The Heavens Rise

For days now, I have watched the horrors that have befallen the city of my birth. And while I must admit, they pale in comparison to the perversions of natural laws that sent me into exile from the very city the world now weeps for, they have inspired me. Inspired me with such force I’m reminded that no matter how much I have been changed on a cellular level, I am still human. Still a teenage girl who will always consider New Orleans her home.

There are masses of starving and dehydrated and dying black people gathered outside the Convention Center without help or any sign of it. I have seen the cries for rescue painted on the rooftops sticking up out of the ebony floodwaters. I have tried to stare at all of it without turning away, and for the most part, I have succeeded.

In the hours after Katrina apparently bypassed the city by a hair, I watched the first reporters stumble out of their hotels and onto Canal Street and into the milky light of a post-storm dawn. They walked dry streets, surveyed a few tree limbs and, because the power was out, they made superficial assessments of their immediate surroundings and declared that the savagery Katrina had been expected to visit on my hometown had not come to pass. Sure, part of the Superdome’s shell seemed to have been torn loose and a bunch of shattered windows in the Central Business District. But aside from that . . .

And I knew they were wrong. They didn’t know my city like I did. They didn’t know the fingers of water that bisected most of its neighborhoods, the streets upon streets of tiny, one-story houses sitting in the shadows of levees and passing ships that often sat higher in the water than the midpoints of the levees themselves. I knew as soon as they put helicopters in the air, as soon as the first reports from outlying areas started pouring in, that the devastation would become clear.

And I was right.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but at first, there was a part of me that was relieved. I knew the body blow of this awful storm would knock my family’s disappearance out of the city’s collective memory. For a while, at least. And that would give me time, more time to consider what lay ahead for me.

I had a nightmare last night. I know I will have it again. I hope I do. It will remind me of my newfound mission.

Apparently Sid-Mar’s, a Bucktown restaurant Anthem’s family used to always drag us to, has been destroyed by the surge. Last night, I dreamed of its flooded interior. The gray water’s inexorable tug peeled Mardi Gras posters off its walls and the overturned tables drifted through the swirl of debris like the skeletons of porpoises. There were no people in this dream; just a slow ballet of ruin.

But it’s the first vivid dream I’ve had since what happened on Highway 22 that night, and it reminded me that I am not dead, that my life is not a nightmare on pause. But I’m going to need a reminder every day, and that’s what this journal is about. I’ve gone days without speaking, and I probably will again, but if I talk to these pages, maybe all of those days won’t end with the same lost, hollowed-out feeling. It’s either that, or start cutting myself.

I am alive. I am real. I still dream, and I still wake up.

My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before her 47th birthday I killed my mother.

24

DESTREHAN

The crew boat pulled up out of the darkness, spitting a trail of bright froth. The black river behind it was a thicket of tug boats and idling container ships. Presiding over this scene was the monolithic Luling–Destrehan Bridge, with matching tuning fork–shaped towers of steel that rose into the night sky, crowned with blinking red lights.

“Hey,” Marshall whispered.

Anthem gave him a steady look. He was still a bit glassy-eyed but a couple cans of Diet Coke had given him some edge. Not his blood, though, Marshall thought. The alcohol level in his blood is still plenty high, and that’s all that will matter once this ride is over with.

“Do me a favor and don’t throw my name around out there,” Marshall said. “There’s just some bullshit with the estate, now that I’m alive again and all. And you know, it’s a small town and I don’t want people to—”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure,” Anthem answered. “Who should I say you are?”

“Cousin?”

“Sure. I got plenty of cousins.”

Once they were standing together on the open back deck of the crew boat, charging across the obsidian vein of the Mississippi toward the towering black hulk that was their destination, Anthem shouted, “She’s a grain ship. A Panamax, the largest they have. But she’s empty so she’s running real fast on the water. She was supposed to load up north of here but the crew found a leak inside one of her dry bulk containers right after she passed under the Luling–Destrehan Bridge. Other pilot and those tugs got her turned around. Now it’s my job to get her as far as Chalmette, so they can send her to Houston for repairs. Greek crew. Registry, Singapore. Do you even care about this shit or should I just let you—”

“No, no. I care!” Marshall shouted back over the wind. The railing he held was attached to a narrow metal staircase that went up ten steps to a platform atop the crew boat’s wheelhouse. The entire boat was rolling so much in the chop that Marshall was forced to hold on with both hands. And he was praying the gun tucked inside the waistband of his jeans didn’t fly out into the river. That would really screw everything up.

