I spent the first hours of my 14th birthday with Dad, ankle-deep in grave-dirt that was swiftly turning to mud under the seasonal Romanian downpour. Dad was shoveling on, with the bundle containing our bounty strapped to his back. The canvass fabric that we’d wrapped it in had been soaked through and it stank something fierce. This one had gone bad long before it had reanimated. To pass the time and not think about how we were struggling against the mud and murk, Dad was telling me his digging tale for the hundredth time.

“Lucius and I were in the middle of another dirty mess, as usual” he said, meaning my grandfather, whom I had never heard him address as Dad, or Papa or even your Granpappy “Stuck in the middle of the Gobi desert, without a compass or rations and barely enough water between us to last the night. The death worms had left us alone after the thrashing we’d given them the night before and they’d gone back underground to lick their wounds. Lucius was dead certain they’d come back. I wouldn’t even listen to him; thought we’d had them good and scared. After all, I’d killed two dozen of them myself! Alright, this is deep enough.” Dad told me, stopping halfway through his shoveling, stomping down on the ground to make sure that the floor underneath was good and solid. Loosening the straps on the canvass-wrapped bundle from his back, he let it flop down on the ground, compacted his shovel shaft and motioned me to climb on his back so he could help me out.

“Now, the Mongolian death worms are hands down the most tenacious creatures in all creation. They’re slick, they breed by the hundreds, they shoot acid through their mouths that can eat through steel and they have six rows of tiny, needle-like teeth ringing their mouth going all the way down to their gullet. They barely have two brain cells to rub together, so they use what little output they got to do two things: get their bellies full and make sure their hives are secure. Up you go, Finn.” Dad said, hoisting me in his arms, pushing me up to the rim of the grave’s mouth. I grappled with the muck for a while, bringing a couple handfuls down on the way up before finally making it.

“When the locals had found the first hive that was near the surface and blew it up with TNT, they thought that they were done with the death worms. Except they didn’t pack quite as much punch in that charge as they ought to. Because to destroy a death worm hive, you need to kill the Queen. Miss the Queen and she’s just gonna burrow so deep you won’t be able to reach her save by drilling halfway into the Earth’s mantle. Head’s up!” Dad said and chucked his backpack up the rim. I caught it without falling flat on my back. Setting the backpack aside, I inched closer to the makeshift grave’s rim, sticking my shovel into the ground for leverage.

“Of course, if they had gotten it right the first time, we wouldn’t have been in all that mess. So what I and Lucius did was, we got our owl-bone flutes and we stomped over the flats of the Gobi, where we’d found the cluster of death worm nests. We made such noise that it drove the Queen crazy, made her send her brood up to kill us. We got them but we lost most of our supplies while doing it. She pretty much crippled us. We knew that she was going to come for us personally, as soon as the sun went down. Okay, I’m coming up. Are you ready?” Dad said, reaching his hand out to mine, all calluses and old scars, the index and ring finger on his right missing. Classroom punishment, Dad would call it. What you get when you let your guard down. He’d never told me how he happened to get those but I remember that the stumps looked too clean cut, too precise.

I was halfway through hoisting Dad up, when I noticed something shifting down on the grave's floor. There was a tiny little sound that I’d picked up despite the pouring rain. Dad droned on:

“So Lucius, he’s getting ready for the big standoff, right? Endgame and all that. He’d killed creepy-crawlies across the length and breadth of the world and he was about to be eaten by invertebrates in the Gobi desert. He was doing his war-dance, getting ready for death. He was so meticulous he could drive you crazy, God bless his tar-black soul. What’s wrong?”

I leaned in closer to the edge of the pit, so I could get a closer look at the bundle. The canvass was a mess, halfway covered with mud and gunk and rainwater, near impossible to make out. But something was moving about in there. I caught a glimpse of something bruised and bloated breaking the surface. Then, something that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

“Finn? You okay?”

A fingernail, drifting on the murky water. Left behind from the thing’s hand as it ripped through the canvass. The rest happened at the stop-motion sequance of a nightmare:

-The thing shot out of the water, its head halfway covered in the canvas, its teeth exposed and clicking, its hands outstretched. Murky, muddy water ran down from its gaping wounds.

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-Dad started saying something, but I couldn't make out the words. His lips moved, but the sounds were nonsense. His hand slipped away from mine and he began to fall so slowly that you’d think he was levitating.

