While I stood there uselessly, Mike ran over to a Chevy parked near the far end of the shed and held a scope in his hand to peer inside.
Tommy Hilfiger and Three-piece repeated the sniffing at mouth and crotch while the woman moaned and panted, clearly in labor. The women around her shuffled out of her way, keeping up their continuous flow of jabberwocky.
The old man took out a knife and handed it to the pale boy. They exchanged words in their weird groaning language, and then without prelude, the boy thrust the knife into the underside of the woman’s belly.
I jerked up the shotgun, banging it into the tank, startling myself. I shrank back, expecting to be seen, but the others were too focused on their task.
The ghostly boy sliced the woman open from hip to hip. At first I thought her intestines were spilling out: then I saw that it was a pile of worms, silver-gray and wet, hundreds or thousands of them, swimming like a school of squids out of the ocean of her belly.
She moaned with another contraction. Three-piece reached his hand up into her stomach and pulled.
A creature flopped out. At first I thought it was a human baby, stillborn, deformed—its head was too small to be fully developed. I thought it was just food for the worms to feed on, and I waited for the mass of tiny creatures to engulf it.
But as the bloody red thing hit the ground, it lifted its head and cried out. It pushed itself up on all fours—its limbs were as inhuman as its head—and began climbing up the woman’s body. She was braced against the wall of the shed, the old man tying her to the wall to hold her upright. Three-piece and the ghost helped the monster climb, petting it and stroking it, crooning to it as it went. The baby bent its squat neck back and cried out again.
The mother cried back, word for word, weakly, fading. The sound sent chills through me, as did the sight of the baby ripping open her shirt and biting into her breast.
“Amanda!”
Mike walked into plain view, toward his daughter, who, I saw now, was hidden in the midst of a cluster of women at the farthest end of the shed.
Her head turned at his voice. She smiled as though she was happy to see him, though her eyes were blank.
Other heads also turned at the sound of his voice. The baby lifted its weirdly disfigured crown and screeched. The mass of worms on the ground wriggled and pulsed in his direction. The three men left the side of the woman and ran toward him.
Mike aimed his gun, and with short controlled bursts, dropped the old man and the ghost. Three-piece fell down, but rose again, blood pouring from his side and from the defensive wounds in his outstretched arms.
My teeth were chattering but I stepped around the tank with the shotgun raised. I was screaming curse words, the same words, over and over and over.
Still I couldn’t bring myself to shoot.
Mike took a step back and shot Three-piece again, dropping him for good. The women in the shed keened and flapped their arms like a flock of frightened birds. Answering calls came from the fields and the houses.
I grabbed Mike by the arm. “We have to get out of here!”
“Amanda,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Amanda.”
She pressed forward, smiling at the sound of his voice: but she echoed the keening cry of the other women, and began to flail her arms.
He shot her in the head, knocking her back and leaving a hole in the wall of bodies.
There were more men coming from the fringes of the farm, out of the house and the cornfield. I had my fist in Mike’s jacket, dragging him backward toward the road. He pulled away from me long enough to light one of the Molotov cocktails he had brought along. The flaming bottle arched through the air and landed in the dry straw of the shed.
The flames raced across the stalls like a golden retriever running to greet its master. The women seemed unable to flee the shed. As they jerked and struggled in the flames, their screams sounded more and more human. The men running out of the cornfields went right past Mike and me, throwing themselves into the flames to try to rescue the most pregnant of the women.
I was retreating, trying to pull Mike along. He was emptying his gun into the screaming bodies, screaming along with them, their voices merged into a single wall of sound that threatened to overwhelm and drown me.
Only the baby escaped the inferno. It had dropped from its mother’s breast at the first roar of the flame, and now it ran, bloody-mouthed, on all fours with its little lizard’s gait toward us.
Mike pointed his gun at the monster, but the trigger clicked on an empty chamber.
The creature stretched out its clawed hand to Mike’s leg, while he tripped, staggering backward, fumbling to switch magazines.