Midian Unmade (7 page)

But that had been eighteen years ago, when Amy was just out of college, when she wasn't as fearful of the world or the consequences of living in it. Now, eighteen years on, Amy was simply scared so much of the time. She worried about Asteria, she worried about herself, and, most of all, she worried that loving monsters was wrong.

In the end, though, she had neither answers nor special wisdom—only doubt and hope. So she cupped her face in her hands and let the chilled wind from the open window numb them both as it raised gooseflesh on her arms.

*   *   *

“Asteria! Hey! Wait up!”

A tall blond boy with buck teeth and an impish grin cut across his face called out from the opposite end of the parking lot.

Asteria kept walking, head down. She did not need this. Not another one, so soon. Why did they clamor for her like ants on a sugar cube?

“Asteria! Hey! Stop for a second! Are you skipping out, too?”

Her stomach dropped away, down, down, below her knees, below her feet, into a place under the earth and within the earth, an unseen vortex filled with swirling blades and talons and thorns and, above all else, desire.

She stopped, not because she wanted to, but because she had to, like a shark invariably drifting toward a distant pool of blood or a viper striking out at a foot that steps too near.

“Because if you are skipping, maybe I can give you ride? Or we can hang out?”

The vortex crawled up from the deep, merging with her stomach, with the tunnels of her body, until she became it—the pit incarnate, the devourer of men and worlds.

Asteria turned, flashed a smile, and waved.

“No,” she hissed to herself. “Stop it. Control it. Just keep walking.”

The boy—Shane? Wayne? Asteria didn't really know his name and didn't particularly care to—ran to her side and threw a gangly arm around her shoulders.

“Did you say something?” he asked.

She shook her head and laughed. She didn't want to laugh. She wanted to growl. She wanted to roar. But roaring and growling were no way to satiate the pit, and she was at its whim.

She yanked on the boy's coat and bent his ear to her mouth.

“Why don't you take me back to my place?” she whispered, the heat of her breath promising ecstasy.

Asteria wanted to punch herself in the mouth and force all those words back into her lungs. She wanted to vomit the pit from her stomach. She knew she shouldn't take so many, so soon, one after the other. It was irresponsible, reckless. And yet, she did want to take this boy, she wanted to let the vortex shred him, body and soul. She wanted to introduce him to oblivion and its terrifying expanses. She wanted to feed.

The boy's eyes grew huge and his hands quivered.

“Yeah, yeah. Sure,” he stammered. “You live with Ms. Radigan in a trailer out on Easter Valley Road, right?”

Asteria nodded and pressed herself to his chest.

The boy's grin grew wider, more confident, less imp than wolf.

“Then … yeah … let's go,” he said, hugging Asteria tight.

He led her to his pickup truck and they hopped inside.

As he whipped around corners too quickly and sped down hills with hormonal abandon, he was sure he was going to get lucky. Sitting beside him, her hand playing along his thigh, Asteria was sure he was going to die.

*   *   *

Amy returned home to find a truck she didn't recognize parked in her driveway. The hair on the back of her neck stood at attention.

She jumped from her car and jogged to the trailer, curses already gathering on the edge of her tongue.

“Asteria,” she called out as she opened the flimsy plywood door to their home, “Asteria, who does that truck belong to?”

No response. And no Asteria in the kitchen or the living room, either.

Anger rising, Amy ran to Asteria's room and threw open the door. And there the girl-thing was, splayed out on her bed, her mouth wide open and stuffed with a pale, bare leg. Her rows upon rows of jagged teeth gnashed and shredded; blood and saliva glistened on her stretched lips. Her eyes shimmered blue and yellow, green and red, like the wings of some tremendous dragonfly. She made no noise but for the rhythmic chomp and slurp of ingestion.

Amy gasped. She'd never seen the act before. She knew it happened. She knew what it must entail. But to witness it firsthand, to feel the heat in the air and to smell the many spilled fluids, was something she'd not been prepared for.

