THEY SAY LOS Angeles is like The Wizard of Oz. One minute it’s small-town monochrome neighborhoods and then boom-all of a sudden you’re in a sprawling Technicolor freak show, dense with midgets.
Unfortunately, this story does not take place in Los Angeles.
The place I was sitting was a small city in the Midwest which will remain undisclosed for reasons that will become obvious later. I was at a restaurant called “They China Food!” which was owned by a couple of brothers from the Czech Republic who, as far as I could tell, didn’t know a whole lot about China or food. I had picked the place thinking it was still the Mexican bar and grill it had been the previous month; in fact, the change was so recent that one wall was still covered by an incompetent mural of a dusky woman riding a bull and proudly flying the flag of Mexico, carrying a cartoon burrito the size of a pig under her arm.
This is a small city, large enough to have four McDonald’s but not so big that you see more than the occasional homeless person on the way. You can get a taxi here but they’re not out roving around where you can jump off the sidewalk and hail one. You have to call them on the phone, and they’re not yellow.
The weather varies explosively from day to day in this part of America, the jet stream undulating over us like an angry snake god. I’ve seen a day when the temperature hit one hundred and eight degrees, another when it dipped eighteen degrees below zero, another day when the temperature swung forty-three degrees in eight hours. We’re also in Tornado Alley, so every spring swirling, howling charcoal demons materialize out of the air and shred mobile homes as if they were dropped in huge blenders.
But all that aside, it’s not a bad town. Not really.
A lot of unemployment, though. We’ve got two closed factories and a rotting shopping mall that went bankrupt before it ever opened. We’re not far from Kentucky, which marks the unofficial border to the South, so one sees more than enough pickup trucks decorated with stickers of Confederate flags and slogans proclaiming their brand of truck is superior to all others. Lots of country music stations, lots of jokes that contain the word “nigger.” A sewer system that occasionally backs up into the streets for some unknown reason. Lots and lots of stray dogs around, many with grotesque deformities.
Okay, it’s a shithole.
There are a lot of things about this undisclosed city that the chamber of commerce won’t tell you, like the fact that we have more than quadruple the rate of mental illness per capita than any other city in the state, or that in the ‘80s the EPA did a very discreet study of the town’s water supply in hope of finding a cause. The chief inspector on that case was found dead inside one of the water towers a week later, which was considered strange since the largest opening into the tank was a valve just ten inches wide. It was also considered strange that both of his eyes were fused shut, but that’s another story.
My name is David, by the way. Um, hi. I once saw a man’s kidney grow tentacles, tear itself out of a ragged hole in his back and go slapping across my kitchen floor.
I sighed and stared blankly out of the window of They China Food!, occasionally glancing at the clock sign that flashed 6:32 P.M. in the darkness from the credit union across the street. The reporter was late. I thought about leaving.
I didn’t want to tell this story, the story of me and John and what’s happening in Undisclosed (and everywhere else, I guess). I can’t tell the story without sounding as nuts as a… a nut bush, or-whatever nuts grow from. I pictured myself pouring my heart out to this guy, ranting about the shadows, and the worms, and Korrok, and Fred Durst, babbling away under this wall-sized portrait of a badly drawn burrito. How was this going to turn into anything but a ridiculous clusterfuck?
Enough, I said to myself. Just go. When you’re on your deathbed you’re gonna wish you could get back all the time you spent waiting for other people.
I started to stand but stopped myself halfway up. My stomach flinched, as if cattle-prodded. I felt another dizzy spell coming on.
I fell hard back into the booth. More side effects. I was already light-headed, my body trembling from shoes to shoulders in random spells, like I swallowed a vibrator. It’s always like this when I’m on the sauce. I dosed six hours ago.
I took slow, deep breaths, trying to cycle down, to level off, to chill out. I turned to watch a little Asian waitress deliver a plate of chicken fried rice to a bearded guy on the other side of the room.
I squinted. In half a second I counted 5,829 grains of rice on her plate. The rice was grown in Arkansas. The guy who ran the harvester was nicknamed “Cooter.”
I’m not a genius, as my dad and all my old teachers at Undisclosed Eastern High School will inform you with even the slightest provocation. I’m not psychic, either. Just side effects, that’s all.
The shakes again. A quick, fluttery wave, like the adrenaline rush you get when you lean your chair too far past the tipping point. Might as well wait it out, I guess. I was still waiting on my “Flaming Shrimp Reunion,” a dish I ordered just to see what it looked like. I wasn’t hungry.
A flatware set was wrapped in a napkin on the table in front of me. A few inches away was my glass of iced tea; a few inches from that was another object, one I didn’t feel like thinking about right then. I unwrapped my utensils. I closed my eyes and touched the fork, immediately knew it was manufactured in Pennsylvania six years ago, on a Thursday, and that a guy had once used it to scrape a piece of dog shit from his shoe.
You’ve just gotta make it through a couple of days of this, said my own voice again from inside my skull. You’ll open your eyes tomorrow or the next day and everything will be okay again. Well, mostly okay. You’ll still be ugly and kind of stupid and you’ll occasionally see things that make you-
I did open my eyes, and jerked in shock. A man was sitting across from me in the booth. I hadn’t heard or felt or smelled him when he slid into the seat. Was this the reporter I spoke to on the phone?
Or a ninja?
“Hey,” I mumbled. “Are you Arnie?”
“Yeah. Did you doze off there?” He shook my hand.
“Uh, no. I was just tryin’ to rub somethin’ off the back of my eyelid. I’m David Wong. Good to meet ya.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
Arnie Blondestone looked just like I imagined him. He was older, uneven haircut and a bad mustache, a wide face made for a cigar. He wore a gray suit that looked older than I was, a tie with a fat Windsor knot.
He had told me he was a reporter for a national magazine and wanted to do a feature on me and my friend John. It wasn’t the first request like this, but it was the first one I had agreed to. I looked the guy up on the Web, found out he did quirky little human-interest bits, Charles Kuralt stuff. One article about a guy who obsessively collects old lightbulbs and paints landscapes on them, another about a lady with six hundred cats, that sort of thing. It’s what polite people have instead of freak shows I guess, stories we can laugh at around the coffee machines in the office break room.
Arnie’s gaze stayed on my face a little too long, taking in my beads of cold sweat, my pale skin, the thatch of overgrown hair. Instead of pointing out any of that, Arnie said, “You don’t look Asian, Mr. Wong.”
“I’m not. I was born in [Undisclosed]. I had the name changed. Thought it would make me harder to find.”
Arnie gave me the first of what I assumed would be many, many skeptical looks. “How so?”
I half closed my eyes, my mind flooding with images of the 103 billion humans who have been born since the species appeared. A sea of people living, dying and multiplying like cells in a single organism. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to clear my mind by focusing on a mental image of the waitress’s boobs.
I said, “Wong is the most common surname in the world. You try to Google it, you’ve got a shitload of results to sift through before you get to me.”
He said, “Okay. Your family live around here?”
Getting right to it, then.
“I was adopted. Never knew my real dad. You could be my dad, for all I know. Are you my dad?”
“Eh, I don’t think so.”
I tried to figure out if these were warm-up questions to prime the interview pump, or if he already knew. I suspected the latter.
Might as well go all-in. That’s why we’re here, right?
“My adopted family moved away, I won’t tell you where they are. But get out your pen because you’ll want to write this down. My biological mom? She was institutionalized.”
“That must have been hard. What was the-”
“She was a strung-out, crank-addicted cannibal, dabbled in vampirism and shamanism. My mom, she worshipped some major devil when I was a toddler. Blew her welfare check every month on black candles. Sure, Satan would do her favors now and then, but there’s always a catch with the Devil. Always a catch.”
A pause from Arnie, then, “Is that true?”
“No. This, this silliness, it’s what I do when I’m nervous. She was bipolar, that’s all. Couldn’t keep a house. Isn’t the other story better, though? You should use it.”
Arnie gave me a practiced look of reporterly sincerity and said, “I thought you wanted to get the truth out, your side of it. If not, then why are we even here, Mr. Wong?”
Because I let women talk me into things.
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Now, since we broached the subject, you spent your senior year in high school in an alternative program…”
“Yeah, that was just a misunderstanding,” I lied. “They have this label, ‘Emotionally Disturbed’ that they put on you, but it was just a couple of fights. Kid stuff, no charges or anything. Craziness is not hereditary.”
Arnie eyed me, both of us aware of the fact that juvenile records are sealed from public viewing and that he would have to take my word for it. I wondered how this would end up in his article, especially in light of the utter batshit insanity of the story I was about to share.
He moved his gaze to the other object on the table, from his perspective, a small, innocent-looking container. It was about the size and shape of a spool of thread, made of flat, brushed metal. I rested my fingers on it. The surface was icy to the touch, like it had spent all night in the freezer. If you set the thing out in the hot sun from morning to night it would still feel that way. You could mistake it for a stylish pill bottle, I suppose.
I could blow your world away, Arnie. If I showed you what was in this container, you’d never sleep another full night, never really lose yourself in a movie again, never feel at one with the human race until the day you die. But we’re not ready for that, not yet. And you sure as hell won’t be ready for what’s in my truck…
“Well,” Arnie began again, “either way, mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. We just get sick from time to time, part of being human, you know? For instance, I was just talking to a guy up north, a high-priced lawyer-type who spent two weeks in the psych ward himself a little while ago. Name of Frank Campo. You know that name?”
“Yeah, I knew him a little.”
“Frank wouldn’t talk to me, but his family said he was having hallucinations. Almost daily, right? Guy had this car wreck and from then on he just got worse and worse. He freaked out at Thanksgiving. Wife brought in the turkey, but to Frank, it wasn’t a turkey. Frank saw a human baby, curled up on the platter, cooked to a golden brown. Stuffing jammed in its mouth. He went nuts, wouldn’t eat for weeks after that. He got to where he was having incidents every few days. They figured it was brain damage, you know, from the accident. But the doctors couldn’t do squat. Right?”
“Yeah. That’s about it.”
You skipped over the weirdest part, Arnie. What caused the accident in the first place. And what he saw in his car…
“And now,” said Arnie, “he’s cured.”
“Is that what they say? Good for him, then. Good for Frank.”
“And they swear that it was you and your friend who cured him.”
“Me and John, yeah. We did what we could. But good for Frank. I’m glad to hear he’s okay.”
A little smile played at Arnie’s lips. Acidic. Look at the crazy man with his incompetent, crazy-man haircut and his crazy little pill bottle and his crazy fucking story.
How many decades of cynicism did it take to forge that smirk, Arnie? It makes me tired just looking at it.
“Tell me about John.”
“Like what? In his midtwenties. We went to school together. John isn’t his real name, either.”
“Let me guess…”
The images start to rush in again, the mass of humanity spreading across the globe over centuries like a time-lapse video of mold taking over an orange. Think of the boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs.
“… John is the most common first name in the world.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And yet there’s not a single person named John Wong. I looked it up.”
“You know, I work with a John Wong.”
“Oh, really?”
“Let’s move on,” Arnie said, probably making a mental note that this David Wong guy isn’t above just making shit up.
Holy crap, Arnie, just wait until you hear the rest of the story. If your bullshit meter is that finely tuned, in a few minutes it’s liable to explode and take half a city block with it.
“You guys already got a little bit of a following, don’t you?” he said, flipping back to a page in a little notebook already riddled with scribbles. “I found a couple of discussion boards on the Web devoted to you and your friend, your… hobby, I guess. So, you’re, what, sort of spiritualists? Exorcists? Something like that?”
Okay, enough farting around.
“You have eighty-three cents in your front pocket, Arnie,” I said quickly. “Three quarters, a nickel, three pennies. The three pennies are dated 1983, 1993 and 1999.”
Arnie grinned the superior grin of the “I’m the smartest man in the room” skeptic, then scooped his coins out of his pocket. He examined the contents, confirmed I was right.
He coughed out a laugh and brought his fist down on the table, my utensils clinking with the impact. “Well I’ll be damned! That’s a neat trick, Mr. Wong.”
“If you flip the nickel ten times,” I continued, “you’ll get heads, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails, heads, tails, tails.”
“I’m not sure I want to take the time to-”
For a brief moment, I considered taking it easy on Arnie. Then I remembered the grin. I unloaded.
“Last night you had a dream, Arnie. You were being chased through a forest by your mother. She was lashing you with a whip made of knotted penises.”
Arnie’s face fell, like an imploded building. As much as I hated the expression on his face a few minutes ago, I loved this one.
That’s right, Arnie. Everything you know is wrong.
“You got my attention, Mr. Wong.”
“Oh, it gets better. A lot better.”
Bullshit. What it gets is worse. A lot worse.
“It started a few years ago,” I began. “We were just a couple of years out of high school. Just kids. So that friend of mine, John, he was at a party…”
JOHN HAD A band back in those days. The party was happening Woodstock-style in a muddy field next to a lake in a town a few minutes outside of Undisclosed city limits. It was April of that year and the party was being put on by some guy, for his birthday or whatever. I don’t remember.
John and I were there with his band, Three-Arm Sally. It was around nine o’clock when I strode out onto the stage with a guitar slung over my shoulder, greeted by a smattering of unenthusiastic applause from the hundred or so guests. The “stage” was just a grid of wooden pallets laid together on the grass, orange drop cords snaking underfoot from the amps to a nearby shed.
I glanced around, saw a set list taped to one of their crackly old Peavey amplifiers. It read:
Camel Holocaust
Gay Superman
Stairway to Heaven
Love My Sasquatch
Thirty Reasons Why I Dislike Chad Wellsburg
Love Me Tender
We took our places.
It was me, Head (the drummer), Wally Brown (bass), Kelly Smallwood (bass) and Munch Lombard (bass). John was lead guitar and vocals, but he wasn’t on stage, not yet. I should let you know that I had no idea how to play the guitar or any other musical instrument, and that the sound of my singing voice could probably draw blood from a man’s ears, and perhaps kill a dog outright.
I stepped up to the mic.
“I want to thank you all for coming. This is my band, Three-Arm Sally, and we’re here to rock you like the proverbial hurricane.”
The crowd muttered its indifference. Head hammered the drums for the intro to “Camel Holocaust.” I slung the guitar around and got ready to rock.
Suddenly, my whole body wrenched in a display of unbearable pain, knees buckling. My hands shot to my head and I collapsed to the stage, screaming like a wounded animal. I scraped the guitar strings to throw out some painful, spastic feedback on my way down. The crowd gasped, watching as I flew into a series of exaggerated convulsions, then finally lay still.
Munch rushed over, studied me like a paramedic. I lay there like a dead man. He touched my neck, then stood and turned to the mic.
“He’s dead, ladies and gentlemen.”
A rustling, drunken panic in the crowd.
“Wait. Please, please. Everyone. Pay attention. Just calm down.”
He waited for quiet.
“Now,” he said. “We have a whole show to do. Is there anyone here who knows how to sing and play guitar?”
A tall man stepped out of the crowd, a head of curly long hair like a deflated afro. This was John. He wore an orange T-shirt with a black stenciled stamp bearing the logo of VISTA PINES FACILITY FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE. The last two words had been crossed out with a black Magic Marker and the words NOT INSAN were scrawled crazily over it. The whole shirt, logo and all, was John’s handiwork.
“Well,” John said, in a fake Southern accent, “I reckon I can play a little.”
Kelly, according to script, invited him onto the stage. John pried the guitar out of my dead hands while Head and Wally dragged me carelessly off into the grass. John picked up the instrument and tore into the “Camel Holocaust” intro. Three-Arm Sally began every single show this way.
“ I knew a man
No, I made that part up
Hair! Hair! Haaairrr!
Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”
That whole bit was something John had come up with, the man having a terrible habit of carrying out his drunken 3:00 A.M. ideas even after daylight and sobriety came. It was always 3:00 A.M. for John.
I turned onto my back and stared into the night sky. That’s what I remember, from that last moment of real peace in my life. The rain had ended hours ago, the stars freshly cleaned and polished against their black velvet background. The music thrummed through the ground and the cool moisture of the grass soaked up through my sweatshirt as I gazed into the twinkling jewels of infinity, all spit-shined by God’s shirtsleeve. And then the dog barked and everything turned to goat shit.
It was rusty red, maybe an Irish setter or a red Labrador or a… Scottish rust-dog. I don’t know my dogs. Ten feet of thin chain trailed off its collar. Bounding around the partygoers, a bundle of manic canine energy, drunk on the first freedom of its life.
It squatted and peed on the grass, ran over to another spot and peed there, too. Marking this whole new world as its territory. It came toward me at a trot, the chain hissing through the grass behind it. It sniffed around my shoes, decided I was dead, I guess, and began snuffling around my pockets to see if I had died with any beef jerky on me.
It recoiled when I reached up to pet it, a catty “don’t touch the hair” look on its face.
A brass tag, on its collar.
Etched with a message.
I’MMOLLY.
P LEASE RETURN ME TO …
… with an address in Undisclosed listed below. At least seven miles from home. I wondered how long it had taken the animal to etch that tag.
The dog, having nothing else to gain from our relationship, trotted away. I followed it, deciding on the spot that I would load up the dog and return it to the owners, who were probably worried sick about it. Probably a family with a little girl, crying her eyes out waiting for it to come back.
Or, a couple of sorority girls dealing with their grief through a series of erotic massages…
It’s hard to look cool chasing after a dog, especially since I sort of run like a girl anyway. The dog pitched annoyed glances back my way as I trotted after it, picking up speed each time. I wound up taking a circuitous path all the way to the other side of the field, where I heard something that turned my guts cold.
A shriek. High-pitched, almost a whistle. Only two creatures on God’s Earth can make that sound: African Grey Parrots and fifteen-year-old female humans. I spun around, moved toward the commotion. The dog seemed to eye me carefully, then ran off in the other direction. I looked around-
Ah. Giggling now. There was a bundle of girls, away from the stage, huddled with their backs to the band. They were surrounding a black guy with dreadlocks, an overcoat. He had one of those Rastafarian berets on his head, definitely going for a look, wanting the attention. Two of the girls had their hands over their mouths, eyes bulging, screaming for the guy to do it again, do it again. From the reaction I figured I had just encountered the most dreaded of all partygoers: the amateur magician.
“Oh my gawd!” said the nearest girl. “That guy just levitated!”
One girl looked pale, on the verge of tears. Another threw up her hands and walked away, head shaking.
Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.
“How high?” I asked blandly.
The Jamaican turned his gaze on me, trying to pull off the piercing stare of the exotic voodoo priest. It was an expression that was supposed to make me hear theremin music in my head.
“You gotta love the skeptic, mon,” the guy said in a rubber accent that was part Jamaican, part Irish and part pirate.
“Show him! Show him!” screeched a couple of the girls.
I’m not sure why I feel the need to rain on this kind of parade. I like to think I’m standing up for skepticism but in reality I was probably just pissed that this guy was going to have sex tonight and I wasn’t.
“What, about six inches above the grass, right?” I asked him. “Balducci levitation? Made famous by magic hack David Blaine in his television special? All you need is some strong ankles and a little acting, right?”
And a stupid, drunken audience…
His gaze froze on me. I had a familiar, nervous sensation, one that goes all the way back to elementary school. It’s the simultaneous realization that I may have talked my way into another fistfight, and that I had not spent any time learning to fight since the last one. In a town where Friday night bar brawls make the Undisclosed emergency room look like the aftermath of a Third World election, sometimes it’s better for smart-asses like me to just keep walking.
Then, he broke out in a big, white, toothy smile. A charmer.
“Let’s see… what can I do to impress Mr. Skeptic Mon? Ah, lookee there. You didn’t wash behind your ears, did ya?”
I let out a loud, theatrical sigh as he reached out to the side of my head, presumably to pull out a shiny quarter from behind my ear. But when he pulled back his hand, he was holding, not a coin, but a long, wriggling black centipede. He let it dangle over his fist, turning his hand over as it crawled around and around. One of the girls squealed.
He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, held the wriggling thing up for everyone to see. I noticed for the first time he had a few layers of first-aid tape wrapped around his other hand. He passed this hand in front of the bug and in a blink, the centipede was gone. The girls gasped.
“Well, the bug was a nice touch,” I said, glancing at my watch.
“You wanna know where it went, mon?”
“No.” I wasn’t feeling well all of a sudden. This guy was giving me an odd feeling in my gut. “But, you know, don’t get me wrong. I am one entertained son of a bitch.”
“I got other talents, you know.”
“Yeah, but I bet all your really good tricks are back at your apartment, right? And you’d be happy to show them to me, if only I were sixteen and female?”
“Do you dream, mon? I interpret dreams for beer.”
That’s the town of Undisclosed in a nutshell. This run-down half city with more weirdos per capita than you’ll find anywhere outside of San Francisco. We should have that printed on the green population sign coming into town: WELCOME TO [UNDISCLOSED]. DREAMS INTERPRETED FOR BEER.
I said, “Well, I don’t have any beer so I guess I’m outta luck.”
“I tell you what, Mr. Skeptic Mon. I’ll do it just like Daniel in the Old Testament. I’ll tell you the last dream you had, then I’ll break down its meaning for you. But if I’m right, you gotta buy me a beer. Okay, mon?”
