“Wait! Wait!”
Every human, canine, and plastic eye focused on Andy, who was staring back at the dog.
“The aklo…it’s the part of the ritual that Dunia was reciting when Wickley interrupted her thirteen years ago, right? So it’s what Wickley heard! It’s what got stuck in his head and he repeated it to me when I put him under pressure!”
Everybody held their breath, lest their respiration distract her.
“Which…backward would be something like…‘Zhro…ng’ngah’hai…nekrosunai mwlgn i? Thtaggoa fhtagn i?!’?”
The words puffed out the flames on the candles.
Silence conquered the room. Andy stared at Tim, Kerri and Nate at the broken display cases on the floor, Joey at the door that had fallen silent.
Then it rattled softly, but the breathing of the creature outside increased.
Outside their window, Thtaggoa groaned.
Faraway, scattered wheezer squeaks began to pop up here and there, some fading into distant screams, different from the crazed, cannibal rage that the kids and the dog had learned to respect. It was a new kind of wheezer vocalization they had never heard.
It was their fear.
Andy queried Nate, stepped out of the circle, and looked out the window.
The street was empty.
Then her heart jumped to her mouth when a wheezer appeared in the window, shrieking, not at her, but past her, flying against its will from over the house’s roof.
She opened the window and leaned out as Kerri and Joey and Nate joined her. Two more six-limbed creatures rolled out of the first floor and into the garden, bouncing off the walkway, as though a silent, invisible hurricane were dragging them through the neighbor’s yard, heading northwest, in the general direction of something that glimmered green on the horizon. A star that had never been there before.
The crying from the wheezers increased in volume and pitch, rising too high to hear for everyone except Tim, who was too interested to even turn his ears away. And their cries were accompanied by the ebbing, throbbing, rock-splitting howl of the cyclopean undergod standing behind the house, mercifully out of sight, its poisonous shadow cast over Blyton Hills now dissolving.
Kerri and Joey and Nate turned suddenly as the banging on the door increased, in time to see it blow off its hinges, toppling the dresser, and they ducked to dodge the wheezer that was fired overhead across the room, out the window, pulling Andy with it.
Kerri barely gripped Andy’s waist in time as she was lifted off the floor, with Nate and Joey and Tim grabbing her in turn, and then they all felt the hurricane blowing around them, deafening, devastating, trying to snatch them from Earth’s gravity and drag them toward a star beyond the explored universe.
Andy, half her body out the window, stared into the gaping, eyeless, terrified face of the creature flapping out in the vortex like a kite in a tornado, digging a claw into her arm, boring into her bones, having decided to carry her along to its exile off this galaxy cluster simply because fuck you, Andy Rodriguez.
She glanced back, and she saw Kerri, and she read Hold on in the lips she’d kissed only once, her own lips crying Please no as one of Kerri’s hands let go.
And then it returned. Carrying a knife.
Kerri stabbed the wheezer’s paw so hard that Andy felt the blade prick her own arm beneath and uttered an ouch of pure joy as the wheezer lost its grip and fell away, spinning, through the enormous worm body of Thtaggoa, now corrupted into subatomic particles carried like dust by the cyclone surrounding the shrieking miserable wheezer and its blasphemous brethren as they crashed through the garden and the town and Pennaquick County and Oregon and over the ionosphere in Canada and out of Earth’s gravitational pull, cruising at lightspeed past the moon and Mars and the asteroid belt and the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Yuggoth, ripping wormholes through space and being spat out at the far end of the solar system, their agonizing cries heard for the last time as they passed through a gas nebula in the constellation of Virgo before squeezing through a physical paradox leading to a barren dead region of outer space.
—
The green star appeared to blink and disappear from the horizon several seconds after the portal outside Mars’s orbit had actually closed, having swallowed the very last piece of Thtaggoa’s spawn and Thtaggoa itself.
The Blyton Summer Detective Club stumbled up from the floor in Kerri’s bedroom. The firmament was filling up again. The white veil was lifting, painting a blue sky grazed by fat smuggled-sheep clouds.
All four, plus a dog, stood in their sloped-ceiling bunker, wordless, contemplating the end of war.
Then Andy clutched Kerri’s waist and shot into her mouth the most violently soft, bloodily sweet, furiously rainbow-waving kiss either had given or received, flooding her tongue with summer rain and lime dew and tropical tidal waves.
She pried herself apart, a string of saliva unbroken between their lips, orange hair gasping in awe, and pointed her index finger at Kerri’s nose.
ANDY: And you and I are gonna try skydiving this summer. All right?!
Tim smugly trotted off the scene to tell his penguin everything was fine.
—
They walked out into the first morning after the apocalypse—a day that had just barged in sweaty and unkempt like a late commuter, asking, Anything happen while I was out?
A lazy rain began to wash out the defiled streets, all casual and gleeful like a late authority figure at the end of a teen detective story.
They roamed into the middle of the road strewn with tree debris, overall not worse than your average rock star’s hotel room. That mild impression lasted until Joey pointed out the hillside in the north, at the beginning of Kerri’s house row. The last time they had seen that hillside, luscious dark green woods covered it completely. Now it was a great expanse of exposed earth, salted with the stumps and corpses of a razed forest. Thtaggoa’s path of destruction came from beyond the hill, where the sky was still sore and veiled by frayed clouds of smoke, and stopped two yards short of Kerri’s backyard. Its width was too much to measure from the ground.
“Holy shit,” Andy appreciated. “That was cutting it close, Nate.”
Tim called their attention from the other end of the road, where a white car had pulled over to the sidewalk and crashed into the side of a parked Chrysler. They recognized it immediately, even though it had lost the sirens. Several sets of claw marks, fingers two inches apart from each other, were etched all across the roof and the sides, striking out the county seal. Smoke poured from under the warped hood.
Andy jogged toward it and leaned through a shattered window.