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The snake flips around and strikes at Order again. Order leaps away, this time to the ceiling. He scuttles across the roof, his palms sticking and then unsticking with every hand-step.
“Order?”
The snake speaks for the first time. Order’s head twists upside fucking down in a way I will absolutely never ever be able to unsee. A neck shouldn’t be able to bend that way, but he is able to look almost straight down while the rest of his torso is able to stay clinging to the roof.
“Stealth?”
From the moment the vault blew open to now, less than ten seconds have passed. There was an absolute flurry of violence enacted by both of these creatures, who it turns out apparently know one another.
“Why are you attacking me?” The snake sounds offended.
“Why are you blowing the fucking roof off the vault?” Order growls the question with the unmistakeable tone of a pissed off older brother.
“It was stuck. Get this web shit off me.”
“It wasn’t stuck. It was sealed.” Order releases his grip on the roof and drops in a backflip down to the floor. He stands in front of Stealth, the snake guy, who is getting himself progressively more trapped in Order’s web with every attempt to get out of it.
“I needed to get in,” Stealth says. “This is our rendezvous point. You shouldn’t have sealed it. That’s fucked up.”
“I didn’t mean to seal it,” Order says. “The control panel defaulted to thirty days.”
“I thought Tinker fixed that.”
“He didn’t.”
By this time, Order is picking the web off Stealth, freeing what I am guessing is another mutant sibling from his web.
It is at this point that Obigor decides what we all really need is the song of his people. He starts shriek-barking at the top of his tiny lungs, producing a sudden burst of sound that makes both Order and Stealth jump as his howling activates the remnants of the adrenalin running through their systems.
“The fuck is that?” Stealth looks around Order and sees me there, still lying in a tangle of silk with Obigor atop me. Under mutant gazes, Obigor satisfies his urge to shriek fairly swiftly and falls silent, licking his gray chops with satisfaction.
“This is Tessie. She is my mate and my pet,” Order explains.
“You’re fucking an old dog?”
Order groans. I know now that Stealth is a younger sibling. He has that crass, chaotic energy and everything is a joke to him. Order, meanwhile, is trying to get everything under control. He comes over to me and swiftly rends the silk that was keeping me under control. It’s a neat party trick the way it sticks to everything but him. The chemistry of it must be wild. Right now, I’m just glad to be free. There’s something about this new snakeman that is giving me the creeps.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m going to go up and get Obigor’s food. And also get back in the car. And also never come back down to this hole again.”
“No. You stay put,” Order snaps. “I will go get the animal’s food. You will stay here. You too, Stealth.”
Stealth really doesn’t seem like much of a name for this particular specimen. Order was well named. Justice the mothman was also well named. But Stealth? I think that was a concept that quickly went sideways.
“I don’t want to stay put. I want out of this hole.”
“Oh, you’re going to want to stay in the hole,” Stealth says. “Things have gotten bad out there.”
“Do you know where Justice and the others are?” Order asks the question while plucking web from his brother’s body.
“Justice and his human and their clutch are on their way here. We split up and took different routes.”
I don’t understand that entire sentence, but it doesn’t seem to surprise Order, so I guess that’s all fine. It’s been a very strange day. I was braced to find some kind of burned out massacre scene, but this almost weirder and more disturbing.
“The original compound has self-immolated,” Stealth says. “We were attacked and had to activate the destruction sequences. Over half a century of history and technology destroyed because someone talked out of school.”
“By who? Not the military or police. There’s not enough interest for that. No chatter on any of the radios,” I say.
“Worse,” Stealth says. “The Others have come.”
