Servants of the Storm (23 page)

Drag, pause.

Drag, pause.

Then a long, slow hiss. A lazy hiss. A toothy hiss.

And in crawls the very thing that haunted my nightmares as a kid. The thing my grandmother said would gobble me up if I was naughty. The thing I looked for in the canals by the side of the road every time I rode the bus to school—and never actually saw, not even when Josephine brought the marsh into my backyard. The thing that grabs me in my worst dreams, takes me under the swamp where it’s dark and forever thick, and rolls and rolls and rolls until I’m just a dead rag doll.

The teeth come first, sharp and old and yellow. Then the eyes, red and frozen in rage. Then the dead white body discolored by years of filthy swamps and sewers, tinged pinkish and grayish with muck caught between the scales. Bits of pink flesh dangle from its mouth, red tinting the teeth. This monster shouldn’t be able to exist, shouldn’t be able to grow to such a size in the wild, because it’s so goddamned obvious, so horrifyingly perverse.

My mother told me albino alligators in the wild were just a story, just a boogeyman for Southern kids whose parents wanted
them to stay out of the marsh. They were only supposed to exist in captivity, kept safe by fences and thick glass. But my grandmother told me they were real, that one would snatch me up if I lied or didn’t clean my room. And I believed my grandmother with all my heart, right up until I was old enough to laugh it off, to think that a pink alligator was more of a joke than a legitimate fear. I never even knew why an albino one was so much scarier to me than the regular green ones.

I guess now I know why: because my nightmares are real.

It lumbers down the aisle, dragging its huge body and long tail along on stubby, muscular legs. The toes are tipped with long, yellow claws, although it’s missing a toe on the leg nearest to me. The mouth is open, and so close that if it turned, it could eat my head in one gulp, just pop it off like a ripe grape. I struggle to hold still, to not budge, to not scream. The tail whips toward me as it passes, almost flicking my leg.

I whimper, and the gator stops. Like it’s listening. I try to join the low hum, but I can’t get low enough to fit in. Still, it’s enough to send the gator crawling back down the aisle. But when it reaches the pool, it doesn’t launch into the water like the other, normal gators did. It continues crawling around the outside of the water, careful to give itself enough room. All the way around back and up the ramp to the illuminated diving platform.

Drag, pause. Drag, pause.

It’s taking forever. Not as long as it took to pass by me, but long enough.

Finally it emerges on the diving platform. It opens its mouth all the way, and the lights shine on hundreds of curved yellow teeth. As if it’s a puppet on a wire, the albino gator slowly and impossibly rises until it’s standing straight up on its back legs.

The humming stops. The kids go silent. The demons are frozen in place. Nothing moves but the snakes and gators roiling and bucking and splashing and spinning in the pool below the biggest monster of them all. The albino alligator. The queen.

The alligator’s skin ripples like there’s something inside trying to climb out. The head jerks backward at an impossible angle, the teeth raised to the ceiling as it hisses, a long, drawn-out sound that goes on for way too long. The sounds gets higher and higher, spinning out into a shriek that makes me feel like my brain is boiling inside my skull. The kids explode into screams, and the demons howl and duck to the ground, hands over their heads like they’re trying to protect themselves from a tornado. Only the distal servants don’t react, don’t move. They’re as still as statues, eyes straight ahead. Without realizing it, I’ve joined the screams, my hands clenched on the seat.

DID YOU THINK I WOULD NOT COME? THAT I HAD GROWN FEEBLE AND FOOLISH, AS ABLE DID? KITTY, YOU DISAPPOINT ME.

The words have to be inside my head, because my ears only hear the shrieking.

KEEP YOUR LITTLE GAMES, DEMON. TAKE YOUR NOURISHMENT HERE. BUT ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT YOU WILL GIVE ME MY DUE. DAVID, COME FORTH.

The kids go silent, their mouths shutting as one and their heads turning like sunflowers to focus on one of the demons. He’s in a tank top and jeans, and leathery folds of skin hang down from his arms like bat wings. He uncurls away from the wall and walks toward the stage as if he has no choice, as if it’s the last thing he wants to do. When he reaches the dark pool, he stops. Trembles. Waits.

CUT OFF YOUR REMAINING DISTAL, DAVID.

With jerking hands at odds with his body, he withdraws a knife from his boot. The cords stand out in his arms and neck, the muscles and bones fighting against the compelling force. In one messy, decisive slash, his entire pinkie falls to the ground, narrowly missing the pool.

