Though raised halfway off the Map, you still knew enough about regular human life to enjoy the occasional grounding experience: a dinner out, a YouTube tutorial. You order a turkey sub from Subway, because you read somewhere that it's the most popular, Sun Chips and a Coke. You eat standing up, still jittery from the fight, and for a few minutes you imagine that you blend in. Maybe you look like a runaway or a street kid, but you're one of them. And then a woman a few years older than you orders a caramel latte supreme and a sesame seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese from the Tim Hortons and you think—it's the clearest thought in the world, like an old-timey radio guy announcing it to your brain—that you could rip her head right off. She'd never have a chance, soft and clueless, don't even know what they're doing as they bumble through life, flinging their trash everywhere, shitting up the earth…
She walks back through the sliding doors, hops in her Honda pickup. The headlights burn your eyes. You're not one of them, never will be.
The rest of the turkey sub tastes like grass and sawdust. You eat what you can and ball up the trash—more poison for Gaia to process, like a drunk guy's liver working on overdrive—and step outside into the icy air. That's when you spot movement on the far side of the parking lot, where the semis are parked.
Black Tarn darts between two trucks, still in the form of a huge wolf. She freezes, bewildered, as if she's never seen a parking lot before, never seen the normal world of signs and maps. Then Scarper appears, dragging what at first glance looks like a huge black plastic trash bag with someone in it. Did they bag another monster? But then you recognize the screams and growls coming from the thing Scarper is dragging: it's Clay. A moment later, you realize that it's not a trash bag at all. It's Clay's flesh, shifting and sloughing off, leaving a trail of black filth between the semis.
Next