It goes along.
I remember the first time I saw a mouthy. Thank God he was on television, or I would have completely lost it. The first time Billie saw one, it was in-person, and she almost got herself arrested over it.
“It wanted me in jail,” Billie told me as we walked along the park trail. She never liked it when any of us called a mouthy ‘him’ or ‘her.’ They were monsters to her, and that was the end of it. “I could tell. It kept egging the cop on, trying to get me in even more trouble. And the cop just stood there! He should have arrested it. It wasn’t even masked.”
“Really? How did it get away with that?” One of the things we realized pretty quickly was: most people don’t really see mouthies. Like, the physical deformities. Even we’re not always sure of one, if it’s wearing a mask as a disguise. It wasn’t until I ran into Billie, George, and the others that I stopped worrying that I had just gone crazy. If I was nuts, so were they — and in exactly the same way.
“We were outside, and it was after the lockdown was over.” Billie shook her head, like the memory pained her. “Even then you couldn’t trust the cops to always do the right thing, especially since I might have taken a swing or two at the mouthy.” She pounded one hand against her leg. “Inhuman bastard didn’t even try to fight. It just backed away until the cop came up running.”
Yeah… it’s becoming increasingly likely/clear that the viewpoint character and their band of friends are the weird inhuman ones. You did mention that there were fewer of them now, though. I suppose that if you wanted to be kind, you could pull a 1984-style “become the monster” ending, in a way.