24. AN EXPERIMENT YIELDS SOME INCONSISTENT DATA

He was wearing a clean black suit, coldly staring me down. I had the thought that it should have been like looking in a mirror—his was, in the basics anyway, my own face. I thought it seemed off somehow, then I remembered that it’s because the image wasn’t reversed—it put my scar on the wrong cheek.

He also just looked so much healthier. So much more alive.

I aimed the shotgun.

Nymph said, “Do it.”

I didn’t.

John said, “Dave? Do it, man.”

Nymph said, “You heard him. Do it. I can see that you feel the doubts creeping in. The fear. Interesting to see if you can stand up to it.”

I said, “Shut up.”

“We keep arriving back to this point, do we not? So, are you a man, or are you a hollow vessel, echoing with mindless desire? Your fear says to take one step back and let them close up that wall again. So, which will act next—the man, or the fear? For it is in this moment—the moment in between feeling an impulse and succumbing to it—that you actually exist. Soon, the waves of impulse will crash in and your soul will be swept out to sea. When my Master consumes you, I doubt he will find you a terribly crunchy morsel.”

“You don’t exist. You’re a manifestation of the swarm, built to play on our self-doubt. Break you down and you’re just a bunch of mindless insects who’ve learned to push people’s buttons.”

“If I pull out a handful of your cells, would they add up to anything more? So, at what point do they become you?”

John shouted for me to shoot and this seemed like great advice. I raised the shotgun and in the time it took me to send the command to my trigger finger, Nymph managed to spring from the bed, fly across the room, and start ripping the gun from my hands.

The two of us both wound up on the floor and I had a moment to remember that John had done this exact thing with the Ted doppelganger, and that he had been tricked into “killing” “Ted” and then for the first time I realized that in that story, not even the gun had been real.

As if it had wanted him to shoot.

Why?

And, in that brief moment of doubt, the gun was torn from my grasp. Nymph stood and aimed it right at my face.

John said, “Shoot! David!”

“I don’t have the gun!”

Confusion outside. I opened my mouth to say what are you seeing but at that moment Nymph opened his mouth and in my voice said, “John! What are you seeing?”

John said, to Nymph, “I’m seeing two of you.”

Amy said, “Oh my god.”

Agent Gibson said, “Well look at that. We got an evil twin situation here.”

I said, “He’s the one in the suit, guys.”

John said, “You’re both wearing the same thing!”

“Oh, goddamnit. John, concentrate, see past the disguise. The one without the gun, meaning me, is the real David. Look at me, look at him.”

Nymph said, “He’s lying! You know he’s lying!”

John stared. First at Nymph, then at me.

He shook his head and said, “When I concentrate, you both look like, uh … I don’t know, man. He’s doing something.”

Nymph somehow smirked without moving his face.

I sighed.

I said to Tasker, “You know what these things are vulnerable to and you knew what this facility would be used for. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that as an emergency measure, each of these cells are rigged to rain burning sulfur down on whoever’s inside, despite being a massive violation of state and local building codes. Am I right?”

She didn’t answer, because she didn’t know if she was talking to a person or a monster larva. But her expression, plus previous experience with this organization, told the story. She—or somebody, probably in that guard room she mentioned—just needed to push a button. Probably.

I said, “Let’s assume that’s true. Here’s what’s going to happen. He’s going to make a play to try to get you to open that door. He can do it one of two ways, either by trying to convince you he’s me and to just let him out, or by doing what I think he’s going to do, which is just shoot me and have me out of the way, at which point he’ll have all the time in the world to convince you of whatever he wants. I’m going to try to stop him, but I probably won’t be able to—he’s stronger and faster. When that happens, when he kills me, I want you to push the button that fills this cell with fire. This cell, and the one with Maggie. Kill us all.”

Amy said to Tasker, “Don’t do it. That’s what it wants.”

I said, “You know this is me.” I looked at John. “You, too. The monster just wants out. I want Amy to be safe. And by far the safest option is to just kill us both. Easy answer.”

I stared down Nymph, who was grinning like an asshole.

I said, “I don’t know who or what you really are and at this point, I really don’t care. Whatever levers you think you can pull in people’s minds, playing off their soft hearts, you’re going to find all those circuits are dead in me. It’s not pretty, but neither is that shit-encrusted plunger we keep next to the toilet. But in the moment that toilet starts to overflow, that shit-encrusted plunger is the most beautiful thing in the world. Well, that’s what I’ve come to realize, over the years. I’m that plunger, that stinking, necessary thing. So, you’re standing there with your gun and your plans, thinking you can reach into their heads out there and play their emotions like a tune. But it’s not them in the cell with you, it’s me, and your unholy hive mind forgot to account for one thing—I just do not give a fuck.”

Nymph nodded, as if in admiration. Then he set the shotgun on the floor.

He said, “You know what? You’re right.”

