* * *
—
“Goddammit, where is it?” Ava tears apart Ian’s bag, left on the floor of the abandoned pavilion. She’s the only one who isn’t in immediate danger, but she feels Mack and LeGrand’s peril acutely, a pressure in her chest, phantom claws piercing her own stomach. They’re ending this today. She pulls out an old leather book and shoves it into one of her many cargo pant pockets. Could work as a wick. But not if she doesn’t find the lighter.
“Ah!” she screams, triumphant, emerging once more from the depths of Ian’s bag with his sleek silver lighter. Thinking better of the book plan, she grabs one of Christian’s Athens Solar T-shirts, takes hold of the monstrous generator, and begins to drag it.
Her still-intact stomach sinks. Maybe they should have chosen someone with two functioning legs for this task.
“Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.” She grits her teeth against the pain. This should never have been her fight. But isn’t every fight her fight, whether she benefits from it or not? She’s so tired of having to fight.
“Mack,” she whispers to herself, closing her eyes, taking a breath. Then she crouches as best she can with a right knee and ankle that won’t bend anymore, shoves her arms through the metal roll cage around the generator—cheap fucks couldn’t spring for wheel attachments?—and stands with a roar.
One foot in front of the other is good enough, she thinks, then she laughs because she only has one good foot. But she’s enough. She has to be.
She is the goddamn strongest woman in the world.
* * *
—
In Mack’s mind, scarred over with wounds from that night, her father had lost his face. He had transformed into something towering, bent at impossible angles, with black holes for eyes. He didn’t hold a knife; he was a knife.
But Mack, staring at death, lets herself finally try to remember her father. And when she does, she laughs.
He had a beer belly. His arms and legs were thin, the hair there so sparse in some areas it wore right off. He couldn’t grow a beard. His eyes were like hers, too big, wide set, so that he gave the impression of always being distracted or slightly puzzled. The fastest way to set off his explosive temper—which was never a difficult task—was to ask if he was paying attention. That lost him most jobs.
He’d always tried to fix plumbing issues, would swear and rage and declare he was taking a break, at which point he would go out to a bar. Mack’s mother would quietly step in and finish the job so that when he got back, he could smugly explain he must have done it right, it just needed a few minutes to settle.
He yelled at his favorite television programs as though his feelings had any bearing on what might be happening on the screen.
He made pancakes with chocolate chip smiley faces, and whistled with the clearest, purest notes.
He hit their mother, and he hit them, not because he was strong, but because he wasn’t. No one who is strong hits a child. No one who is strong does anything he did.
And Mack has no questions about that: He chose to do what he did. He looked at the world and felt it owed him more than he had, and when that didn’t materialize, he took himself out along with everyone who had tried to love him, who might have been happier without him.
Finally, at last, Mack can form him in her mind as small, impotent, poisonously angry. Not a monster at all, but the most pathetically human of men.
The monster in front of her is not human at all, but there are traces in its hands. It doesn’t have claws so much as thick, grooved nails that have never been trimmed, broken and growing and broken again into jagged edges. It shuffles toward her on legs that bend backward at the knee, like a cow’s. At the end of those legs, covered in dense, matted fur tinged green with moss, heavy hooves fall on the ground not with cheerful clopping, but with careful padding.
Its shoulders are broad, too broad, rippling with power on either side of a massive chest, but its waist narrows to an almost delicate taper before turning into hips not designed for upright walking. It has no genitalia at all, just more of that matted, green-tinged fur. It hunches, head parallel to the ground. Atop a short, broad neck, its face is a flat expanse with two nostrils, flaring as the monster breathes in deeply, searching. The terrible scarring where they put out its eyes balances between incongruously delicate ears, velvet soft, sloping on either side of the head beneath the long, sensuously curving crown of horns.
They look heavy. She wonders if they make its neck ache after a day of hunting.
Unlike her father, there is nothing pathetically human about this monster, but it strikes her as pathetic nonetheless as it shuffles closer, bringing with it the scent of death and decay and rot to assault her senses, warning her that this is the end.