“Sure. I mean, you’ve obviously been blessed with supernatural gifts. What better way to use them than to fish for free beers at parties.” I craned my head around, and thought I saw the dog trotting around a tent where somebody was selling corn dogs. I told my feet to turn and walk after it. I commanded my mouth to tell this guy “never mind.” Neither responded.
I knew that absolutely nothing good could possibly come from this encounter and, somehow, that a whole lot of bad could come instead. But my feet were planted.
“You had a dream early this morning, in the middle of the thunderstorm.”
I looked him in the eye.
Pfft. Lucky guess…
“In the dream, you were back with your girl Tina…”
Whoa, how’d he know-
“-and you come home, and she’s there with a big honkin’ pile of dynamite. One of those big cartoon plunger detonators, ready to blow. You ask her what she’s doin’ and she says ‘this’ and shoves down the handle and,” he spread his hands in the air, “boom. Your eyes snapped open. The explosion in your dream became the clap of thunder outside your window. So tell me, mon. Am I close?”
Ho. Lee. She. It.
He smiled. All eyes were on me, the naked shock on my face. A girl whispered, “Oh my God…”
There is no feeling I hate as much as speechlessness in the face of another man. I mumbled something.
One of the girls muttered, “Was he right? He was right, wasn’t he?”
A raven-haired girl next to her wearing raccoon eye shadow suddenly looked like she had been drained by a vampire. The group had unconsciously taken a step or two backward, as if there was some kind of safe distance at which the world would start making sense again.
“The look on his face tells me I was right,” he said, through a grin. “Wouldn’t you say, girls? But wait, there’s more.”
I wanted to walk away. Up on the pallet stage behind me John was tearing away the solo that marks the end of “Camel Holocaust,” rapping some impromptu lyrics, all over the cacophonous drums of Head “the entire show is one big drum solo in my mind” Feingold, and the band’s thunderous triple-threat bass. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, everything from garage bands to Pearl Jam. Maybe my opinion is biased, but I would have to say that Three-Arm Sally is the shittiest band I’ve ever heard.
“You can guess the meaning of the dream, mon. The girl layin’ in wait for you, ready to wreck your world again. But the dream be tryin’ to tell you somethin’ else, too. The dream be tryin’ to warn you, givin’ you a demonstration.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “You made a lucky guess, somebody probably told you about-”
“You see, you gotta be brave to ask yourself the scary questions. How did your mind, David, know the thunder was coming?”
Thunder? What? Get away from this guy, man. Get away get away-
“What? You’re full of-”
“The thunder came right as she hit the detonator in your dream. Your mind started the dream thirty seconds before the thunderclap. How did it know the thunder would be coming at that moment, to coincide with the explosion at the end?”
Because it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward, I thought, crazily. Holy shit I’m quoting Alice in Wonderland. This is the worst fucking party ever.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. This, this is bullshit.” I was looking everywhere but at the Jamaican, suddenly terrified that I’d see him floating a foot off the grass. The girls were tittering to each other in amazement, a story to tell in the hallway Monday. Screw them. Screw everybody. But the bastard just wouldn’t stop talking.
“We’ve all had those dreams, mon. You dream you’re on a game show, on TV wearin’ nothing but a jockstrap. At the exact moment the game show buzzer goes off to tell you you’ve lost, the telephone buzzes in real life. A call your mind couldn’t have known was coming. You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud. Your mind is a-”
“-What ever. Whatever.”
I turned away, shaking my head, my mouth dry.
Walk away, walk away. This ain’t right, you know it. You want no part of this guy.
Onstage, John was now crooning the slow, mournful dirge that was “Gay Superman.”
“The camel of despair
soars, strapped to his jet pack
David Wong
of haunted memories…”
“Want me to tell you where your daddy really was when you were in the hospital with that broken leg?” he said to my back. This stopped me, my guts turning to ice again. “Want me to tell you the name of your soul mate? Or how she’ll die?”
“Stop, or I’ll tell you how you’ll die”-that’s what I wanted to say but didn’t.
I walked away, forcing the steps. It was that jarring sensation of unreality, like the first time you see the road go spinning around your windshield in the middle of a car crash. I was actually dizzy, unsteady on my feet.
“Do you want to know when the first nuclear bomb will go off on American soil? And which city?”
I almost launched myself at the guy. But, once again a probable trip to the hospital was avoided by physical cowardice. This guy could probably kick my ass even without magical powers. I was so wired at this point I had the insane urge to punch one of those girls instead. Probably lose that fight, too.
“You know what, mon, why don’t you take your fake Jamaican accent and get back on the boat to Fake Jamaica,” is another thing it would have been cool to say, had I thought of it. Instead I sort of mumbled and made a dismissive motion with my hand as I stumbled into the crowd, acting like the conversation failed to hold my interest.
“Hey!” he shouted after me. “You owe me a beer, mon! Hey!”
Gypsies and psychics and Tarot readers have a hundred generations of practice at their art. And practice is all it is. Cold reading, wishful thinking, deductive reasoning. Throw out some general statement that could apply to any person on this Earth-
“I’m sensing that something is troubling you.”
“You’re amazing! Yes, it’s my husband…”
– and the mark tells you the rest. But the fake Jamaican had no way of knowing what he knew. No possible way. I watched my shoes mash through the weeds. This man had just ruptured the thin fabric of all I believed to be-
I walked right into a girl, broadsided her, felled her like a tree. I saw, to my horror, that it was Jennifer Lopez.
YOU KNOW HOW to tell if you’ve been single too long? When you help a girl to her feet and get a rush of excitement for the two seconds you hold her hand on the way up.
“Jeez, sorry,” I said as Jennifer picked up her beer bottle. “I was walking away from, uh, you know, voodoo. Thing. Flying voodoo man.”
She was in denim shorts and a tank top, hair in a ponytail. I guess I should point out that this was not the famous Jennifer Lopez, but rather a local girl I was fond of who happened to have that same name. I guess it would have made a better story if it turned out to be the singer/actress and if you want to picture J. Lo whenever I mention this girl, feel free, even though my Jennifer only looked like the famous one when she was walking away from you.
She worked as a cashier at Home Depot these days and I made it a point to show up in her lane buying the manliest items in the store. In my apartment I now had an ax, three bags of cement mix and three different crowbars. On the last visit I bought a ten-pound sledgehammer and, looking disappointed, asked her if they had a bigger one. She didn’t answer, not even to count back my change.
As she brushed grass clippings off her butt I felt the intense urge to reach over and help her. I managed to restrain myself.
Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like testosterone.
“I’m really, really sorry. You okay?”
“Yeah. Spilled my Zima a little, but…”
“What are you doin’ here?”
“Just, you know. Party.” She gestured vaguely with her hand at the crowd and music. “Well, good seein’ ya…”
She’s walking away! Say something!
“I’m, uh, here with the band,” I said, following her while using the most casual, non-following stride I had in my walking repertoire. She glanced up at the band, then back at me.
“You know they started playing without you, right?”
“No, I don’t, like, play an instrument or anything. I’m just… well, you saw me at the beginning there. I was the guy that fell down and died.”
“Well, I just got here.” She walked a little faster.
She’s getting away! Tackle her!
“Well,” I said after her, “I’ll see you around.”
She didn’t answer, and I watched her walk away. Intently.
She met up with some blond kid in droopy pants, a sideways ball cap and a band T-shirt. The whole sequence depressed me so much I didn’t think about the floating Jamaican again until…
THREE HOURS LATER, John and the crew were packing their scratched equipment into a white van with the words FAT JACKSON’S FLAP WAGON spray-painted on the side. That was the name of the band before they changed it a few months ago.
“Dave!” said John. “Look! Can you believe how much sweat I have on this shirt?”
“That’s… somethin’,” I said.
“We’re all meeting at the One Ball. You comin’?”
That’s the One Ball Inn, a bar downtown. Don’t ask.
“No,” I said, “I gotta go to work in seven hours.” John had work, too. We both worked the same shift at the same video store. John had been through six jobs in three years, by the way. Some girl came up behind John and put her arms around him. I didn’t recognize her, but that was normal.
“Yeah, me, too,” he admitted. “But I gotta buy Robert a beer first.”
“Who?”
“Uh, the black guy.”
John gestured toward a group of five people, three girls and two dudes with their backs to me. One was a huge guy with red hair, next to him was the rainbow beret and dreadlocks of my voodoo priest.
“See him? He’s the one in the white tennis shoes.”
Not only did I see him, but he turned toward me. He made eye contact and shouted, “You owe me a beer, mon!”
“The man likes his beer,” said John. “Hey, I heard there was somebody from a record company out there tonight.”
“I don’t like the guy, John. He’s… there’s something not right about him.”
“You like so few people, Dave. He’s cool. He bet me a beer he could guess my weight. Got it on the first try. Amazing stuff.”
“Do you even know how much you weigh?”
“Not exactly. But he couldn’t have been off by more than a few pounds.”
“Okay, first of all-never mind. John, the guy does an accent. What kind of a person goes around like that? He’s phony. Also, I think he might be, uh, into somethin’. Come on.”
“ ‘Into something’? You are so quick to judge. Have you thought that maybe he was raised by his father, who was a fugitive from the law? And that, to conceal his identity, his father had to fake an accent? And that maybe young Robert learned how to talk from his dad and thus adopted that same fake accent?”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No.”
“Come on, John. My car is behind the trees back there. Come with me.”
“Are you goin’ to the One Ball?”
“No, obviously not.”
“Then I’m ridin’ with Head in the Flap Wagon. You’re still welcome to come if you want.”
I declined. They loaded up and left.
I felt a little abandoned. There wasn’t anybody else I really knew there, so I wandered around for a bit, hoping to run into Jennifer Lopez or at least that dog. I did find Jennifer, where she was sitting in a cherry-red ’65 Mustang making out with that blond kid. He looked barely old enough to drive. This made me furious for some reason and I sulked my way back to my underfed Japanese economy car, shoes kicking up little sprays of moisture from the tall grass as I went.
The dog was waiting for me.
Right there by my door, like it couldn’t understand what had taken me so long. I unlocked the door and “Molly” leapt into the passenger seat. I gawked, half expecting the dog to reach around with her teeth and pull down the seat belt. She didn’t. Just waited.
I flung myself down into the little Hyundai, feeling like a thousand questions were squirming around my gut. I dug into my pocket for my car keys. I pulled my hand out-and screamed.
Not a full-fledged female-victim-in-a-slasher-movie scream. Just a harsh, rasping “WHAH?!?” On the palm of my hand, etched into the skin, was the phrase, YOU OWE ME ONE BEER.
I sat there, in the dark, staring at my hand. I did this for several minutes, felt my stomach clench, then decided to lean out the door and vomit in the weeds. I spat and opened my eyes, saw movement in the puddle. Something long and black and wriggling.
So that’s where the centipede went…
I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back in my seat. In that moment I decided to go home and crawl into bed and pretend that none of this had ever, ever happened.
TELLING THE STORY now, I’m tempted to say something like, “Who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?” I won’t say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow.
Once, in chemistry class, John “accidentally” made a Bunsen burner explode. I mean it actually shattered a window. He got suspended for ten days for that and if they could have proven it wasn’t an accident he’d have been expelled, as I was a year later.
He was kicked out of art class for submitting very, very detailed charcoal nudes of himself, only with about six inches added to his genitalia. He broke his wrist after a fall while trying to ride a friend’s van like a surfboard. He has burn scars on the back of his thighs from what he told me was a mishap with homemade fireworks, but what I believe was the result of his and some friends’ attempt to make a jet pack. He told me a year ago he wanted to go into politics some day, even though he didn’t have even one minute of college. A month ago he told me he wanted to go into the adult film industry instead.
DARKNESS AND WARMTH. And then, an all-beep rendition of “La Cucaracha.”
My cell phone. I peeled my eyes open. Bedroom. Nighttime. My floor looked like a Laundromat explosion. Magazines here and there, overflowing trash can. Just as I had left it.
Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-
My hand managed to knock over every single object on my nightstand before it found the cell phone. I squinted at my clock, now lying helpless on the floor. Quarter after 5 A.M. I had to be at work in less than two hours.
“Hello?”
“David? It’s John. Where are you?”
Voice scratchy, breathing heavier than he should be. Like a man just after a fistfight.
“I’m in bed. Where am I supposed to be?”
Long pause.
“Is this the first time I’ve called tonight?”
I sat straight up, fully awake now.
“John? What’s going on?”
“I can’t get out of my apartment, Dave.”
“What?”
“I’m scared, man. I mean it.”
“What are you scared of?”
“It can’t be real, Dave. It can’t. The way it moves, the way it’s made… this is not a product of any kind of evolution or anything. It’s not real. No. But it still managed to bite me.”
What?!?
“What?”
“Can you come over?”
One time, John wound up in the hospital after he blacked out behind the wheel of his car. He wasn’t moving at the time, thank God, but was in line at a Wendy’s drive-through. This was after five sleepless and foodless days of vodka and some combination of household chemicals he was using for speed. I didn’t know about it until a week later because he didn’t tell me, knowing I would have kicked his ass right there in the hospital.
But I told him if he ever got into that kind of trouble again without telling me I would not only kick his ass, but would in fact beat him until he died, then pursue him into the afterlife and beat his eternal soul. So John being spaced out on crank or crack or skank tonight wasn’t reason to declare a national holiday, but at least he came to me this time.
I said, “I’ll be there in twelve minutes.”
I hung up, pulled on some clothes I found draped over a chair, almost killed myself tripping over Molly the dog curled up in the doorway. I went out the front door with the dog in tow. It was raining again now, fat drops of April ice water that tingled down the back of my shirt as I ducked into my car. I was halfway to his building when my phone sang again. John’s number popped up on the glowing display.
“Yeah, John. You okay?”
“Dave, I’m sorry to wake you up. I got a problem and I need you to listen-”
“John, I’m on my way over. You called me five minutes ago, remember?”
“What? No, David. Stay away. There’s somethin’ in here with me. I can’t explain it. I don’t think it’ll kill me, it seems to just want to keep me here. Now, I need you to go to Las Vegas. Contact a man named-”
“John, just calm down. You’re not making sense. I want you to sit down somewhere, try to chill out. Nothin’ you’re seeing is real.”
A pause, then John asked, “How do I know this is really you?”
“You’ll know in just a few minutes. I’m comin’ up on your block now. Just chill, like I said. John?”
Nobody there. I sped up, rain drumming the windshield and boiling up into puddles on the passing pavement.
I was pounding on the door to John’s apartment seven minutes later, still pounding on it five minutes after that. I considered going down and waking up his landlord when I tried the knob and realized the door had been unlocked the whole time.
It was dark. No use looking for a switch-John’s only light was a floor lamp across the room and far be it from John to do something as rational as putting the light source where you could reach it from the door. Memory told me at least two pieces of furniture and probably twenty empty beer bottles stood between me and the lamp.
“John?”
Nothing. I tried a tentative step into his apartment, my shoe kicking over a stack of magazines. I tried to step over them, cracked something glass or porcelain on the other side.
“John? Can you hear me? I’m going to call the-ooomfff!!!”
I was hammered by either a flying body tackle or an unnecessarily aggressive hug. My assailant and I landed hard on the carpet, pounding the breath from my lungs.
“It almost killed you!” John screamed, inches from my face. “You’re an idiot, you know that? You’re an idiot for coming here. We’re both gonna die now. You could have brought help but now we’re both gonna die in this room.”
He sat up off me and in the darkness I could detect his head whipping back and forth, as if searching for a sniper. He put one finger up to my face.
“Shhhhhh. I don’t see it. When I say ‘go,’ we’re goin’ to the other side of the room as fast as physically possible. You can clear it in three steps, dive at the end. Move like the Devil himself were after you. Ready?”
“John, listen to me.” I paused, forced air into my lungs and tried to think. “You can’t miss any more days at work. If you let me take you to the hospital, we’ll tell them you’ve been poisoned or something. I don’t think they’ll go to the cops. We can get a note from the doctor there. If we’ve got a note I could talk Jeff into keeping you on.”
“Go!”
John pushed himself to his feet, sprinted across the room and flung himself over an overturned sofa next to the wall. He sailed over it, arms flopping about like a rag doll, smacking into the wall behind it with a heavy thud.
I calmly stood up, walked to my right and turned up the floor lamp. I looked over to see John peer over the overturned sofa. Next to it was an armchair, on the other side a capsized coffee table. The man had built a furniture fort on that side of the room.
“John…”
He stood up, eyes wide. He put his hands out to me, fingers splayed.
“Dave, do not move.” He spoke flat, low and dead serious.
“What?”
“I’m begging you,” he said, almost whispering now. “I know you don’t believe me. But when you turn around, you will. But do-not-scream. If you do, you’re dead. Now. Very slowly, turn around.”
Very slowly, as asked, I turned.
For a split second I was sure I would see something. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, as if swept by a puff of warm breath.
There was nothing there. I sighed, pissed at myself for getting sucked into this.
I faced John again, my raised eyebrows telling him I saw nothing more threatening than a very large and very naked poster of what appeared to be a female professional wrestler.
“No, it moved,” he said. “There.” He pointed to the corner, near the ceiling.
Very slowly, I turned and craned my neck, eyes following his pointed finger to the spot on the wall he so desperately needed me to see.
Still nothing.
“John, you can either come with me to the hospital, or I’m calling an ambulance. But what I’m not going to do is-”
“The door! Go!”
John hurdled the sofa, then ran and threw himself through the open door. I stood watching as he tumbled onto the carpet and then smoothly unfolded into a dead run down the hall outside. I faintly heard him thump through the stairwell doors, shouting victoriously.
I sighed and looked around his apartment. I found and pocketed his keys, then poked around some more and found his jacket on his bed. I grabbed for it, then yanked my hand back in pain. Something jabbed my finger, left a dot of blood on it. I reached into the jacket’s front pocket…
A syringe.
It was one of those cheap disposable ones they sell to diabetics. There was residue inside and it was fucking black. Like used motor oil. I broke off the needle in the trash and stuck the rest of the syringe in my pants pocket. I had never done this before and I didn’t know if a doctor would need it or not, to examine the contents. If not, I was going to shove it up John’s ass.
I rooted around in his pockets for vials or pipes or anything else that would indicate what he had in his system. All I found was an empty pack of Chesterfields and a wadded-up FedEx receipt for something he sent to a Nevada address.
I stopped myself before I drifted into the area of what could be called “snooping” and locked up the apartment behind me. I went down and found John pacing back and forth in the parking lot, rain pelting him, fists clenched, ready for the dark god Cthulhu himself to come flopping out of the first-level doors. I tossed him his jacket, told him to get in my car. He opened the door, and froze in fear.
“What?” I barked. “What is it now?”
John was staring at Molly like she was the fluffy devil incarnate.
“John?”
“Uh… nothing. When did the dog find you?”
“You know this dog? It’s been following me around like a lost, uh, dog.”
“I dunno. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, before… something else follows us.” He glanced up at the apartment building.
I ducked into the car but didn’t start it.
John glanced up at the building once more, said, “Just tell me you could see it. At least that.”
“I didn’t see it. Tell me what this is.”
I held up the syringe. John rubbed his eyes, a man exhausted.
“You don’t wanna touch that. What time is it?”
“Just past five in the morning.”
“What day?”
“Friday night. I mean, Saturday morning. It feels like Friday night because I’ve barely slept yet. And we got work today, remember?”
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“You called me. You begged me.”
John leaned back, closed his eyes. For a second I thought he had dozed off. Finally, he mumbled: “I did? When?”
“Tell me what this stuff is, John. They’re gonna ask me, first thing. Tell me before you fall asleep.”
“I remember now. Calling you. It’s hard, everything’s running together. I called and called and called. Like a shotgun, firing in every direction hoping to hit somethin’. I bet I called you twenty times.”
“Twice. You called me twice. John, answer my question.”
“Really? You kept getting weird on me. You know what I think? I think you’ll be getting calls from me for the next eight or nine years. All from tonight. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t get oriented. Kept slipping out of the time… you’ve got a voice mail message three years from now that’s freaking hilarious.”
I jammed the syringe back into my pocket and started the car. John reached over, grabbed my wrist. His eyes were open and alarmed.
“Wait. Where are we gonna go? Where are we gonna be safe from this thing?”
“Emergency room, John. I’m not playing this game with you. I don’t know what else to do and I don’t know how we’re gonna pay for it. You’re on a bad trip, or whatever they call it. Maybe it’s a big deal, maybe it’s not. Maybe you can just sleep shit like this off. I don’t know because I’m not a junkie and I’m not a doctor.”
“No. The hospital’s no good. We’ll go to your place, or somewhere. Anywhere but here.”
I can’t make myself recount the rest of this conversation. I’m too ashamed of it. The long and the short of it is that I let John talk me out of taking him to get treatment, that I worried more about him liking me than about whether he lived or died, that on that night, at that moment, I was the lowest, most selfish, worthless coward who ever lived.
So where was there to go? We were both scared for different reasons. He needed safety and I needed some kind of familiar comfort.
