“I still think so.”
“You’re nothing but cardiac muscle, dude.”
“Lub-dub.”
“Anything moves that fast, teeth that big — its diet isn’t just fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.”
I switched off the handheld spot. Although the beam had been directed away from me, I was groggy from a surfeit of light. I had not seen much, yet I’d seen too much.
Neither of us suggested going on another Big Head hunt. Surfers don’t trade bite for bite with sharks; when we see enough fins, we get out of the water. Considering this creature’s speed and agility, we wouldn’t have a chance of catching it, anyway, not on foot or in the Jeep, and even if we did find and corner it, we weren’t prepared to capture or kill it.
“Supposing we don’t just want to sit here sucking down beer and trying to forget we saw anything,” Bobby wondered as he got behind the wheel.
“Suppose.”
“Then what was that thing?”
Settling into the passenger seat again, working my feet around the beer cooler, I said, “Could be an offspring of the original troop that escaped from the lab. There might be bigger, stranger mutations occurring in the new generation.”
“We’ve seen beaucoup offspring before. And you saw a bunch earlier tonight, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They look like normal monkeys.”
“Yeah.”
“This was awesomely not normal.”
I knew now what Big Head was, where it had come from, but I wasn’t ready to tell Bobby quite yet. Instead, I said, “This is the street where they trapped me in the bungalow.”
Assessing the sameness of the houses around us, he said, “You can tell one of these streets from another?”
“Mostly.”
“Then you’re spending a seriously psychotic amount of time here, bro.”
“Nothing hot on TV.”
“Try stamp collecting.”
“Couldn’t handle the excitement.”
As Bobby drove off the rutted lawn and over the curb, into the street, I holstered the 9-millimeter Glock and told him to turn right.
Two blocks later, I said, “Stop. Here. This is where they were spinning the manhole cover.”
“If they take over the world, they’ll probably make that an Olympic event.”
“At least it’s more exciting than synchronized swimming.”
As I got out of the Jeep, he said, “Where you going?”
“Pull forward and park with one wheel on the manhole. I don’t think they’re still here. They’ve moved on. But just in case, I don’t want them coming up behind us while we’re inside.”
“Inside what?”
I walked in front of the vehicle and directed Bobby until he stopped with the right front tire squarely atop the manhole cover.
He switched off the engine and, with the shotgun, got out of the Jeep.
The weak onshore breeze grew a little stronger, and the clouds in the west, which had swallowed the moon, were gradually expanding eastward, devouring the stars.
“Inside what?” Bobby repeated.
I pointed to the bungalow where I’d squeezed into the broom closet to hide from the troop. “I want to see what was rotting in the kitchen.”
“Want to?”
“Need to,” I said, heading toward the bungalow.
“Perverse,” he said, falling in beside me.
“The troop was fascinated.”
“We want to lower ourselves to monkey level?”
“Maybe this is important.”
He said, “My belly’s full of kibby and beer.”
“So?”
“Just a friendly warning, bro. Right now I’ve got a low puke threshold.”
11
The front door of the bungalow was open, as I had left it. The living room still smelled of dust, mildew, dry rot, and mice; in addition, there was now a lingering odor of mangy monkey.
My flashlight, which I’d not dared to use here before, revealed a series of three-inch-long, yellowish-white cocoons fixed in the angle where the back wall met the ceiling, home to developing moths or butterflies, or perhaps egg cases spun by an exceptionally fertile spider. Lighter rectangles on the discolored walls marked where pictures had once hung. The plaster wasn’t as fissured as you would expect in a house that was more than six decades old and that had been abandoned for nearly two years, but a web of fine cracks gave the walls the appearance of eggshells beginning to give way to hatching entities.
On the floor, in a corner, was a child’s red sock. It couldn’t have anything to do with Jimmy, because it was caked with dust and had been here for a long time.
As we crossed to the dining-room door, Bobby said, “Got a new board yesterday.”
“The world’s ending, you go shopping.”
“Friends at Hobie made it for me.”
“Hot?” I asked as I led him into the dining room.
“Haven’t ridden it yet.”
In one corner, at the ceiling, was a cluster of cocoons similar to those in the previous room. They were also big, each three to four inches long and, at the widest point, approximately the diameter of plump frankfurters.
Outside of this bungalow, I had never seen anything quite like these silken constructs. I moved directly under them, fixing them with the light.
“Not uncreepy,” Bobby said.
Within a couple of the cocoons were dark shapes, curled like question marks, but they were so heavily swaddled in flossy filaments that I could make out no details of them.
“See anything moving?” I asked.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Might be dead.”
“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced. “Just some big, dead, half-made moths.”
“Moths?”
“What else?” I asked.
“Huge.”
“Maybe new moths. A new, bigger species. Becoming.”
“Bugs? Becoming?”
“If people, dogs, birds, monkeys…why not bugs?”
Frowning, Bobby thought about that. “Probably wouldn’t be smart to buy any more wool sweaters.”
A cold quiver of nausea wound through me as I realized that I’d been in these rooms in absolute darkness, unaware of the fat cocoons overhead. I’m not entirely sure why I found this thought so deeply disturbing. After all, it wasn’t likely that I’d been in danger of being pinned to the wall by some bug and imprisoned in a suffocating
