She pulled it out and stabbed it into the ropy limb that was dragging Jackie away from her. The limb slackened.
Diane stepped forward against every instinct and shoved her arm between it and Jackie’s neck. She pulled as hard as she could, and Jackie wriggled frantically. It seemed that even with Diane pulling, the gap was not nearly big enough for Jackie to escape, but the limb was so slimy with its toxic substance (now burning through Diane’s jacket) that Jackie was able to slip her head out.
They stumbled backwards. Jackie’s neck and face were a mess of purple blotches, and she was sweating hard through her clothes. Still she remembered to scoop the King City box back off the floor. Diane took off her rapidly dissolving jacket and tossed it to the ground. The librarian’s limb recoiled, curled back into the massive body, then shot out at them again.
As they ducked and ran down a parallel aisle, Diane saw, through the gaps between the books, the librarian emerge from the shadows. She saw, exactly and in full, what a librarian looked like. Her stomach lurched.
She would not forget the sight, recurring in dreams and panic attacks, until the moment she died, at which point she would forget it. Eventually, on the day she finally died, one of things that ran through her mind was: Well, at least I won’t have to remember that anymore. It made her happy, and she died smiling.
But that was much later.
Jackie did her best to keep up with Diane. She was younger and faster, but the poison was coursing through her. Her gait was unsteady, and she hissed hard through clenched teeth.
They tore through the fiction section, and into biographies. Helen Hunt’s face was completely gone, replaced by a gaping mouth, distended from chin to hairline, a buzz of gray rushing at them from its depths.
Then the shelves ran out and there was only space. Ahead was the wide open reading room. A death trap. The moment they stepped out into that, every librarian would see them, and then it would be over. They turned to look, and that white, ropy limb was hissing toward them, leaving a thick, oily trail on the carpet.
They looked at each other. Jackie leaned on Diane’s arm, struggling a bit now with standing up.
“We can do this,” Jackie said. “Just move before you can think about consequences.”
Diane nodded, and they ran as thoughtlessly as they could manage into the reading area. There was a bellow from all around them, and more of the white limbs seethed out of the floor and the shelves. Bulbous shapes loomed at them from the ceiling. The librarians had all come out to greet them.
The skittering of hundreds of spindly legs. A buzzing. Red eyes, maybe, or red spots or blood squirted into the air. There were primary jaws and secondary jaws and tertiary vestigial jaws, and each of them turned to two women running toward the exit.
They couldn’t run straight because of the broken fountain, and so they curved around it. Jackie, even with her body weakening, had found a reckless energy inside and was running faster. Diane was gasping and slowing, cursing years of intended workouts that had never happened. The younger woman took her by the shoulders and pushed her ahead. They became a four-legged animal of escape. Fangs and stingers and those boneless white limbs slapped the tile of the fountain just behind them. There was buzzing all around.
To the left was the reference section. Jackie didn’t look, but she could hear whatever had been in the shadows rushing out at them. Then the checkout area. The return slot’s lid was lifting up, a tentacle-like tongue, or tongue-like tentacle, glopping out of it like sludge.
There was a roaring, incoherent voice. It sounded like the entire building, the walls and floors and metal skeleton of its structure, telling them they would die.
Diane watched the front doors of the library approach, and the boneless limbs of the librarians worked their way in and through the handles, shutting the doors with their bodies.
They weren’t going to make it.
“We’re not going to make it,” Diane said.
“We’ll make it.”
Jackie turned her shoulder forward, putting her entire flung weight into the glass doors and the poisonous limbs. Broken glass and toxic librarian blood spat out onto the tiles of the entrance corridor. Jackie landed in a pile of the glass and a puddle of the gray ooze. Diane ran through the resulting hole and scooped Jackie up. She was so light, really.
They were out of the foyer, out into the empty parking lot. The building behind them expanded and then came back together with a humf. They turned, but nothing was pursuing them. The front doors were unbroken, and there was no sign of any creatures. It was quiet and waiting once again.
Jackie gasped as much air as she could into her throbbing lungs. Her legs were shaking, but she was standing.
“I said we would make it. Who was right?” Jackie said at the ground, bent in two. “Who was right?”
“Are you okay? Do you have any glass in you?”
“A little bit, man, but I’m okay.”
Diane smiled at Jackie. After a moment, Jackie smiled back. Then they started laughing. They couldn’t stop. They stood and leaned into each other and laughed. Jackie was still covered in purple blotches and pouring sweat, but they laughed about that too.
“You were right,” said Diane. “You were right. Oh my god, we’re actually alive, aren’t we?”
Jackie waved it off.
“More important, we have answers.” Jackie nodded to the box in her hand and the folder in Diane’s. “I mean, god, I hope we have answers.”
Diane nodded and sighed. The sigh held neither despair nor relief, only air. “Guess back to dealing with this mess now.”
“Guess so,” Jackie said.
Jackie looked at her car and Diane looked at the sidewalk, and they both almost walked away.
“Hey,” said Diane. “Do you want to look at this stuff together? Just see if there’s anything we can both learn from it?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Jackie, still looking at her car. “That’d be cool, I guess.”
Diane put her arm around Jackie’s shoulder to help her to the car, but her energy was almost gone in the panic of having nearly orphaned Josh, so Jackie put an arm around Diane. Limping, but moving, they carried one another away from the library.
Chapter 29
The shoe box marked KING CITY had a book and a small stack of newspaper articles. The book was called Fun Facts and Anecdotes Related to King City and Environs. It was written by noted actor and civic historian Harrison Ford. It was cheaply made, and even a skim of its contents indicated a lack of careful copyediting and layout in its production.
Jackie flipped open to somewhere in the middle.
King City Fact #1061
Did you know? King City is the only city in California to have had a mayor right from its very founding. It has never gone a second without a mayor. It has always had one!
Again.
King City Fact #702
The fad of playing “Dark Side of the Moon” over “Wizard of Oz” was popularized by King City’s own George Taylor Morris.
Again.
King City Fact #986
We have the most oranges.
“What the hell?” she said, flipping faster through the useless book. “I almost died for this?”
King City Fact #3