The dog was already drowsing, but his breathing was still rapid, with a small, pained squeak at every exhalation.

“Show the mouth,” Ray told Romeo, who pulled back the dog’s black lips.

Blood jetted onto the table. The teeth were being pushed out at the roots by some strange pink growth splitting open the gums.

Ray’s gloved hand prodded the pink. “It’s solid. Feels almost rubbery.”

The camera swooped away and showed Cheney. He was licking his front legs but otherwise looked normal. In the corner of the basement, Bush sat watching his fellow subjects.

Then the shot cut to two days later, and I didn’t know what I was seeing anymore.

On the table was a heap of fur. The dog was still alive, panting, but he must’ve been tranquilized almost to death. His jaw was broken open, overflowing with a shapeless mass of pink. The stuff had ruptured the skin along his ribs and braided with the tendons of his legs. Bulbs of pink protruded from his asshole.

Cheney was sedated too, and looked just as Rumsfeld had two days before, his teeth cracked, pink breaking through the gums.

“It shows first in the mouth and lips”—Ray gulped—“maybe—because the flesh replenishes fastest there—”

The voice behind the camera spoke: “We have to kill them.”

I’d never heard Romeo speak.

Ray said, “We have to see it to the end.”

“This is the end.”

The camera cut to black.

7.

I paced around the apartment, a pattern dancing, strung together like lanterns on a wire, behind my eyes—Quinn’s shadow that night at the barbecue, the way he gnashed the meat, Zeke on the day of his discharge, his lip chewed and bleeding. I’d thought it was just a nervous tic.

It shows first in the mouth and lips.

“I thought I saw her,” Carmen had said, and her friends told me it was just a junkie, it couldn’t be Jules.

Like she was eating her face.

I didn’t think about Lane. Pink globs intruded when my mind veered from Floella to Quinn to Jules to Zeke. When at last I went to sleep, I slipped into a dream of sitting in Pavel’s house in Mimico. The front door was open and I could see cars on the road below. In my lap, yellow flames began to catch. I couldn’t get up, I tried brushing them off, but they gathered on my wrists and leapt to my chest. I heard the air around me crackle and still I couldn’t stand. The door was right there, cars rushing by, and I spread the fire over myself until it screamed.

I awakened. He was there.