He turned to the group in the hall and said, “Fry us both. It’s the only way to be sure.”

He turned to me and got a pensive look in his eyes. “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have seen a snail get eaten by a bird, survive its digestive tract, then get shit out two hundred miles away onto the roof of the World Trade Center, five minutes before the first plane hit. I have seen a man’s body obliterated by a train because he was trying to retrieve a dropped slip of paper that a woman had written her phone number on, not realizing the number was fake. I have seen an entire species-changing genetic line wiped out when a single Homo erectus got his dick stuck while humping a knothole. All these moments forgotten, like piss in a swimming pool. Time to die.”

I turned back toward the hall, feeling an odd sense of relief, trying to quickly put together my last words to Amy. It wouldn’t need to be anything too profound (why start now?).

I met her eyes, and it took me a moment to realize there was no glass between us—she was standing in the open door to the cell.

She screamed, “COME ON!” at the exact moment Agent Gibson arrived to try to wrestle her away from the door.

Nymph flew toward the open door, trying to blow past me. I threw my body at him and slammed him onto the floor, and I couldn’t tell if I was feeling the flesh-and-bone body of a dude in a business suit, or the squishy, pulsing mass of the fuckroaches. I think I was feeling them both, at the same time.

The shotgun skidded across the floor, bounced off the wall, and skipped back toward me. I crawled over Nymph, grabbed the gun, and shoved the barrel into the back of his head.

I yanked the trigger.

Click

I pumped it and pulled the trigger again and again, nothing.

Tasker had sabotaged it. Pulled out the firing pin, probably.

That bitch.

Nymph flung me aside and bowled past Amy into the hall. I followed.

Alarms were sounding. Black cloaks were flowing into the hall from wherever they’d been hiding. I yelled for John, but couldn’t find him in the pandemonium. The cloaks aimed their strange weapons at both me and Nymph.

Tasker said, “Don’t harm the specimen!”

I said, “You just said you were going to kill it!”

“That was a test!”

Nymph said, “Hold on, so now is it better for me to be the specimen or David?”

Amy pushed herself away from Gibson and pointed to me. “This is the human. Unfortunately.”

The black cloaks moved in on Nymph, so I guess they believed her? He raised his right hand. Everything from the elbow down disintegrated into a flock of about ten fuckroaches. They flew toward the nearest cloak, who was wearing a rubber mask that gave him the slack face of an elderly woman. The insects landed on various points of its body, then quickly burrowed through the cloak and body armor. The thing in the cloak screamed an inhuman scream, and then exploded, as if the fuckroaches had pulled it apart from the inside. Grayish-blue hunks of meat landed everywhere—it had the texture of a vegetarian recipe for imitation human tissue. The rest of the cloaks recoiled but again didn’t fire—they were waiting for the order. Though at least they now knew which one was me.

Nymph gave me a smug look and said, “You cannot comprehend the suffering that is about to occur, Mr. Wong. You said you don’t give a fuck, and I believe you. You think none of it matters, that it’s all a big joke. But I assure you, Mr. Wong, right now, no one is laughing.”

There was a commotion from behind Nymph and I heard John, screaming, “FART DILDOS, COMING THROUGH!”

There was a mechanical noise like air brakes. A projectile hit Nymph and filled the hall with sizzling sparks. Nymph went to the floor, a smoldering hole in his back, hunks of metal burning brightly in the wound. The smell of sulfur filled the hall.

John was holding a homemade weapon. The barrel was PVC pipe, leading to a complex mechanism like the cylinder on a revolver. Only instead of bullets, each chamber contained one sex toy. On his back was a tank of compressed gas.

John fired again. A pink projectile whizzed through the air, made impact with Nymph, and exploded in that shower of pungent fire.

The fuckroaches scattered. The black cloaks unleashed their strange weapons on the bugs, vaporizing them in midair, with orange beams that radiated ungodly amounts of heat. I wondered if they ever accidentally fired their weapons on the wrong setting.

Then, all that remained was the larva, writhing in pain on the floor, shed of its disguise. The burning chunks of thermite and sulfur were eating through its skin.

It seemed to be pulsing, swelling.

John cocked his dildo cannon and fired again. The maggot squealed and thrashed, but it was still not dead. The smoldering embers of sulfur ate through its husk … and still it seemed to get bigger.

I said, “Where the hell did you get that thing?”

“It was in the back of the Jeep! We must have built it while we were on the Sauce. The memory hit me all at once. Want me to shoot it again?”

Amy said, “Look!”

A split had formed in the maggot’s thick outer skin, where the sulfur had finally burned through. The larva was now nearly twice its former size, it skin stretching and pulling like a bratwurst on a grill.

From within the wound, a sheer blackness seemed to leak out like steam. And from it, I sensed an infinite coldness that defied all reason.

We’re too late.

John said, “Is it dying?”

Amy shook her head. “No. It’s hatching.”