It was the children, of course. Not just that they would tell the other, and move him a few small steps further into the necessary fear. But also because he really liked children. They were wonderful to work with, they broadcast emotions that were so very powerful, and raised the whole energy of the event to a higher plane.
Children—wonderful.
This was actually starting to be enjoyable.
For a while, it was enough to ride in the monkey-things and help them kill.
But even this grew dull with the simple repetition, and every now and then IT felt again that there had to be something more. There was that tantalizing twitch of something indefinable at the moment of the kill, the sense that something stirred toward waking and then settled back down again, and IT wanted to know what that was.
But no matter how many times, no matter how many different monkey-things, IT could never get any closer to that feeling, never push in far enough to find out what it was. And that made IT want to know all the more.
A great deal of time went by, and IT began to turn sour again. The monkey-things were just too simple, and whatever IT did with them was not enough. IT began to resent their stupid, pointless, endlessly repeating existence. IT lashed out at them once or twice, wanting to punish them for their dumb, unimaginative suffering, and IT drove IT’s host to kill entire families, whole tribes of the things. And as they all died, that wonderful hint of something else would hang there just out of reach and then settle back down again into slumber.
It was furiously frustrating; there had to be a way to break through, find out what that elusive something was and pull it into existence.
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And then at last, the monkey-things began to change. It was very slow at first, so slow that IT didn’t even realize what was happening until the process was well under way. And one wonderful day, when IT went into a new host, the thing stood up on its back legs and, as IT still wondered what was happening, the thing said, “Who are you?”
The extreme shock of this moment was followed by an even more extreme pleasure.
IT was no longer alone.
E I G H T E E N
The ride to the detention center went smoothly, but with Deborah driving that merely meant that no one was severely injured. She was in a hurry, and she was first and foremost a Miami cop who had learned to drive from Miami cops. And that meant she believed that traffic was fluid in nature and she sliced through it like a hot iron in butter, sliding into gaps that weren’t
really there, and making it clear to the other drivers that it was either move or die.
Cody and Astor were very pleased, of course, from their securely seat-belted position in the backseat. They sat as straight as possible, craning upward to see out. And rarest of all, Cody actually smiled briefly when we narrowly missed smashing into a 350-pound man on a small motorcycle.
“Put on the siren,” Astor demanded.
“This isn’t a goddamned game,” Deborah snarled.
“Does it have to be a goddamned game for the siren?” Astor said, and Deborah turned bright red and yanked the wheel hard to bring us off U.S. 1, just barely missing a battered Honda riding on four doughnut tires.
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“Astor,” I said, “don’t say that word.”
“She says it all the time,” Astor said.
“When you are her age, you can say it, too, if you want to,” I said. “But not when you’re ten years old.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “If it’s a bad word it doesn’t matter how old you are.”
“That’s very true,” I said. “But I can’t tell Sergeant Deborah what to say.”
“That’s stupid,” Astor repeated, and then switched directions by adding, “Is she really a sergeant? Is that better than a policeman?”
“It means she’s the boss policeman,” I said.
“She can tell the ones in the blue suits what to do?”