But the worst part was how the giant ship had almost no definition at all as they barreled toward it. It gave Marshall the nauseating sense that they were heading straight for a looming black void, a realm of hallucinatory nightmares ready to swallow them both. But the grain ship wasn’t all ghostly darkness. Floating a hundred feet above the water, the bridge was a bright halo of light tucked at the very back of the vessel: electrified, human, real.

“All right, look,” Anthem said, voice raised over the wind. “I’m not gonna lie to you. This part is dangerous, okay? But it’s quick and you’re gonna have people helping you. How’s your movement?”

“My movement?”

“Your muscle coordination. Your reflexes. You were out for a long time so I’m—”

“I’m good. I can move.”

“Good. Okay, so ship’s crew’s gonna throw down a ladder. It’s short and you just go straight up. I’ll help you from behind, and some crew’ll pull you up from on deck. Sound good?”

Marshall nodded. The crew boat pulled parallel to the grain ship’s enormous black hull, and about fifteen feet overhead, a hatch popped open, piercing a rectangle of bright fluorescent light in the ship’s flank. An unfamiliar, stinging heat speared up through his chest, raking the back of his throat. Fear. He hadn’t felt much of it since he’d awakened six months ago, not since almost killing himself at Beau Chêne that afternoon. Now, here it was again, as fresh and overwhelming, as full of hot pulsating life as it had been when he was a pimply teenager.

One of Anthem’s powerful hands came down on Marshall’s shoulder and gave him a tight, paternal squeeze.

“Steady and ready, podnah. That’s what my dad said to me first time I ever did this. When we’re done, we’ll put it on a T-shirt for yah. How’s that sound?”

“Why’s it so dangerous?”

“ ’Cause neither boat’s gonna stop moving. Also, the river’s so high now they had to ballast down the stern so we can get under the Huey P., which means the ship’s gonna be angled . . . kinda.”

“Kinda?”

So we’ll fall in the water. What’s so bad about that?

Well, you could get crushed in between both boats on your way down. Or you could make it to the water alive and then get torn apart by one of the giant propellers right below the surface.

Of course Anthem didn’t mention any of these facts specifically. Because he was such a gentleman. A hero.

This was too ambitious, braving the elements with Anthem like this. He could have done something to the guy on dry land, for Christ’s sake, something that would have disgraced him as effectively as what he was planning out here. It was people he could control; not ships, not currents. And he still hadn’t figured out why Anthem’s frequencies seemed to all resonate at Mach 10 when he’d tried to hook him. But maybe he was reading too much into that to begin with. Maybe it was just performance anxiety, this whole need to murder Anthem Landry in the most spectacularly perfect way.

He’d been provided with a wonderful opportunity the minute the phone had rung in Anthem’s apartment. How ungrateful it would have been for him to turn it down.

“You don’t have to do this, man!” Anthem shouted.

High above them, two crew members tossed a rope ladder out of the open hatch. The rungs were metal, heavy enough to keep the ladder weighted and to the side of the ship. “I can have the crew boat take you back and we can meet—”

“No, no, no!” Marshall shouted back. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Really.”

“You sure?”

Why don’t you go first, you patronizing piece of shit? You go first, then I’ll make sure you slip and fall and turn into mincemeat in the muddy Missusip?

But he couldn’t have that. An accident would never do. Yes, it might be enough to bring Nikki out of hiding, but from the moment he read all those groveling comments in response to Anthem’s missive, Marshall knew disgrace was the only option. And for that he needed the river. And for that he needed to stop being such a goddamn pussy and climb the fucking ladder.

It was over in a few minutes.

The worst part was mounting the platform on the crew boat, those few nauseating minutes of being trapped on a tiny platform swaying with the vessel’s every movement ten feet above the churning river. But the climb was mercifully brief, only a second or two of weightlessness between the moment when Anthem couldn’t push anymore and the crew members overhead started pulling on his shoulders. Then his feet were planted on a solid metal floor and a sickly, sweet stench plugged his nose and throat. Empty or fully loaded, the grain smell was still overwhelming, like loaves of bread that had been left in the sun for days.

