She can barely walk under the soaked housecoat. Giles, though revived in spirit, is still old. They are not going quickly enough. The man in the Arcade Apartments will catch them. Elisa throws a look behind her, waiting to hear the crunch of the ruined Cadillac rolling after them like a tank or see Richard Strickland part curtains of rain, grinning lazily, saying to her, once again: I bet I could make you squawk. Just a little?
If not Strickland, some good citizen will approach to help, and all will be lost just the same. Elisa looks about frantically, hair spitting rain. One more miracle is all they need. An abandoned car with the keys in the ignition, a maniac bus driver still running his route. Elisa starts signing to Giles: “Too slow.” He isn’t looking. She reaches past the creature, drags the sign across Giles’s arm. He pats her hand, but it’s not a response. He’s trying to get her attention. He pulls to a sudden halt. The creature pitches, and Elisa nearly topples in her silver heels. Stopping is a terrible idea; she glares at Giles. But he is staring at the curb, eyes wide open against the downpour.
To their right, a dark mass gathers in the gutter. Mud, Elisa thinks, coughed up by inundated sewers. But the mass is moving. Swimming through cascades of rain. Scrabbling over wet pavement. Elisa identifies the creatures with a dull shock. Rats, pouring out of the flooded sewers. Far off, a horrified observer screams. The rats tussle past one another, pink tails twitching, spreading across the road like tar, wet pelts winking in the streetlights. Elisa looks left and it’s the same, a black ripple of rodents. She feels Giles clutch at her hand and she holds her breath as the rats encircle them. The madness intensifies: The rats stop en masse, holding a five-foot distance, black eyes staring, noses twitching. Hundreds now, waiting for a signal.
“I confess, my dear,” Giles says, “I do not know what to do.”
Elisa feels the creature stir from beneath the soaked blanket. A single huge, taloned hand emerges, and though his body heaves in a struggle for breath, the hand is steady. It makes a smooth, curling gesture, a benediction, the rain gathering in his scaled palm. The field of soaked rats undulate in a collective shiver, one small body to the next, and a strange scritching noise rises to compete with the beat of rain. It is the scrape, Elisa realizes, of a thousand minuscule legs backpedaling across pavement. She wipes rain from her eyes, but there is no mistaking it.
The rats are parting, creating a path to let them pass.
The creature drops his hand and slumps so heavily that Elisa and Giles have to snap together to keep him from collapsing.
“‘It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast,’” Giles quotes, his voice trembling. “W. C. Fields.” He swallows, nods at the road ahead. “Together, then, we go. Into the fray.”
27
MOLTEN TEARS BLAZE down Strickland’s face, already burned from the Caddy’s steam. He will not become a human again. Changing would be crawling back into the womb, voiding his whole history, confessing to a purposeless life. Impossible, no matter how badly he might want it. The monkeys shriek and he does what they say, forcing himself to look at Deus Brânquia. Mere paint, mere canvas. He stands, finds equilibrium. Yes, that’s right. If he has to, he’ll yank off another two fingers, a whole arm, his own head, anything to see the blood flow and prove which one of them is real.
Strickland passes through the splintered door into a hallway uproarious with rain, and faces the second apartment. Best to save bullets. Six or seven kicks and he’s inside. It’s worse than Lainie’s unpacked boxes. It’s a slovenly hole fit for vermin. That’s all Elisa Esposito is. The second the Negro told him how Elisa had been raised in an orphanage, he should have known. No one has ever, will ever, or should ever want her.
He follows her smell into a cluttered bedroom. The wall over the bed is covered with shoes, many of which, to his shame, he recognizes. His cock responds, and he wants to rip it off the same as he did his fingers. Maybe later, when he comes back to watch the whole building burn. Deus Brânquia’s smell is thick here, too. He hurries to the bathroom, finds a tub varnished in luminous scales. Little air-freshener trees cover every inch of wall. What in the holy hell happened here? The idea he’s beginning to form disgusts him.
Strickland teeters into the main room. His vision spirals. They’re not here. Somehow the asset got away. The Beretta grows heavy in his hand. It pulls him to the right, to the right, in one circle, then another. He’s spinning. The detritus of Elisa’s world, the world he once wanted, swirls into an ugly brown. He glimpses something, has just enough sense left to notice it. He has to jam the gun against a rattletrap table to halt the nauseating rotations.
A day-by-day calendar. Inked across today’s date are the words MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS. Strickland checks the clock above the table. Not quite twelve. There’s still time. Still time if he can stop spinning, if he can run in a straight line. He snatches a phone from its cradle on the table, dials with a finger that looks long and insectile next to its missing brethren. Fleming picks up. Strickland tries to tell him to divert the containment crew, coming all the way from Occam, to the docks just down the street. He can’t tell if his instruction succeeds. His voice no longer sounds like his own.
“****** ******** ** *** *****! ******* **** *** ******! ***, ***, ***!”
28
THE RATS WERE all she noted at first because they so outnumbered the rest. By the time she sets her foot on the jetty, her dazed eyes have accepted other subterrestrial dwellers among the palpitating legion, predators and prey alongside one another in a cross-species peace that imitates that of Elisa and the creature. Matted squirrels, red-eyed rabbits, ponderous raccoons, sewage-stained foxes, bounding frogs, scampering lizards, glissading snakes, and, squirming beneath them all, a layer of worms, centipedes, and slugs. Insects churn above the rolling rodentia, a black stripe that persists even through the driving rain. On the periphery, overland animals have begun to arrive, too. Dogs, cats, ducks, a single mysterious pig, drawn forth as if to bow before a god that they, in their beastly hearts, had always awaited.
The animals peel from the jetty to let the trio pass. The pier is as short as Elisa remembers, maybe forty feet, though that is plenty. The thirty-foot depth mark has been far surpassed; only the top of the stanchion is visible. The river level is mere inches below the jetty and it bucks in the storm, spilling across the planks. Here it is, then. All elements are aligned. Yet Elisa stands still, rain drilling into her flesh. Her breaths come in scraping jags; she realizes that they resemble the creature’s labored pull of air through his flapping gills. She feels a hand on her wet back.
“Hurry,” Giles whispers.
She cries, but so does the sky; the whole universe sobs, the people and animals and land and water, all weeping for a unity nearly sealed between two divergent worlds, but that could not, in the end, be sustained. Elisa’s arms dangle at her sides and she feels the cool, damp scales of the creature’s hand slide against hers. They are holding hands. For one final time, they are joined. Elisa looks at his beautiful face through the prison bars of rain. Great onyx eyes gaze back, betraying no inclination to take to water, despite how the absence will kill him. He will stand here forever if that’s what she wants.