BURN IT.

The lighter he pulls from his back pocket shakes in his hand, and he stoops to collect the severed pinkie, black blood dripping down his arm. After several impotent clicks, the lighter finally makes a flame, and he holds the trembling finger over it until it catches in a sickly puff of smoke. His eyes are pinned to the gator, his lips drawn back in a feral grimace as his distal burns. I don’t have any sympathy in me for the bat-winged demon, but this is nasty to watch nonetheless.

As soon as there’s no finger left to hold, the voice booms again.

ENTER THE POOL.

One step is all it takes, and David the demon lands in the black water with an explosion of fierce movement as the creatures within claim him. He screams as he’s pulled under, jaws ripping into his flesh in a gooey black hell of body parts and rotten bone.
I bite my bottom lip hard and try not to throw up. Soon the pool goes still, and David is gone.

DEMONS, YOU WILL REMEMBER WHO RULES YOU. KITTY, I WILL BE WATCHING YOU MORE CLOSELY. TRAITORS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

Movement catches my eye, and I turn my head just enough to see Kitty trembling against the wall in another slinky dress, her body dancing like she’s having a seizure. I can only suppose that because I hear silence, the voice is speaking in her head only. Soon she goes limp and falls to the ground.

CHILDREN OF SAVANNAH, YOU WILL FORGET THIS PLACE. YOU WILL FORGET THE THINGS THAT YOU SAW HERE. YOU WILL GO BACK TO YOUR EVERYDAY LIVES. YOU WILL TAKE YOUR PILLS. YOU WILL HAVE YOUR NIGHTMARES. YOU WILL DRINK THE WATER FROM YOUR TAPS. YOU WILL IGNORE THE STRANGE THINGS IN YOUR CITY, THE DARK SPOTS OF ROT. YOU WILL COME TO US WHEN CALLED. YOU WILL FEEL AND SCREAM AND TREMBLE TO FEED US.

There’s a long pause, an exhalation.

BUT NEVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE MINE.

In the following silence the creatures in the black pool begin fighting, tearing each other to bits, biting and ripping and writhing amid chunks of demon guts.

As one, the kids in the arena open their mouths and whisper, “Yes, Josephine.”

BAKER STANDS, AND THE WATER
moccasin recoils and hisses, mouth open and fangs bared. He steps over it like he doesn’t see it, like it’s not even there. It strikes and misses him, and I jump onto the bleacher, nearly hyperventilating.

“We need to ride a coaster,” he says calmly.

I don’t want to ride anything, but I’m not ready to leave yet either. I still haven’t seen Carly. Hopefully, whatever Josephine’s presence plugged into Baker will lead us deeper into Riverfest and toward my missing friend. That voice was like the eye of the storm, pressure and madness and insensible violence, and I doubt I’ll ever forget it, even if I don’t quite understand it.

The other kids are getting up to leave too, talking together in weirdly drowsy voices, like they’re just coming out of a movie that was kind of a letdown. The demons are subtly herding the
crowd, walking from behind and blocking the side aisles. We have no choice but to go with the flow, and I try not to touch any distal servants. I scan the crowd, but there’s still no sign of Carly.

I glance one more time at the scene below. The black pool is full of dead, floating things, the snakes half-eaten and floppy. A couple of the smaller gators are dead and missing chunks. The gators that are still alive are chomping and ripping and rolling, and the water churns and splashes with their feast, with slurry blood and guts. The great white gator sits on the platform, on all fours as it should be. The strange light is gone from its eyes, and its mouth is thankfully closed. It looks a little confused, if a gator’s alien face could show confusion. It shoves off into the water, grabs a chunk of gator body, and starts rolling. Back to business. Josephine, or whatever part of her possessed the albino monster from my nightmares, is gone. I hurry out from under the dome.

The night air feels wonderfully crisp and sharp after the warm, wet reek of the black water and the gators. Baker seems to know where he’s going, so I follow him back toward that awful Free Fall, even though it makes my skin crawl. I’ve been constantly scanning the crowd, and my breath catches when I finally see what I’ve been looking for: an orange corduroy jacket, jean shorts, and cornrows. I change directions, pulling Baker along by his sleeve. He doesn’t complain, but then again, we’re headed toward something even worse than the Free Fall. I can see it under the moonlight, the loops and curls shining like barbed wire. A few lone
green lights flicker on what was once the biggest, fastest, scariest coaster in the state.