Behind him, the crew members hoisted Anthem through the hatch. And the guy had a shit-eating grin on his face even before his feet came to rest on steel. Pride. He was proud of Marshall. Genuinely, stupidly proud of his new friend. Marshall managed his best sheepish grin in return, but he had to look away because all he could think of was that Anthem had probably smiled that way when he was fucking Nikki. And she’d probably given him plenty of reason to.

A stout bearded white guy in a baseball cap and a vest jacket was hovering behind the tiny, dark-skinned crew members. “Who’s this, A-Team? One of your journalist friends?”

Anthem cackled, but immediately looked away from his fellow pilot, probably to avoid breathing on the guy. “Naw, man. Just a cousin of mine from out of town. Careful on the way down there, Favreaux. Wouldn’t want to have to comfort your wife in that nice Jacuzzi of yours.”

“Only comfort you’re ever gonna give a lady is a child support check, Landry.”

And then the pilot disappeared down the ladder, and Anthem gave Marshall a conspiratorial grin, as if they had just accomplished something momentous together. Then the two crewmen—Asians, Marshall could see now, probably Thai or Malay or some other for-shit country where the only thing to do was leave—led them down the long metal-walled corridor.

Anthem had been so concerned with remembering the walkie-talkie he’d need to communicate with other vessels on the river, he’d forgotten Marshall was carrying his cell phone, and he didn’t notice when Marshall fell back and hurled the thing through an open porthole.

25

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

She would drain the pool as soon as she got there. That was her plan.

The execution of it was another matter entirely, and that’s what Nikki Delongpre was plotting as her family trundled along Highway 22 in her father’s massive Lexus SUV, a car so big and cosseted, her mother claimed it could double as an insane asylum cell for a wealthy heiress. And her mom would know; whenever they took long drives together as a family, Millie Delongpre would stretch out across the length of the backseat with her favorite pillow, several strands of platinum-blond hair draping her slack mouth as she dozed. Tonight was no exception. Her father was driving, as always, and he was caffeinated but silent, probably running through party preparations in his head.

While Nikki kept her head turned to the window so she could chew her fingernails without fear of parental disapproval, her father gently tapped his fingers atop the steering wheel, keeping time to Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” It was the official song of her parent’s epic, enduring love affair, the song her father had played on a cheap old stereo the night Millie had accepted his marriage proposal in a shadowy cathedral of cypress and string lights. The song of Elysium, and the song of their lavish wedding, still spoken of in ecstatic terms by the close friends who’d been in attendance. But Nikki always found Satchmo’s voice to be haunting and mournful, and this piece of music relegated her to the sidelines of a mythic romance she feared she’d never be able to live up to in her own life.

She kept telling herself she should be grateful for how quickly things had worked out, and part of her was: Ben’s detective work, the confession from Brittany Lowe, all of it was miraculous, really, and now Anthem, the only man she’d ever loved, had been returned to her after days of darkness and grief and worst of all, uncertainty, days of having her carefully crafted life plans blown to the winds like dust from her palms. But there was one loose end, and it was a big one.

The pool.

It hadn’t been touched since her terrible night with Marshall Ferriot, and odds were it was still swarming with those awful little nameless things. They’d been all over her skin as she’d run for her 4-Runner and she was willing to bet the little creepy-crawlies were the cause of the terrible headaches she’d suffered for days after. They weren’t excruciating; it was the brief, distortions of her vision that had frightened her the most. A pressure would start in her temples, and then for a few seconds, everything was grayscale, and a little twinkly around the edges, like she was looking at the world through a fish tank stained with ash. But she hadn’t said a word about them to anyone. How could she?

Any mention of the headaches or the stuff in the pool and suddenly one question from her father was sure to turn into two and then her mother would get involved, her mother who could never keep a secret, and then they’d both be demanding to know why she’d gone all the way out to Elysium without telling anyone, and swimming? Had she really gone swimming out there by herself? . . . Time. That was what she wanted. Just a little time to let everything settle, to let the reconciliation between her and Anthem become a solid, reliable thing before she had to answer any questions about Marshall Goddamn Ferriot.

But she didn’t have time.

