The chain drew me steadily upwards until I reached the tip of the crane. Far below, the surface of the lake boiled as the Mother thrashed at the end of her noose.
46
I picked my way down the sloping crane arm as quickly as I could. When I reached the ground I pushed the lever back to the center position, locking the drum into place. The Mother hung half out the water, twisting and jerking against the chain biting into her flesh. The entire crane arm bobbed and groaned in time with her struggles. I knew she wouldn’t be trapped for much longer.
I needed to get into the shack. I couldn’t go through the ring of frenzied bags around it, so that left just the one option. I looked hard at the roof, took two running steps, and leapt.
I sailed upward and out, pin-wheeling my arms in an attempt not to tumble and keeping my eyes on the rapidly approaching tin roof below. Chuck and Anne both looked up with wide, disbelieving eyes as I dropped down out of the sky, nearly on top of them.
The building boomed and rattled as I hit the roof flat on my back not two feet from the edge. The impact knocked the wind out of me.
Anne helped me to my feet. “That was amazing! I can’t believe you just did that!”
“I promise you, it wasn’t my first choice.”
“Now what?” The shotgun in her hands boomed. A bag with the face of a snarling, bearded man pitched back and out of sight below the roofline.
I beckoned to Chuck, and when he came over, I reached out and tore off one of his sleeves. Having just come out of the water, my clothes were still soaking wet.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, I need the fabric.”
The roof was made up of several overlapping sheets of tin. It was easy enough to peel one back, exposing a wide gap between the two-by-fours supporting the roof. When I judged it wide enough, I dropped through.
The inside of the shed was free of bags. The first time I had been in the shack, I had noticed a striker in the moldering pile of old welding aprons and gloves. Used to light a welding torch, a striker is just a spring loaded handle that rubs a piece of flint against a steel plate. It’s small, lightweight, and reliable. Better yet, it still works if it gets wet.
I stuck that and a can of turpentine into the back pockets of my jeans, and then went over to the drum of diesel. I turned it over onto its side and started punching holes in it with a screwdriver from the bench. I worked as fast as I could, since the noise was sure to attract attention from the outside, and also because I wanted as much fuel left in the barrel as possible when I was done.
I grabbed the leaky drum by the ends and hefted it. It was a hell of a lot heavier than I expected, but I managed a controlled run to the door. One good kick sent it flying open, knocking a couple of bags out of the way and opening a path between the door and the crane. I shot out of the doorway at a dead run.
I could hear them in pursuit as I got close to the crane, but they couldn’t catch me by the time I was close enough to jump up onto the arm. I braved the slope of the crane like a man on a tightrope. The bags lacked the coordination to follow and quickly turned back to the mob surrounding the shed.
Slippery, stinking fuel poured off of the barrel and made the metal struts slick under my feet. If it hadn’t been for the rust to give me traction, I wouldn’t have made it ten steps. As it was, I had several close calls hefting a couple of hundred pounds of fuel up the ever-narrowing steel path.
By the time I reached the top, diesel was running down my arms and soaking into my shirt and pants. At the apex, I could feel the Mother thrashing down below. The crane arm juddered under my feet.
I dropped the barrel straight down into center of her hideously toothed maw. The impact sent sickening ripples through the rubbery flesh. The mouth contracted hard around the drum and I could clearly hear razor-sharp teeth punching through the metal sides. Diesel fountained out of the barrel, creating pools of fuel in the creases and crevices of the Mother’s pit of a mouth.
I wiped my hands off as well as I could on the back of my wet jeans and shirt, hoping to get enough of the oily stuff off of my hands to keep me from going up like a torch, and then pulled the turpentine can out of my pocket. I unscrewed the silver metal cap and tossed it away into the wind.
Chuck’s cotton sleeve made a fine wick once twisted into the mouth of the can. Turning the container upside-down for a moment allowed the thin liquid to soak the cloth all the way through. I pulled out the striker and squeezed the arms of the handle together. A shower of bright orange sparks fell across the cloth. It caught instantly.
I tossed my makeshift torch off the edge and watched as it flared and smoked on the way down. It landed by the barrel in a shallow pool of diesel, the tiny yellow flame a pinprick far below.
I chanted “C’mon, c’mon” under my breath for long seconds until I saw pale flames run out in waves and tendrils all around the barrel, growing higher and fiercer as I watched.
The crane arm lurched hard under my feet as the Mother convulsed, forcing me into a crouch, my fingers gripping the struts with white knuckles. The fire grew into a roaring pillar. Thick, greasy smoke billowed up past me and tentacles whipped and slashed the air as the Mother tried to bend and twist against the chain, fighting to duck beneath the water only a few feet below her head.
The stink of burning meat and petrochemicals was becoming overpowering, pushing me back down the arm a good ten feet or more. Half of the thick tentacles were now hanging limply off to one side, the flesh charred and dead, and the other half jerked around randomly as what passed for the Mother’s brain began to roast and die.
Standing high over the lake, I looked down at the carnage that I had wrought. Just as there had been recognition on an instinctive level, some part of me mourned her passage as she burned.
The Mother’s struggles became feeble and random in her final moments, so I turned and started walking back down towards the ground, watching the crowd around the shed closely. If I was right, the bags would drop any second, unable to survive the loss of their controlling intelligence, the same as when the prime worm inside a bag was killed.
I felt a long, shuddering tremor through the soles of my shoes when the Mother died. I was right in that the reaction from the bags was immediate. But I was completely wrong about what that reaction would be.
47
The bags didn’t drop. Instead they went berserk, attacking everything in sight. They were clawing and biting and stabbing the metal walls of the shed while other bags next to them were slicing and ripping the flesh off of their bones. They died without ever seeming to notice.
Bags who were looking up when the Mother died became fixated on the roof and began leaping up with newfound strength, no doubt ripping muscles and ligaments with abandon, and catching the rooftop easily.
Chuck was out of ammo. Anne aimed and shot with impressive speed and precision as bags began pulling themselves up to the roofline, but I could see that she was now down to the shells containing shot in the last half of the drum. Bags were coming up on all sides of the roof now, and I knew that Anne and Chuck would be overrun in moments.
I ran down the crane and made one last leap to the roof. I kept my feet this time and drew my baton.
“You couldn’t kill the Mother?” said Anne as she backed towards me.
“I killed her.”
“You said that the bags would all die when she did! These things are ten times more dangerous now than they were while she was alive.”
An old man with white hair and bloody hands pulled himself up to the roof in front of her. The gun in her hands dry fired on an empty chamber. Anne waited until he got a foot onto the roof and let go with his hands to stand up. In that instant she skipped forward and hit him in the face with a hard forward jab of the stock. With nothing to hang on to, he fell backwards off of the roof, only to be torn to pieces by the bags he landed on below.