American Elsewhere

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO




Mona has to break in to enter the store of her choice—a picture frame shop—and she heads straight to the back. With each boom the pictures rattle on the walls and resettle at new angles. She knows she should feel terrified, but after giving up her daughter, everything’s on mute.

She grabs a mirror off the wall as well as a thin drape, one that’s see-through. She takes the stairs in the back to the roof, and though she stays low she can see the hulking form of the giant kicking its way through Wink. Pipes and bricks and streetlamps fly around its feet like shrapnel.

“F*ck,” says Mona. It will be here even sooner than she imagined.

She can see Parson standing in the park in the center of town, and in his arms… “Oh, Jesus,” says Mona. Her daughter is hysterical, screaming at the top of her lungs. It’ll just be a little bit, baby. Just a little bit. Just hold on.

She takes the mirror and wraps the drape around it so it will not cause any noticeable glare, though she can still see its reflection. Then she props it up against an air-conditioning unit on the eastern side of the building, so the mirror faces the town square, where the courthouse and the park are.

Once she has it situated, she lies down perpendicular to the edge of the building, hidden from the street behind a short wall about two feet high. If she looks straight down along her body she can see the mirror, and in its reflection what is just over the wall behind her: right now there is nothing but more shop fronts, trees, and the pink water tower that just says WINK.

Good. This works. Now she sits up to see if the rest of this stupid idea of hers is going to.

Parson and her daughter are still standing in the park. Her daughter’s face is flaming red, just utterly beet-red.

The earth shakes. The giant is eight blocks away now.

It is huge. Tremendous. So big Mona cannot even understand what she’s seeing. With another step, it’s six blocks away.

The streets below begin to crack, like fibers of a net unable to contain their catch.

Mona looks to the mesa. She hopes Gracie is ready, because it needs to be…

“Now,” whispers Mona. “Now. Now.”

Does she imagine a glimmer of light on the mountain? Maybe reflected from a tiny surface…

Parson and her daughter grow slightly translucent. Then with no warning, they vanish.

The giant stops in its tracks.

Mona drops to lie flat on the roof of the building.


There is no sound but the buzzing that echoes across Wink. Mona imagines the giant standing there, wondering exactly what the hell happened. Because after all, She’d imagine that with First gone, so went all the real threats in Wink…

The earth shakes, but much more softly, much more slowly—a hesitant step. Mona can hear roads and buildings cracking behind her like icebergs in the Arctic.

Mona quietly eases the bolt of the rifle up and checks the chamber: a glint of gold winks back at her. She reaches into her pocket and sets the five or so shells still there on the ground beside her. Ideally she won’t need them: if Parson was right, this will take only one shot.

Then two incredibly loud steps, very fast and very close. Mother must have realized the baby is on the mesa, near Coburn and the lens. Mona imagines Her terror as She wonders if someone in Wink knows something She doesn’t, and if there is some secret to the lens that might reverse all this. Could they know? Could they possibly know?

The roof of the building starts going dark, as if in an eclipse. But Mona knows better. It’s Her shadow.

The trees quiver madly. The glass in a nearby building quakes, buckles, shatters. Shards make a twinkling rain on the sidewalk below. The giant must be so close…

Then the mirror goes dark with a sea of black, pockmarked flesh. Right outside the park.

Now.

Mona springs up, wheels around, and brings the rifle up, the jittering optic bewildered by the sight of such huge, sprinting legs, and then…

The booms stop.

Mona puts the optic square on her target. She considers the distance, the wind… yet it doesn’t really matter, because it’s such a huge target…

But the giant has stopped. It is turning around.

Mona becomes aware of two huge lamplight eyes looking down on her.

She begins tightening her trigger finger.

Time seems to slow down, and the next few events take place in what must be a millisecond:

Mona thinks: It can’t have seen me. It can’t.

(But is Mona not that creature’s daughter? Perhaps the giant can sense her just as it can Mona’s own daughter. Maybe it always knew she was there, waiting. And now it begins to suspect…)

The giant’s hand twitches.

There is a crackle in the air.

A scent of ozone. A burst of white.

And, somewhere, the echoing sounds of distant thunder.


Parson sees the lightning bolt come shooting down to strike the building’s roof. A dull boom echoes across the valley to where they stand on the mesa.

“Oh, no,” Parson whispers.

Behind him the baby grunts disconsolately as Gracie rocks her. She is placated chiefly by Gracie’s dress, whose stripes the child finds very interesting. Gracie is slowly becoming less… whatever it is she became, and more human, and more catatonic. She stares off into space, eyes vacant, as if she is too bruised and wounded to cry.

Parson ignores them, and peers at the town. The roof is now black and covered in smoke. He assumes Mona is dead, which means he will have to try to do this himself somehow… yet then he sees a figure standing in the smoke, completely still, with a rifle saddling her hip, staring ahead.

He keeps watching. Neither she nor the giant moves.

“What is she doing?” he asks.