Page 128 of A Better World

They kept going through to a solarium with a ceiling made of mirrors. The next room let out to an unexpected place: the stairwell leading down, down, down, to the reactor. The showstopper.

“Now where?” she croaked, wringing her sticky, wet hands. Then came a wild and hurtling sound that echoed. She could hear a man’s keening, his large body slamming against walls as it tracked them, following light.

Keith Parson came crashing through the doorway. He’d shoved his eyes back into their sockets, but they moved out of synchronicity. He panted, his fingers and lips cyanotic blue, his face bloody and red. She’d seen this before in people right before they died, though she hadn’t expected it now, when Keith had been so badly hurt. Though his pursuit was unwelcome, it at least meant that Hip would not have to carry the burden of having dealt a death blow.

Semiblind and coursing with adrenaline, Keith swung at the air with the indignant fury of a young man whose time has prematurely run out. They were cornered. Josie raced down the clanging metal stairs, so Linda and Hip followed. Flinging blood, shrieking animal sounds of fury, Keith held to the railing.

They had a lead but lost it. Keith jumped from stairwell to stairwell; even as he landed wrong, crunching his ankle, slamming his knees, he seemed to feel no pain.

Down, down, down. This was all so awful that her mind wandered.She thought of the disrobed people in that room, their feet wet with Russell’s blood. She thought of all the plans and jokes and routines. The sides of the bed they slept on, the way she liked to doze while he drove. She thought of all the ways that life gets complicated when lives are intertwined, in ways that are impossible to explain except for the people living inside the tangle.

They got to the bottom—the reactor.

The machine was composed of networks of giant metal barrels connected by more metal tubing. These groaned and ticked in a way that seemed wrong and that she had not witnessed on the last visit. Heat came off the center of the thing in blurry waves.

Keith threw his machete to the landing, then jumped the last set of stairs. She was out of breath and in too much shock to come up with a better plan. She grabbed the knife by the dull end, threw it aside. In her peripheral vision, Hip and Josie hustled for it.

Keith’s costume was torn, revealing the pink-skinned man beneath. There was something tender in that pink—a human trapped under monster skin. Panting, wheezing, he stayed squatting, even as he struggled to stand. Closer now, she saw that his head was hemorrhaging blood in pulsing, heartbeat waves. He wobbled, landing on his bottom.

Linda came forward. How much he saw, she couldn’t guess. “Please,” he whispered. “Help.” Then, slowly, like something unwinding, he lay down on his back.

Linda felt his carotid artery. No flow. His blue fingers curled again and finally into stiff claws. His mouth opened and locked.

She pulled away his hood, a sleek Omnium material. She could see his sickly, once pleasant face. Full lips and small eyes. The end of the Parson line.

There were hands by her side. The kids. No one was ready yet to hug. You can’t hug when you’re that full of adrenaline. They stood over the body, not seeing that body, but thinking of Russell’s body.

How much time passed? Seconds? Minutes?

“Hello?” a voice asked.

They all three jumped. Between a coil composed of hundreds of rods and its attached metal barrels came Percy Khoury.

“This is the Beltane King?” he asked. His expression bore that same stunted fury as the first time she’d met him, way back on the soccer field in early September. Careless of the blood, he twisted the neck of Keith’s limp body to see his face. “You got him?”

Had they gotten him? It was hard to remember that far. Hard to think about anything except Russell on the floor.

Percy didn’t wipe his hands clean after touching the body, but stuck three fingers into his mouth and blew, loud and whistling. The sound was primal. It resonated, its meaning clear:Come here, pet. I have something for you.Linda and the kids backed away. She knew, even though, if asked, she wouldn’t have had the words to explain. You know some things on a deeper, wilder level, in a place without logic.

They heard rumbling. She remembered the thing in the dark with its knowing eyes. The sound was a kind of scuffling, feathery lumber, and she knew:itwas coming.

Muscles shaking, bodies heaving, the family formerly known as the Farmer-Bowens did not have it in them to run.

Out from a crevice of the reactor lumbered the thing she’d imagined, and dreamed about, and feared: the great white caladrius. It was real, after all.

The size of a large and awkward man, it picked its way toward the stairs and crouched over Keith’s body. It nosed against his belly, the gesture almost loving, nudging him to wake up. Then, with sharp teeth, it tore open his trunk from groin to chest and began to eat.

The twins turned away. She watched. She needed to see. It left the skin and ate only from the insides. This included the bones. Then came two more giant caladrius and they, too, began to eat. She saw now that whatever personality she’d imagined for this species from tending Sunny was a projection. They were a mindless tide of dirty white predators drawn to the fresh smell of blood.

They hunkered, obscuring Keith’s carcass. She saw only cellar-filthy feathers that would never fly.

“He had that coming,” said Percy Khoury, the mad soccer dad without a child. “But don’t worry. They’re sneaky poopers. They won’t go after big game like humans. Just carrion.”

“What are you doing down here?” Linda asked, soft to avoid the attention of the creatures.

He wore that same outfit he’d been wearing when she’d first met him, his belly revealed under a loose, unbuttoned trench coat. She noticed, too, that his tool belt was now open and spread across the floor: big, specialized drills and coils and saws.

Percy’s eyes lit up. “God came to me. He told me to rain down the fire. I’m vengeance.” Then he put his finger vertical to his lips: “Shhh.”

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