I’m not sure how we decided on Denny’s but that’s where we wound up. Well-lit, familiar, full of people. We sat in a booth and downed cup after cup of coffee in silence, John smoking his cigarettes and sneaking furtive glances out the window, me counting the seconds that passed without any psychotic ravings. I convinced myself with every passing peaceful moment that things were getting better, that the worst was over. In that, I was pants-shittingly wrong.
“Well?” I asked. “How are you doin’? Any better?”
“I saw things. Tonight. Both before and after I…” He trailed off, sucked on his cigarette instead.
“Okay,” I said. “Back up. You don’t know the name of the drug?”
“Robert called it ‘soy sauce.’ But I’m thinking now that was just a nickname and that it wasn’t, you know, actual soy sauce.”
Robert? Oh, of course. Robert, the Fake Magical Jamaican from the party. I would be finding Robert, I decided. I would be having a word with him.
“Robert?” I asked. “What’s his last name?”
“Marley.”
Of course.
“That’s the only name he gave you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to pry.”
“And he gave you the-”
My cell phone chirped. I ignored it. Who could possibly be calling at this hour? Tina, crying, wanting to get back together a sixth time because she’s at home and lonely? Jennifer Lopez, deciding she was wrong to have brushed me off at the party and wanting to play a game of Hide the Cocktail Wiener?
“Yes. He did,” answered John. “We were drunk, in the One Ball parking lot, after close. We were passing around a joint; Head and Nate Wilkes crushed up some kind of pills between spoons and snorted it. There was… other stuff. Anyway. We drank some more.”
Beepbeepbeep BEEP, BEEP…
“And then the Jamaican guy pulls out the sauce. ‘It be openin’ doors to other worlds, mon,’ he says. We made him do it first, saw that he didn’t die. It seemed to make him pretty happy and then-Dave, the guy-I know I didn’t really see this-but the guy shrunk himself, made himself three feet tall. We all laughed our asses off, then he was back to normal again.”
“And you still tried that shit?”
“Are you kidding? How could I not?”
The phone sang its electronic ditty again.
“Did anybody else do it?”
“Are you gonna get that?”
“You avoid my question one more time and I will come over this table and punch you in the face. Look into my eyes. You know I mean it. I’m tired of your-”
“It’s not that easy, Dave. Everything’s mixed up, like if somebody made you watch ten movies at once and then made you write an essay on ’em. That stuff… Dave, I’m remembering things that haven’t happened ye-I mean, that didn’t happen. Even right now, all that stuff from Vegas. Did we go to Las Vegas? You and me?”
The phone chirped a third time. Or fourth, I lost count.
“No, John. We’ve never been in our lives, either one of us. Are you the only one who took the sauce?”
“I don’t know, that’s what I’m tryin’ to say. We went to Robert’s place, but Head and the guys didn’t come. I think they got nervous when they saw a needle come out. There were some kids around, the party kind of landed there, at Robert’s trailer. Now please, please, please get your phone or turn it off. That damned song you got in there is driving me up a wall.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You took something that scared Head? The guy who did the stuff that killed River Phoenix just to prove he was the better man?”
“Dave…”
“All right, all right.”
I pulled out the phone, flipped it open, slapped it to my head.
“Yeah.”
“David? It’s me.”
Ah, that feeling again. That chill of unreality, my belly full of coffee turning to liquid nitrogen.
The voice was John’s.
No question about it. The man who was sitting across from me, smoking quietly without a phone anywhere near his head, had called me.
I glanced at John, said into the phone, “Is this a recording?”
“What? No. I don’t know if we’ve talked tonight, but we don’t have much time. I think I called you and told you to come here. If so, don’t do it. If I haven’t called, then obviously you should still stay away regardless. Now, I need you to go to Las Vegas. There’s a guy there-”
“Who is this?”
John, in the booth there with me, gave me a look. On the phone: “It’s John. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you and I can see you,” I said, a tremble in my voice. “You’re sitting right here next to me.”
“Well, just talk to me in person, then. Oh, wait. Do I look like I’m injured in any way?”
“What?”
“Fuck! Someone’s at the door.”
Click. He was gone.
I sat there, the phone still pressed to my ear, suddenly very, very tired.
IF I HAD been sitting with anyone else, I would have assumed I was being set up for some drunken practical joke. But I knew this wasn’t some elaborate prank of John’s for two reasons: one, John knows how I get when I’m pissed off and wouldn’t intentionally do it, and two, it wasn’t funny.
I was scared. Truly scared, maybe for the first time since I was a little kid. John looked pale and half dead. My feet were wet and cold, my contact lenses were itching, my brain aching from sleep deprivation. I wanted to burn that cell phone, go home and lock my doors and curl up under a blanket in the closet.
This is the breaking point in a human life, right here. But my whole life had been leading up to this, hadn’t it?
From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again and again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I’d stop fucking up the party.
They wanted to push me outside, where the freaks huddled in the cold. Out there with the misfits, the broken, glazed-eye types who can only watch as the normals enjoy their shiny new cars and careers and marriages and vacations with the kids.
The freaks spend their lives shambling around, wondering how they got left out, mumbling about conspiracy theories and Bigfoot sightings. Their encounters with the world are marked by awkward conversations and stifled laughter, hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity.
Sitting there on that night in April, I pictured myself getting shoved out there with them, the sound of doors locking behind me.
Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.
It was like dying.
“WAS THAT ME?” asked John. “That was me, wasn’t it?”
I looked down at my coffee and considered flinging it into John’s face.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I really am. For messin’ up your sleep cycle and for everything that’s about to happen, the people that are going to, uh, explode.”
I was already up, walking out. I guess John paid at the counter behind me, I don’t know. I pushed my way out the glass door, dug out my keys. I opened the driver’s door and Molly the dog immediately flung herself out onto the pavement, barking her head off, looking right at me. Then she trotted off across the empty lot, turned and barked some more, then trotted a few steps farther and barked again.
John said, “I think she wants us to follow her.”
She scampered off down the sidewalk, glancing back at us to make sure we were coming. I slid into the car.
I pulled out of the space and drove in completely the opposite direction of the dog. John seemed like he wanted to comment on this, but the look on my face probably warned him off. I vaguely heard the sound of the dog running and barking after us as I turned onto the street, but disregarded it. We drove in tense silence.
Finally, tentatively, he asked where we were going.
“We’re going to fucking work, John. It’s six o’clock and we’re opening the shop. There’s nobody there to cover for us.”
He didn’t reply to this. Instead, he leaned his seat back, turned and looked out the passenger window at the passing storefronts and the few early-morning joggers, not saying a word. I eventually asked him how he was doing, got no answer. I could see he was still breathing. That was good. Sleeping, that’s all. I guessed that was good, too.
If he gets sick and dies, Robert Marley, they’re gonna find you in a ditch somewhere.
I stopped at a red light, feeling foolish as always for stopping at an intersection at an hour when the streets are deserted, just because a colored lightbulb told me to. Society has got me so fucking trained. I rubbed my eyes and groaned and felt utterly alone in the world.
Thump!
Scratching, on the window.
Like claws.
I flinched, turned.
It was claws.
Molly’s. She was on her hind legs, her paws pressed against the window.
“Woof!”
“Go away!”
“Woof!”
“Shut up!”
“WOOF!”
“Hey! I said shut up! Get your feet off my car!”
“WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut! Up!”
This went on for longer than I care to admit, and it ended with me getting out and leaning my seat forward so Molly could jump into the back. Yes, the entire spiraling trajectory my life took since that night was because I lost a debate with a dog.
She sniffed around John and then barked at me, the sound deafening in the enclosed space. Still, John didn’t stir.
“What do you want?”
That seemed like a perfectly reasonable question at that moment. The dog clearly had intentions, somehow, and wasn’t going to leave me alone until I acted on them.
“What? Do you think I’m your master? Did little Timmy fall down the fucking well? What do you-”
I stopped, my eye drawn to her jingling collar, and the little metal tag there.
I’m Molly.
Please return me to…
She stopped barking.
THE PLACE WAS way the hell out of town, out near the big drain cleaner factory.
At one point I took a right turn and Molly went into a barking fit. I did a U-turn and she immediately calmed down.
I saw a big, run-down Victorian house standing off by itself at the end of the block, and realized the dog had just directed me to the right address. I didn’t know if dogs really did that but at that moment I was sure this dog could do it-
“Oh, shit.”
I actually said that out loud, in the car. Something had clicked so hard in my mind my whole body twitched.
I knew this place. I flashed back to the party, a huge kid with red hair, his back to me, standing with Robert the fake Jamaican.
That was Big Jim Sullivan.
This is his house.
Big Jim was a year ahead of me in school, six inches taller and twice my weight. He got famous around town after a carjacking attempt, which ended with Jim tearing the gun out of the assailant’s hand (ripping the skin off the guy’s trigger finger in the process) and then beating the man over the head with his own gun. Afterward Jim visited the guy in the hospital and spent several hours reading Bible verses to him. He once won a fight with Zach Goldstein by chucking him bodily over a guardrail.
I had lived in constant fear of the man, and even now I had the urge to flip the dog out of the car window and speed away.
You see, Jim had a sister.
We called her “Cucumber,” but I couldn’t remember her real name. She was in Special Ed, a couple of years younger than me. People think she got that nickname because of some sexual thing, but it was a reference to sea cucumbers. They have this defense mechanism where they puke up their guts when faced with a predator, hoping the predator will go for their guts rather than eating them. I should know, I made up the nickname.
You see, Jim’s sister used to throw up a lot, and I mean a lot. Like, twice a week at school she’d wind up vomiting somewhere or on somebody. I don’t know what exactly caused it. She had a lot of things wrong with her but at least she got one of the more clever nicknames out of the deal.
My last year in school, after I had gotten sent off and put into the Behavior Disorder program, Big Jim heard me using that nickname and I lived the rest of my school days afraid he would break me into little pieces in the parking lot. The worst part would have been that as I was bleeding and feeling teeth breaking off in my mouth, I would’ve spent every second of the pummeling knowing I deserved it.
So Big Jim was at the party. With Robert? What did that mean? And why was his dog there? Did he bring his dog to every party? Had he gone blind, and was Molly his Seeing Eye dog? Was it the dog’s birthday?
I felt like an idiot. Here I was toting the animal all over town, putting myself at grave risk in the process, when I could have just left her at the party where her owner was.
I scrambled to think of how I would approach him with all this, the soy sauce and Robert and his unnaturally smart dog.
Wait. Driveway’s empty.
So? Jim probably tied on a good drunk and was now sleeping it off at a girlfriend’s house.
Bullshit. Big Jim doesn’t drink, and wouldn’t leave his kid sister at home alone all night.
I got out of the car and motioned for the dog to follow. She didn’t. I called to her and patted my thigh, which I’ve seen other people do with dogs so I figured it must work. Nothing. I did this for several minutes, the dog not even looking at me now, sniffing around John again. I realized no amount of thigh slapping, not even an all-out blues hambone, would move this animal. I leaned into the car and started tugging at her collar. She backed off, growling, looking at me with a disdain I didn’t think canines were capable of.
“Come on, dammit! You made me drive here!”
Through all of this, John still didn’t stir. I think that was what freaked me out most of all. He was laying there in the uncomfortable bucket seat, twisted and slumped like a crash-test dummy. More passed out than asleep. I reached in and grabbed roughly at Molly’s collar.
I’m going to skip past the next ten minutes and just say that I wound up carrying Molly up to the house. The plan was to tie her up around back and slip away unnoticed, but as I passed by the front door, it opened.
Not all the way, just the few inches allowed by the security chain. I was hit by that jittery caught-in-the-act feeling. I turned, huge dog in my arms, to see the pale, freckled, utterly confused face of Jim’s sister. No sign she even recognized me, or maybe she just didn’t want to acknowledge where she recognized me from.
Hey! Weren’t you in my Special Ed class?
I quickly propped my chin over the dog’s back and spoke. “Um, hey there. I, uh, have your dog.”
The door closed. I stood there for an awkward moment, feeling the odd urge to drop the animal and run. I heard Cucumber’s voice from inside, shouting, “Jim! The guy that stole Molly is here!”
I sat the dog down and grabbed hold of her collar before she could bolt. The door snapped open again and I half expected Big Jim to show himself, his Irish copper-topped head appearing a foot and a half above where the girl’s had been. But it was the sister again, saying, “He’s coming. You better bring me the dog now. Or you can have it if you want it.”
“What?”
“The dog. You can have it. That one is worth a hundred and twenty-five dollars but you can have it free because it’s used.”
“Oh, no. I don’t need a… I mean, uh, it’s yours, right?”
“Jim’s. But he doesn’t like it, either. He’s coming.”
“What, is there something wrong with it?”
Her eyes flicked quickly from me, to the dog, and back. Is that fear? Something make her nervous about this dog?
You and me both, honey.
“No,” she said, looking at her shoes.
“Then why’d you pay a hundred twenty-five dollars for it?”
“Have you ever seen a golden retriever puppy?”
“Your brother isn’t here, is he?”
She didn’t answer.
“I mean, there’s no car here. Doesn’t he drive a Jeep or something? Big SUV?”
She looked over, then said, “We have a gun in the house. Do you want the dog or not?”
“I-what? No. Where’s Big Jim?”
“Who?”
“Jim, your brother.”
“He just went down the street. He’ll be back any second now.”
“Dammit, I’m not gonna attack you. Didn’t he go to a party last night?”
Long pause. She said, “Maybe.”
Oh, shit, look at her. She’s scared senseless.
“Just outside of town, right? At the lake?”
She snapped, “You know where he is?”
“No. He never came home?”
She didn’t answer. She wiped at one of her eyes.
“The dog,” I said. “Molly, she was at the party. Did he take her there?”
“No. She ran off before that.”
So… the dog followed him to the party? It was there looking for Jim? Who knows.
She said, “I think Jim’s dead.”
This stopped me.
“What? Oh, no. No, no. I don’t think-”
She broke into tears, then choked out the words, “He won’t answer his phone. I think that black guy killed him.” She looked right at me and spat out, “Were you there?”
This was an accusation. She wasn’t asking if I was at the party. She was asking if I was at the scene of Jim’s death. This conversation was spinning out of control.
“No, no. Wait, the black guy? Is his name Robert? Got dreadlocks? How do you know him?”
She wiped her face with her shirt and said, “The police called.”
“About Jim?”
She nodded. “They asked if he was here but they wouldn’t say anything else. There was this dreadlocks guy, he came to the house a few times. He was on drugs. Jim works at the shelter for church and they do counseling and stuff for people like that. Sometimes people come here asking for Jim, asking for, like, rides or loans. The black guy would come here but Jim wouldn’t let him inside. Molly bit him. She ran out and bit his hand while he was talking to Jim.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday. He was right where you are. He was yelling.”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“He said a dog bit his hand. I think the guy was some kind of Devil worshipper.”
“Uh, that’s possible. Do you-”
“I’m closing the door now.”
“No! Wait! What about the-”
The door closed.
Defeated, I led Molly around to the back of the house where I found about ten feet of chain, ending in a broken link, where Molly had presumably snapped it the day before. So the dog had broken her chain, then walked seven miles to an empty field in a neighboring town where she somehow knew her master was attending a party? Come on.
I tied the chain around her collar and tried to make a knot with it. I climbed back into the car, saw that John hadn’t moved even one millimeter other than for the steady rise and fall of his ribs. Still alive. That was good because we had to be at Wally’s in a few minutes and I hadn’t been looking forward to opening the store all by myself.
IF I HAD known what was about to happen at work I wouldn’t have gone, of course. I would also have taken off my pants. But I didn’t have the power of future sight-not at that point, anyway-and so I just sat sulking behind the wheel as we ramped into the parking lot to start the 7:00 A.M. shift at Wally’s Videe-Oh!, where I had worked for two years, John about two months.
John was always bitching about “Wally” and how greedy “Wally” was and how he should have given me a raise by now. He didn’t realize that there was no person named “Wally” in the Wally’s organization. That was the name of the DVD-shaped mascot on the store’s sign. I never had the heart to tell him.
I parked and engaged in a discussion with John, transcribed as follows:
“John? We’re at Wally’s. You need to get up. John? John? John? You need to get up, John. John? I can see you breathing, so I know you ain’t dead. You know what that means? It means you gotta get up. John? Come on, we gotta go to work. John? Are you awake? John? John? Wake up, John. John?”
I finally climbed out of the car and walked around to his door. I reached for the handle, and froze.
His eyes were wide open, staring blankly through the glass. He was still breathing and blinking, but not really there.
Great. Now what?
If you’re thinking, “Call an ambulance,” I admit that’s what a smart person would have done. What I did was experiment for a few minutes, poking him and slapping him on the cheek and getting no response. Finally I found I could lure him through the door by taking his cigarettes and holding them out as bait. He walked like a sleepwalker, slow and shuffling, otherwise unresponsive.
Once inside I planted him in front of the computer behind the counter, reached around and brought up a spreadsheet to play on the screen in front of him. If anyone came in, he would appear to be sucked into his work on the PC. I looked at the scene, considered, then grabbed his right arm and propped up his chin with it. There, he looked deep in thought now.
I put away returns and boxed up Tuesday’s new releases so Tina wouldn’t have to. I pretty much managed to look normal for the few customers who accidentally missed the Blockbuster two blocks down the street. When I got some time to myself after lunch, I flipped through the yellow pages, picked up the phone stuck to the back wall and scooted up a chair.
Two rings, then, “St. Francis.”
“Yeah, uh,” I said awkwardly. “I need a priest.”
“Well, this is Father Shelnut. What can I do for you?”
“Um, hi. Do you have any experience with, like, demon… ism? Demonology, I guess. Like possession and hauntings and all that?”
“Wellllll… I can’t say that I’ve personally dealt with anything like that. People that come to me and say they’ve seen things or, say, they feel a kind of unexplained dread in their homes or hear voices, we usually refer them to a counselor or, you understand, a lot of times medication can-”
“No, no, no. I’m not crazy.” I glanced over at John, still catatonic. “Other people have-”
“No, no, I didn’t mean to imply that. Look, why don’t you come talk to me. And even if you need to talk to a professional I got a brother-in-law who’s real good. Why don’t we do that? Why don’t you come in and have a talk with me?”
I thought for a moment, rubbed my temple with my free hand.
“What do you think it’s like, Father?”
“What what’s like?”
“Being crazy. Mentally ill.”
“Well, they never know they’re ill, do they? You can’t diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can’t see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.”
I thought, then said, “Okay, but let’s just suppose I honestly, I mean, in reality ran into something from beyond the-OW!”
It was a pinch on my thigh, like a bee sting. I flung myself upright, toppling my chair, letting the handset bang off the wall. I shoved my hand into my pocket, tried to pull out the syringe I had lifted from John’s place.
I couldn’t pull it out.
The blasted thing was stuck to my leg. I pulled, felt skin and hair come loose. I hissed through clenched teeth, my eyes watered.
I yanked, tearing the syringe free and out of my pants, turning out the white pocket with it. I saw a dime-sized hole in the white fabric, stained red. I saw a drop of the black goo now hanging out of the end of the syringe. Now, I’ll try to explain this without cursing, but the black shit that came out from that motherfucker looked like it had grown fucking hair.
No, not hair.
Fucking spines. Like a cactus.
Did I mention that the stuff was moving? Twitching? Like it was trying to worm its way out of its container?
I ran into the employee bathroom, holding the syringe at arm’s length. I thought about tossing it down the toilet, had visions of the stuff multiplying in the city sewer, and then threw it in the sink instead. I ran out, got John’s lighter from his shirt pocket and came back and held the butane flame to the squirming blob. It burned, curling up and around like an earthworm. The end of the syringe browned and melted along with it, stinking like charred electrical wires.
The soy sauce, the black stuff from Planet X or whatever it was, burned in the flame until it became a tiny hard black crust in the sink. I shook it off the end of the misshapen syringe and washed it down the drain, ran five minutes’ worth of water after it. The syringe went in the trash.
I stumbled back out of the bathroom, shaking as if chilled. I picked up the phone, said, “Uh, are you still there? Hello?”
“Yes, son. Just calm down, okay? Nothing you’re seeing is real.”
There was a strange, venomous warmth spreading through my thigh.
“Look,” I said, “I appreciate your time but I’m really starting to think there’s nothing you can-”
“Son, I’m going to be honest with you. We both know you’re fucked.”
Pause from my end.
“Uh, excuse me?”
“Your mom writes on the wall with her own shit. Big changes are coming to Deadworld, my son. Waves of maggots over oceans of rot. You’ll see it, David. You’ll see it with your own eyes. That is a prophecy.”
I jerked the phone away from my ear, looked at it like it would bite me. I slowly hung it back on the cradle-
“David Wong?”
I spun around. A bald black guy in a suit stood at the cashier counter.
“Yes…”
“Detective Lawrence Appleton. Please come with me. Your friend, too.”
“No, I, uh, can’t leave the shop. John and I are the only ones-”
“We’ve already contacted the owner. He’s sending someone in to cover for you. You’ll lock the door on your way out. Please come with me, sir.”
I WAS ALONE in the “interview” room at the police station; the one-way mirror was to my left. In it I saw myself slumped in the chair, the disorganized black hair, the beard stubble that had crept onto my pale face like mildew on white porcelain.