Ben, Anthem, her own parents; she had no right to let them become victims of her secret. She couldn’t let them get anywhere near that stuff, whatever it was. Tons of Google searches had given her all kinds of images of bacteria and parasites and microbes but none that matched what she’d seen floating through the flashlight’s beam that night. So a nickname had come to her unbidden, and she couldn’t manage to shake it no matter how hard she tried. Swamp sperm! And the real reason she couldn’t get the words out of her mind was obvious; they were part of her not-so-subconscious belief that the headaches were divine punishment for what she’s done—what she’d almost done. Even though she’d read tons of pamphlets on domestic violence, even though she’d rolled her eyes at plenty of TV shows where battered women blamed themselves for the abuse heaped on them by their lovers, her thoughts about what Marshall had done to her always reset at the blame game.

If you hadn’t kept it a secret. If you hadn’t been so quick to believe Brittany Lowe’s story about Anthem. You knew something was wrong with Marshall. You’ve always known. But you ignored it because he was so handsome and because he made you feel special and valuable and worth going to North Carolina for if it ever came to that.

A better person than her would have gone back to Elysium on her own and drained the pool before now. But she’d barely gone anywhere alone after Marshall had slammed her into the side of the pool; she’d never been subjected to that kind of violence before, had never even been threatened with it. It left her feeling so timid, broken down. And yes, a little privileged not to have known that kind of fear before, but still terribly ashamed at how badly it had sidelined her. Of course, she had gone to replace her water-ruined cell phone on her own, but that had been a real struggle. As she was standing in line at the Sprint store, her hand had traveled reflexively to the welt on the back of her head, and as soon as her fingers grazed the enduring soreness there, she found herself in a panic, looking over both shoulders, convinced that Marshall was about to come barreling into the store, a semiautomatic pointed at her head.

Just point. Divine inspiration. This is what she’d been looking for ever since they’d pulled away from the house. First thing, walk to the pool, turn on the light and point and say, “What the hell is that stuff?” You’ll have warned everyone, no one will get exposed without their knowledge. And it won’t be a lie because fact is, you still don’t know what that crap actually is.

It was perfect. She’d been overthinking everything. What else was new?

Just point.

She was on the verge of laughing aloud at this simple revelation when a pickup truck flew past them going in the opposite direction, and in the rearview mirror, Nikki saw the truck’s headlights illuminate the large black snake sliding across her mother’s chest.

Darkness descended. She told herself it was a trick of the eye. But she could hear its scales rustling against her mother’s blouse.

Her lips parted; she heard herself wheeze. She went to reach for her father’s arm and saw the speedometer. They were hurtling down the highway at seventy-five miles per hour. And so she froze. She froze because the snake she’d seen had been huge, body almost as thick as her wrist, scales the color of smoke. A water moccasin, it had to be. And yes, yes, yes, snakes only attack when their territory is threatened, but this bastard had been removed from his territory and placed in hers and so there were no rules. There were no rules and oh my God it was huge and her mother couldn’t wake up because she’d scream and if she screamed, what would she—

“Dad,” Nikki whispered.

The head. She needed to see the head. Her father had taught her everything about snakes when she was a little girl. Too many things, in fact. He’d scared her so badly that she’d never after ventured farther than a few yards from the trailers at Elysium without Ben right beside her. She had to see the head. If it was rounded, they were okay. They would be fine. But if it was flat and pointed, then—

Millie Delongpre stirred, let out a soft grunt, the same kind of sound she made when she took an unexpected bite of cilantro. She hated cilantro. Then, her eyes still closed, she lifted one hand toward her chest and that’s when Nikki screamed, “Mom! Don’t!”

Ear-piercing screams. Her father shouting “Hey hey hey what?” And suddenly her mother was a dancing silhouette in the backseat, arms pinwheeling, the snake lost to shadow, no way to tell if she’d been struck. Dancing up and over the backseat, onto the bench seat behind it, still screaming, still oblivious to her daughter’s cries.

Then Nikki saw it. The snake was coiling up on the floor of the backseat, all five feet of it, poised to strike. And her mother was still screaming and screaming. All three of them were now. A deranged blend of pure fear and desperate cries for calm.

Then they hit the guardrail.

There was a deafening pop that was louder than the rest of the chaos and it felt as if Nikki’s wrists had caught fire; she’d thrown her hands out in front of her just as the air bags had exploded. Shards of glass skated across her cheeks and nose. Her father was thrown backward against his seat, tongue jutting lewdly from between his teeth, eyes slits. Then came the water, a great, dark green curtain of it that turned milky in the plunging headlights before slamming into the spiderwebbed windshield. Everything shifted underneath her; the tail of the giant SUV was spinning outward from the bank, and they were floating. Floating under the highway bridge, the nose of the Lexus dipping further below the surface, floating past dark banks of knotted cypress branches and nothing else, no boathouses, no lights in the dark. And in a deranged instant, Nikki felt as if the shattering glass, the exploding air bags, her broken wrists all amounted to a blessed thing, because they had all brought an end to her mother’s terrible screams.