Asteria's eyes flickered back into humanity. She focused on Amy, disbelief and shock passing over her contorted face, then pounced from the bed, and, with a muffled shriek, slammed the door shut.

Amy backed away. Embarrassment, excitement, and rage colored her cheeks. She didn't know how to handle this situation. What was the proper way to approach one's ersatz daughter when one had found her shape-shifted into a vaguely reptilian form and in the throes of gastronomical delight? Should they talk about the incident? Should they forget it had happened? Or should Amy finally just let Asteria run away, back into the grime and shadows where she'd found her? No one wrote self-help books on topics like this. Even the Internet didn't have message boards or FAQs for adoptive mothers of monsters.

Amy paced outside Asteria's room. She considered the myriad possible avenues of discussion she could take with the girl, but none seemed right.

Without warning, Asteria—now fully in her human vestments—burst from the room and shouldered past Amy.

“Come on,” she said as she swept by. “We have to get rid of the truck before anyone notices it's here.”

Amy followed, stopping only in the bathroom to pick up two sets of rubber gloves. Outside, Asteria was doubled over, retching in the driveway. Something fell from her mouth and tinkled to the ground.

Amy scowled at the bloody, shiny pile in the dirt and asked, “You swallowed his keys, too? Really?”

Asteria refused to respond. She tore a pair of gloves from Amy's grip, snapped them on, and picked up the keys.

“Ready?” she asked no one in particular.

Amy folded her arms over her chest and said, “I think we should talk about it.”

Asteria blinked and smiled as if amused by some slow-burning joke.

“Talk? About what? Where we're going to leave the truck?” she asked. “I assumed we'd ditch it out by Pine's Mountain, near Route 45.”

“No, Asteria.” Amy sighed. “Not about the truck. About what you did in there. About what I saw.”

The smile grew wider, almost clownish.

“What did you see, Amy?”

Amy struggled to find words. She'd seen death. She'd seen pleasure. She'd seen the inhuman heart of the universe beating strong and vibrant in one of its favored children.

“I'll tell you what you saw,” Asteria said, preempting an answer. “You saw me. All of me. And you saw me doing what I do, what I have to do. It took ten years, ten years of you desperately avoiding what you knew to be true, but you finally saw it. And I know. I know. It's one thing to see the fangs, the spines, the crazy eyes and studded skin, and stand in awe of their power, their destructive potential, but it's another thing entirely to see how that power is used.”

“Asteria, look … look.” Amy stumbled over her thoughts. “You … we … need to find someone. To help you. To help you control it. This is all just … just too much.”

The smile on Asteria's face vanished, replaced by a hard, freezing vacancy.

“I had people who could have helped me. A lot of people. In Midian. They were going to teach me when I was just a little older. But someone burned them all away, Amy.”

Amy stood silent. She had no way to quench that fire from decades past and she wondered if it would ever stop burning.

Asteria gazed up into the sky. Dusk had settled over the firmament and stars had begun to poke through its darkening bowl.

“In monster movies,” she said, more to the stars than to Amy, “nobody ever really likes the mob of villagers. They're not heroic. They're not villainous. They're nameless, faceless nobodies. They have pitchforks and torches and shotguns and riot gear, which you'd think would give them some sort of character, but, really, they're just a lumbering mass of anger and fear. See, they're angry that something has threatened the world they know and understand. Whatever that thing is, it's forced them out of their little routines, their safe assurances. And they're afraid—oh so afraid—that it will change everything for them and that their knowledge, their understanding, their routines and assurances, will be forever lost.

“Everyone who watches monster movies wants to be the hero … or the monster, I suppose, but no one ever wants to be one of the mob. Why? Because everyone already knows that they're part of it. Despite all the illusions of heroism or villainy most people cultivate about themselves, everyone knows that when a true threat enters their world, they'll glob onto a huddled mass and pick up a pitchfork, too. The mob makes everyone realize that they're not heroes or villains, but scared, powerless, inconsequential nothings.”

Amy threw down her gloves and shouted, “No. No, Asteria. I am not like those people who burned your family. I care about you. I want what's best for you.”