Man, you need to lose some weight.
I had been in there for thirty minutes. Or two hours, or half a day. If you think time stops in the waiting room at the dentist, you ain’t never been alone in an interrogation room at a police station. This is what they do, they throw you in here to stew in the silence, all your guilt and doubts burning a hole in your gut so the truth can spill out onto the tile floor.
I should have gotten John to a hospital. Hell, I should have called an ambulance as soon as I got off the phone with him this morning. Instead I’ve fucked around for twelve hours and for all I know that black shit from the syringe was eating through his brain that whole time.
That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That’s what makes a person a dumbass, folks.
Morgan Freeman stepped in and laid a manila folder before me. Thick paper. Photos. A white cop followed him. Something about their manner pissed me off; like they were swooping in on prey. I wasn’t the bad guy here. I wasn’t the one selling that black shit. But now I get to listen to these douchebags tell me everything I should have done instead of what I did? There was no fucking time for that.
“I want to thank you for coming down, Mr. Wong,” he said. “I bet it’s been quite a night for you. Been a long night for me, too, as a matter of fact.”
“Okay.” You know what helps? A warm glass of go fuck yourself. “Where’s John?”
“He’s fine. He’s talking to another officer just a few rooms from here.”
I actually couldn’t name the actor the black guy reminded me of, so I stuck with Morgan Freeman. Though now that I looked at him he bore almost no resemblance. This man was heavier, with round cheeks, a goatee and a shaved head. I couldn’t remember what he said his name was. His white partner had a crew cut with a mustache. Almost a G. Gordon Liddy, a cookie-cutter cop from central casting. I couldn’t help but think how much cooler he would look if he would just shave his head like his partner. Morgan should say something to him about that.
“John is talking?” I asked. “Really?”
“Don’t worry, man. Since you’re both gonna tell the unvarnished truth, you don’t gotta worry about your stories matching, do you? We’re all friendly here. I ain’t here to make you piss in a cup, or to lean on you about all that mess that happened your last year in school with that Hitchcock kid.”
“Hey, I had nothing to do with-”
“No, no. Don’t even bother. That’s what I’m sayin’, I’m not here to accuse you of nothin’ at all. Just tell me what you did last night.”
I had a knee-jerk impulse to lie, but realized at the last second that I hadn’t actually done anything illegal. Not as far as I knew. Sounding guilty anyway, I said, “Went to a party out by the lake. I came home just after midnight. I was asleep by two.”
“You sure about that? You sure you didn’t go over to the One Ball Inn down on Grand Avenue for a nightcap?”
“What’s a nightcap?”
“Your buddies were all there.”
Well, officer, I really only have the one friend…
“No, I had work this morning. As you know. I went straight home.”
I knew I should be talking about the Jamaican. Only my knee-jerk impulse to never volunteer anything to the cops was holding me back. That was stupid. Robert Marley should be sitting here, not me. He was the one handing out the black voodoo oil that seems to have put a crack in the universe. That’s got to be a felony, right?
I thought about that shit, moving, out of the syringe like a worm. Then I thought of that substance being inside John, and shivered.
“You feelin’ okay?”
I heard myself say, “Uh huh.”
As I said it, a strange, jittery energy rose up inside me, radiating from the chest out.
The syringe.
In my pocket.
Biting my leg.
The spot of blood.
Moving. Inside John. Inside me.
All of a sudden everything was too bright, like somebody turned up the saturation on all the colors in the room. Everything came into high focus, a high-def signal. I spotted a moth on the opposite wall, and noticed a small tear in one of its wings. I heard a guy talking on his cell, and realized he was on the sidewalk outside the building.
What the fuck?
I looked the detective in the eye. I was startled to find I could see his next question coming before he even spoke it, word-for-word…
Have you heard the name…
“Have you heard the name Nathan Curry? Guy your age, parents own a body shop here in town?”
My heart was hammering. I muttered, “No.”
How about Shelby Winder?
“How about Shelby Winder? Heavy girl, senior at East Side High? Ring a bell?”
“No. Sorry.”
Clarity lit up my mind like a sunrise. Everything was obvious now, all the walls of the maze turned to glass. I immediately knew two things: this list of people had all been at the party last night…
And they were all now dead or heading there.
Now how do I know that? How do I know any of this? Magic?
You know damn well why. That black shit John took made blood contact with you. Now you’re getting high, partner.
He asked, “What about Jennifer Lopez?”
“Oh. Yeah. I know her.”
“Not the actress, now, but-”
“I know. I saw her last night. Is she okay?”
“Arkeym Gibbs?”
“No. Wait, yeah. Big guy, right? Black? I don’t know him, but he was the only black guy in my high school…”
I trailed off, studied the detective’s face. No, this was not another day at the office for this guy. He’s seen things, the kind of things that sit in the brain, like a tumor, poisoning everything around it. I saw all through him, just like that.
He’s got two kids, two beautiful daughters. He’s suddenly very, very worried about the world they’ll grow up in. He’s Catholic, wears a gold cross around his neck. But today he’s taken it off, put it in his pocket. He keeps sticking his hand down there and rubbing it between his fingers. He thinks the end of the world is coming.
It’s not that I could read the cop’s mind. I couldn’t. I just read his face. We all can tell by the look in somebody’s eyes that they don’t think our joke is funny or that they don’t like what they’re eating or whatever. It was just like that. The information was there, presented in the subtle play of facial muscles from microsecond to microsecond.
He read off more names. Justin White, Fred something, a couple others. I didn’t recognize any of them and told him so. The last name on the list was Jim Sullivan.
So Cucumber was right to worry.
I didn’t tell Morgan I knew the name. In the years since I’ve wondered how many lives could have been saved if I had.
“You’re not outta school even three years. You went to high school with most of these people, East Side. But you only knew the one girl?”
“I kind of kept to myself.”
“And then you got shipped off to the other school-”
“Look, I’m not saying anything else until you tell me whether Jennifer is dead or alive. That ain’t confidential information and I deserve to know.”
Don’t bother. He doesn’t know.
“We don’t know. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why I got six hours of overtime already today. At least nine people were at the One Ball at closing time, twelve hours ago. Four of them are missing. Your friend is here.”
He paused, probably for effect.
“The rest are dead.”
It’s funny. Up until that point, despite all the evidence that had been provided to the contrary, it had never hit home how much trouble I was really in. I thought about John, again wondering if I had killed him by not rushing him to the ER.
I turned and looked at myself in the one-way mirror. The image was distorted, the other cop out of range at the back of the room. What was left was just me and Morgan, the clean-cut protector of the people, standing tall over the slumped, unshaven kid in a battered video store T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wadded up on a car floorboard for two days. Good guy and bad guy. Trash man and trash.
“What about Justin Feingold and the guys John was with?” I asked. “Kelly and-”
“They’re fine. I’ve already talked to ’em, the whole band. They went home before the party moved on. Which brings us to my next question. Your friend is the only known survivor of the One Ball Inn and-now don’t take offense at this-but he ain’t lookin’ too healthy right about now. Did he say anything this morning at work? Maybe while you guys were putting away the last night’s porno returns?”
The white cop across the room stepped forward, put his hands on his hips. Waiting for an answer. Morgan left his gaze on me, calmly waited for me to fill the tense silence. Old interrogation trick.
“John called me last night, talking crazy, clearly out of it. Paranoia, hallucinations, the whole bit. This would have been around five A.M. I came over. He was acting, well, crazy. Seein’ things. But otherwise okay. Conscious, you know. Not, like, puking or convulsing or anything. I calmed him down, we went and got some food. That was that. We went to work.”
“What did he say? Exactly?”
“Monsters in his apartment, said he couldn’t remember how he got where he was, so on.”
“Did he say what he was on?”
“No.”
“You know we can find out anyway, right? We’re not interested in booking a bunch of your raver friends for poppin’ pills. To somebody like me, the dead bodies are what matters. And if somebody’s sellin’ poison, right now, as we talk-”
“No. I’d tell you if I knew. You’re a cop, you know I’m tellin’ you the truth. So, what, that’s how everybody died? Overdose?”
“This Jennifer Lopez, she was your girlfriend?”
“No.”
I thought about repeating my question, then stopped. Instead I replayed his question in my mind, focused on it, studied every contour of each word, was almost terrified to find I could glean libraries of information from between each syllable. In an instant I learned volumes by what he didn’t say, by the way he breathed, the minute twitch at the corner of his mouth, the slight widening of his left eyelid on the third and fifth word.
This detective last ate seven hours and fifteen minutes ago, two Egg McMuffins and four cups of coffee. You can smell it in the oils seeping through his skin. Check out his posture, he hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He forces a smoothness into his voice, wants to come across cultured but shrewd. He tells people his hero is Shaft, but it’s really Sean Connery’s James Bond. In his daydreams he sees himself hanging off a helicopter in a tuxedo.
And then, in a blink, I knew everything he knew. I saw the fate of each of the dead kids from the One Ball.
Nathan Curry had committed suicide, shot himself in the temple with a little.32 caliber pistol he kept hidden under his bed.
Arkeym Gibbs took a swim, fully clothed, in his family’s swimming pool-they found him floating facedown a few hours later.
Shelby Winder and another girl, Carrie Saddleworth, were found together. Each dead of a massive stroke. Shelby was missing her right hand, the wrist a ragged stump wrapped with a blood-soaked shirt.
The rest-Jennifer Lopez, Fred Chu, Big Jim Sullivan are nowhere to be found. They were all at the One Ball with John last night.
Now, only John remained.
You know all that, but you still can’t remember this cop’s name? You’re teetering on the brink of Crazy Man Bluff overlooking Weird Shit Valley.
“And to answer your next question,” I continued, “I didn’t know Jennifer well enough to know who her friends were or where she may have run off to. I’m sorry.”
Detective Freeman stepped forward and flipped open the manila envelope. He fanned out four photographs. One was a mug shot of a young black guy. Dreadlocks. I knew this was my fake Jamaican, knew before my eyes focused on the photo.
The next three pictures were vivid splashes of crimson.
Once, when I was twelve, for reasons that made sense at the time I filled a blender with some ice cubes and three cans of maraschino cherries. I didn’t know you had to use a lid on one of those things, so I hit the button and watched it erupt like a volcano. The room in the cop’s photographs looked like the resulting mess in our kitchen that day, everything a red spray with lumps.
He pointed to the Jamaican’s mug shot. “What about that guy? You know him?”
“He was there. At the party last night. Whatever John was on, this guy gave it to him. John told me.”
You already knew that, didn’t you, detective?
“That’s Bruce Matthews. Runs an amateur unlicensed pharmaceuticals operation on the corner of Thirtieth and Lexington.”
I nodded toward the red photos.
“What’s that?”
Morgan pointed to the mug shot.
“Before.”
He pointed to the red-drenched pictures.
“After.”
The first picture was just lumps on the floor, on carpet that was probably brown at one time but was now dyed a wet, purplish black. It looked like somebody had tossed down a bucket of raw steaks and chicken bones. The next picture was a close-up of one wall, deep red splatters over half the surface area, occasional bits of meat stuck here and there. The third picture was a close-up of a severed brown hand in a pool of red, fingers curled loosely, a bandage around the palm.
I turned my eyes away, suddenly sweating heavily. There was that tableau in the mirror again, just me and Morgan, face-to-face. Did he think I had anything to do with this? Was I a suspect? In my panic, I couldn’t read him. He let the silence congeal in the air, staring down on me. He broke me, and I broke the silence.
“What could even do that to a person? A bomb? Some kind of-”
“Nothing you know how to do, I’m sure of that. Maybe somethin’ not, uh, not within our bounds of familiarity.”
That fear again, on Morgan’s face. I understood it now.
But there’s more. Much more. He’s buried it so deep even you can’t read it.
The door opened and the detective’s words trailed off. A fat Hispanic cop ducked in and whispered in his ear. Morgan’s eyebrows shot up and the two of them left the room.
I heard a commotion outside, hurried shouts and feet shuffling on floor tile. After about ten minutes Morgan stormed into the room, eyes wide.
No, no, no, no-no-no. No. Don’t say it…
“Your friend is dead.”
CLICK!
A tape recorder, clicking off at the end of a cassette. Arnie had apparently set the thing on the table before me at some point. I hadn’t noticed. He grumbled an apology, fished out a new tape and went about changing it. I glanced over at his discarded notebook, saw he had abandoned his note-taking just after the word “Holocaust.”
I pushed away the plate of chicken, rice and snow peas that was the Flaming Shrimp Reunion. I had been picking through it for the last half hour, leaving the chicken. That bird, I knew, had lived a very sad life and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It also had spent its days covered head to toe in bits of other birds’ crap.
“When you got your cell phone bill, did it list the call you got at Denny’s?”
“What? I’m sorry.”
“The call you got from your friend at Denny’s when your friend was sitting there next to you without a phone. Was that call on your cell phone bill?”
“I never thought to check.”
The waitress swept by and claimed my plate, dropped off a fortune cookie and my ticket. She ignored Arnie. I held the cookie in my hand, tried to concentrate and “see” what the fortune said inside it. I found I couldn’t.
Arnie scratched his head, knitted a question with his eyebrows.
“So the black stuff, the soy sauce, it’s a drug, right?”
“Well, I’ll get to that.”
“And it makes you smarter? When you take it, it lets you read minds and all that?”
“Not really. It heightens your senses. I think. I don’t know. When you’re on it, it’s like overload, like if you hooked your car radio up to one of those interplanetary SETI antennas. You get shit from all over the place, can see things you shouldn’t be able to see, but I don’t think it would help you do your taxes.”
“And you still got some of this stuff?” He glanced quickly down at the silver canister.
“I’m getting to that.”
“You’re on it right now? That’s how you did the thing with the, uh, with the coins and the dream and all that earlier?”
“Yeah. I took some today. It’s fading though.”
“So the effects don’t last that long.”
“The side effects don’t last that long. The effects will last the rest of my life, I think.”
Maybe longer.
Arnie scratched his forehead.
“So, the kids that died, this is that rave overdose, right? I remember all that a few years ago, seein’ it on CNN. They thought they had gotten hold of some tainted Ecstasy or somethin’ like that? So you were the guy that-”
“I can’t figure out at what point the party got turned into a ‘rave’ in the newspapers. There was no techno music or dancing or PVC pants and there was certainly no raving. Freakin’ rave. It’s one of those words they throw around to scare old people.”
“What color is the interview room down at the precinct?”
“Uh, white. It’s flaked off in places, shows institutional green underneath.”
“And if I contact Detective Appleton, he’ll remember talking to you?”
“Good luck finding him.”
Arnie made notes.
“So?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve probably got a book here,” he said. “Flesh it out a little.”
“A book? Meaning a work of fiction? Meaning it’s all bullshit?”
Arnie shrugged. “It’s nothin’ to me. A story is a story. I’m just a feature reporter, so the fact that you think it happened is my story. But it’s like Whitley Strieber, writes that book about aliens. Nobody would ever have heard of it, except he sells it as nonfiction, swears to the end that it all really happened.”
His eyes flicked over to the little metal canister again. I realized my fingers had been fidgeting with it.
“Well, I’m not into that whole aliens thing, but I don’t think it’s right to label the guy a fraud, Arnie.”
“Exactly. He’s got a nice house, though. His own radio show. Played by Christopher Walken in a movie. Wouldn’t you like that? You know, I don’t remember leaving the house with any change in my pocket. You could have slipped those coins to me.”
“Without you feeling it? And the thing with your dream? Come on, Arnie.”
Gotta love the skeptic, mon.
“I saw a sleight-of-hand artist in Vegas who, as part of his show, would call somebody out of the audience and steal the glasses off their face. No kidding. He’d send the poor sap back to his seat and he’d be squinting around, tryin’ to figure out why he couldn’t see all of a sudden. There’s no magic, Mr. Wong. Just knowing tricks the other guy doesn’t know about.”
I stood up. “Come with me. I wanna show you somethin’. In my truck.”
We made our way out to my rattly old Ford Bronco II. I bought it after my old Hyundai got totaled a few years ago in a manner that was undoubtedly unique among all vehicles ever totaled in vehicle history.
I approached the rear and dropped the tailgate, revealing a white sheet covering a large box the size of one of those plastic portable dog carriers. Not coincidentally, it was a portable dog carrier.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen, Arnie?”
He grinned, looking over the box. Like a damn kid at Christmas.
Look, everybody! The crazy man carries around a big crazy box! Let’s all humor him at once!
“One time,” he began, “I was down in my basement and there’s just a couple of bare lightbulbs that hang down, you know? So it’s all shadows, and your shadow kind of stretches out across the floor. Anyway, one time, out the corner of my eye, you know, it sort of looked like my shadow back there was movin’ without me. I don’t mean the bulb was swinging and the shadow was just wavering back and forth, I mean the limbs were, like, flailing around. Real fast, too. It was just for a second and like I said, it was just one of those tricks of light you get out the corner of your eye. But I tell ya, I didn’t go back down there until it was broad daylight out. Is what you got in there gonna beat that?”
“I need you to get in that mind-set, Arnie. We’re out here, in public with lights on and the whole world’s solid and lined up real neat. But down in that basement, in the dark, alone, you believed in things. Dark things. I need you to open yourself up like that. Okay?”
“It was just somethin’ I thought I saw. I never said there was anything there, Mr. Wong.”
“Just humor me. Ready?”
I threw back the sheet. Long pause.
“Do you see it?”
“No. Or, you know, it’s an empty cage.”
“Turn your head, so you’re looking at me. You should see the box out the corner of your eye, just like the shadow in the basement.”
“Okay.” Arnie’s grin was fading. He was losing patience fast.
“Do you ever go in the bathroom at night, Arnie, and for a second, just a split second, you glimpse something in the mirror other than your reflection? Then you turn the light on and, of course, everything’s fine again. But for just a half a second, maybe while you’re leaving the room, you see out the corner of your eye that it isn’t you in the mirror. Or maybe it is you, only changed? And what’s looking back at you is something completely different? Something not very human?”
“Let’s go back inside, okay? Your story was more interesting.”
“You’re going to die, Arnie. Someday, you will face that moment. Regardless of what you believe, at that moment either you will face complete nonexistence, which is something you can’t possibly imagine, or you will face something even stranger that you also can’t possibly imagine. On an actual day in the future, you will be in the unimaginable, Arnie. Set your mind on that.”
Silence, for a few seconds. Arnie nodded a little.
“Okay.”
“Now, without turning your head, look at the box.”
Arnie did, recoiled, yelped, stumbled and finally fell on his ass.
“Oh, shit!” he gasped. “Shit!! What the shit is that? Sh-shit! Shit!”
I threw the sheet back over the box and closed up the Bronco. Arnie scrambled to his feet and backed up ten steps, halfway to the door of the restaurant.
“How did you do that? And what the fuck was that thing? What the fuck?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. Pretty freaky, isn’t it?”
“You-you made me see something. Something out of my own head. You freaked me out so I would see something.”
“No, it’s really there. I’m surprised you saw it so easy. You must have an open mind. Most people don’t see it that fast unless they’re stoned or drunk.”
Arnie kept stepping back, muttering.
“I was in the Navy. Diver. I saw some shit, deep-sea shit that didn’t look like anything that belonged on this world. But that was nothin’, nothin’ like that… that thing.”
“I want to tell the rest of the story, Arnie. I need to. I need to get it out. But you need to take it for what it is. The truth. Are you ready to do that?”
Arnie looked at me with uncertainty, then nodded. “Okay. Until I figure it out for real, okay.”
“Eh, that’ll have to do.”
After a moment we walked back toward the restaurant. As we passed through the swinging doors (still painted with the slogan HOLA AMIGOS!!) I picked up my story.
“Anyway, so the cop comes in and tells me John is dead…”
I WAS OUT of my chair before I knew it, halfway to the door.
“Wha-How??!”
The cop stopped me cold with a stiff arm to the chest.
“Now calm down,” Morgan said, not looking at all calm himself. “He went into a convulsion or somethin’ and his pulse stopped but-now listen to me here-we got ambulances, they’ll be here in thirty seconds. We got Vinny doin’ CPR on him. Vinny’s a lifeguard in his off-hours. That boy’s in the hands of people who know what they’re doin’. That don’t include you, so you got no business fartin’ around out there, gettin’ all hysterical and whatnot.”
I knocked his hand away from my chest. The white cop dropped his arms and came toward us, though looking a little less shocked than what I would have expected, having had somebody just drop dead in their police station. Apparently he wouldn’t have to fill out the paperwork.
Morgan’s lips peeled back slightly to reveal gritted teeth. He started to say something, stopped himself.
Oh, shit. This guy’s on the jagged edge…
“Here’s what you’re gonna do, son.”
He breathed.
“You’re gonna wait here. I’ll be back in five minutes and you are gonna start telling me the truth. I am gonna get to the bottom of this and if you obstruct me you will live the rest of your days wishing you had not.”
He stepped back, made sure I wasn’t going to rush the door, then turned out of the room. What chilled me wasn’t the cop’s threats. It was the single, dark thought I could read pulsing through his head:
The dead are getting off lucky in this deal.
That didn’t seem like a normal cop thought to me.
