Finally it all came to a head when Spencer decided to turn on the TV and drown her whining out. She toddled up to him and grabbed at the remote.
“DORA! DORA,” she screamed.
Spencer yanked the remote away from her savagely, swinging it in an arc that knocked her arms away at the same time. The sickening snap that followed was unmistakable. Spencer had heard the sound of bones breaking before. He’d broke peoples bones before. There was no mistaking that sound, or the way Baby Suzie’s arm hung at a wrong angle.
There was a breathless moment of stunned silence from her, then the scream that followed was unlike any that had preceded it. It was a scream of pain.
Spencer stared at her, stunned.
Jesus, he thought. How could anything be so fragile?
Spencer’s mom rounded the corner into the living room. She took one look at Suzie and guessed at what had happened well enough.
“How could you!” she screamed at Spencer. She picked up Suzie and went straightaway to the garage. Spencer heard the car leave a few moments later, obviously to take Suzie to the hospital. He was left alone, not knowing what to do with himself.
Fucking stupid kid. She should have known not to mess with me.
This was it for him, he knew it. They’d never keep him after this. Baby Suzie was their real child, he was just somebody they all had to live with. There was no competition between the two. They’d send him back to the hospital, or somewhere else. After all he’d risked to get back, he was going to be expelled again.
He went to his room, not wanting to be around to face any of them when they showed up. He sat in the corner with only a lamp for light. Stared at the open closet, his hand on the lamp’s power cord. Thought about turning it off, letting them come for him. He felt angry at Suzie, or something like it. The truth was he didn’t really know how he felt, but whatever it was it was terrible. He wanted it to be over. All of it.
Maybe it was for the best that they send him away. The truth was that his parents acted like they had lost everything, survived it, then been given back something broken to serve as a reminder. They didn’t seem to know how to handle it, and the thing about it was that he didn’t care how they felt about it. Any tender feelings he’d had for them had faded a long time ago, faced with the fact that there was absolutely nothing they could do to help him in Nowhere Blvd. The moment he realized he was truly on his own over there was the moment that in his heart he no longer had any parents. In fact any tender feelings he had at all seemed to have left him. He felt like he wasn’t a person anymore. That he couldn’t be a person ever again. He felt like a rock made of fear and violence. Not a human, a rejected thing.
As Spencer woke in the Rejected Woods the day after the manhunt, he ran over the plan in his mind. He’d never actually seen the transfer of bodies to the bone pile, but that didn’t mean anything. The angle was such that the only way to see it was from Smiling Jack’s mansion or from the woods themselves, two places he’d never been in his time on the run.
As he began walking west (finding his ankle to be considerably improved by the nights rest) he knew he should be prepared to wait a few days for another body to be delivered. Though in truth he didn’t think he would need to. He knew enough about hunger to know that if food didn’t show up fairly regularly, the Rejected monsters would start making sojourns into the town, no matter what normally prevented them. But of course he might have to wait for the right body.
He had quite a few fears about different parts of the plan, so much could go wrong. But as he walked through the forest that morning, one was already coming true. He figured the Rejects would be clustered around the food, like any animal. Especially considering the forest seemed to contain absolutely nothing edible, just trees locked in endless Fall. And as he walked towards the goal his theory was confirmed by the increasing number of furtive movements he saw off in the distance (or sometimes not so far off). Thankfully they seemed to be avoiding him, like most wild animals did when he and his dad had gone hunting. Either that or they were setting a trap for him…
Spencer arrived within telescope site of the bone pile around noon and watched it from the branches of a tree. The wait was long but his patience was of a quality he wouldn’t have thought possible back in the days of TV and video games. Over the course of the day he was witness to horrors the likes of which he’d never encountered in either.
The telescope spotted four of them throughout the day, the monsters of the forest. By the third he no longer questioned what they were. The first he caught digging around in the ground, perhaps for food that Spencer couldn’t see. It was the size of a faun and dark and hairless. It seemed to have fleshy snakes for arms, but closer inspection revealed instead that each arm had five or six elbows, allowing them to bend in strange ways. Its legs, contrarily, had no knees. And so it walked stiffly on all fours, lifting its neck painfully to look around. Its face looked very much like that of a boy of perhaps five.
The second looked something like a giant snake. It had mottled black and white flesh (human like, not scales) and squirmed along the ground. On closer inspection he noticed it had fingers in the front instead of a head. The head itself seemed to be lower down, the face presumably dragging along the ground. Unlike a true snake or worm, you could tell by the way it moved that it was clearly jointed in at least four places. No snake would ever move in such an inefficient manner, and he wondered if it might be injured.
He thought about where they might have come from, tried to think up different theories about how they might be born out here in the underground forest. But all his theories were hazy, didn’t seem to make much sense. Until the third creature came along. Unlike the first two she was clearly human. A girl of perhaps eight, with bright red hair. Also unlike the others, she was dressed, as if she hadn’t been out in the forest very long. She wore dirty jean coveralls and a green shirt and was normal in all ways except for the second head attached to her left shoulder. The head, which seemed to belong to a younger Asian girl, was clearly dead and was starting to turn black with rot. It hung there lifeless, stretching the stitches that held it on. Thick black stitches which Spencer could see even at a distance.
He looked at her and was somehow reminded of his last glimpse of the twins, and then suddenly he knew where they came from. He felt stupid for not seeing it before, it was obvious even if it was too horrible to think about. After all, it was all in their name. The Rejected. He realized that his assumption had been wrong. The Perfects weren’t the only ones who survived, they were just the only ones who came out right.
Why did Smiling Jack make these? Was it for some kind of monster’s fun? Jack hadn’t looked like he was having fun when working on the twins. He’d looked frustrated. And in retrospect, maybe even confused. It was like Julie said, Smiling Jack just didn’t think like people, didn’t understand them right. Spencer knew now that whatever else Jack was, he was batshit crazy.
Once Spencer realized the poor girl was a person he thought about calling out to her, trying to talk to her somehow. But how? What would be the point? She wasn’t really human anymore, and even if she was human, there was nothing he could do for her. He would just be putting himself in unnecessary danger, just like when he had come back to warn the kids from his original group.