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“How are my babies?” Sally is speaking in a sing-song voice which almost makes me think she’s had part of her brain removed. Last I saw Sally she was a hardbitten New Yorker, who secretly smoked in the weirdest way, holding her cigarette between her index and her ring finger for reasons I never understood. She was quirky and reclusive and often rude, and I loved all of that about her. I don’t recognize this tone. What has Justice done to her? And what does Order intend to do to me? Where did either of them get children… Oh. Oh no.
I look over her shoulder and recoil in horror.
There are… things… wriggling around in the back seat. Three larval creatures with nearly human faces. They emit giggling sounds, sort of like toddlers with cherubic cheeks. They have no arms or legs, but they do have little hands and feet emerging from the waving segments of their caterpillar like bodies. They are playing, I think, clambering over one another back and forth the way puppies do.
She looks at me. I look at her. I do not know what to say about what I am seeing. It is a perversion of all things wholesome about family life, and yet it is sort of adorable too. Am I grossed out? Horrified? Afraid? Yes.
“What’s… who are these?” I try to formulate a respectful question.
“I laid eggs,” she says, matter-of-factly. “And then these hatched. These are my monster children.”
“Wow!” I say, suddenly knowing precisely what word I need to utter. “Congratulations!”
“I know they’re creepy looking,” Sally says, doing me a massive solid. I thought I would have to pretend her larvae were adorable, and I have a hard enough time doing that with normal human offspring.
“They’re just different. That’s all. I never thought I’d see you as a mom, but here we are. It’s really good to see you. I was so worried. Chief Connor is going to be, well, really fucking angry, I guess, but so relieved you’re alive.”
“We need to talk about that,” she says. “We need to talk about a lot of things. You need to be careful. If you sleep with one of these creatures, you don’t know what could be coming out of you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means one time was all it took and then, bam, couple of weeks later, I was chained in a basement laying eggs.”
“What the actual fuck!”
“It sounds worse than it was. Or maybe it sounds exactly as bad as it was. Justice didn’t tell me about the babies coming, I don’t think he wanted to get his hopes up. He loves being a dad.”
“Should we be running away right now?” I whisper the question. I’m worried for her and for me, but not for the baby-faced larvae. I just can’t get any kind of empathy going for them. They’re a bit too Thomas the Tank Engine in appearance for my liking - if Thomas was a wormy thing.
“No.” Sally smiles. “I’m staying. If you want to go, take the car. You know I’ll always have your back.”
It’s very sweet of her to be ready to aid me in my escape while sacrificing herself to this new motherhood, but I can’t run now. Obigor is down in the vault still, and I am not going anywhere without him, ever.
It is just as well we abandon escape plans immediately, for soon we are far from alone.
“Need some help?” Justice appears and manages to scoop all three larvae up in his four massive arms. The worms giggle for their daddy, and for a second I think they might be cute.
* * *
Hours later…
“I’m looking forward to when they wrap themselves into a chrysalis. It will be less work,” Sally says, cradling a wriggling, armless caterpillar in her arms. It has her eyes.
I’m listening to family chat catch up in a family of mutant monsters. Obigor is nestled in my arms, appearing to take an interest in the conversation. He’s doing a better job of it than I am, I think.
“She says that,” Justice says with an indulgent grin at his brothers. “But I think you’ll miss them while they pupate.”
I am trying to pretend as though this conversation is reasonable and normal. I am trying so hard it takes up pretty much all of my energy.
One of the larvae wriggles off the sofa and makes its way toward Obigor, who immediately leaps off my lap, drops into a play bow and starts happily shrieking.
He’s not as agile as he once was, and he runs with a bit of an angular gait, but it is enough to entertain all three larvae. Obigor isn’t particular about who or what he plays with, probably because he can’t see them anyway. As far as he knows they’re all just big wriggly puppies.
Justice the mothman, Order the man-spider, Stealth the explosive, and Sally the broodmother are sharing post-dinner coffee. They offered me some and I accepted, because I am trying very hard to not seem like the odd one out, but I haven’t touched mine. I have very little to say, which is fine because everybody else has a lot to say.
According to the conversation, their whole original burrow and laboratory was burned out in a self-destruct sequence designed to prevent the cryptid mutants from being discovered by humanity at large. Most of them have scattered to back up locations like this one. There’s a huge network of them all over the country and maybe the world, boltholes built at a time when paranoia and defensiveness was at a high. It’s come in handy now in their time of need.
I sit and I listen, and I worry. I worry how I’m going to explain this to Chief Connor. I worry what’s going to happen to Sally. I worry about what might happen to me. Seems these men don’t bother to communicate their reproductive capacities ahead of time, and though I know I am a big enough girl to realize what happens when you have raw, passionate mutant sex, I didn’t think about that side of things at all.