I stood there, lost, listening to the confusion of shouts and controlled panic outside. I heard sirens out front. Ambulance.
My cell phone chirped. On any other day I would have shut the thing off, but that seemed unwise somehow. I looked toward Officer Liddy, now standing placidly in the middle of the room, and I gestured toward my pocket as if to ask if he minded. He said nothing, I answered my phone.
“Yeah.”
“Dave? This is John.”
“What? Are you-”
Alive?
“-in an ambulance or something?”
“Yes and no. Are you still at the police station?”
“Yeah. We were both-”
“Have I died yet?”
A long pause from my end.
“Um, yeah, according to the cops.” I glanced at the white cop, who showed no interest in my conversation.
“Then there’s no time to explain all this. Get out of there.”
“But-I’ll be a fugitive,” I whispered, turning away from the cop. “They know where I-”
“Listen. Get up. Walk to the door. Leave the room. Leave the building. Whatever you do, see that big white cop standing there in the room with you? Don’t look at him in the mirror.”
“Huh?”
I glanced back over my shoulder at the cop. Something was… off.
“Just go. Now.”
I tried to get a read on the cop, and realized that’s what was off. Even with the soy sauce I was getting zero information from the G. Gordon Liddy-looking detective. I turned my head a few degrees to the right…
– Don’t look at the mirror don’t look at the mirror-
… to the reflective surface of the two-way mirror directly opposite the cop.
It was just you and Morgan in the mirror, Dave. Even after the white cop stepped forward.
In the mirror it was just me. Standing there, talking on my cell.
Alone.
I spun toward the cop.
“I don’t get it.”
“He’s not real, Dave. Not in the, uh, traditional sense.”
“He’s coming toward me!”
“Go, Dave. You’re gonna start seeing things like this from time to time. It’s important that you not freak out.”
The cop was one step away from me now. His mustache twitched, as if he was starting to grin underneath it.
“So he, uh, can’t hurt me?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure he can.”
A hand clenched around my face. The cop’s fingers dug into my cheeks, squeezing, rigid as iron bars. I thought my teeth would crack into pieces. He pushed me back using my face and slammed me against the wall.
I clawed at his arm, but it was like trying to tear the limbs off a bronze statue. I smacked him across the nose with my phone. His mustache twitched again as if this amused him greatly.
The mustache kept twitching and twitching and then one end of it began to curl up and peel off, like a man’s disguise torn off by a hard wind. Finally the mustache detached completely, leaving a patch of pink, shredded skin. The thing flapped its halves like bat wings-no, it really did-and flew over and landed on my face.
The cop’s mustache bit me above the right eyebrow. I slapped at the thing with my left hand, then worked my leg up and, with all my strength, shoved a knee into the detective’s guts just below the ribs.
A jolt of pain shot up my thigh, like I had kneed over a pile of cinder blocks. But I felt him give, pushed back by the force. The mustache bat flittered over to my ear and clamped down, feeling like somebody doing five piercings at once. I slapped at it again, suddenly realized the cop had reeled back and fallen to a knee on the floor. I should have been free of him but the hand was still around my face-
Ah, look at that. His arm came off.
The man had a six-inch bloody hole on one shoulder now. The detached arm, on its own, whipped around my neck and coiled up like a python. No hint of bone in there now, the arm making two loops around until the ragged stump hung under my chin like a meat scarf.
I thrashed around, tried to pry the thing off. The armsnake was all muscle, tensed and wiry, slowly squeezing off my windpipe.
Colored spots flashed before my eyes, lack of oxygen shorting out the wiring in my brain. I blinked and saw the floor was closer than before. I was on my knees.
The mustache bat flitted around my head, taking stinging little bites on my cheek and forehead. It went after my eye, pulling at the lid, and I couldn’t get my hands up to swat it away. Arms not working right.
The meat scarf squeezed tighter. The whole room got dark. I was on all fours and I suddenly realized the best idea was just to lay down there on the floor and go to sleep.
I detected movement from the corner of my eye. The rest of the cop’s body. It was up, walking toward me.
Shit!
I crawled clumsily toward the door. Gordon reached for me with his remaining arm and I felt his fingers try to snatch my shirt. I flung myself toward the door, my face banging off it. I reached up, clawing around for the handle. I sucked air through a squeezed windpipe, my head felt like it would pop like a balloon.
Don’t be locked don’t be locked don’t be locked…
The handle turned. I banged open the door with my head and spilled out of the room-
– AND IT WAS over.
The thick bundle of armsnake had vanished from my neck, as had the flying mustache. I stood up, saw four guys hustling down the hall with an empty stretcher. I stuck my finger in my mouth, it came out bloody. I looked my cell phone over, saw it had the cracks and busted mouthpiece from its tour as a nose club seconds ago. I cursed at myself, sure that whatever freak-ass cellular conduit I just had with John was now cut off.
People rushed past me and I wanted to push my way through to see what was up with John, remembered John’s disembodied instructions. Taking advantage of the chaos, I strolled back through the police station, finally walking right out the front door.
I hit the sidewalk, my heart pounding. What now?
A fat man in a shiny business suit strode by without a glance my way.
Without trying, I realized that he was going to die in just two weeks, a heart attack while trying to knock his cat out of a tree with a broomstick.
A pretty late-model Trans Am gleamed past and I noticed from the posture of the driver that the car was stolen and that the owner was dead. The car’s fan belt was going to break in 26,931 miles.
Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.
Fine. I took a deep breath. Now what?
My car was two miles away at Wally’s and I didn’t have cash to waste on a taxi, even if one of the town’s three cabs should happen by at this moment. To my surprise, my cell phone rang. I put the broken thing to my ear, realized I owed some props to the engineers at Motorola.
“Hello?”
“Dave? It’s me.”
John.
“Where are you right now, Dave?”
“I’m on the sidewalk outside the cop shop, walking. Where are you? Heaven?”
“If you figure it out, let me know. Right now just keep walking. Go toward the park. Don’t freak out. Are you freaking out?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe this phone still works.”
“It won’t for very much longer. Half a block away, there should be the hot dog guy. Can you see him?”
I walked a dozen steps, smelled it before I saw it. The cart was plastered with right-wing stickers, and had a yellow-and-orange umbrella hanging over it. The hot dog guy was painfully thin, looked about one hundred and sixty years old. As much a landmark as this city has.
“Okay.”
“Buy a bratwurst from him.”
Questioning this seemed a waste of words.
The man and I exchanged $3.15 and a brat wrapped in a hot dog bun and a sheet of wax paper.
For a moment, I hesitated, then drew two fat, neat lines of mustard along its length. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Cell phone balanced between shoulder and ear, John spoke again, as if under water, his voice growing fainter by the second.
“Now put it up to your head.”
I looked down at the rivulets of oozing grease, congealing with the now dripping mustard and was thankful that I didn’t use ketchup or that brown hot onion sauce.
Glancing around, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead.
A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom.
As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money’s worth by eating the bratwurst while it was still hot, I heard it.
“Dave? Can you hear me?”
John’s voice, coming clear as day through the tube of seasoned meat. I glanced down at the cell phone and got the point. The display was black, the glass busted out of it. A green circuit board was poking out of the warped seam along one side.
“All right, all right. I’m hearing you through some kind of psychic vibration or whatever and not the phone. I get it. You could have just told me that.” I lowered the sausage and replaced it with the cell. “Okay, what’s next?”
Nothing.
I heard a faint sound coming from the bratwurst, put it back to my head.
“Dave? Are you there?”
“Yeah. I can’t get you through the cell now.”
“You have to talk through the bratwurst from now on.”
“Why-”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.
“-Okay. What do we do?”
“The only reason you can hear me is because you got some of the soy sauce into your system, from the syringe. But it’s not very much and it won’t last long.”
“What is it, John? The sauce… it was alive. I swear it-”
“Listen. You gotta get over to Robert’s place. There aren’t any cops there now, but there will be. We have sort of a narrow window here. Take a cab to Wally’s and get your car, then go to Shire Village on Lathrop Avenue. It’s a trailer park, south of town past that one candy place. You should be able to get there in twenty minutes with any luck.”
“I don’t have any cash. I had five bucks and I just spent three of it on the bratwurst.”
“That bratwurst was three bucks? Holy crap. Okay. Give me a second. All right. Check between the sausage and the bun. You’ll find a hundred dollar bill folded up in there.”
Encouraged that maybe all this black magic could actually produce something positive, I fingered around under the sausage for a few seconds.
“Nothing here, John.”
“Okay. I guess I can’t do that. Do you have your ATM card?”
TWO HOURS LATER I pulled my Hyundai into Shire Village. The now-cold bratwurst sat on the dash, little smears of mustard on the windshield where the sloppy wax paper contacted it. I put it to my head.
“John?”
I was greeted with a burst of static, but then John’s voice came in, fainter than before.
“Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“What, did you drive under a bridge just now?”
“No. We’re at the trailer park. Finally. Which one is Robert’s?”
Static again. Then: “It’s wearing off. Don’t talk, just listen. Go inside and-”
Static.
“-and as long as you absolutely remember not to do that, you’ll be fine. Good luck.”
“What? John, I didn’t catch the-”
Dead. The voice was gone, the static was gone. It was just a sausage again. I resigned myself to the hope that whatever I had to do next would be apparent from a look at Robert’s place.
His trailer was one of only two that had yellow police tape over the porch and door, and the other one looked like it had been abandoned months ago. Meth lab.
I parked off in the grass across the lot and walked toward Robert’s abode. Nobody was there, or at least nobody who came in a car. I knocked for some reason, then went in.
They had cleaned up the blood and guts. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, since I should have known they wouldn’t just let the entrails collect flies for twelve hours. Still, I recognized the room from the photos the cop showed me, the scene of Robert’s wet explosion. The carpet was still a few shades off from its original color and the walls were forever stained a faded reddish-brown. And there was a smell, awful and organic. Mildew and rotten milk and shit.
The walls were stripped bare, no family photos or framed landscapes from Wal-Mart or movie posters. Did the cops do that? No television. A sofa, a chair pocked with cigarette burns. Was he living here, or squatting?
I glanced into the open kitchenette at one end of the trailer, then turned and walked down a short hallway to the other end. I pushed through a closed door leading to what had to be a bedroom-
– and stopped. I was suddenly looking out over a snow-dusted field, a range of mountains spiking into a stunning violet sky from the horizon. Not a picture, that’s not how it struck me. It was like that end of the trailer had been chainsawed off to reveal the outdoors, only if that had really happened I would’ve only seen the neighbor’s rusty trailer and an abandoned Oldsmobile floating among the weeds. What I saw instead took my breath away.
I stepped backward into the hallway, dizzy, disoriented, afraid I would be sucked in somehow. It took almost a minute to realize what I was looking at.
It was a painting. A floor-to-walls-to-ceiling mural. He had painted the walls, the trim on the windows, the damned glass in the window. He painted over the curtains, painted the carpet, painted the sheets and wrinkled comforter on the unmade bed so that, when viewed from the doorway, the effect was beyond photographic. There was a half-full water glass on the nightstand, and a sprout of ice-coated weeds painted on the wall continued on the nightstand and onto the glass. There was a little crack in the glass and the artist incorporated it into the painting, the fracture becoming a glint of sunlight off an ice-covered leaf.
The effect was too much. It gave me a heaviness in my gut like the first time I saw a skyscraper when I was a kid. Picasso could not have done this, not if he had a lifetime to devote to it. Step on that carpet and disturb the texture, or brush against the comforter and the effect would be ruined.
Whoa. Just… whoa.
I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbing it, overwhelmed by the details.
There’s a deer, complete with little hoofprints in the snow. A happy little cabin, the family in the yard…
As I took in those little details, my amazement began to sour, congealing into a cold dread.
The cabin on the mountainside, that’s not a little tree out front. It’s a makeshift cross, with a man hanging from it. His legs have been cut off. The woman standing next to it… look at the infant in her arms. It has a single, curved horn coming out of its skull. And unfortunately for the old man, the baby still looks hungry. The frozen pond in back, those aren’t reeds sticking up through the ice all across the surface. Those are hands. And that deer? It has a huge cock, making a little trench in the snow behind it…
I closed the door, deciding to never open it again. I walked back down the hall toward the living room, passed a bathroom, then did a double take, leaning back to look inside. Nothing unusual.
The toilet is askew.
“So?” I said, out loud.
Damn my curiosity. I stepped into the bathroom, saw that the back of the toilet was indeed sitting a good foot away from the wall, where it ought to be. The stool was bolted to a square piece of flooring that was no longer neatly covering the square hatch below. I scooted the stool out to the middle of the floor, looked down the hatch. Basement access?
This is a trailer, dumb-ass. Probably just a dope hidey-hole down there. The question is whether he kept pooping in this toilet after he disconnected the drain…
Two feet below the hatch was the gravel and dirt surface under the trailer, interrupted by a hole that had been dug into the ground wide enough for a man to drop through.
An old well? Wait a second… there’s light down there. Did this man get his shovel and just dig himself a trailer basement some weekend?
There was a roll-up ladder leading down the hole, the kind some people keep by their bedroom windows in case of fires.
Yeah, climb right down there, dumbass. It’s not like a man spontaneously exploded just feet from this spot or anything. Go down and be a meal for the infamous Midwestern Tunneling Explodebear.
But John sent me here for a reason. Maybe a retarded reason, knowing John, but I had come this far. I thought about him, thought about spending the rest of my life without him, and a moment later I was sitting on the linoleum floor, dropping my legs down through the hatch. I tried to look down the hole, could only see that, as I thought, there was an open, lit space down there. I grabbed the floor and dropped my body down the mouth of the hole, finding the ladder with my feet.
The rungs were slippery with mud, and the dirt stank like mold all around me. As I went down, I was hit with another smell so strong it seemed to generate its own warmth. Sharp and rotten and fecal.
The hole went down about twice the length of my body before my feet were hanging in a dim, earthy chamber that seemed big enough to stand in. The stench got stronger, and when I dropped down my feet splashed in a slimy puddle of Robert Marley shit.
I stood straight, kicking crap off my shoes. My head brushed a surprisingly smooth ceiling. The room was almost perfectly round, a diameter about the width of the trailer. The light was coming from one of those camping lanterns, on the floor next to the curved wall on my left. An odd, low, rumbly sound emerged from somewhere, seemingly from every direction at once in the round room.
I looked around quickly.
Shapes, on the floor.
I stepped over and picked up the lantern, scanned the room, fully expecting to find at least three corpses. All I saw was a pile of junk off to one side, including a broken television and what looked like yard compost with something like twigs sticking out here and there. There were a couple of empty jars along the wall near it, faded pickle labels on each. There was something that looked like a long duffel bag lying against the wall on the opposite side.
I stepped slowly toward the duffel bag thing, saw with horror that it was something like a huge, fat caterpillar, leathery and probably five feet long. It was segmented like an earthworm, the end a puckered circle of tiny teeth. I would have run away shrieking like a banshee at that point, but the thing was so over-the-top gross that I was sure it was something he made. A sculpture or whatever. And it wasn’t moving, obviously. I would have mentioned that by now.
Just to be sure, I stepped forward very slowly and nudged the worm thing with my foot. Nothing. Maybe a novelty pillow of some kind. I watched it for a moment longer and then carefully backed off toward the junk pile. On the way, I took a glance at the walls, wondering if this dirt chamber was going to collapse without supports. Covering the strangely smooth dirt was a clear, wavy substance like glass or ice. I can’t tell you what it felt like because I didn’t even consider touching it.
I glanced nervously at the worm pillow one last time, then stepped back and slipped in something slimy again. A little wet pile of what I thought were sausages. On closer inspection, I saw they were fingers.
Four severed digits, along with strips of flesh and bare bone. They all had an odd, misshapen look, as if they were somewhat melted.
My windpipe closed. My heart tried to punch through my sternum.
I took two steps backward, covered my mouth with my hand and tried to calm myself.
Get out get out get the fuck out-
I took long, slow breaths. I tore my eyes off the mess on the floor and walked to the other side of the room.
I arrived at the large pile of random junk, including the gutted television. I was startled to see the TV was on. There was a shot of what looked like a view through somebody’s intestines, like when doctors send those little cameras in there.
Then the shot changed to a picture of a twentysomething guy with long blond hair who looked vaguely familiar. He was sitting casually in a living room chair, talking to someone off-camera who was referring to him as “Todd.”
The scene flicked again, showing a blurred, uneven first-person shot of a car moving down a residential street.
The rumbling stopped. I stood straight, looked around. The worm thing-wasn’t it closer to the wall before? Nah.
I turned back to the TV setup. I couldn’t see a power cord leading up and out of the chamber but figured maybe there was a car battery or something hidden in there somewhere. I looked closer at the pile of what I had mistaken for twigs and saw it was a sticky collection of some unknown, uh, something. The back of the television had been removed and a strip of what looked like red seaweed led out of it and into a large, dead fish. The gut of the fish had been slit open and bulging out of it was a pink, wet mass of something the size of a basketball, like its innards had swollen to fifty times its normal size. Close to it was an aquarium tank filled with a thick, yellowish substance that could have been slug slime and at the bottom was a wrinkled grayish mass that could have been a human brain or possibly a meatloaf.
I had the awful realization that I was looking at a machine of some kind and just when I thought nothing here could surprise me, I looked into the television screen and was proven wrong.
A trailer-this trailer-was on the screen.
Small, as if being seen from a distance.
But getting bigger.
The viewer moving closer.
Somebody’s point of view, heading this direction. If the feed was live, just a minute away.
I turned, stepped forward, fell flat on my face. The lantern crashed to the floor, rolling, sending light and shadow dancing over every surface. It gave me a quick, strobe-light view of the huge slug thing I had tripped over, which was now resting under my splayed legs. It had moved out to the center of the room with startling speed.
I could feel the thing warmly pulsing and quivering under me, its soft mass giving under my legs. I kicked off of it, pushing backward on my ass, saw the thing squish its way after me. The lantern went out, casting me into a darkness broken only by the soft glow of the mutant television and a shaft of yellow light from the bathroom above.
I could hear the thing sliming around me, felt it near my face. I stumbled to my feet, slipped in the huge pool of shit in the center of the room, back onto my ass, bouncing my head off the hard ground. I got up on my hands just as a heavy weight like a canvas bag filled with meat landed on my chest.
The fucking thing had jumped on me.
Pinned me.
A hundred-pound bag of slime compressing my lungs.
I waited for it to bite my face off.
A few seconds later, the low, rattly sound resumed.
After a long moment I realized that it had gone to sleep. I gently rolled the snoring creature onto the floor, careful not to wake it. I very quietly stood and jumped halfway up the ladder. In ten seconds I had my palms down on the sticky bathroom floor, shoulders brown with what was hopefully mud, pants stained with shit. I decided right then I would leave and go home and watch some TV and drink a-
Thump.
I almost pissed myself. It was a faint sound, from the other end of the trailer. The kitchen end. I stepped into the hall, expecting to see a flame-shooting vampire, a hybrid squid/clown, the Devil himself.
Nothing. Probably just wind. A micro-earthquake. Sudden termite migration.
THUMP.
A heavy sound, violent. Adrenaline set my muscles on fire and, like a dumbass, I moved toward the sound. Definitely from the kitchen. In seven steps I crossed the Robert Marley estate.
My shoes hit linoleum. I looked around the counter, floor and appliances. No elves, no gremlins, no nothing. Not yet.
Dead silence. I realized I was holding my breath. I realized I was not holding a weapon. I glanced around for something like a knife-
THUMP.
The refrigerator.
THUMP.
No. The freezer section at the top. The little door up there rattled with the sound, like it was bumped-
THUMP.
– from the inside.
Get out. Get out, David. Go. Go. Go. Go. GO. GO. GO!
With one last thump, the freezer door flew open.
A round, frosty lump the size of a coffee can tumbled out of the freezer, fell to the floor, rolled to a stop two feet away from me. I stared at it, stared into the open, empty freezer. I steeled my courage-
– then turned and ran my ass off.
I stomped toward the exit, made it in three flying strides. A half second before my hand would have ripped the knob off the front door, I happened to glance out the window and see a sedan parked out there where none had been before. Plain white, but too many antennas.
Cop car.
Somebody getting out.
Fucking Morgan Freeman.
He walked toward the front door, ten feet away from me. I spun around, searching for a back exit. Even if there was one, it would mean stepping over the possessed jar or whatever had rolled out of the freezer, which was now sitting on the tile, rocking back and forth, steaming faintly. I saw now the thing was a bundle of duct tape, something wrapped in layer after layer of the stuff.
No thanks.
A look back outside. My cop friend was coming this way, pausing to turn and look back over his shoulder at something I couldn’t see. What would I say when he came in? I can usually cobble together a pretty good lie if I have a couple of hours to plan-
Pock!
A hollow snapping sound, from the freezer jar. The thing hopped an inch off the floor and so did I when I heard that sound.
It did it again, jumped higher.
Shit, like something trying to punch its way out from inside-
Snap. Ka-chunk.