Asteria stared at Amy and held out her open hand, smeared in blood and bile.

“Then let's move this truck together, okay?”

Amy took a deep breath and nodded. She knew what she had to do, for her sake, for Asteria's sake, and for the sake of more young men and women.

“Yeah, okay.”

She reached for her discarded gloves, fished in her pocket for her car keys, and tromped toward her car.

Asteria's upturned palm remained empty.

*   *   *

Later the same night, long after they'd dumped the truck by the side of the road, Asteria opened her bedroom window and crept outside. It was still full moon—a far cry from her preferred time for nocturnal roaming—but she wanted to adhere to Amy's plan. Maybe hunting the native fauna would satisfy the pit. Maybe a healthy deer would satiate the hunger.

She had to try.

Years ago, Amy had seen her panhandling on the street and taken her in. She'd given her a warm bed and a place to call home for the first time since Midian. An orphan herself, Amy had wanted for the two of them to be friends, if not family. And in return all she asked was that Asteria not heed the lamentations of the pit.

But, as was Asteria's refrain, Amy didn't understand what she asked. Asteria the girl and Asteria the monster could never be separated. The loving soul and the infinite void that pulsed within her were one and the same. Violence spun in orbit around the atoms of her being. She could no more stop killing than she could stop thinking, stop breathing, stop feeling guilty about ruining Amy's life.

“A devil with a conscience.” Asteria sighed into the frigid darkness. “How can such things be?”

Amy had been good to her, even if Amy didn't understand. And so, for Amy, she would try to take the life of something that wasn't human and hope it pleased the pit all the same.

Through the barren fields she ran, faster than any human, faster than most of the small mammals that scurried in the darkness. She smelled caution in the air, fear of tooth and claw, but it wasn't the same as the nuanced terror that humans exuded.

She stopped dead and listened. Something grazed nearby, tentatively chewing at whatever remnants of corn or soy might have been left over from the autumn's harvest.

Asteria stalked her prey with the deliberate grace of a great cat. Body pressed low to the ground, she spotted her quarry—a young buck, head down, rooting in a field, oblivious to so much of the world.

She moved in. When she was close enough, she struck, and her strike was sure and lethal.

She crouched in the moonlight and tore the beast apart, swallowing it in massive bites, as she would any other sacrifice to the pit. But the meat tasted sour, bitter, and spoiled all at once. The flesh of a lower animal would not do. The void would not abide such a base offering.

The deer came rocketing back from the pit and flew from Asteria's mouth, a geyser of meat and blood spouting to the stars above.

“No,” Asteria moaned. “No. It has to work.”

Remembering all the smiles and the hugs and the kind words Amy had lavished upon her through the years, Asteria scooped up handfuls of the gore that had spewed from her stomach and downed them again.

She punched her abdomen and hissed, “Take it. Take it.”

But again the organic miasma returned.

For what seemed hours, Asteria hunched in the field and force-fed herself the same sustenance that her body could not use. Again and again she regurgitated and again and again she swallowed, until, finally, she became too weak to swallow and the pit grew too enraged to ignore.

And when it was over, she lay down in the field and she wept, because she knew that she was destined to lose yet another family.

*   *   *

Just before dawn, Asteria, blood-slicked and exhausted, slid through the window that overlooked her bed and dropped onto her mattress. Immediately upon hitting that bouncy surface, several hundred pounds of muscle crushed down upon her and held fast her arms and legs. She felt metal encircle her wrists, binding them together. A m
é
lange of voices shouted commands and the lights flicked on throughout the trailer.

Someone yelled, “Oh my God,” and another blizzard of commands and legal rights engulfed Asteria. She picked out enough individual orders to realize her captors wanted her on her feet, so she stood.

She glanced around the room and her heart shriveled. Police surrounded her, and police could mean only one thing: Amy had surrendered.

An officer covered Asteria's nude form with an oversized blanket and two others marched her into the living room, where Amy sat, also handcuffed, beside a man in a navy suit—some sort of detective, Asteria guessed.