She hates you.

She betrayed you.

Kill her.

He tries to say her name. Tries to ask her who she is. The words don’t sound like words. All she manages is to squeak out a single word:

“Daddy?”

And that does it. The water that quiets the fire. The wind that cools the magma. It’s still there. Inside him. Inside his belly. But for now the cast iron door is shut. The fire is contained inside the furnace that is Mookie Pearl.

He lets his daughter go. She gasps. Blood flows fresh from her wound.

Then: a voice from behind him.

“Mookie Pearl. Loyal until it all starts falling apart.”

He spins.

Standing there in the door: the Boss. A small man made smaller by Mookie’s size.

That accusation: disloyal. All the years that Mookie has given to the Organization – to the man standing before him – come rushing back. A cruel accusation, disloyalty. Mookie’s been nothing but loyal. The furnace door inside him pops open again. The fires of anger belch out. Napalm spills.

He stomps forward, cracking the wooden floor. He reaches for Zoladski–

But suddenly the man leaps in the air, fast as a jungle cat. He clings to the ceiling. Wisps of white hair waving. Mookie sees his blue eyes glittering.

Through the roar of blood in his ears, Mookie thinks:

The Boss doesn’t have blue eyes.

Something roils beneath the Boss’s flesh. Something that no longer aims to be contained. Mookie swipes at the Boss, but the man drops from the ceiling, and skitters backwards into the hall – and as the old man moves, his body rises as his arms lengthen and his legs distend. As he stands to full height, what was once a small man is now as tall as Mookie.

The creature’s fingers stretch and splay. Something begins to grow from their tips. Black spears glistening. Slicing at the air. Similar nails poke through the man’s shoes.

His jaw shifts, cracks. At first Mookie thinks it’s opening wider and wider like the mouth of a Snakeface, but then the lower jaw breaks in half and peels away, all the way back to the man’s ears. What it reveals is not a human mouth at all but some kind of leech maw: rings layered upon one another, a threshing contorting sphincter of shark’s teeth.

All sense of loyalty to the man is gone then. Because the man himself is gone.

Mookie looks forward to killing this thing.

He storms forward. An inelegant approach – the single-path march of a locomotive looking to explode a cow upon its tracks. But he can’t help it.

The Red Rage cares little for finesse.

The Boss drops to all fours and scuttles forward, nails clicking.

Mookie clasps both fists together: a knuckled hammer. He leaps forward, bending at the hip, dropping the hammer of his flesh–

The Boss is gone. Mookie’s coupled fists hit the floor.