That’s how I spell the sound of a doorknob turning. Morgan was just two feet away from me now, on the other side of a door-shaped piece of imitation wood, coming in. I ducked down, looked at the jar now with hope that the leprechaun or demon or whatever jumped out of it would distract the cop from asking the rather obvious question of why the hell I was here after walking out on my interrogation. I braced myself for what was sure to be one of the more awkward moments of my life.
The doorknob snapped back into place, released from the other side. I risked a look through a living room window and saw Morgan looking away, toward the gravel driveway and this time saw what he saw: a white van pulling in, parking next to his cruiser. Big logo on the side. CHANNEL 5 NEWS. A guy stepped out of the driver’s seat, hauling out a camera and a folded tripod, and a pretty reporter emerged from the passenger side. Not only was I about to be discovered lurking around a restricted crime scene, but my arrest for said offense was about to be broadcast on live television. It would literally be the worst job of secretly sneaking into a restricted area in recorded history.
POCK! POCK!! POCK!!!
There was a bulge now on the side of the jar or whatever it was, strands of duct tape fibers popping out in the center, giving under the strain. All of a sudden being arrested didn’t seem so bad and I should have ducked outside with my hands raised high in surrender. But fear kept my ass Velcroed to the carpet. The jar convulsed, and again I wished I had a weapon, preferably a flamethrower.
Outside, I could barely hear cop and reporter having a terse forced-politeness contest.
“Hi, I’m Kathy Bortz, Channel Five-”
“-All inquiries go through the captain, you’ve got the number. It’s all cleaned up in there anyway, you missed the really good pictures by a few hours-”
She may have missed the story, Morgan, but I bet she’d be pleased to capture a live shot of whatever was about to happen to me.
Here’s exclusive Channel 5 video of a local man having his brain eaten by a winged gremlin. Local gremlin experts warn that-
FOONT!
The jar erupted, ejaculated, gave birth in a cloud of stringy tape bits. A shotgun hole blew out from the guts of the can and a little blur of an object zipped out and bounced off the paneled wall above me. The offspring fell to the carpet, bounced and landed next to my shoe.
A little shiny metal canister, the size of a pill bottle. Not moving or growling or glowing. Just sitting.
Waiting.
I stared dully, then forced myself to crane my neck up and around to see the scene outside, the cop turned right toward me, gesturing. I threw my head back down out of the way, sat down hard on the carpet with my back against the wall.
He saw you. Did you see the flicker of surprise on his face? He caught a glimpse of your head looking out from the trailer window. Dumbass.
I looked at the little metal vial, scooted back from it. Are those footsteps I hear outside? I raised my foot to kick the vial away, then reconsidered.
You know what’s in there, right?
Nope. No idea.
You know Robert had a stash of the shit that infected John…
Faint voices, from outside.
“What part of ‘no comment’ do you not fucking understand?”
Closer than before?
… and if he had a stash, he couldn’t just cram it under his bed. That black shit moves. It has a will, an attitude. It bites.
And then I realized, all at once, what I had come here for. John led me here, of course. When I was on the stuff, the little hit in my bloodstream I got when it attacked my thigh, I could communicate with-
(the dead)
– with John. When it wore off, I could not. My one chance to save him lay inside the bottle, wicked as it apparently was.
I picked up the bottle, cold as an ice cube. I found a seam and twisted the top half off, expected black oil to ooze out.
Instead, out tumbled two tiny, cold pebbles. Perfect and black in my palm, like two coal-flavored Tic Tacs. The same stuff, I figured, in convenient capsule form for those who are afraid of needles.
You’re afraid of needles.
So?
If it had been a hypodermic, you wouldn’t have even considered putting it inside you. How convenient.
I closed my eyes, steeled myself like the first time I did a shot of whiskey.
It knew. And what is it you’re doing, exactly? For all you know, this stuff oozed out of a crashed meteor. You’ve found it in the home of a dead man, after following a trail of dead bodies to get here. So go ahead, put it right in your mouth, dipshit.
I hesitated, felt an itching in my palm where the capsules sat. I could hear nothing from outside, which fed a little sprout of hope that maybe everybody had just left.
If you do this, there ain’t no turning back. Somehow you know that.
I felt the itch again, a crawling sensation on my palm. I looked down and saw the capsules sitting innocently and then-I saw them move. Wriggling in my hand like a couple of fat, black maggots. I flung them to the carpet, flailing my hand around like it was on fire. I stumbled to my feet. The things twisted, changed, grew tiny little black limbs.
Two flat appendages grew out of one of the capsules, began to twitch, move, flap. A blur now. Wings. The black blob made a terrible, insectile fluttering sound against the carpet. Then, the Tic Tac launched itself at me, a faint, dark streak.
I didn’t realize my mouth was hanging open until that moment and if I had known I would have closed it, I assure you. In an instant the thing was skipping off my tongue and landing as a horrible, twitching tickle on the back of my throat. I coughed, hacked, convulsed. The soy sauce insect crawled down my esophagus. I felt its little tingly legs all the way down to my gut.
I opened my eyes, looked desperately for the other one. Hard to spot on the dark carpet-
There.
It buzzed, it flew. So fast it vanished from my sight. I clamped my lips shut, slapped my hand over my mouth for good measure. The thing landed on my left cheek and without thinking I brought up my other hand and swatted it like a mosquito.
Pain. An acidic burn, an iron from the fire, jammed into the soft skin under my eye. I suppressed a scream, brought my hand away from my face and found it bloody.
The stab of agony in my cheek became a bright, broad ache that seemed to radiate down to my toes. A pain so big my mind couldn’t wrap itself around it, mixed with a weird, buzzing itch that comes specifically with tearing flesh, the feel of whole nerve endings torn from their roots and tossed aside.
I tasted the copper flow of blood in my mouth, felt something moving over there…
OH SON OF A MOTHERFUCK THE FUCKING SOY SAUCE IS DIGGING A FUCKING HOLE INTO MY FUCKING FACE.
I fell flat on the floor, thrashing and rolling like a seizure. I forgot where I was, who I was, everything in my mind vaporized by a hydrogen bomb of panic.
OH THIS HURTS THIS HURTS THIS HURTS I CAN FEEL THE THING CRAWLING ACROSS MY TEETH NOW OH SHIIIIIIITTTT.
My face and shirt were wet and sticky with blood. I felt the second intruder crawl across my tongue and down my throat, felt my stomach wrench with disgust. I heard footsteps just outside the door now, felt relieved, knew I would throw myself at Officer Freeman and beg him to take me to the emergency room, to pump my stomach, to bring in an exorcist, to call in the Air Force to bomb this whole town into radioactive dust and bury it under sixty feet of concrete.
And then, calm.
Almost Zen.
I again felt that sensation from the police station, the radiating energy pulsing from the chest out like that first swallow of hot, spiked coffee while standing outside in the dead of winter. The soy sauce high.
The doorknob began to turn. Morgan was coming. Hell, Morgan was here. I wanted to run, to duck, to act. Frustrating. The body is slow, so slow-
And just like that, I was outside my body.
Time stopped.
It was so easy for me, I almost laughed. Why hadn’t I caught on before? I had a full 1.78 seconds before the detective would step through the door. The only reason we would normally perceive that span as being a short amount of time is because the wet mechanism of our bodies simply can’t accomplish very much in that span. But a supercomputer can do over a trillion mathematical equations in one second. To that machine, one second is a lifetime, an eternity. Speed up how much thinking you can do in two seconds and two seconds becomes two minutes, or two hours or two trillion years.
1.74 seconds until confrontation time now, my body and the body of my nemesis frozen in the moment, on opposite sides of the door, he with his hand on the knob, me on hands and knees in suspended agony.
Okay. I needed a plan. I took a moment to mentally step back, to assess my situation. Think.
You are standing on the thin, cool crust of a gigantic ball of molten rock hurtling through frozen space at 496,105 miles an hour. There are 62,284,523,196,522,717, 995,422,922,727,752,433,961,225,994,352,284,523,196,571,657,791,521,592, 192,954,221,592,175,243,396,122,599,435,291,541,293,739,852,734,657,229 subatomic particles in the universe, each set into outward motion at the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, whether or not you move your right arm now, or nod your head, or choose to eat Fruity Pebbles or Corn Flakes next Thursday morning, was all decided at the moment the universe crashed into existence seventeen billion years ago because of the motion and trajectory of those particles at the first millisecond of physical existence. Thus it is physically impossible for you to deviate-
I never finished this thought.
I was no longer in the trailer.
Sun. Sand. A desert.
Was I dead?
I looked around, saw nothing of interest except brown and brown and brown, spanning from horizon to horizon. God’s sandbox. What now? I thought of John’s ramblings his first hours on the sauce, saying he kept falling out of the time stream, everything overlapping.
I saw movement at my feet. A beetle, trundling along in the sand. I figured this might mean something, so I watched it, followed it as it inched along the desert floor. This went on for approximately two hours, the bug heading steadily in one direction. I had begun to form a theory that this beetle was some kind of Indian-vision spirit guide meant to lead me to my destiny-then it stopped. It stayed in one spot for about half an hour, then turned around and began crawling back the other direction.
In a blink, I was somewhere else.
A chain-link fence.
Brown, dead grass.
People around me, in rags like refugees.
This was getting ridiculous. I stood there for a moment, baffled. I remembered John again and was determined to keep my head, to hang on until the stuff wore off. I looked down and saw I was holding a fork, my hand stained with a gray dust, like ash.
A little girl approached me. She was deformed, filthy, a good chunk of her face missing. One eye. She studied me, then ran up, kneed me in the groin and wrenched the fork from my hand. She ran off with it, and when I looked up-
White walls.
Industrial sounds.
Machines.
I was in a large building, very clean, and a man stood in front of me wearing a blue uniform, watching a small computer screen on what had to be an assembly line. To my left I saw a massive red sign that said NO SMOKING OR OPEN FLAME ON THE PRODUCTION FLOOR, with a cartoon explosion underneath it.
I stepped forward, noticed the guy had one of those Far Side flip calendars next to him. It was badly out of date, the current page a couple of years old.
I had to stop this, somehow. I felt like I was a swimmer, getting tossed downstream by white-water rapids. I knew somehow that if I didn’t get ahold of myself, I would drift like this, forever.
Not expecting to get a response, I said, “Uh, hey.”
The guy stirred, turned. For just a moment I thought I saw his eyes meet mine, but then his gaze swept around the room, seeing nothing. The man apparently decided he had imagined it and turned back to his monitor.
The room was full of people at various machines. It was obvious no one could see me. I was here, but I was not here. I looked down and, sure enough, could not see my feet.
My feet, I knew, were still in a trailer in Undisclosed, on a Saturday afternoon. I focused all my concentration on getting back there, to that spot, to that time, to my body. And in a blink, I was back in the trailer, on the floor. Pain in my face, stench of shit on my pant legs.
I breathed a sigh of relief, tried to remember what I had been doing, when Morgan Freeman stepped through the door and stopped cold at the sight of me.
Damn. I suck at this.
I looked up, climbed awkwardly to my feet with my hand on my bloody face, my pants stinking of Robert Marley’s feces.
The detective looked me over.
He had two red plastic gasoline cans with him.
He’s gonna burn this place down, I realized with perfect clarity.
And he’s gonna burn me with it.
Morgan sat the gas cans at his feet, then lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence for a moment, looking off into space as if he had suddenly forgotten I was there.
“So,” I began, figuring I would remind him, “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.”
He shook his head slightly. “Same as everybody. You’re trying to figure out what in the name of Elvis is going on. Everybody ’cept me. Me, I don’t even wanna know no more. I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing with these here gas cans.”
“I think I know. And I don’t think Robert’s landlord would approve at all.”
He studied my bleeding face, then reached into his pocket and handed me a handkerchief. I pressed it to my cheek.
“Thank you. I, uh, fell. On a… drill.”
“You believe in Hell, Mr. Wong?”
Five seconds of confused silence, then, “Uh, yeah. I guess.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you believe in Hell?”
“Because it’s the opposite of what I want to believe.”
He nodded slowly, as if this answer seemed to satisfy him. He picked up one gas can, unscrewed the cap, and started splashing the orange liquid around the living room.
I watched him for a moment, then took a tentative step toward the door. In a blur of movement Morgan turned, whipped his hand out of his jacket. A revolver was now aimed right at my face.
“You leavin’ already?”
My mind was still buzzing and suddenly I saw a flash from Morgan’s memory, something too bizarre to grasp. It was a scene from this morning, here at this very trailer. Blood.
And screaming. All that screaming. What the hell did you see here, Morgan?
Then I had another vision, of walls erupting in flame around me. I put my hands up in surrender and he nodded down toward the other gas can.
He said, “Help me.”
“I’ll be glad to. But first I want you to tell me what happened to John. You know, the other guy you were interrogating?”
“I figured he was with you.”
“Me? Didn’t he, you know, die?”
“Sure did. He was in the interview room and Mike Dunlow was askin’ him the same questions I was askin’ you. And your guy was muttering responses like he’s half asleep. He keeps sayin’ we gotta let you and him go, that you got to get to Vegas, else it’s the end of the world-”
Las Vegas again. What the fuck is in Vegas?
“-So finally Dunlow says to him, ‘Look, we got dead or missing kids here and we’re gonna find out what we need to know, so you’re stayin’ in this room until I’m satisfied or you die of old age.’ Your boy, when he hears that, he falls over dead. Just like that.”
“Yeah, that sounds like John.”
“And now he’s gone. Got a call from the hospital, it’s just an empty bed where he was. They figured he skipped out on payin’ the bill.”
“That also sounds like John.”
I picked up the gas can and removed the cap. Morgan put his gun away. I soaked the couch.
“You know a kid named Justin White, Mr. Wong? High school kid?”
“No. You asked me that back at the police station. He’s one of the missing, right?”
No, you know him. Think.
Morgan said, “Drives a cherry-red ’65 Mustang?”
Ah. I didn’t know the man but I knew the car. This was the baby-faced blond kid I saw Jennifer making out with at the party.
“I know what he looks like, that’s it.”
“He’s the guy who called in the-the whatever happened here. Now, this is how my day started. Just so you understand me, so you understand my state of mind. Okay? Kid calls nine-one-one in a panic, hysterical, talkin’ about a dead body. This was about four in the morning. I happened to be two blocks away at the time. So I race over and I’m the first one there and from outside I hear screamin’. And there’s people runnin’ away, kids peelin’ out in their cars. Party that went bad and all that.”
He stopped splashing the gasoline and sat the can on the ground. He stared off into space for a moment. He sucked some inspiration from his cigarette butt and spoke again.
“I go up to the door, I tell ’em it’s the cops. I go inside and I see-
– I WAS THERE. Just like that.
I was still in the trailer, standing in the exact same spot. Only the pain in my cheek was gone, and horrible rap/reggae hammered my ears from a floor stereo across the room. The light was different and a glance toward a window told me it was night. I looked down and again couldn’t see my feet.
Here, but not here.
It was like somebody had hit rewind on the trailer, the playback from about twelve hours ago.
The room was full of people. I spotted the faces of Jennifer Lopez and Justin White in the crowd. I scanned the room for John, but there was no sign of him. But of course he would have been gone by now, back at his apartment having a rough night of his own.
The music thumped but nobody was moving, or talking. All were standing frozen, their eyes fixed on a spot to my right. Holy shit the song was bad. It was “Informer” by the white reggae rapper Snow. “Infooooormer, younosaydaddymesnowblahblahblay…”
I turned to see what was so compelling as to draw a room full of frozen stares.
Robert the pseudo-Jamaican’s body was curled up on the floor, twitching. He was saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay, mon! Just give me a minute now! I’m feelin’ better!”
His words would have been more reassuring if his head hadn’t been separated from his body, laying a good two feet away from the shredded pink stump of his neck.
The disembodied head kept offering reassurances, the head scooting around the floor slightly with each movement of his jaw. One of Robert’s arms came free at the shoulder, landing softly on the carpet. I realized with revulsion something was wriggling in the exposed guts, like worms.
Someone screamed.
The party turned into a stampede.
I jumped as some girl ran through me, passing through where my body should be. Everybody was circling around Robert, trying to get to the door while avoiding the infested, oozing mess and-holy shit is this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds.
The music stopped abruptly. Somebody had knocked over the stereo.
I saw Justin in the corner, screaming into his cell phone. “I said he’s dead! And he’s talking! But he’s also dead! Just fucking get down here and you can see for yourself!”
I watched the partygoers spill out of the door, but never saw Jennifer pass me. I turned and saw the back of somebody heading the opposite way, down the hall. No door down there, dumbass.
But there is a basement under the bathroom.
There was a sound like a garbage bag of pudding dropped off a tall building onto a sidewalk.
Robert had erupted, chunks slapping off the walls in every direction.
Justin let the phone fall from his hand. His mouth hung open. The room had emptied, now just him and the pink pile of what was left of the Rastafarian drug dealer, together in total silence.
A single white insect appeared. It circled above the wet wreckage of Robert’s former body, a white streak, creating the faintest buzz in the silent room.
The insect was joined by another. Then two more.
The sound grew. A high-pitched noise somewhere between the chattering of angry squirrels and the screech of locusts.
Dozens now. Each time I blinked, the swarm doubled in size. The bugs were long, like worms, and flew horizontally. Too many to count now, a swirling cloud above the spilled flesh.
I wanted out of this room, out of this town, off this planet. I had no means to move. It was the nightmare we’ve had a thousand times, a horror we can’t run from because the horror has swallowed us whole.
The sound grew with the swarm, I could feel it, it had a gut-level power like the pulse of John’s music at the party last night.
Then, in unison, the white swarm flew toward Justin.
He screamed.
The door burst open-
– I BLINKED, AND saw Morgan in front of me. The stench of gasoline flooded
my sinuses. Back again.
“I come through the door and this kid, Justin, he’s on his hands and knees and just wailing. And I think he’s been stabbed in the gut but I look closer and he’s got something on him. All over him, his arms and his face.”
Morgan left the cigarette in his mouth as he spoke, the paper burning away, leaving a quarter inch of ash dangling off the end. Gasoline dripped off the wallpaper around me.
“It looks like, like thick hairs. All over him,” he said. “White, maybe like pipe cleaners, or little twisted bits of fishing line. And they’re on his eyelids and ears and neck and arms and this guy is screamin’, on his hands and knees, just shrieking like a little kid. And I see these things in the air, too, buzzing around him.”
A half inch of ash hanging off his cigarette now. My eyes moved from it to the gasoline-soaked floor at his feet.
“And man, I am frozen there, in the doorway. I mean, I look over and on one side of the room I got a guy sprayed all over the walls like he stepped on a land mine and then there’s this, and I should go try to, try to render some assistance but I don’t wanna touch him. I don’t want whatever’s on him on me.”
Morgan’s words trailed off again. He looked down at his own hands, as if to make absolutely sure they were clean.
The long hunk of ash fell off of his cigarette, onto the wet carpet below.
It went out with a soft hiss.
Morgan said, “Then I did what I shouldn’t have done: I ran back out to my car and called for the ambulance. I mean, it’s already on the way and I shoulda stayed in and, I don’t know, found a can of bug spray or somethin’ or dragged the guy off into the shower and washed these things off him but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself because of the way the guy was screamin’. But not just that. Bugs, even biting bugs, I’ll handle if I got to. But I could…”
He paused, testing what he was about to say in his own head. “I could hear them. Inside me. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, but found myself unable to speak. He opened a closet, doused the contents with gas.
“So I go to the car and I call it in and I’m real vague about what’s goin’ on, okay? I got a can of Mace in the car and I grab it and I head back inside and I’m thinkin’ I should call a hazmat team, guys who could come in and, I don’t know, seal this place off, disinfect it. But I gotta try to help this guy first and I rush back inside, and… he’s fine. Just like that. He’s standing there fixin’ his hair and there’s no sign of these things nowhere, the bugs or whatever. And this kid, Justin, he starts talkin’ like normal, like I just got there.”
I went down to the bedroom, threw open the door and, without looking in, tossed in the half-full gas can. I shut the door behind me. Morgan saw me, smiled.
“Yeah, you saw that. That painting. That’s messed up, ain’t it? Ain’t no man who could do that. And I tell ya what, you stay in there long enough, that mural gets inside your head. The dude that was takin’ pictures of the crime scene, he went in there for half an hour. He had to be dragged out and he was cryin’. Like a little baby.”
I said nothing.
He went on. “So the ambulance gets here, and the kid says he’s fine but I put him in it anyway, told the guys the kid maybe had somethin’ in his blood that could kill him any second. I mean, I know this kid is… infested, I guess. And I wanna know what this stuff is, but I never found out because the kid never arrived at the hospital. That ambulance took off from here with sirens and lights and it’s goin’ to St. John’s, which is just ten minutes away. Ambulance crew shows up there forty-five minutes later, laughin’ and jokin’ and carryin’ fast-food cups, and the kid is nowhere in sight. They ask the two guys what happened and they got no idea what anybody’s talkin’ about. No memory of any of it. Nobody’s heard from the kid since and when they go back out to the garage they find the effing ambulance is gone. They still ain’t found it. So, do you understand the kind of day I’m havin’?”
I wiped my cheek with the handkerchief, now deep red and sticky. My hands stank of fuel. I tried to process all this, still studying the carpet, wondering if maybe there wasn’t a swarm of alien bugs zipping around under the subfloor.
