“Mama? Should I call an ambulance? You want an ambulance? You want me to get a glass of water for you?” The questions came out in a rush. Anton was relieved, though. She continued to look around the bedroom, seeming to regain her bearings.
Her gaze stopped on the nightstand: faux Tiffany lamp, half-drunk jar of power shake, Bible, iPhone. The growling noise was louder. It was like she was building up to a yell or maybe a scream. Was it possible she didn’t recognize him?
“That’s my drink, Mama,” Anton said, as she reached out and grabbed hold of the jar with the shake. “No thanks to you, ha-ha. You forget to make it, you goose.”
She swung it, belting him across the side of his head, the connection a dull bonk of plastic finding bone. Anton tumbled backward, feeling pain and wet and bafflement. He landed on his knees. His sight focused on a green splatter on the beige carpet beneath him. Red dripped into the green. What a mess, he thought, just as his mother hit him with the jar again, this time flush against the back of his skull. There was a sharper crack upon impact—the thick plastic of the blender jar splitting. Anton’s face slammed forward into the shake splatter on the bristly mat of the beige carpet. He inhaled blood and shake and carpet fiber, and threw out a hand to pull himself away, but every part of him, every wonderful muscle, had gone heavy and limp. A lion was roaring behind him and if he was going to help his mother get away from it, he needed to get up and find the back of his head.
He tried to call for Magda to run but what came out was a gurgle and his mouth was full of carpet.
A weight fell on his spine and as this new pain added itself to the old pain, Anton hoped that his mother had heard him, that she might yet escape.
A homeless dog started barking in one of the holding cages, and two others joined in. The nameless mongrel at his feet—so like the one Fritz Meshaum had smashed up—whined. It was now sitting up. Frank absently ran a hand along its spine, calming it. His eyes stayed locked on the screen. One of the young men attending Kinsman Brightleaf—not the one who’d handed him the poultry shears, the other one—grabbed his shoulder. “Dad? Maybe you shouldn’t do it.”
Brightleaf shrugged the hand away. “God says come into the light! Susannah—Kinswoman Brightleaf—God says come into the light! Come into the light!”
“Come into the light!” echoed the man who’d passed the shears, and Brightleaf’s son reluctantly joined in. “Come into the light! Kinswoman Brightleaf, come into the light!”
Kinsman Brightleaf slid his hands into the cut cocoon covering his wife’s face and thundered, “God says come into the light!”
He pulled. There was a ripping sound that reminded Frank of a Velcro strip letting go. The face of Mrs. Susannah Kinsman Brightleaf appeared. Her eyes were closed but her cheeks were flushed, and the threads at the edges of the cut fluttered with her breath. Mr. Brightleaf leaned close, as if to kiss her.
“Don’t do that,” Frank said, and although the TV sound wasn’t high and he had spoken barely above a whisper, all the caged dogs—half a dozen of them this afternoon—were now barking. The mongrel made a low, worried sound. “Buddy, don’t do that.”
“Kinswoman Brightleaf, awake!”
She awoke, all right. And how. Her eyes flew open. She lunged upward and battened on her husband’s nose. Kinsman Brightleaf screamed something that was bleeped out, but Frank thought it might have been motherfucker. Blood sprayed. Kinswoman Brightleaf fell back onto the table with a sizable chunk of her husband’s beak caught in her teeth. Blood dotted the bodice of her nightie.
Frank recoiled. The back of his head struck the file cabinet crammed in behind his desk. One thought—irrelevant but very clear—filled his mind: the news network had bleeped out motherfucker but had permitted America to see a woman tear off a goodly portion of her husband’s nose. Something in those priorities was badly screwed up.
Cacophony in the room where the nose-amputation had occurred. Shouts off-camera, and then the camera tipped over, showing nothing but a wooden floor upon which a spatter of blood droplets was accumulating. Then it was back to Michaela Morgan, who looked grave.
“Again, we apologize for the disturbing nature of this footage, and I want to repeat that we have not absolutely confirmed its authenticity, but we have late word that the Bright Ones have opened their gates, and the siege is over. This would seem to confirm that what you just saw really happened.” She shook her head, as if to clear it, listened to something coming from the little plastic button in her ear, then said, “We are going to repeat this footage again on top of every hour, not out of sensationalism—”
Yeah, right, Frank thought. As if.
“—but as a public service. If this is happening, people need to know one thing: if you have a loved one or a friend in one of these cocoons, do not attempt to remove it. Now back to George Alderson in the studio. I’ve been told he has a very special guest who may be able to shed a bit more light on this terrible—”
Frank used the remote to kill the TV. What now? What the fuck now?
In Frank’s little holding compound, dogs that had yet to be shipped to the Harvest Hills Animal Shelter continued to bark madly at the moth that fluttered and danced in the narrow corridor between their cages.
Frank stroked the mongrel by his feet. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s all right.” The dog stilled. Not knowing any better, it believed him.
Magda Dubcek sat astride her son’s corpse. She had finished him off by sliding a green-streaked shard of the blender jar into the side of his neck, and made sure of it by driving another shard into the opening of his ear and all the way down his auditory canal until it buried itself in his brain. Blood continued to spurt from the wound in his neck, soaking the beige carpet in a larger and larger pool.
Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Magda, at some strange distance, was dimly aware of them. Why is that woman crying? she asked herself, not certain who it was that was crying, or where. Come to think of it, where was Magda herself? Hadn’t she been watching television and decided to have a rest?
She wasn’t in her bedroom now. “Hello?” she asked the darkness that surrounded her. There were others in that darkness, many others, she thought she sensed them, but she couldn’t see them—maybe over here? Over there? Somewhere. Magda probed outward.
She needed to find them. She couldn’t be alone in here. If there were others, maybe they could help her get back home, to her son, to Anton.
Her body rose from the corpse, elderly knees cracking. She stumbled to the bed and flopped down on it. Her eyes closed. New white filaments began to unfurl from her cheeks, wavering, then falling gently down to the skin.
She slept.
She searched for the others, in that other place.
CHAPTER 6
It was a hot afternoon, one that felt more like summer than spring, and all across Dooling telephones were beginning to ring, as some of those who had been keeping up with the news called friends and relatives who had not. Others held back, sure the whole thing would turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, like Y2K, or an outright hoax, like the Internet rumor that Johnny Depp was dead. As a result, many women who preferred music to TV put their infants and toddlers down for their afternoon naps, as always, and once their fussing had ceased, they lay down themselves.
To sleep, and dream of other worlds than their own.
Their female children joined them in these dreams.