Her father was out cold, slumped forward against his seat belt in the space left by the rapidly deflating air bag. Lukewarm water rose over her ankles as it poured in through the door frame. Behind her, the snake was swimming in frenzied circles in the flooding backseat. But when she went to reach for her seat belt, her broken wrist sent rings of fire up her arms and she cried out in agony. The pain triggered something else; a headache, just like the one she’d suffered for days after her awful night with Marshall. Only this one was stronger, much stronger, and for a few seconds, she feared she’d broken part of her skull along with her wrists.

Then Nikki Delongpre lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror, and that’s when she saw that the world had changed.

It was worse than the brief, grayscale distortions the headaches had brought on previously. The world itself had gone silvery and luminescent, and where her mother was crouched and frozen in the very back seat, her form seemed to be shedding tendrils of bioluminescence. It was as if the intense pressure inside her skull had given way, and left her seeing invisible threads of . . . she didn’t know what, so the words that danced through her brain next were stroke, aneurysm, cerebral hemorrhage. But there was another feeling, and it was in her chest, and it was pure pleasure. A sense that she was taking in great, greedy gulps of the purest oxygen she’d ever inhaled, and it was cleansing her, dousing the pain in her broken wrists, numbing her to slick swamp water crawling up her legs.

And then she heard her mother say, “Stroke. Aneurysm. Cerebral hemorrhage.” But Nikki was allowed only a second or two of realizing that her mother had just spoken her thoughts aloud before it felt as if she was thrown from her body. Suddenly, she had only the vaguest sense of her back resting against the wet leather seat. Up and down had become relative terms, and the hallucinations that gripped her were more than vivid, they were multidimensional and she wasn’t sure if they were passing through her or she was passing through them. Cypress branches and string lights and the voice of Louis Armstrong coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, and then her father down on one knee before her, crying, extending a ring in one hand. But her father’s face was so intricate, so vivid, so real, that Nikki knew this couldn’t be the product of her own mind—she had never known her father’s face that well when he was so young. No, some fundamental piece of her mother’s memory, of her mother’s very soul, was passing through her. And then when her young father leapt to his feet, screaming, and the tall grass all around them began shifting from the motion of a hundred approaching serpents, Nikki realized that her mother’s soul had been irreparably damaged by what had just happened in the concrete world. That what was pushing through Nikki was a terrible hybrid of her mother’s greatest joy and her greatest terror.

And then the hallucination was over, but the delicious, unzipped feeling was still in her chest, the world still swimming in silvery luminescence that both mirrored and danced gracefully with all the solid elements of the ordinary world.

Nikki imagined the fish-skinning tools she’d seen her father load into the back of the SUV, and her mother turned, pulled the case out from between two suitcases.

Nikki envisioned one of the curved steel blades and her mother, who was miraculously and entirely under Nikki’s control, unzipped the set and withdrew the tube skinner.

Then, before she could think twice, Nikki drove her mother to reach down and seize the snake by the neck, and because she had been drained of all life, Millie Delongpre did so without a moment’s fear or hesitation.

She lifted the snake from the rising water, its body whipping like a horse’s tail. Then she slammed it against the back of the seat in one hand, plunged the tube skinner into the center of its fat body and dragged the blade down its length. The snake’s breaking ribs made a sound like glass crunching under a boot heel. Once it was filleted, Nikki forced her mother to cast the limp, scaled body into the cargo bay and crawl forward over the backseat, through the water, then over the armrest, until her breasts were resting on Nikki’s lap and her legs resting across her father’s.

There was a gun in the glove compartment, but there was no way Nikki could manage it with her broken wrists, not without possibly killing one of them. She drove her mother to stretch across her lap, and as her hands struggled with the latch, her eyes were wide but vacant, her face betrayed no frustration. The door wouldn’t budge. The window was closed and intact and the pressure of the water was holding the door shut from the other side.

There was no other choice. Still shrouded in silvery, shifting halos, her mother opened the glove compartment and removed the black pistol inside, unsnapping it from its holster, raising it and pressing its barrel directly against the glass; all of which Nikki commanded her to do with a series of simple visual images she had placed in her own mind.