“So,” I said, “can you, uh, hear anything? Right now? Like they’re still hanging around in here?”
“Not since I got back.”
“But you’re gonna burn the place down just to make sure?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re not gonna let me go.”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “Those things that were on the guy? I been describing them like they were bugs or worms or something, you know, something you’ve seen before. But when they flew, I had one fly right across my face, okay, and they didn’t have, like, wings or anything. They had this little row of bristles, spiraling down their length like a barbershop pole. They sort of twisted through the air like that, headlong. A corkscrew motion. And the ones that were on the guy, on his skin? That’s what they were doin’ I think, turnin’ and drillin’ themselves into him. You understand?”
“You don’t think they were from this world.”
“You said it, I didn’t. I said I heard them, it’s like a, like a chittering I guess. You hear it, you don’t hear it really but you just get the sound in the middle of your head, like an itch. It’s not so much like a swarm of bees but more like a crowd, a crowd at a concert because you can pick out words and, I say it out loud and it sounds insane, but you can hear them talking to each other, coordinating. And more than that, you can hear their hate. Okay? I want you to understand this. I want you to understand what I’m about to do.”
“I think I do.”
The survival part of my brain was scrambling for a plan to get the cop’s gun or at least get away from him, but in my current clarity of mind I realized the certainty of it all. The man was going to shoot me and leave me here, no matter what I did. I was just waiting for it now. An odd feeling.
“So,” he said, a kind of slow panic creeping into his eyes, “you understand my mood. You understand why I’m out committin’ felonies today. There are dark things happenin’ and I got the real lonely feeling like I’m the only one who knows, the only one who can do anything about it.”
Morgan moved toward the door, blocking my exit. He sat the gas can down, almost empty now, and gestured to it. “Pick it up, and toss it out the door, in the yard.”
I hesitated, the detective put his gun on me again. I did as he asked. He pulled out his lighter once more and, holding it in one hand and his revolver in the other, ignited it. The gasoline fumes burned my nose now and I was getting lightheaded.
Standing there, a little yellow flame flickering in his hand, he said, “You know, everybody’s got a ghost story. Or a UFO story or a Bigfoot story or an ESP story. Sit around a campfire late at night and you won’t find one janitor who ain’t seen a glowing old lady roamin’ the halls in the middle of the night or maybe a hunter who’s seen a pair of leathery wings flappin’ out of a tree, somethin’ way too big to be a bat. Or just somethin’ simple, like a little kid at the store who goes around the corner and disappears into thin air a second later. And nobody thinks it’s real because they figure nobody else saw it, but everybody’s got their story. Everybody.”
He gazed into the lighter flame as he spoke, as if mesmerized. His gun was pointed at the floor and with a soft double-click his thumb pulled back the hammer, as if on its own.
“Now what I think,” he said to his lighter, “I think all that stuff is both real and not real at the same time. And I think the people who see it and the people that don’t are both right. They’re just like two different radios, switched to different stations. Now I ain’t no Star Trek fan and I don’t know about other dimensions and all that. But I am an old Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain’t just rapists and murderers down there; I believe it’s demons and worms and vile things that wouldn’t make no sense to you if you saw them. It’s the grease trap of the universe. And I think somehow, through some chemistry or magic or some voodoo, that faux Jamaican S.O.B. opened the door into Hell itself. He became the door.”
I nodded, opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“And me,” he said, nodding to himself. “I intend to close it.”
He raised his gun and shot me in the heart.
I WOKE UP in Hell. Darkness and pain, time standing still. No wailing, though. I was sure Hell would have wailing.
A creak, a floorboard. And then a FLUMPH sound, like a lit gas grill.
I blacked out.
I came back. How much time had passed? I smelled smoke, was sure I was in Hell this time. Or was I dreaming?
I forced my eyes open, my nose filled with an acidic itch. I was disappointed to find Hell had a cheap tiled ceiling, some browned with water damage.
My chest hurt. Stung. I was shocked to find I still had an arm and could move it. I felt a wet patch right in the middle of my shirt, winced with the pain. I was cold all over, and vaguely realized I was in shock. I thought of Frank Wambaugh.
Frank worked on the Worthington Munitions production line in Plano, Texas, for eleven years. The company manufactures over one hundred types of cartridges for hunting, sport shooting and law enforcement. A couple of years ago Frank was manning his station as a third-line inspector, the last step in a meticulous quality control process. Defective bullets at Worthington are measured in parts per billion, thanks to that three-tiered inspection system and to the fear of legal liability should one of their cartridges explode in a policeman’s face.
Nonetheless, there was a bad bullet among the half-million.38 caliber rounds produced that day at Worthington, thanks to a fly that crawled inside one of the casings as it passed from the machine that added its pinch of propellant. The defective fly bullet was the only one that day to pass by both of the first two inspection stations unnoticed. Frank would have spotted it, but at the exact moment the possible defect error displayed on his screen, Frank was distracted by a man behind him.
Or so he thought. He turned, and saw no one.
When he satisfied himself that he had imagined the spoken “hey” that, upon reflection, he heard more in his head than with his ears, he returned to his work and was none the wiser. The defective round thus passed unnoticed, was packaged, sold through a law enforcement catalogue eight months later and finally distributed to Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton six months after that.
A year later Freeman loaded said cartridge into his revolver and fired it into my chest. The projectile had only a fraction of the normal propellant and thus less than one tenth of its usual impact force. The bullet had punched through my skin, scratched the thick bone over my heart and bounced off.
I opened my eyes, didn’t remember blacking out again. So tired. Waiting for the flames now. I raised my head and saw the couch was a bonfire, black smoke rolling up to the ceiling. Fire licked the paneling and it bubbled and blackened under its touch. The carpet below the couch was saturated with high octane. The moment a spark fell it would-
I was moving, just like that, crawling on hands and knees. Damn, smoke filling in so fast now, like breathing wads of hot cigarette butts. Gotta get to the door, gotta get to the door. Can’t see shit. I saw something that looked like a door, reached out, touched smooth metal. Refrigerator.
I had crawled in the exact wrong direction. I turned, crawled. Felt along the wall. Carpet on fire now. Shit, hot as hell in here. I crawled. Crawled and crawled. Ah, here’s the door. Thank God. I reached out.
Refrigerator again.
My skin burned, pulled tight on my skull. The place was an oven, a blast furnace. Is that my hair burning? I squinted around. The living room was an orange blur behind me. Could I even make it through there now?
I felt this weird twitching in my chest and realized I was coughing. I lowered my head to the linoleum, hoping to find a few inches of fresh air down there. So tired. I closed my eyes.
PEOPLE DIE.
This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.
I was lucky. I learned this a long time ago, in a tiny, stifling room behind my high school gym. Most people don’t realize it until they’re laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever.
And no one cares. You kick and scream and cry out into the darkness, and no answer comes. You rage against the unfathomable injustice and two blocks away some guy watches a baseball game and scratches his balls.
Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don’t know what it is. Well I know. It’s apathy. That’s the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck.
I realized the heat was gone. The sound was gone. Everything was gone. Just darkness.
That wasn’t right, darkness would have been something. This wasn’t even that. Was I dead?
It was the same detached sensation from before, the feeling of floating across worlds without my body. Only there was nothing to see here, nothing to feel. Only…
I was being watched. I knew it. I could sense it. There were eyes on me.
Not eyes. One eye. A single, reptilian, blue eye. I couldn’t see it, there was no seeing here. There was just the awareness of it. I was in the presence of something, an intelligence. I recognized it and it recognized me back. But not in the way a man sees and knows another man; it was the way a man sees a cell under a microscope. To this thing, I was the cell, insignificant under its vast, unfathomable perception.
I tried to sense the nature of it. Was it good? Evil? Indifferent? With my mind I reached out and-
RUN.
I ran. I had no legs, but I ran, I pushed myself away, willed myself to escape from this thing.
RUN.
I sensed heat. I was pushing myself toward an unimaginable heat but I welcomed it. I would throw myself into a lake of fire to escape that thing in the-
– DARKNESS. REGULAR DARKNESS now, the familiar back side of my own eyelids. Heat all around me, heat so intense I could barely recognize the sensation.
A low sound. Wailing?
From outside. Getting louder. A car coming. A dog barking.
Get back. Get back!
Who said that?
A thunderous, terrible noise. Glass shattering, metal screaming, wood snapping. The kitchen was exploding around me. I was flung backward and suddenly a blast of fresh air washed over my body.
I was looking at the grille of a car, my car, the Hyundai “H” symbol a foot from my face.
The car reversed itself and wrenched free of the wreckage that had been the kitchen’s west wall. There was now a rupture near the floor, frayed with tufts of pink insulation and shredded aluminum siding. I rolled myself out of the hole, fell hard onto the cool grass outside. I coughed, coughed.
Coughed.
Passed out.
I woke up what felt like hours later.
Or maybe seconds.
The trailer was a fireball behind me. I was too wiped out to appreciate that I had avoided death twice within a few minutes, first by a fraction of an inch then by a few smoke-filled breaths.
I heard a bark.
David? You alive?
That voice again, from nowhere. I struggled to my feet, saw my car sitting about twenty feet away.
Molly the dog was sitting behind the wheel. I stared at this for a good solid minute. She barked, and again I heard words in the sound.
John’s voice.
I didn’t think it could get any stupider than the bratwurst thing, but I suspected I was about to find out otherwise. I climbed into the car, pushing Molly over to the passenger’s seat.
Molly looked at me, with concern. No, not Molly.
John looked back at me, with Molly’s big brown eyes. Molly barked, but I heard:
We’re in big fuckin’ trouble, Dave.
“No shit, fluffy. How did you work the pedals?”
“Woof!”
Listen. There are three people still alive from last night other than me. Big Jim Sullivan, Jennifer Lopez and Fred Chu. I don’t know a whole lot else because my own body ain’t workin’ so well. I know we’re all together and we’re on the move and once we get where we’re goin’, something bad, bad, bad is gonna happen.
“Wait, wait, wait. Why are you a dog again, John?”
“Arrr-oof!”
(Sneeze)
Justin White, or the thing that used to be Justin, he’s got me. My body, I mean. He stole a vehicle. When I’m in my body I can’t see nothin’, but I can hear. It’s somethin’ big enough to hold all of us, some kind of truck. Dave, you gotta find it.
“Is it an ambulance? The cop told me he stole an ambulance from the hospital. So there are actually four still alive from last night, if you count Justin.”
“Woo-”
No, no, no. I said there were three that were alive and I meant it. Justin White ain’t alive. He’s a walking… hive or whatever.
“Those things inside him, what are they?”
“Woof!”
Bitch!
This threw me, and I stared in dull confusion for a moment before I noticed the dog was looking past me. I turned and saw a little brown-and-white beagle tied up next to one of the trailers.
“John?”
“Woof!”
Sorry, Dave. My grandpa used to tell me, toward the end when he was going crazy, that talking through a dog ain’t like talking through a sausage. Molly is in here with me and I gotta compete for the barker.
“Where is Justin, or this Justin Thing, taking everybody?”
I already knew the answer as soon as the question left my mouth. I said it along with the dog’s bark: “Las Vegas.”
“So what’s in Las Vegas?”
“Woof! Arrrrr-oof!! Grrrr…”
You know that Bugs Bunny cartoon, where they spill the ink on the floor and then climb through it as if it was a hole? I think that’s what the soy sauce is like. It’s a hole, it opens you right up. Those worms, and the other shit in Robert’s basement, the sauce let that stuff come into our world, by turning people into holes. And I think if the sauce infects enough people, in one place, it can make one single big-ass hole.
“Shit. Is it worth asking what’s going to come through the hole?”
“Woof.”
I don’t know. But what comes through will have to feed.
I nodded. “Right. And Vegas has all those free buffets.”
Molly closed her eyes in frustration. I had never seen that expression on a dog before.
No. Listen. There’s a guy named Albert Marconi. He does these conferences on the occult, he’s having one there at the Luxor, that’s the big casino shaped like a black pyramid. We’re going to go there.
“Wait. How do you know this?”
Because it’s already happened.
“That doesn’t make any-”
“Woof!”
CAT! CAT! CAT! CAT!!!
Molly was up in the seat, jamming her head out the half-open passenger window.
“John…”
“WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOFWOOFWOOFWOOF!!!”
Cat!! Cat! Cat!!! Cat!!! CAT!! CAT!!!! CAAAATTT!!!
A filthy gray cat zipped across the trailer park, across the front of the car and off into the distance. Molly pulled her head inside and tromped over to the driver’s-side window, stomping on my crotch and shouting “CAT!!!” the whole way. It took ten minutes to get the dog calmed down, at which point she promptly curled up and went to sleep in the passenger seat.
“John?”
The dog farted. I got nothing else out of her the rest of the night.
I DROVE TO a convenience store and bought a road atlas. Back in my car I unfolded it in my lap and drew out the path to Las Vegas with an ink pen. Was I actually doing this?
I knew I would need cash for gas and to replace the several vital parts of the Hyundai’s drivetrain that would likely shatter over the course of the long drive. I had nothing in the bank. This seemed to be a rather major problem, but within a few seconds of watching the sunset in the convenience store’s parking lot, a plan popped into my head, fully formed and alien. I had learned to accept such things in the last few hours.
This wasn’t Dave thinking.
This was soy sauce thinking.
I drove downtown, scanning the alleys until I saw a rail-thin Mexican kid standing by a Dumpster wearing a St. Louis Rams jacket. The kid was wearing the jacket, not the Dumpster. I calmly stepped out of my Hyundai, smiled broadly at him.
I had never met him before.
I had no idea what I was doing.
Without hesitation, I heard myself say, “Yo. Mikey said you got a package for me.”
What the fuck.
The kid squinted at me, didn’t move. “Who the fuck are you?”
The kid moved slightly, the bottom of his Ram’s jacket sliding up his skeletal frame. The gun sticking out of the kid’s jeans was black and sleek, looking like something that could shoot lasers. The irony that he was able to afford a nicer gun than the Undisclosed Police Department gave Detective Freeman would have amused me if I wasn’t busy picturing the kid pumping six bullets into my forehead with it.
Again, I heard myself speaking. A single word that to me, had no meaning.
“Creech.”
My soy sauced brain had officially taken off without me. I was operating on autopilot, phrases and words scrolling up into my mind as if fed to me on a teleprompter.
The kid said nothing.
He reached into his jacket…
And pulled out an envelope.
He stepped up and gave me a hug, slipping the envelope to me in one smooth, practiced motion.
As the kid turned away, I slowly let out the breath I had been holding.
I would like to reiterate: what the fuck.
Back in the car, I pulled the envelope out, opened it, saw it was stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills. I had no idea what any of that was, only that speaking those words to that person would get me cash, like a complicated PIN at an ATM machine.
I counted six thousand dollars.
Alrighty.
Without knowing my destination, I drove directly to the Merry Nation Bar and Grill, six blocks away. I went to the parking lot and glanced around, still without any real idea of what I was looking for.
I went right to a cobalt-blue Dodge pickup that I had never seen in my life. I found it unlocked, reached in, felt around under the seat.
I pulled out a satin-finish steel automatic handgun.
Fully loaded.
God bless America.
I stuck the gun in the back of my pants, felt strangely comforted by its gouge into the small of my back as I sat back down in the Hyundai. Evening had set in now, on one of the longest, most retarded days of my life.
I was about to point the car west, then realized I didn’t want to drive for over 1,500 miles-
1,669
– in these shit-stained pants and bloodstained shirt.
I drove home to change, proving that even on the soy sauce, part of me was still a dumbass.
I THREW THE clothes in the trash and showered, paranoid the whole time,
thinking I was hearing opening doors and floor creaks and murderous things bumping around outside the shower curtain. It had been that kind of a day.
I dressed and put on Band-Aids, collected my toothbrush and a comb and contact lens fluid and dumped it into my leather duffel bag.
I flung myself down the hall-
I stopped cold.
My bag fell from my hand with a soft thud.
A teenager stood there. Right in the middle of my living room, a space that had been proudly teenager-free for years.
Braces.
Black Limp Bizkit T-shirt.
I said, “Justin?”
Standing there with a shit-eating grin on its face, the thing that had been Justin opened its mouth and emitted a rumbling sound, like something boiling up from his lungs. After a moment he closed it again.
He gathered himself and said brightly, “Why you frontin’ here? You know what time it is. Stop callin’ me Justin like nothin’s changed, yo.”
I pictured swarms of white worms twitching through his bloodstream and suddenly had to fight the impulse to run away screaming like a toddler.
I took a step back.
Justin took a step forward.
Buying time, I asked, “What should I call you?”
I shifted my feet, felt the nudge of the gun against my lower back. I had never fired a gun before, and certainly never fired one at a man. The thought brought cool sweat to my forehead and a hot, jittery anticipation. Not entirely unpleasant. I had felt it before.
Justin’s mouth opened again, struggling to speak words completely foreign to itself.
“Shitload. Know why? It’s because there’s a shitload of us in here. Now here’s what’s gonna happen-”
The left side of Justin’s scalp disappeared in a spray of pink brain matter. He was thrown backward, my finger squeezing the trigger as fast as it could twitch, the sound shattering the air. Little sprays of blood flicked out from Justin’s chest and thighs and gut, shots landing and backing him across the room.
Jesus, Dave.
I had drawn the gun in a mindless reflex, like slapping at a mosquito bite. I tasted blood where I had bit through my lip. I felt electricity inside, the buzz of the violence, sparks raining down inside my skull as if from a blown fuse.
Too familiar.
Shitload stumbled backward one last time and fell against a wall, but kept his feet.
I pulled the trigger again.
Click.
I squeezed the trigger about twenty more times just to be sure there wasn’t another shot hiding in there somewhere. Shitload righted himself, looked down at his wounds, sighed like a man who has dropped his pie in his lap.
Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me.
I saw now that the white rods were binding up each of his wounds, forming a stitching like the back side of fiberglass. I finally realized I wasn’t fighting this kid, I was fighting those things. The fear was like lead weights in my chest.
He said, “Man, your little nine is useless against-”
His words were cut off when the empty gun I hurled at him smacked off his cheek, knocking him backward once more. He brought a hand to his face.
“Stop that shit! Don’t you know we got the same plan?”
He took a step toward me. I looked across the room. The door. The window. I couldn’t make it to either without going through Shitload.
He said, “We both goin’ to Vegas, right? You all packed up and all.”
My hand at my side, I made a fist.
“Uh, I don’t think so.”
I realized once more that I was about to enter a fight and, again, had learned no fighting skills since the last one. Only this time there was a good chance the fight would end with me feeling the opponent’s teeth ripping out my eyeballs.
“Sure you is.”
He lunged. I threw a flailing punch that missed by a foot.
The Justin monster fired out a low punch, the impact exploding in my groin. I doubled over, struggled to keep my feet.
“The only difference is…”
He advanced and in a blur threw three more punches that each landed solidly on my balls. A heavy sickness bloomed in my gut and I fell back against a chair. I awkwardly kicked at his chest.
He caught the leg and delivered an expert crotch kick that finished me.
“… I’m doin’ the drivin’.”
Justin clasped both of his hands into one fist, raised it high above his head as if in victory and then with all his might brought it down on my groin.
I blacked out.
DARKNESS, BARKING AND footsteps. I felt Molly’s wet nose on my forehead, then felt her walking over me. All four paws managed to hit my aching crotch on the way over.
I felt the floor moving against me and realized I was being dragged. I was hefted over a shoulder like a sack of dog food and dropped onto a metal floor. A door clanged shut, a latch clicked into place.
In the haze I felt the presence of others around me, could sense terrified thoughts darting around their minds like flies. I could sense the sauce in them, the soy sauce, I could smell it on their thoughts like alcohol on a wino’s breath.
Vegas.
I had a hallucination, or a vision. It was the road atlas, spread before me, the red highways tangled like arteries across the country. Undisclosed on the right, Las Vegas a red dot on the left, the line of an ink pen scratched along the highways joining the two.
We were going there because he wanted us there. Not this Justin monster, either. Who?
The soy sauce? Again I felt the presence of it in this space. Pulsing. A will of its own. The soy sauce was alive, I knew that.
But beyond it, too, there was someone else. Something else. And every dark thing I had run into was working on its behalf.
In my vision, the map rustled. The red spot marking Las Vegas pulsed, as if something was pushing it from behind. Scratching. Like an animal trying to gnaw its way through.
My eyes snapped open.
I was expecting to find myself inside Justin’s stolen ambulance. Instead I saw cardboard boxes stacked around me, each bearing liquor logos. There was a sweet, spoiled smell of ancient spilt beer around me.
Sitting on one stack was Big Jim Sullivan, copper hair capping 275 pounds of bulk.
You should call home, Jim. Cucumber is worried about you.
Next to Jim was a very pale and shaky Jennifer Lopez, scratched and dirty, wearing the same outfit from the party.
Lying across a row of green Heineken cases was a little, wiry man with shoulder-length hair and a goatee, whom I had never seen before and who, by process of elimination, had to be Fred Chu. He had his tattooed arms folded under his head and looked unharmed. Molly went and sat down in the middle of them, bored.
