have to do.”
“Leave Wink?”
“Yep.”
“But we can’t! No one ever gets out of Wink!”
“I did, once. When I went to Coburn through the back way. I had to walk out of town, then back into it.” She leverages herself up and out of the car, clutching the baby to her chest. “Get back in the Charger. We’ll just head to—”
A new sound joins the buzzing reverberating through Wink. It is incredibly, incredibly loud, so loud it feels like it reaches past her eardrums and vibrates her brain directly. It sounds like someone is slapping a bass string miles long, or maybe as if some vast engine is trying to turn over, gears guttering and cranking…
It sounds, Mona thinks, a little like the buzzing coming from the necks of all the people in Wink, only much, much larger.
“What is that?” asks Gracie.
“I don’t know.”
Then Mona sees something in the landscape. It is so vague it is hard to pinpoint it, but she finds herself looking to the south, where she first entered the valley and passed the sign with the antenna on the mesa. She stares at one of the mountaintops there, and then she sees it.
No way, she thinks.
“What?” asks Gracie.
“Shh,” says Mona. She raises a hand.
Gracie comes to stand beside her. “What?” she asks, more softly.
The river of children is thinning out. Mona guesses that must be all of them. But did she see…
It happens again. Gracie sees it too, and gasps.
“Did that just… did the mountain just move?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Mona slowly. “Yes, it did.”
The movement is so large it dupes the eye into thinking it impossible, but it is really happening: they watch as the entire top half of the mountain rises just a little bit, then falls back down again. The motion is uneven, lopsided: the left side of the mountaintop teeters and slides away more than the right. Trees are uprooted and go tumbling down the mountain like sticks. Huge clouds of dust go roiling up, filling the sky.
“Is it an earthquake?” asks Gracie.
“No,” says Mona. “No, I don’t think so.”
It happens again, harder. Mona is reminded of someone kicking blindly at a door, trying to break through any way they can, and then…
The mountain does not burst, as Mona expects: there is no eruption, no explosion. At one point the mountain lifts up again, but it just keeps lifting; or actually it pivots, like the peak is the top to a hinged box that is slowly being opened; yet as it pivots more and more, the entire mountain is sloughed away, tons and tons of rock and earth sliding off. Dust fills the air, rushes down to the town in a tidal wave. It is as if all the topography was resting on a carpet someone has just started ripping up.
No. No, that’s not right—it’s not ripped up. It’s being pushed up. There’s something underneath the mountain, as if the whole of it is resting on something’s back…
Mona can see it now, just barely: a dark, bent form lost in the mushroom cloud of dust. It is not just big: the mere glimpse of it forces her to redefine all her preconceptions about the concept of “big.”
It stands. There is so much of it, it seems to take forever. And the buzzing sounds around them increase, as if an audience applauding.
“Oh, my God,” says Gracie.
It takes up the whole sky, the whole horizon. It keeps standing until it blocks out the sun, its shadow stabbing forward to swallow the entire town, and then it lifts its arms from the cloud of dust and stretches them out, buzzing horribly, a deep, abysmal voice that makes the very skies shake as it glories in its newfound freedom…
“Yeah,” says Mona.
Mona has seen this thing only once before, in a vision of the mesa north of Wink, long ago. On that occasion she did not get a very good look at it, but now she has a chance to review.
It looks somewhat like a person: it has legs and arms and a torso, but it is far too huge, far too bulky, a massive, cyclopean person easily over six hundred feet tall. Its skin is dark and pockmarked like that of a humpback whale, something used to lightless submersion. It is covered in veins and black, sinewy muscle. Its shoulders and arms and deltoids are huge and swollen, its thigh muscles are mammoth, rippled tumors. Its belly sags down over its groin in a spill of collops and