.
Hanging from the larger crane was a massive chain with a hook at the end. The chain ran down the center of the latticed arm into a drum attached to a diesel engine. There was no operator’s panel as such, just a long lever to spin the cable drum and a T-shaped handle on a cord to hand start the motor.
Beyond the cranes was a single-story metal building with no windows and a single door, which was secured with a big corroded padlock. More crane drums wrapped with various sizes of chain sat on rotten pallets of wood at crazy angles, the bases sagging through the collapsed wooden slats to rest on the ground beneath.
Below, a sea of enraged bags surged and eddied in the parking lot, each of them clutching a favorite implement, be it a butcher knife, ice pick, or humble wood chisel. They were frantic, like ants after their nest had been kicked over. As we watched, they swarmed over the bound captives and massacred them.
Chuck stared at the carnage with wild eyes. “We’re not going to make it. We can’t fight that many.”
“Maybe not, but for right now, we’re okay.”
“We’re okay? Are you shitting me? There are at least fifty of those things down there looking for us. We’re trapped up here and as soon as they notice us, we’re going to die.”
“Chuck. Hey. Listen to me. We’re not going to die. The Army sent me and my team out against all kinds of nightmare things I can’t begin to describe to you, and we came back every time. That’s what I do. I fight and I win and I will be goddamned if a bunch of fishbait motherfuckers with kitchen knives are going to do me in now. Got it?”
“And the building-sized monster in the lake?”
“Is up next. Now, let’s check the shed and see what we have to work with.”
The blocky padlock bleeding rust turned out to be more robust than the door it was guarding. The shackle was completely jammed in the body of the lock by corrosion, so when I yanked on it trying to break the lock, the entire latch fell out of the tin door.
I tossed the whole mess aside and peeled the door open as gingerly as possible, since any squealing would give us away, and I didn’t want to give the mob below a target just yet. The hinges chirped a little as I shifted the door, so I stopped when there was just enough of a gap to squeeze through.
The inside of the shed smelled like fuel, rusted metal, and rock dust. A wooden bench ran across the back wall, covered in black grime, heaps of decomposing hand tools, and lengths of chain. In one corner sat a fifty-five- gallon drum with a peeling paper label on it that had the word DIESEL stenciled across it, the opposite corner had welding supplies but no rig, and the floor was littered with quart cans of turpentine and machine oil.
My eyes were drawn to the lengths of cord with T-handles attached to the end hanging from hooks on the wall, but when I touched one of them, the cord crumbled between my fingers. Dry rot. The one in the crane engine
