“How?”
“Nat, I will allow Stephanie back into the church. I will let her stay there during the days, be in the storm shelter when needed. Your mother will not have to watch her during the day.”
This had been the first good news in so long that it almost puzzled Nat, as though he had lost his hearing and was suddenly greeted by the cry of a mourning dove.
He tried hard not to let his voice break, “You would do this for us?”
“The book is important.”
Jesús’ old Chevy Custom 10 dated from the Reagan Administration. It had belonged to Dr. Chainey, who ran the cancer clinic. Nat could’ve got a new pickup after the Dying in Austin, but he didn’t like to steal from the dead. Comesee lay twenty miles to the south. No one drove there because it lacked large grocery stores to loot — besides, as a small town, it might still have people.
The sun looked like the sun today, which Nat always felt was a good sign. He left on FM 1193. The first three miles held no surprises. About four miles on he saw one of the webbing cities. Roaches, the kind called palmetto bugs in Texas, had increased in size after the Rising. They were about as big as his fist and their shiny black carapaces were marked with bright green angular signs. They built cities. On the last day CNN had been on the air, there had been some remarks about them as the “Great Race.” Nat couldn’t see anything great about oversized bugs. People knew that they weren’t a thing of nature because their web cities were illuminated at night. The city took up the better part of what used to be a cotton field, so Nat knew it was at least forty acres in size.
He couldn’t see any of the bugs, which made him feel better. One time a couple of them flew into town and seemed to be checking everything out. Mr. Franks had run inside his house and grabbed a bottle of Raid and ran after them spraying the air. They stopped and sort of hovered. The poison seemed to do no harm, but after thirty seconds Mr. Franks just sank to the ground. His skin showed angry red blotches in the shape of the angular designs on the bugs’ wings. He never came to and passed a few hours later. Now when a bug flew by, people ran indoors.
As he continued south, the sky changed from blue to the color of lead. Comesee had been a little anglo town. In the old days (which seemed so far gone), it survived by its junktique stores that sold to the Austin tourists on weekends. Nat hadn’t thought about the town since the Rising, even though it was just a few miles away. Since then you just assumed anything that could be bad was. The billboards still welcomed folks in the name of the Lions. Historic Denton’s BBQ still promised the best Elgin sausages and brisket. Even the Dairy Queen was up ahead nine blocks on the left. A few burned-out cars were on the highway, but the passage into town looked clear. Nat glanced at the pair of loaded Glock 37s on his passenger seat. Bullets worked against most things. If it didn’t hurt your eyes to look at it, generally bullets would hit it. He slowed down as he came into town, waiting for either for signs of humans or of the Change.
It was the latter.
The Chevy dealership was covered with gray mucus. Nat could see angular things of metal that jerked inside. He gave it wide berth and drove on into the center of town the corner of 2nd and Main. Calabazas — what do they call them — jack-o-lanterns stood in front of every business on Main. It was spring, no time for fresh pumpkins. At least it was spring back in Doublesign. Father Murphy said he had to look for Two Guys from Texas Books. Time was pretty leaky these days.
There it was. Middle of the block between to the karate place and Hickerson’s Video and Game Rental, it had big plate glass windows. It wasn’t covered in slime; it looked normal. Maybe there was a healing book inside. He hated getting out of the truck. Nothing swooped or buzzed or squelched. The air smelled clean and hot. He left the motor running. He walked to the door. It was dark inside; faded reds and pinks dominated the window display. The Rising had happened in February, and many places still commemorated a faded Valentine’s, when earth’s old lovers had come back. The door was locked. He got a cinderblock out of the back of the pickup and smashed the glass. All of the jack-o-lanterns had rolled closer to him while his attention had been elsewhere. Reality was melting; he would have to be quick. Dr. MacLeod had explained to them that the “Otherness” had to seep in through “liminal” things. Nat thought that “liminal” meant scary. He kicked two of them away from the door, grabbed a flashlight and went in, careful not to slip on the broken glass. The store didn’t smell right — it didn’t have that acid tang of Tia Rebecca’s yellowing romances. It stank of fire and copper, but the books looked OK.
There it was. The Bible. It sat on a shelf beneath diet books, with other Bibles and Books of Mormon and old Methodist hymnals. But it was big and black with gold lettering Biblia Santa. It had a nice heft in his hands, but as he picked it up something laughed in his head. Voices in the head weren’t unusual, but they made him miserable. Outside the shop, the jack-o-lanterns weren’t round or orange any more. They were becoming one of those clear snot-looking things that seemed to have rusty machinery and mercury inside. They were dumb but fast. He grabbed some paperback novels and flung them on to the street. The snot-thing formed several eyes that focused on the books and squelched off in their direction. Swallowing hard, he ran toward it, since he needed to get to his truck. It didn’t turn until he was inside. He threw the truck in reverse and pulled into the crossroad. It had sensed him and shot out two long runners of snot to pull itself toward the backing Chevy. It grew mouths. Some yelled “Tekeli-li!” Others made the sound of fire engines and turkey buzzards. One mimicked a reporter from Channel 42, “Tex DOT has no explanation of the mysterious slime on I-35.”
He turned his truck toward Doublesign. The creature was gaining speed. It had made some of the strands into tentacles that were holding on to his tailgate. He put the pedal to the metal. 40, 50, 60. At 75 the main mass couldn’t keep up, but about a gallon of the goo had managed to plop itself in the bed of his truck. It was making little green eyes that looked like zits and little centipede legs to scuttle across the bed. It slimed its way up his back window and its little eyes just spun around. Two mouths formed, their voices thin and high like a kid that has breathed in a helium ballon. One yelled, “Tekeli-li!” and the other said, “¡Si usted ve un soggotho escaparse!” Nat laughed. That was — what’s his name on KHHL out of Leander. Man, he was funny.
Before.
Yeah, before.
Nat tried to concentrate on his driving. He rolled his window up as far it would go. A tiny thick tendril was pushing itself against the window, a tiny eye forming at the tip. He didn’t want to take it into the village. He had some bug-spray, a Crip-blue bottle of Raid Flying Insect Killer. He braked hard and leapt out the passenger side window and let the loathsome mass have it. Jesús, Maria y José. It pulled itself into a dirty white ball and flung itself on the asphalt. It was rolling away. Some days you got the bear; for Steph’s sake he hoped the bear would never get him. Dr. MacLeod said that all life on Earth came from the shoggoths. He said they had never gone away, just “hidden up the spiral staircase of DNA.” All of the things that showed up three years before had always been here, but most humans couldn’t smell them or hear them or see them. When that city had Risen in the Pacific, we could touch them and they could touch us.
The sky looked blue, hazy, but not dangerously so. The sun was white and some turkey buzzards were flying off to the west. The ground had grass and a few late-season bluebonnets on it. Figuring it was not against the law to pick them now, Nat gathered a few and one Indian paintbrush for contrast. He put them in his truck on the passenger’s side next to the Bible. He decided to open it, to look for cures. Father Murphy had disgusted him by suggesting that some curandero bullshit would be good against the Otherness. Real crosses and real rosaries hadn’t worked. At his worst moments, Nat thought that the campo santo of the Church didn’t really work either. Some day They would come, some ally of the Thing in the Pacific. Doublesign was a small village. It couldn’t feed them the fear and misery they drank like wine.