“What about Hynde? Can we, like, do anything?”
“Not much. Why? You guys friends?”
Yes, damnit, Goss wanted to snap, but he was pretty sure she had lie-dar to go with her Seven-dar. “There’s...not really a show, without him,” was all he said, finally.
“All right, well—he’s pretty good and got, at this point, so. I’d keep him sedated, restrained if I could, and wait, see who else shows up: there’s six more to go, after all.”
“What happens if they all show up?”
“All Seven? Then we’re fucked, basically, as a species. Stuck back together, the Maskim are a load-bearing boss the likes of which this world was not designed to contain, and the vector they form in proximity, well—it’s like putting too much weight on a sheet of...something. Do it long enough, it rips wide open.”
“What rips?”
“The crap you think? Everything.”
There was a sort of jump-cut, and Goss found himself tagging along beside her as Camberwell strode back up the passageway, listening to her tell him: “Important point about Hynde, as of right now, is to make sure he doesn’t start doin’ stuff to himself.”
“...Like?”
“Well—”
As she said it, though, there came a scream-led general uproar up in front, making them both break into a run. They tumbled back into the light-sticks’ circular glow to find Journee contorted on the ground with her heels drumming, chewing at her own lips—everybody else had already shrunk back, eyes and mouths covered like it was catching, save for big, stupid ‘Lij, who was trying his level best to pry her jaws apart and thrust his folding pocket spork in between. Goss darted forward to grab one arm, Camberwell the other, but Journee used the leverage to flip back up onto her feet, throwing them both off against the walls. She looked straight at Camberwell, spit blood and grinned wide, as though she recognized her: oh, it’s you. How do, buddy? Welcome to the main event.
Then reached back into her own sides, fingers plunging straight down through flesh to grip bone—ripped her red ribs wide, whole back opening up like that meat-book Camberwell’d mentioned and both lungs flopping out, way too large for comfort: two dirty grey-pink balloons breathing and growing, already disgustingly over-swollen yet inflating even further, like mammoth water wings.
The pain of it made her roar and jack-knife, vomiting on her own feet. And when Journee looked up once more, horrid grin trailing yellow sick-strings, Goss saw she now had a sigil of her own embossed on her forehead, fresh as some stomped-in bone-bruise.
“The Terrible Zemyel,” Camberwell said, to no one in particular. “Who desecrates the faithful.”
And: “God!” Somebody else—Lao?—could be heard to sob, behind them. But: “Fuck Him,” Journee rasped back, throwing the tarp pinned ‘cross the permanently open doorway wide and taking impossibly off up into the storm with a single flap, blood splattering everywhere, a foul red spindrift.
‘Lij slapped both hands up to seal his mouth, retching loudly; Katz fell on his ass, hind-skull colliding with the wall’s sharp surface, so hard he knocked himself out. Lao continued to sob-pray on, mindless, while e
verybody else just stared. And Goss found himself looking over at Camberwell, automatically, only to catch her nodding—just once, like she’d seen it coming.
“—Like that, basically,” she concluded, without a shred of surprise.
—
Five minutes at most, but it felt like an hour: things narrowed, got treacly, in that accident-in-progress way. outside, the dust had thickened into its own artificial night; they could hear the thing inside Journee swooping high above it, laughing like a loon, yelling raucous insults at the sky. The other two drivers had never come back, lost in the storm; Katz crawled away and tore at the floor with his hands, badger-style, like he wanted to bury himself alive head-first. Lao wept and wept. ‘Lij came feeling towards Camberwell and Goss as the glow-sticks dimmed, almost clambering over Hynde, whose breathing had sunk so low his chest barely seemed to move. “Gotta do something, man,” he told them, like he was the first one ever to have that particular thought. “Something. Y’know? Before it’s too late.”
“It was too late when we got here,” Goss heard himself reply—again, not what he’d thought he was going to say when he’d opened his mouth. His tongue felt suddenly hot, inside of his mouth gone all itchy, swollen tight; strep? Tonsillitis? Jesus, if he could only reach back in there and scratch...
And Camberwell was looking at him sidelong now, with interest, though ‘Lij just continued on blissfully unaware of anything, aside from his own worries. “Look, fuck that shit,” he said, before asking her: “Can we get to the trucks?”
She shook her head. “No driving in this weather, even if we did. You ever raise anybody, or did the mics crap out too?”
“Uh, I don’t think so; caught somebody talkin’ in Arabic one time, close-ish, but it sounded military, so I rung off real quick. Something about containment protocol.”
Goss: “What?”
“Well, I thought maybe that was ‘cause they were doing minefield sweeps, or whatever—”
“When was this?”
“...Fifteen minutes ago, when you guys were still down there, ‘bout the time the storm went mega. Why?”
Goss opened his mouth again, but Camberwell was already bolting up, grabbing both Katz and Hynde at once by their shirt-collars, ready to heave and drag. The wind’s whistle had taken on a weird, sharp edge, an atonal descending keen, so loud Goss could barely hear her—though he sure as hell saw her lips move, read them with widening, horrified eyes, at almost the same split-second he found himself turning, already in mid-leap towards the descending passage—