-I jumped into the grave, shovel in hand. It seemed unreal, how the rain drops hovered all around me like tiny glass beads, how they broke apart as they collided with my body. I saw the kaleidoscope of writhing, squirming worms in the thing’s festering wounds, watched as I moved despite myself, raising my legs so my knees almost rested against my chest, bracing myself for…no, not impact. This was the training kicking in. It was cold and calculated and planned.

My feet struck the thing across the chest, slamming it against the dirt wall. I felt something caving inside its chest. Its ribcage popped but I was battle-mad, too fast and angry to care. We tumbled down into the muck, me and the thing. It clawed at my face, raked its broken, twisted fingernails across my cheeks, bit into my sleeve but got its teeth caught against the woven mesh underneath.

The shovel head came down edge-first before I even knew that I was doing it, crashing against the coronal suture on its skull. Something gave way under the canvas. It sounded like a bundle of kindling, snapped across a knee. The thing made a strange, gurgling noise but it didn’t let go of my sleeve, so I cracked one at it again and again until the canvas caved in and I could hear something wet slapping against the shovel’s head. Finally, it let go and plopped back down inside the muck.

“Fifteen seconds. Not bad.” Dad said, from his perch at the top of the grave, stopwatch in hand. “Your coordination needs a little bit of work, though; I could have fallen in there with it and then where would you find the room to swing that shovel of yours?”

I stared up at Dad, trying to make sense of the situation. My clothes were soaked, heavy with rain. There was a pounding in my chest, a whistling in my ears and the mother of all storms going on in the pit of my stomach.

“Other than that, your performance was exemplary! You noticed that it had escaped its bounds and wasted no time whatsoever! Pow! Right in the noggin!” Dad grinned and reached his hand out to me, beckoning to get close. I just stood there, staring. “Finn? You okay?”

And right then, I realized exactly how not okay I was. As a matter of fact, I was far from okay, bordering major freakout, but not quite losing my mind just yet. It had just occurred to me how strange, how weird, how downright insane everything was. Not just about the situation I was in -3 meters deep into the earth, with grave-dirt and thing-brains seeping into my shoes, soaking wet with Dad leaning over me giving me his usual what’s-the-big-idea grin- but about my whole, entire life so far.

“Come on Finn, just take my hand. It’s going to be all right, sweetheart.”

When I was 6, Dad drove me all the way to the woods nearly two hours from our house. He parked the car in some clearing and made me take a root-choked path that led me in so deep that I had no hope of ever finding my way home. When we reached a creek, Dad told me pretty much the same thing, just before vanishing. He left me there to find the way back on my own. It took me four days to get back. When I returned, he acted like nothing had happened. Mom had been crying her eyes out. For an entire month, I would dream that I was still in the woods living off the bugs that lived under rocks, seeing the Big Bad Wolf in every shadow.

“It’s alright, Princess. It’s okay, pumpkin, it’s over.”

When I was 8 years old, Dad took me hunting in the City. We were going after a creepy-crawly that was preying on the vagrants, turning them inside out. We disguised ourselves as homeless people, begged with them in the streets. When it finally came for us -a beastie with carapace like a roach’s, wingspan like an eagle’s, hooks for hands and teeth like buzzsaws- Dad left me alone to fend it off, to draw it out. I bawled like a baby when it grabbed me. Kept crying even after Dad sneaked up behind it and splaterred its head against the wall with his sledgehammer. We didn’t tell Mom about it, of course.

“Finn! Pull yourself together, for Pete’s sake!”

Dad scolded me, when we went after the thing in the grave. I had panicked and let it go when it had climbed up the belltower with some unlucky girl about my age in its grip. It wasn’t too strong or too fast, but it was cunning and contagious. If it had bit that girl, she’d have died and become exactly like it, hungry and mad. I could have split its head open with the throwing axe but I hesitated at the last moment, gave it just enough time to get away. It let go of the girl when it realized that her struggling was slowing it down. But we had to spend almost three days looking for it across the countryside. We’d had it constantly on the run, so it hadn’t gotten to bite anyone, eliminating any risk of an infestation. Dad got it, stuck and arrow in its eye and I’d thought that was that.

Except Dad had made sure not to get it.

“Don’t be mad, Finn.”

Except Dad crippled it, just so I’d think he was in danger, to see if I had the stones to do the deed.

“This was a test. You passed with flying colors.”

I needed to get the hell out of my life.

“Dad? I want out.”