23
IT’S THE RAIN’S fault. Must be two inches deep, suctioning him toward the gutter. Lashing the windshield with dizzying ecliptics that make him misjudge the turn. The movie theater springs into view, its thousands of lights smudged like drizzled yellow paint. He cranks the wheel at the adjacent alley, relying on the ballyhooed power steering, but too late. The bashed-in back end muffs the simplest maneuvers, and his Caddy—his beloved teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville, two-point-three tons and eighteen and a half feet of palatial leisure, zero to sixty in ten-point-seven seconds, AM/FM stereo sound, crisp as a fresh dollar bill—rams into the side of the theater.
Strickland shoves his way out. He tries to shut the door, force of habit, but he’s not used to missing two fingers. He misses the door entirely, his hand slicing through rain. He takes stock of the disaster. Front end smashed, back end smashed. The American dream demolished from both ends. It doesn’t matter. He’s the Jungle-god now, the monkeys ripping apart his stupid human skull. He stomps through ankle-deep puddles. A man with a name tag rushes at him from the box office, gesturing in dismay at the broken bricks strewn across the sidewalk.
In the jungle, this man is just a buzzing carapanã. Strickland lashes out with the Beretta, strikes him in the nose. A pennant of blood flaps before the rain splatters it to the sidewalk. Strickland stalks past the writhing body, hunts beneath the waterlogged glitz of the marquee bulbs. Finally, back in the alley, he spots it. An alcove, a door to the overhead apartments. Elisa, his voiceless vision, his hope of the future, his betrayer, his prey. The Caddy blocks the whole alley. He has to climb over the indented hood. The bifurcated engine spews steam, and Strickland pauses inside it. The heat of the Amazon, the leprous thrill, the warm viper squirm, the sweltering swirl of piranha, all of it picking him down to the hard, clean, sharp, efficient bone.
What’s that he sees at the other end of the alley beneath a moth-flickered light? A white van missing its front bumper, painted with the words MILICENT LAUNDRY. Strickland pushes from the scorching steam and grins, feeling a million hard darts of rain bouncing off his skull.
24
THEY SWAY AT the top of the fire escape, overweight with the creature between them. Elisa wears the quickest of coverings, her ratty pink bathrobe and the first shoes she saw, Julia’s silver-encrusted specials, which she grabbed like talismans, and sure enough she slips, her top half pitching over the guardrail. The creature, draped in a blanket that barely hides him, pulls her from the brink. Below, Elisa sees the Pug. Also below, a car wreck, a goliath green machine wedged between alley walls, blocking the Pug’s only exit path. Directly beneath them, out of view, she hears the knob of the Arcade Apartments being throttled, then the loud whacks of a shoe kicking the door, then a blast so loud all the raindrops freeze in place for one second, red light from the gunpowder flash transforming each drop into the blood of an expiring world.
The man’s footsteps race upstairs. Giles, in turn, pulls Elisa down the fire-escape stairs. Their descent is the opposite of their inchworm climb with the creature a week ago, a madcap scramble, feet slipping and bodies colliding. Elisa can only tuck her head into the creature’s neck and hold on to Giles’s sopping sweater. He leads them onward, fast, undaunted. His new hair is slicked to his head and the paintbrush in his breast pocket bleeds green through his shirt. Her heart, if punctured, would bleed green, too, she thinks.
They reach the alley with broken hearts, but not one broken bone.
“We’ll have to go on foot!” Giles cries over the downpour. “Just a few blocks! We can make it! No discussion! Go, go!”
The alley is its usual minefield of potholes. Elisa has never cared until now, when every other step plunges one of them shin-deep into oily water. There’s no time to unbuckle the silver heels. They progress like damaged pistons, one up, one down. It’s taking them far too long. Finally, they are at the crashed car, blinded by its headlights. Elisa crawls over the scrunched hood, then helps Giles hoist the creature. Giles is last, gathering the fallen blanket, wrapping it back around the creature, and shoving them onward. Elisa throws a look back at Mr. Arzounian, who gawks from the sidewalk, a hand pressed to his broken nose, perhaps believing that the strangest film he ever screened has come to life.
25
STRICKLAND SMELLS DEUS Brânquia. The memory floods back from the Amazon. The Gill-god’s scent of brine and fruit and silt. In Occam’s labs, antiseptic cleaners had blotted it out, and that had been a mistake. How stupid are humans to rob themselves of their most critical defensive sense? He knows who’s to blame. The janitors. Their soap, bleach, and ammonia weren’t wiping away the crud of this world. It was hiding a second world, an ascendant one, unless Strickland moves fast and puts an end to it.
Two apartment doors. He picks the first one. Doesn’t bother with hands or feet. He points the Beretta, fires at the knob. The door is of lousier quality than Delilah Brewster’s. The middle third of it disintegrates into sawdust. Strickland boots away the sharp-edged clingers and shoulders inside, gun raised, as prepared as he was at the bottom of the pile in Yeongdong to murder anything that breathes.
Deus Brânquia, colossal, beatific, resplendent, lords from the center of the cramped, dusty apartment. Strickland was wrong that he was ready. He isn’t. He screams, and falls to his knees, and fires, and screams, and fires, and screams. Bullets pass right through Deus Brânquia. The Gill-god doesn’t react. The gun goes hot in Strickland’s hands. His arms tremble from the discharges. He throws himself back against the wall and covers his face. Deus Brânquia gazes down at him, patient and unchanged.
Strickland wipes rain from his eyes, begins to understand. This Deus Brânquia isn’t real. Not in the sense of a thing that he can kill. It’s a painting. Bigger than life, disorienting in detail. It is Deus Brânquia, somehow, as if painted with Deus Brânquia’s blood and scales upon a rock dredged from Deus Brânquia’s grotto. Strickland angles his head and the picture of the Gill-god seems to lift its arms, offering embrace. Some kind of visual trick. Strickland rejects the memory. It barges in anyway. His chasing of Deus Brânquia to the fateful bayou. His cornering of it in a cave. How it had reached out to Strickland, accepting his violence, anger, and confusion, understanding the obligation Strickland felt to the god he called General Hoyt. Strickland, in reply, had harpooned Deus Brânquia. Until now, he’d never noticed that he’d impaled himself on the harpoon’s other end, binding the two of them forever, wound to wound.
26
ELISA CAN’T DENY that it is a form of miracle. The night she has no choice but to walk in public with the creature at her side is a night so brutally beset by sheeting rain that the streets are empty. Rogue automobiles idle in parking lots, drivers hoping to wait out a storm that they must suspect won’t ever end. Woeful loners huddle under bus-station carapaces or store awnings watching the water rise ever higher over their shoes. The sidewalks are impassable, so Elisa and Giles walk along the highest available ground, the center of the road, the creature supported between them, his gills opened to the rain.