Then, Queen saw herself through Vern’s eyes: wild and unkempt, any semblance of sanity worn down by decades of torture. Queen turned away and stood. “Stay with me,” Vern repeated.
Queen did not stay. Queen grabbed Ollie’s firearm. “It was very nice to meet you, Vern,” she said, as kindly as a woman serving up peach cobbler at brunch, and Vern imagined her as she must’ve been before the fungus, before Cainland, before Ollie.
Queen placed the barrel against her temple and fired. Like a dead, frozen bird, she dropped.
“No!”
Vern crawled over to Queen’s body.
“Come back!”
But there was no coming back from this. The fungus had already started feasting. Through the mycelium, Vern fed on Queen’s brain.
“Goodbye,” said Vern, wishing to linger, knowing she could not. Queen was gone, but Gogo was still there, and so was all of Cainland. Ollie had tried to lay that future tragedy at her feet. Vern wouldn’t let her.
Vern was no monster. Nineteen tender years old, she couldn’t be said to be much more than a girl. She had changed little since the night she’d birthed Howling and Feral. Just like then, she was not so lost in teenagedom that she thought herself wise.
Dismissing the urge to grab Queen’s hand and squeeze, Vern stood. She ran to the van and swiped Ollie’s phone, but she couldn’t unlock it. It needed Ollie’s face.
She looked around her. The sun was bright and the sky was turquoise. To the side of the road, brown and orange dirt. It was a harsh landscape, stark as night, and as merciless, too.
This was the first time in four years that Vern had been without her knife, but she was her own artillery now.
With Ollie’s body held firm between her knees, Vern wrapped her hands around Ollie’s jaws, squeezed, and wrenched upward. She beheaded the woman with the ease of her mam uncorking a bottle of wine. She held Ollie’s head by the hair and dangled it in front of the phone. It unlocked.
Vern held the screen close to her eyes and found the internet icon. From there, she used the mic to find out where she was and flipped on the setting that made the phone’s computer read the text aloud in a robotic voice. Gogo had taught her these settings so she wouldn’t have to strain her eyes.
Gogo. She needed help if she was going to make it. According to the phone, Gogo and Vern were over a hundred miles away from a hospital. The nearest towns were barely more than gas stations and farm shops. None of these would offer them sanctuary. “Think, think, think, think,” said Vern.
Sun stripped her surroundings of color. The world blazed around her bland and beige, as if consumed by fire. Vern stood in the center of the gray road, aching eyes squinted against the punishing light. She spread her exoskeleton out. Ollie’s head was still in her hand and hung at her side.
Fifteen minutes later an SUV screeched to a halt in front of her. The span of her exoskeleton covered the width of the road. “Get out the vehicle,” Vern said. She needed to get Gogo, and this would all be a waste if the driver simply pressed the pedal and drove away when her body was no longer blocking the road.
A man, Black, young, dressed for high summer in a tank top and bright pink swimming trunks, came out of the SUV with his hands up. “Come here,” said Vern, hastily adding, “I’m not going to hurt you.” But that was too soft. “If you cooperate.”
The man—boy? she couldn’t see his face well, but he strode with the arrogance of youth, all limber and fast metabolism. The boy came to her, steps careful. He trembled in fright, but he’d also removed a cell phone from his pocket and began recording her. “This is live,” he said.
“Good,” said Vern. Wherever she ended up, dead or in a cage, she didn’t want her existence to be a secret.
Vern picked up Gogo, who was passed out but moaning, from the side of the road and carried her to the back seat of the SUV and laid her down. Next, she retrieved Ollie’s head. She’d need it to work her phone. Finally, Vern got in, lifting Gogo’s head onto her lap.
“Come on!” Vern yelled out of the open window.
The boy jogged back to the vehicle and popped into the driver’s seat. “I’m not a goddamn chauffeur,” he said, but he was still shaking, still afraid. “Is she—”
“She’s fine,” said Vern. “I need you to take us to the nearest hospital.”
“St. Francis is, like, fuck, it’s a two-hour drive if I push it. Can she make it that long?”
“She can,” said Vern, willing it so.