Ollie, trembling, scrabbled to her feet and pressed her hand against the lock. There was another hissing sound and a beep, but no movement. “It’s stuck, Vern,” she said. The doors leading outside of the van were bent shut and would not open when Ollie tried to wrestle her way out.
“Press it again!” said Vern.
Still shaking, Ollie obeyed. “Shit,” she said, when it still didn’t work, but the third attempt was a success, Vern’s cage door shuddering open a fraction—yet still not the whole way. Ollie slid in. “Don’t—don’t interfere with my mind.”
Vern wiggled her wrists, drawing attention to the restraints. “That depends on you,” Vern said in threat. Queen had laughed so drunkenly when she’d reached into those men’s minds and tugged, and Vern could understand why. For once, she’d been the one in control. How delicious it must have tasted to usurp those who’d felt so certain of their everlasting reign.
Ollie undid Vern’s restraints, but she was lagging. She’d almost passed out by the time the task was finished.
Once free, Vern rushed to Gogo, checking her pulse. She was alive, but just. Vern rammed her shoulders through the warped metal doors at the back of the van and they opened. She unhooked Gogo from the various pieces of medical equipment and carried her outside to fresh air, laying her gently on the road’s shoulder. “It’s gonna make this okay,” she said.
A shot was fired. Ollie had stumbled from the van. Too out of it to aim, she flung her handgun wildly and pulled the trigger over and over. She was surprisingly spry as she army-crawled in Vern’s direction.
“Ollie!” Queen cried.
“Stay inside,” she called. She’d released Queen from her holds, but she didn’t want her interfering with this. Ollie knew Queen didn’t have the discipline to subdue Vern without killing her, and the project needed Vern alive. Like Ollie had said, there’d been no perfect vessel for the fungus since Queen herself.
“Give it up, Ollie,” said Vern.
Ollie kept firing, and a bullet grazed Vern’s shoulder. She hissed, more in annoyance than in pain, then bolted toward the fiend. Let this be finished once and for all.
She tackled Ollie and straddled her at the waist. Ollie’s eyes looked beseechingly up into hers, but the ship of mercy and forgiveness had sailed. Fiends didn’t get clemency.
While she was poised over Ollie’s warm body, the animal lurking inside Vern surfaced. This was who the fungus had turned her into: her true self.
On instinct, she stretched her mouth open wide, leaned down, then clamped her teeth over the fiend’s neck. She jostled her head back and forth like a dog, tearing into her victim, her incisors never once breaking contact with Ollie’s pale skin. Blood spurted out, soda from a shaken can. It warmed Vern’s face with its silky red splendor.
Ollie was dead.
As in their previous altercations—the night the children were born and when Ollie’s true identity was revealed—Queen stalked nearby, just out of view and reach. She stood in the van’s entrance.
Queen screeched until all her breath was gone. She stared with stricken eyes at her handler. In a fight between Vern and Queen, Vern would lose, and without the advantage of the for est, Vern couldn’t outrun her, either. All she could do was remain where she was and hope Queen was more merciful than Vern had just been.
“I’m sorry,” said Vern.
Queen convulsed in an anguished fugue, and Vern shuddered as visions poured through her. The early days of Cainland. Queen’s gradual transformation. The obviousness of her gifts and afflictions threatening the secrecy of the project. A row of glass cages like those in the van, Queen in one of them. Ollie tending her, feeding her scraps of food when she showed her obedience. Queen wailed. The low tones reached down into Vern and tugged. Melodious and deep with despair, Queen’s cries were a funeral song.
Vern waited for the images in her head to become threats, to shift from Queen’s archive of pain to the pain she planned to inflict on Vern for killing her progenitor. Ollie had made Queen, just as Reverend Sherman had helped make Vern. Queen looked at Vern, eyes sad and wide.
“I’m sorry,” said Vern again.
All speech left Queen. Rasping, shrieking, and moaning were all the language she knew. Vern had been there.
“Come with me,” said Vern. “Back to Cainland. Help me save them. Stay with me, and take back what they took from you. Your life. Your dignity. Your whole mind. She didn’t love you. She didn’t care about you.” Queen shook her bowed head as she cried over the dead body. Embarrassed by the viscera still dangling from her lips, Vern wiped the back of her hand over her bloodstained mouth. With her mind linked directly to Queen’s, she could see herself through Queen’s eyes. Vern looked cruel.