Then she forced her mother to fire. While the word had been visually altered in ways previously unknown to her, the sound of the gunshot was deafening and vicious. Her father jerked awake next to her. And it was only then that Nikki realized she’d never heard a real gunshot before, and certainly never so close. The muzzle flare blinded her, seemed to scald her face with flecks of white-hot powder. When she screamed, so did her mother, only Millie’s sounded like a mute’s pantomime.

Then it felt as Nikki’s entire rib cage had been pulled on by a giant hand. The impossible connection she’d forged with her mother had been disrupted in the blink of an eye, and she could feel it being yanked away from her now. Her instinct was to pull back, but when she followed it, there were searing flashes of pain inside her skull, and after a white flare that wiped her vision, the normal, shadowed world and all its gory, wet darkness returned.

Water was pouring in through the fresh gunshot in the passenger-side window. The SUV was tipping nose forward. Her father was scrambling out of the pitching, sinking vehicle. But her mother had rolled onto her back in Nikki’s lap. And even though her eyes were wide, she still looked lifeless and hollowed out; she didn’t react as the water rose over her face. That’s when Nikki realized that her mother was shuddering, teeth knocking together, arms jerking and splashing in the water.

You did this to her. You had a connection with her, some kind of impossible connection, and then the gunshot scared you and it all went wrong. And now . . . And now . . .

The SUV tipped forward, the windshield suddenly flat with the bayou’s surface. More water gushed through the gunshot window, but before it rose to cover Millie Delongpre’s face, Nikki saw the woman’s eyes collapse until her pupils were great yawning black holes, spreading outward to devour her forehead. And her mouth; her mouth opened as if she were about to scream, but the teeth inside folded in on themselves and blackened, and before the bayou filled the interior of the car, Nikki realized that whatever she’d just done to her mother, it was turning her body into something formless and primordial, something in which flesh and bone were being reduced to the same fluid consistency.

And then the water claimed them both, and suddenly Nikki Delongpre was kicking and struggling, the pain in her wrists causing her to scream, causing her to swallow water which set fire to lungs that just seconds earlier had been blessed by oxygen so pure it seemed to come from heaven.

Something was grabbing her. And it had tendrils. Snakes? More snakes? She kicked at them and batted them away, before she realized that whatever it was, it was changing shape in the water around her. It was grasping at her. And she could hear the sound of metal being rent all around her. Whatever was clawing at her, it was clawing at the car too, with greater success. And it was getting bigger.

She was yanked upward, suitcases knocking into her, pulled up through the darkness by some tremendous force. At first, she thought it was just air pressure forcing her out of the car as it sank nose-first toward the bottom of the bayou. But she was rising too quickly, and when she exploded through the punched-out rear window of the SUV, lungs aflame, she kept rising up into the air, until her legs were dangling. And that’s when she felt a massive pressure against her chest.

The creature that stood perched on the sinking, upended tail of the Lexus, water sluicing down its scaled body, was at least seven feet tall, and it had her mother’s eyes. They were shaped like inverted teardrops, the largest features on a conical head, but they were Millie’s and they were huge and they were blinking madly with newfound life. The rest of its face and humanoid body were covered in giant versions of the smoke-colored scales of a water moccasin. The monster’s mouth was a long, lipless leer, and on its back, three thick, scaled tentacles danced through the air behind it, meeting in a knotted amalgam of muscle and tendon against its upper back, a grotesque knapsack that made its lithe, slender body look like that of a butterfly. The tentacles flexed and coiled, a constant roil of serpentine energy, assuming a graceful pose one minute, a predatory stance the next.

It was a living nightmare. Her mother’s living nightmare, and whatever Nikki had done to her, it had turned her mother into this thing that now held her in two claws, high above the rippling water. The creature’s mouth opened, revealing row upon row of jagged teeth shaped like snake fangs. Then there was a loud pop and the creature’s right eye exploded, shedding ocher-colored gelatin across Nikki’s chest. Then another, then another, as her father, standing on the nearby bank, emptied the pistol from the glove compartment into the creature’s head before it could speak its first words. By the third shot, the creature released Nikki from its claws, and the water closed over her once again, just as she glimpsed the monster her mother had become tumble sideways off the tail of the Lexus with deadweight.