Ken was worried he wouldn’t be able to. But only with part of his mind. The other part of him saw the thing again. Saw it and saw that strange bulge around the creature’s hips.
He realized what it was. Realized what was wrapped around the thing.
He felt fear bloom anew, panic flowering with blossoms that matched the sparks that burst into being whenever the thing cut through the floor, whenever metal fell to earth and was crushed.
“No,” he whispered. “Nonononononono….”
20
Aaron was still stabbing down, running back and forth between the two holes in the bus like he was playing the world’s strangest game of Whack-A-Mole.
Christopher held the axe, the one that said “Cass” in thick red letters. Screaming at Aaron to “get it kill it get it man get it kill it!”
Maggie and Buck still pressed on opposite sides of the bus, feet up on the seats they occupied so they sat sideways directly across from one another. They held their silent burdens tightly, so tightly Ken wondered how the little girls could breathe.
He wondered if his daughters needed to anymore. They were changing. Becoming….
What?
Sally roved restlessly, back still arched, now in the aisle, now perched atop the metal bars that ran along the tops of the seats. Ken often wondered about those bars, often thought that in a bus meant to ferry children from place to place they could have come up with something softer and safer than a bare iron bar right at the spot a kid’s face would hit in case of a front impact.
The driver, their mysterious savior with the raw voice, still struggled to keep the bus on the road while at the same time avoiding the debris field that had been left when the world fell apart.
The wheels on the bus kept turning.
Ken saw it all. Saw it, registered it in some peripheral portion of his mind.
But mostly he was watching through the holes. Looking at the thing. Replaying what he had just seen. Figuring out what it meant.
When Derek came home from the hospital two days after his birth, he was so small. And Ken and Maggie, first-time parents, still hadn’t learned how tough babies really were. He seemed so tender, so fragile. The soft spot at the top of his head where the skull bones still hadn’t fused occasionally pulsed, as though he was destined –
(to die to fall and die and then rise again but not as a man from heaven but a demon from Hell, oh Derek why couldn’t you just have died)
– to have thoughts that would change the world. But looking at that slight bounce, the drum beat of his life overlaid on the nearly unprotected surface of his brain, how could Ken and Maggie help but think he might break, might just shatter like finest crystal left from a long gone age?
Changing diapers was the worst at first. Derek had been circumcised, and it didn’t matter that the doctors said he’d heal up quickly and there wouldn’t be any lasting ill effects. Looking at him, seeing a piece of gauze over his crotch – a piece of gauze that was stained through with blood and Vaseline and then plastered down with liberal amounts of urine and fecal matter – Ken always shuddered. Wondered if his baby would be the first kid in recorded history to lose his wiener to poop-infection.
It got so he hated the mere sight of diapers.
Eventually he got over it. Eventually he even got to the point that he enjoyed changing diapers. Enjoyed the bonding it provided. Though he could have done without the time he learned the hard way that little boys could pee straight up and if you didn’t do some strategic pre-aiming a good deal of that pee was liable to go right in your mouth.
Still, for a while there the mere sight of a diaper was enough to put Ken into a strange version of a PTSD attack. Just seeing a picture of Elmo – who figured large on all Derek’s diapers – was enough to start him sweating.
That was probably why he saw what he did; and not only saw, but understood.
The child-thing, the baby-thing below the bus, the monster that was trying to pull the entire vehicle apart from the bottom up, had a strange bulge around its center. Flesh-colored, scabbed partially over the same way that the rest of its body was starting to scab. Sores wept dark fluid from part of the fleshy growth, while other parts of it seemed perfect and unblemished.
In fact, one part was so perfectly unmarked that Ken could see the design.
Could see Elmo, mouth open, big eyes wide and staring the way they always were. And the whole thing coated by a translucent film of flesh.
The child/infant/creature had Changed wearing a diaper. And whatever had caused the Change was causing the thing to integrate the material into itself. To make what was outside inside.
Ken looked at his arm. He saw a half-circle where he had been bitten by one of the things. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t Changed.
Why?
And if he had, would he now be slowly growing a gauzy membrane over his clothing?
And then…?
He didn’t know.