Andi nodded. “Are they all here now?”
Tyler looked around, not randomly but with the gaze of somebody who was assessing his surroundings. George felt a cold shudder racing down his spine.
“Only TJ and Ben are missing. They rarely come to play. I don’t know why. TJ knows great games.”
“Okay. You stay here.” Andi approached the shelf, his eyes already with that faraway look that meant he was conferring with his tiny informants. He lifted his hands, his fingers caressing the section where the sewing machine was placed. There was a softclick, and then Andi grabbed the wood and swung part of the shelf toward himself. George stood left of him and had a great view of the darkness behind the shelf-door, and also the doubtful pleasure of getting a lungful ofeau de mortwhen the air from the room rushed out. Coughing, he took a lamp from a nearby smaller table before he followed Andi through the door.
The air was not only more pungent, but also damper, the ground not concrete as in the rest of the underground lair but soil that was suspiciously loose for a room in a prepper bunker. The whole space was roughly forty feet long and a little less broad, and judging from the rotting timber holding the ceiling up—which was also hardened soil mixed with long streaks of rock, probably connected to the boulder outside—George was inclined to say this room had been added to the bunker after it was built. If his sense of direction wasn’t leading him astray, it was located behind the visible part of the boulder, where the trees were standing closer together. The ground had to be rocky here; otherwise building the bunker would have been impossible to begin with. The swamp was too close to keep it dry.
“Food, food, eat, prey, need more, hatching, changing,gurgle,tlk, tlk, tlk, ssht, ssht, so full, pupae, down, just bones, rotting away,cht, cht, krt, here, dig here, there’s the food, need it, more, more, MORE!”
George saw Andi going down on his knees, and for the first time he really looked at the ground, didn’t just register it for the softness beneath his boots, and he cried out. It was moving. Crawling. Like a living carpet, the soil quivering, flashes of silver and brown and white in the gloom of the lamp, his partner down, tiny bodies swarming his hands, hastening up his sleeves, as if they were welcoming him, surging around him, and George knew he had to get him out. Andi was so still, making soft clicking noises, and now that he was listening closely, George could hear it: the scraping of chitin on earth and stone and skin, a low hum that was even more eerie because he knew what it meant, thousands of mandibles tearing away flesh. The scent was there as well, still a solid presence, although he had gotten used to it by now, fate of the detective, George guessed. The corpses were under the earth, the mixture of rotting flesh and soil scraping at the back of his nose, something familiar he would recognize anywhere. This was really bad. George knew a serial killer case this big would make national news, and he and Andi would be smack in the middle of it. Just thinking about the strain this was going to put on Andi made George wish they hadn’t found Tyler. It was a fleeting thought—of course finding the boy was important—and he felt bad about being so egoistical, even though he knew it was justified. A small heaving sound brought George back into the here and now, where he had to take care of a partner who was overcome by sensory input.
Shuddering, George fought the urge to just stamp down in order to kill as many arthropods as possible and get the hell out of this chamber of death. Instead he took another step forward, to grab Andi at the scruff of his neck and yank him up. His partner didn’t fight back; he was pliant, lifeless, as George dragged him out of the secret room back into the one where Tyler was waiting, watching them with huge eyes.
3. Dancing on Glass
“IS HEall right?”
All right… those were words, not sensations, not the hunger gnawing at his insides, not the urge to dig and feed and procreate and spin a cocoon and turn liquid and become something new in the remnants of something dead; the something dead was a human body, important, killed, he knew that, what did “killed” mean, he needed to eat, so delicious, the temperature just right for the eggs to hatch that much faster, though how he knew what faster meant, he didn’t know, the word resonated in his head, there were too many of them, too much input, too concentrated, he had to get back, back to the waves on the beach, the breathing, slow and steady, his walls were there, offering protection, he was coming back, crawling out of the turf, clutching at the warmth of the hand offered to him, he needed to be there, it was too important not to be, George, yes, George was here, Andi was back.
“I think I’m fine. Mostly.” He forced a smile for Tyler before he turned to George, wholookedat him, his hazel eyes full of concern. “I’m sorry. There were too many, and when we entered—I thought I could control it, but they’re so hungry. It was too overwhelming.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” George was still holding his hands, grounding him, giving him a connection to the reality of the blobs, of humans, of his kind. He looked down where their skin met, saw an ant crawling over his wrist—
Salt and different pheromones, not the way to the nest, not from the colony, far from it, a wide expanse of warmth vibrating under his legs—
And his perception shifted into an endless line of mirrors, each showing him and the ant, the ant and him; he had six legs and two arms, couldn’t use either because was he Andi looking at the ant or the ant experiencing the blob it was crawling over, the soft thumping of his pulse indicating unsteady ground even though it was firm, in a way, warm, no prey, though, obstacles, thin and wiry; he had to be careful not to get caught; it tickled, so strange, being tangled up and being the tangling—
George bent forward and blew on the ant, sending it to the ground where it lay stunned for a moment before it went back toward the shelf, the door into that monstrous room where so many were resting, too many for such a small space, really, partly layered, the bones mixing, the fluids of the rotting flesh seeping into the remains of the ones that had come before; this was bad, a serial killer, for sure.
“Izzy says you’re all fractured.” Tyler, who looked at him with a similar concern in his eyes as what George always showed.
“Izzy is right.” That didn’t seem to reassure the boy. Andi looked at George, who didn’t seem to know what to say either. He wasn’t used to dealing with young people. It was tedious, he decided. “There are a lot of arthropods down here. And I’m all of them.”
“Ah, I see.” Strangely enough, Tyler seemed to understand. Then again, he was seeing ghosts. That surely helped him with perspective.
George put his arm around Andi’s shoulders, always so generous with his warmth.
“I think I heard something above. We have to come up with a good explanation as to how we found Tyler so quickly. Not to mention the room.” He indicated his chin in the direction of the shelf.
Andi groaned. Plausibility. The bane of his existence.
“The room is easy. The shelf was a little off the wall, and we’re detectives and therefore nosy by nature. Hell, the ground in there is practically moving, not to mention the smell. We all know what that means.”
“Yes. That fits.” George turned to Tyler. “Now how did we know to look for him here?”
“Fuck.” Andi rubbed his face with both hands. When he had gotten the first glimpse of Tyler in the minds of the arthropods—it had been easy, the only boy in the vicinity, moving away from the chief’s house—all he had thought of was finding him. Now he regretted his eagerness. They should have made a show of inspecting his room and the house, even though he would have had to interact with the chief then.
“Uhm, could I have lost this?” Tyler was holding a lunchbox made of metal in front of them. Andi cocked his head. It showed Harley Quinn in all her mad glory with her pigtails and her baseball bat, and it was shiny, something that could have reflected the sparse sunlight and caught his attention from the car.
“George, what do you think?”
“It’s flimsy but better than nothing. Can I see?”
He took the box from Tyler, weighed it in his hands before he opened it. “It’s still full. That’s good.”
“Yes. Makes it believable that Tyler lost it on the way here. But how plausible is it for Tyler to not notice it being gone? Or falling out? And how did we determine which way to go?”