The Frog Strangler. Even the name’s awful.

I remember when I was younger, asking my mom why they would name a ride such a horrible thing. She didn’t know, so I asked my nana, because like Gigi my nana knew everything. And she said, “It’s the folksy name for a storm so bad that it doesn’t just rain cats and dogs, it even kills frogs, animals God put on this earth to love a storm. Like Katrina. Katrina was a frog strangler. Hope I never see one up close.”

And she never did, since she died before Hurricane Josephine struck. If by some miracle the amusement park had survived Josephine, they would have changed that coaster’s name before you could spit. The Hurricane, too, probably.

I quicken my pace as Carly disappears into the control booth. Baker keeps up with me, silent and still acting a little drunk. I lift the chain to climb under so I can scoot around the exit path to get to her without going anywhere near the ride itself.

“You confused, sugar?”

I look up, mouth open in surprise when I see the woman who’s speaking to me. She’s not a demon, not a kid, and not a distal servant, obviously. But there’s something dark in her fake smile, something cruel in her ice-blue eyes. A cambion, then. Otherwise she looks like your average middle-aged mom, like some lady you’d see at the grocery store in expensive jeans and heels and a cardigan. Which is what she’s wearing now, her manicured
nails tapping on the metal bar while she waits for me to answer.

“We should ride the coaster,” I say, mimicking Baker’s tone from earlier.

“Good idea. Line’s over there. No cutting.” She points with a glossy red nail.

I drop the chain and follow Baker to the back of the line. The last thing I want to do in the entire world is get on this goddamn death machine, but with the cambion lady watching me and with Carly right there, on the other side of the ride, I have no choice. I walk behind Baker through the maze of bars, my body and brain fighting just like David the demon’s did. I don’t want to do this. But I will, to get to Carly.

Ten kids wait for the ride patiently and quietly, which seems almost as unnatural as their earlier humming. We reach the back of the line just as the empty coaster rolls up with a jerk. The kids get on, two to a cart. One car has a bright splash of still-wet blood on it, but the kids who sit there don’t seem to notice. More kids crowd up behind us, and I glance back to see the cambion still standing there, directing more kids into the line. I can’t see Carly in the control booth, but I do notice a couple of silent forms with animal ears hiding in a shadowy stairwell. Everything seems stretched and thin and cold, like something could snap at any moment. Maybe that something is me.

We end up in the last car, and I can’t help looking down at the place where it’s connected to the one in front of it. The metal is
rusty but looks solid enough. We sit down, and I reach over for Baker’s side of the seat belt to buckle us in.

“Feeling frisky?” he asks, still dreamy but with a shadow of his mischievous grin. I roll my eyes as I dig around under his butt for the belt.

I find it and click it and tighten it as far as it will go. The train starts to pull off with a jerk, and I reach up frantically for the safety harness, which I normally think of as the “Oh, shit” bar. As we begin to roll up the first big hill, I tug on the harness, but it won’t come down. All the other cars are on the incline, and no one else is bothered by the fact that the sole piece of metal keeping us from certain death when we go upside down is failing to engage.

Our car lurches up toward the hill, and the ground starts to recede. I was already petrified, but now I’m frantic, and I yank and yank on the harness like I can pull it down through sheer force of will. Beside me Baker is humming, his fingers tapping out Xbox combinations on his knee.

“Baker, you’ve got to help me pull this thing down,” I say in a rush. “We’re all going to die.”

“It’ll be fine,” he says. His hand lands on my knee, warm and sure. I’m freaking out too much to slap it away.

The first car is almost at the top of the hill, and the train falls back with a click as the first car wobbles over the top. Just as it clears and starts to pull us all down the slope and into a double loop, the harnesses snap down into place over our chests. With a huge gulping breath I tug on it, but it holds.

“Told you,” Baker says. Then, “Here we go!”

We crest the hill, and I can barely see anything. The moon is behind a cloud, and the unlit coaster is black on black. But I feel gravity pull me down, and everyone on the coaster screams. Mine is a bloody-murder-death yodel. I always holler on the first hill, but this is different. My scream grows even more terrified when I look down and see a flash of moonlight on metal.

There’s a place at the bottom where the track is rusted through and twisted. There’s no way the car can make it across that gap.