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receive the monster as she came charging after me, through
wall and fire. She lowered her horned head and rammed into
my chest, lifting me from the floor and pinning me upon
her lethal antlers. She hurtled onward, smashing me through
anything in her path. Finding nothing else, she finally
crushed me against the undercarriage of an overturned truck.
Somehow, I still lived. I think the Red Dream had been
born between us, and within its extents, she and I were true
monsters, beyond the call of conventional pain and fragility.
I tore myself free of her evil headdress, snapping off spines
like branches from a tree, calling up screams from her
hellish, gaping mouth. I seized hold of her remaining horns
and attempted to twist her head from her body. Shortly after
her vertebrae began to crackle, she stood to her full height,
well above my own, denying me the leverage of the burning
earth, dangling me before her forest of teeth.
I reached to my back, raising my father into the air. Miss
Patience lunged forward with her terrible mouth yawning
impossibly wide, revealing the path so many had traveled.
Before either of our blows could land, the world became
thunder and fire, and the ground opened beneath us. The
second batch of explosives had detonated, and Miss Patience
and I tumbled into the stygian depths.
We led a tumbling parade of fire and stone into the
smoking pits of the earth, intertwined like two serpents,
each trying to swallow the other. Comprising the tail of our
downward procession toppled the cannibals and flaming
structures and smoking earth that comprised the corrupted
town of Lastrygone. I found it ironic that the detestable
creatures suddenly found themselves swallowed by the
fiery maw of the earth, dinner to the greatest cannibal of all.
Though the earth had ever been the eater of its own children,
it was also shelter to the oldest darkness—and I had just
betrayed it to a dead, burning star.
Even as we plummeted, Miss Patience was busy trying
to work her enormous jaws around me. All the while, I was
128 | Mark Anzalone