On sight of me, Fred Chu said, “Shit.”
Jennifer buried her head in her hands and began weeping softly.
Jim said, “Hey, you found Molly.”
The engine started and we jolted into motion. I raised my head and looked around the dim cargo area. Among the crude beer-case furniture the passengers had stacked for themselves was a low, unoccupied seat of boxes in the corner, as if they had known I was coming.
For some reason this annoyed me so much I almost failed to notice that sitting in the corner, cross-legged and wearing hospital pajamas, was John. He stared intently at the wall, not blinking.
Big Jim said, “We’re moving again.” He reached down and stroked Molly.
I sat up. Big Jim turned his eyes on me, said, “We heard the shots. Are you the one who hurt him? I saw his head.”
“I was aiming for his heart but, yeah, I did get him.”
Jennifer sobbed the word, “Good.” An empty, flat, bitter sound. Jim turned toward the others and said, “Okay, we got one more hostage. We can still make it, guys. Just gotta believe, that’s all.”
I pretended not to hear this, concentrated on not puking from my ball trauma.
I asked Jen, “Are you okay?”
Jen nodded. “Where’s he taking us?”
“Las Vegas.”
That drew stares from around the room.
“No, seriously.”
Fred Chu said, “The rest of us are fine, by the way. But you gotta understand what’s happenin’ here. The guy who attacked you, he ain’t no fuckin’ man, okay? He’s been invaded by fuckin’ body snatchers or whatever.”
“Yeah, I-”
“-I mean if you saw what happened with Shelby. The Jamaican guy spat acid on her hand. The muscle and bone fell apart, just, like, dripped off like fuckin’ wax.”
I thought of the ache in my groin, realized I had gotten off easy.
Jim said, “Justin is-or those things inside Justin-are evil. And I mean that as a noun, not an adjective. They’re the kind of physical manifestation that could only have been spawned by the Devil himself.”
“I don’t… completely disagree with that.”
“Now, we’ve been praying,” continued Jim. “All of us, in a circle. Fred, Jen and me, even John, as best we could involve him. I had to threaten to beat them first but they joined in eventually. We prayed for someone to come along, to save us from whatever dark thing is up there behind the wheel. And then you showed up, like an answer. Now, you faced that thing. You stood up to it. You’ve been delivered to us, to be the voice to answer a question I have put to God over and over since this whole thing started: How do we kill it?”
“No, Jim, that’s not the question. The question is, can it be killed at all.”
I pictured the map, and the rabid thing trying to claw through. I realized the scale was all wrong. To this thing, whatever it was, the real Las Vegas, the whole Earth, all of mankind, was as insignificant as the red dot on the map. I pictured a blue, knowing eye, in the darkness.
But that’s still the wrong question, isn’t it? Maybe Justin can be killed. Maybe not. And maybe it doesn’t mean a fucking thing.
I looked toward John.
He should be the one doing the talking. He’s been waiting his whole life for something like this, just to prove the universe is as retarded as he’s always pictured it in his head. I needed John to be here, alive and unafraid. I needed him to be John.
I turned toward him and said, “Wake up.”
Nothing. I looked back at Molly, then nudged John with my foot. “Wake up. Wake up, asshole.”
More nothing. I felt eyes on me, resisted the urge to punch John right in his stupid catatonic face.
“Look, we fucking need you. Now wake up.”
“Hey.” A soft voice, from behind me. I turned and Jennifer Lopez’s wet eyes met mine. There was sympathy there, and I felt a tug from inside. Though that could have been one of my testicles detaching from the trauma. “Calm down, okay? You’re not helping.”
Molly stirred, looked around lazily and then trotted over to John’s frozen body. I stepped back as she nuzzled him, then flinched when I saw his hand reach over to pet her.
There was a jolt through John’s body, like an electrical shock, so fast that we could barely process the change in posture.
Suddenly he was on his feet, confused, looking at his hands like he was surprised to have them. Looking up, he seemed to see us for the first time and said to no one in particular, “I had a really vivid dream that I was a dog.”
IT TOOK JOHN a while to come around. He knew we were in a beer truck piloted by some kind of infested evil, but seemed to have trouble adjusting to actually existing inside his body, in one physical location.
“I’ve got such a headache.” He searched his pockets, said, “Anybody have any smokes I could borrow?”
No one did. John took the empty seat, then turned his eyes on me and said, “Let’s, uh, start over. How many people do you see in here?”
“What?”
“Just humor me.”
Jim said, “I know what he’s asking. They can make you see what they want you to see. John wants to make sure we can all trust our eyes. Right?”
Going around the room, I pointed out the four other residents of Undisclosed who had the misfortune of depending on John and me for their lives. Five if you counted Jennifer’s boobs separately, as I suddenly had the impulse to. Goddamned testosterone.
John nodded, seeming somewhat relieved. “Good. And yeah, like Jim said, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t, uh, projecting, I guess. You know what I’m saying, Dave? Like that cop in the police station, the one who wasn’t really there. I wasn’t in the room but I remember it anyway, and he looked like a stereotypical cop, like a generic. Standard issue. An extra in a movie.”
Jim nodded again and I wondered how much of this same shit he had been through himself. He said, “Hollywood raised us. Your mind processes the world through a filter formed by comic books and action movies on Cinemax. That’s why kids put on trench coats and take guns to school. The Devil knows how to control us.”
Jim seemed to be seizing on the opportunity to bring up Satan in a conversation where nobody could counter him with rationalism. Devils and angels seemed pretty plausible in this context and Jim intended to ride that horse hard.
John said, “People who wake up in the middle of the night and see those big-eyed alien abductors or a ghostly old woman… it’s always something they saw in some movie, isn’t it? Your mind puts a familiar face on something it can’t understand. Only here, somehow it becomes real. At least to you.”
We rode in silence, I think all of us wondering what was behind the flowery wallpaper our perceptions had always pasted on the unknown. All the things the mind won’t allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants.
Fred spoke first, breaking the silence.
“Well fuck ’em. That’s what I say.”
Jennifer said, “I took a cinema class at the community college last semester. Most of the films were in French and were about people making out in coffee shops, or in apartments over coffee shops. But I don’t even have a TV anymore, so that might help.”
I closed my eyes and sighed, wishing Jim would pray for longer attention spans. “Okay,” I said, “let’s set that aside because at the moment we’re not talking about ghost stories or vampires. That thing up there in the cockpit is real, real as any of us-”
Crotch-punchingly real!
“-and it can make us really dead. Now do you guys understand what it wants with us?”
Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.”
“Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”
I sighed again, rubbed my forehead with both hands. There was a very real chance that the conversation had taken a turn that would allow John to talk about his dick, which was a subject it could take hours, if not the better part of days, to come back from. Nipping it in the bud, I said:
“Nooooo. It’s none of that. Look, you know the story of the Trojan horse? A few soldiers get inside the enemy camp riding in this big horse statue, then at night they sneak out of the horse and let the rest of their army in the front gates? Well, that drug the Jamaican was on, it let something through. He became the horse. And those things, the white flying wormy things, they came through. Now they’re in Justin and now he’s looking to open the gate and let their buddies in.”
This brought silence. I scanned the cartons around us, the vague outlines of a plan forming in my head.
Fred said, “Dude, how do you possibly know that?”
“I pieced it together through inductive reasoning and information relayed to me by John when he was talking to me through the dog. Long story.”
“Okay,” Fred said, accepting it readily. I sensed that I was in the presence of the king of the go-with-the-flow types. “But why us?”
“Because we were chosen,” Jim answered. “Called. And that’s all that matters.”
We were chosen all right, Jim. But not by God, unless God is a black liquid in a silver jar. Hell, maybe he is.
I locked eyes with Jim. I thought of his sister saying the Jamaican had showed up at their house. Jim, at the party, talking to Robert.
He was right there, from the beginning.
And he fucking knows more than he’s letting on.
Did he light the fuse on this whole situation somehow? Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they’re the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight.
Fred nodded and said, “So what you’re saying is, if we all die, that’s not even the worst-case scenario.”
John replied, “I’d still like to shoot a little higher than that, Freddy.”
I looked over his shoulder and scanned the cardboard boxes stacked up against the back wall of the truck. I thought for a moment and then asked John, “How much alcohol does liquor have to have in it before it will burn?”
A COUPLE OF hours later, we had a dozen full bottles lined up near the rear door, each with a bundle of wet cloth cut from Fred’s flannel shirt jutting six inches out of the opening. When the Justin monster finally stopped, we’d wait for him to open that door and light his ass up.
But the truck didn’t stop. For hours we rode in useless silence, slumped against the metal walls, drifting in and out of fitful sleep. John found a little vented slit in the side of the cargo hold and we took turns watching the world flow by outside.
The wait was Hell. Sunday morning turned to Sunday afternoon. We pissed in empty bottles, though I can’t remember exactly how Jennifer pulled that off. The view out of the little vent turned from cornfield to desert as hundreds and hundreds of miles of highway skimmed by under us.
Twenty-eight hours, nineteen minutes. That’s how long we were in the truck, all told. We found a case of Evian water at the back of the truck but our only source of calories came from warm beer, a diet for which John needed no adjustment at all.
Finally-finally-we slowed, taking multiple turns as if having entered a town.
Each of us sprang up, moving to the back of the truck. We started gathering up bottles.
The truck stopped. We all held our breath. But then it started off again, in a different direction.
We had our plan. Or, considering that the plan had come from me, we had given up and were waiting to die.
Big Jim glanced around at us and said in a low, solemn voice, “Listen, now. Because when that thing opens the door, some of us may die. And at that point, you may have a chance to run, to get away, to save yourself. But we have to stay and finish the job. Do you understand?”
We nodded. Again I was hit with the sense that he comprehended a danger far larger than the rest of us did. He continued, “I don’t think you do understand. But…”
He swallowed.
“… You guys know my sister, who’s back home at this moment. In that big, old house. Well we’ve always had a mouse problem. And, you know, we work hard to keep the place up, to keep it clean, since our parents passed away. But you can’t keep the mice away. They get everywhere. The cabinets, the walls. I got poison set out all over the place for these things.”
Fred pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked it once to make sure it worked.
Jim stared at the floor and continued, “Then, one day I look under her bed and she’s got a little saucer there, with bread on it. The bread’s all chewed off at the corners. She put it there on purpose.”
The truck turned again. We heard the crackle of gravel under the tires now.
Jim looked up at us again, a kind of pleading in his eyes. “Do you understand? She was feeding them. The whole time I was trying to kill them, she was trying to keep them alive.”
I pictured her back there, small and alone in that cavernous house, and I did understand. Jim fucking knew something was coming, on its way to this world, through Las Vegas for whatever fucking reason. He knew what was at stake, while the whole world, vulnerable and unaware, went about its business behind us. I just wished he would use his sister’s damned name so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking of her as Cucumber.
“John, Fred. You guys, if one of you makes it out of this instead of me, I want you to promise me something. I want you to look in on her, make sure she’s-just make sure she’s taken care of, okay? She’s smart, you know. I don’t mean she’s-it’s just she ain’t never been on her own. I want you to promise me.”
The truck turned again. Slowing.
John said, “Of course, man.”
I thought of John’s last pet, a little terrier dog that jumped out of his third-floor apartment window and died while he played video games on the couch. Yeah, Cucumber will be in good hands, Big Jim.
John flicked his lighter. The truck turned for the last time, then slowed to a stop. I couldn’t breathe.
John peered through the vent, trying to see where we were. He said, “If I die, I want you to tell everybody I died in the coolest way possible. Dave, you can have my CDs. My brother will demand the PlayStation, since I borrowed it from him a year ago, so don’t fight him for it.”
Jennifer hesitated for a long moment before whispering, “Um, there’s a loose floorboard under my bed. I keep stuff down there. There’s some pot and a little notebook with like, some guys’ names in it, and-some other stuff. If I die I want one of you to go in my bedroom and get all that stuff out so my mom doesn’t find it.”
John reached over and lit the wicks on all three of the Molotov cocktails I held. His hand was steady, mine were not.
Fred whispered, “Okay. If I don’t come back, and say they don’t got my body, like if Justin eats me or somethin’, tell everybody you don’t know what happened. Make it mysterious. And then a year later spread rumors that you’ve seen me wanderin’ around town. That way I’ll be like fuckin’ Bigfoot, everybody claiming to have seen me here and there. Legend of Fred Chu.”
John nodded, as if he were committing this to memory. He lit his own firebombs, glanced up at me and asked, “You got any final requests, in case this don’t end well?”
“Yeah. Avenge my death.”
WE WERE POSITIONED in a circle by the front of the door, each with a high-proof cocktail in each hand. I studied the small orange-and-blue flame dancing on the bundle of wet cloth crammed into the bottle. My heart hammered. Molly whimpered behind me.
The moments oozed out like ketchup from a glass bottle. I could hear Jim breathing next to me, felt a trickle of sweat roll down my temple.
The latch clicked and scraped. Every muscle in my body tensed. I looked down and squeezed the beer bottle in my hand.
Jesus, we are going to die, we are actually going to die here.
The door slowly ground up in its tracks. A band of pale moonlight appeared at the floor, a stiff wind whistling in as the door slid upward. There he was, revealed from the shins up. Jeans and shirt and-
Oh, holy shit.
Justin looked mostly normal, skin pale under the moonlight, blond hair rustling in the stiff breeze, a pimple on his chin. Only now both of his eyes were protruding about six inches from his skull.
The pupils at the end of their new white-and-pink stalks twisted horribly in our direction, staring at us for a very long and terrible moment. We were so caught off guard by this that it killed our momentum, all of us frozen and expecting the person next to them to make the first move.
To Jennifer’s credit, she broke the paralysis by weakly tossing a flaming bottle at Justin. The Justin monster watched as it missed and bounced harmlessly to the ground, rolling to a stop. The wick flickered and went out. Shitload curled his twin optical skull-erections down and looked at the sad bottle draining its contents into the dirt. After a moment he turned back up to us and said, “Put that shit down and come with me, fools.”
He backed away from us, seeming to realize his eyes were dangling from his skull and in a series of sickening, jerky neck movements sucked them back in.
We stood there for a moment, looked at each other with a kind of deflated shame and defeat, then did what he said.
They were waiting for me, I realized, too late. They were waiting for me to push the attack, to lead them.
Welcome aboard the David Wong Disappointment Train, fuckers.
We weren’t in Vegas. A quick glance around showed we were squarely in the middle of rural nowhere. It was a windy night and in small-town Nevada that apparently means dust. Justin, the hybrid walking demon hive and Limp Bizkit fan, led us across a dusty yard onto a paint-peeled dusty porch where a pair of ancient and very dusty shoes sat mummifying in the dusty desert air.
The door was ajar and had only a perfectly round hole where the knob should have been.
Propped next to the door was a dust-covered but new FedEx box, which almost certainly was a delivery mistake since this place looked to be in its tenth year of vacancy.
Justin pushed in through the door, indifferently kicking the box inside as he passed.
As we moved inside I noticed for the first time that Justin had an old, mud-smeared glass jar in his hand and I vaguely remembered seeing it or one just like it in the Jamaican’s makeshift basement. He placed it on the floor and walked around to us one by one, arranging our bodies, seated, in a semicircle around it. I saw a speech coming and could only pray that I wouldn’t come out sounding like a white kid raised next to a cornfield trying to record interlude skits for a gang-sta rap album.
Shitload said, “This world is shit, yo.”
Oh, goddamnit.
“How do you people be gettin’ around in this, all in these bodies and shit? You act all scared that I’m gonna kill ya, when it’s the best thing I could do for you, yo. Deadworld, man, it’s alternate layers of rot and shit and rot and shit.”
I looked around the dim group, saw moonlight from the window cracks reflecting off of tears on Jennifer’s cheeks. Big Jim had his eyes closed, maybe in prayer. Fred Chu looked around as if uninterested, stroking his goatee with one hand and fidgeting with a strip of carpet foam with the other. John was staring vacantly at a spot on the other side of the room, already distracted into a dull stupor. Molly licked her crotch.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Undisclosed Hell-Conqueror Strike Force!
To at least feel like I was doing something, I said, “Deadworld? Is that where you’re from?”
“No, dude. That’s where you’re from. It’s where we are now. This place, it’s a horror show. If the guy next to you decides to knock you out of this world forever, he can do it with just a piece of metal or, hell, even his bare hand. You blobs, you sit there, chillin’ in this room and I can smell the rot of dead animals soaking in the acid of your guts. You suck the life from the innocent creatures of this world just so you can clock another day. You’re machines that run on the terror and pain and mutilation of other lives. You’ll scrape the world clean of every green and living thing until starvation goes one-eight-seven on every one of your sorry asses, your desperation to put off death leadin’ to the ultimate death of everybody and everything. Dude, I can’t believe you ain’t all paralyzed by the pure, naked horror of this place.”
After a long, long pause John said, “Uh, thank you.”
John’s eyes never moved as he spoke, and suddenly I saw a look there, a confidence. I followed his gaze, saw what he was seeing, and then quickly looked away again.
I glanced back at the Justin monster, wondering if he had caught on. But he was busy. He twisted the lid off the old pickle jar, and a small, shriveled thing, like a dried-up earthworm, dropped out and landed quietly on the floor.
Shitload went to the kitchen and I heard him messing around with the sink in there. No water. He came back, studied our faces, and pointed to Fred.
“Piss on it,” he commanded.
I was so baffled by this that I wasn’t even sure I had heard him right. But Fred, having perfected going with the flow to a degree that philosophers could study for centuries, shrugged and said, “Okay.”
He stood, unzipped, urinated on the floor, zipped up and sat back down. The little black dried-worm sliver sat in the middle of the bubbling puddle. Nothing for a long time, maybe a minute.
And then, the worm twitched.
Jennifer screamed, everybody jumped.
The shriveled nothing grew. And grew. And grew.
Just add water!
A hand formed. A human hand, pink and the size of a baby’s. Stretching out from behind it, instead of an arm, was something like an insect leg. It was a foot long, springing out to length before our eyes like a radio antenna. Something like a shell took shape. I saw an eye, red and clustered like a fly’s. Another eye, this one with a round pupil, like a mammal, grew in next to it. Then another eye, yellow with a black slit down the center. Reptilian.
The thing grew and grew some more. It grew to the size of a rabbit, then a small dog, then stopped when it was about a foot-and-a-half high and maybe three feet wide, probably the same overall mass as Molly.
The finished creature seemed to be assembled from spare parts. It had a tail like a scorpion curling up off its back. It walked on seven-yes, seven-legs, each ending in one of those small, pink infantile hands. It had a head that was sort of an inverted heart shape, a bank of mismatched eyes in an arc over a hooked, black beak, like a parrot’s. On its head, no kidding, it had a tuft of neatly groomed blond hair that I swear on my mother’s grave was a wig, held on with a rubber band chinstrap.
What was strange about it, or rather, what was stranger about it was that the two sections of its body-the hindquarters and the abdomen-were not connected. There was a good two inches of space between them and when it turned sideways you could see right through the thing. But it moved in unison, as if they were connected by invisible tissue.
The little monster stood twitching there on the floor like a newborn calf, still dripping with urine.
John said, “Huh.”
Fred said, “Guys, can you all see that fuckin’ thing, or is it just me?”
The beast moved in circles, looking around the room. Justin said to us, “Don’t move. If I ask it to, it’ll kill you, yo. You don’t know what that thing’s capable of. Shit, lookin’ at the thing, I don’t even think it knows. But that ain’t my goal, I coulda capped you all back home if that was the plan. It ain’t.”
The thing turned and turned, staring down each of us, its dozen eyes blinking at different intervals. It finally stopped, looking my direction. Molly stirred behind me, a low growl rising from her.
“All I need you to do is hold still, yo. In a minute ain’t none of you gonna remember why you got all worked up and shit.”
The creature crouched, then vanished in a blur. I threw myself back, expected the monster to suddenly be on me, but it wasn’t. I heard a horrible, high-pitched yelp behind me and turned to find the monster on Molly’s back, its legs wrapped around her body, dug into her fur like steel cables.
Jennifer screamed, everyone stirred. Justin shouted at us to stay down, stay down. I watched as the thing whipped back that scorpion tail (Did I say it was like a scorpion? The freaking tail had hair on it.) and with a flick, the end was buried in the dog’s hide. The length of the tail started pulsing and twitching. It was pumping something into her.
Molly whimpered.
And then it was over. The beast jumped off. Molly looked terrorized but kept her feet. I saw the tip of the monster’s scorpion tail and noticed a drip of thick, black fluid trickling out.
Soy sauce.
Wait. What? That’s where it comes from?
A burst of movement, behind me. Shuffling feet and shouts.
John was making his move, diving in the direction we had been looking earlier. He skidded on the floor and seized the white FedEx box.
Shitload was on him fast, Bruce Lee-fast. He delivered a kick to John’s gut that actually knocked him back a couple of feet. He then wrenched the box from John’s arms. Shitload looked baffled, moved to throw the box aside but stopped cold.
He looked at the label, then at John, then at me, then at the label again. I stood and moved slowly toward them.
Shitload stared at John and said, “What’s in here?”
John said nothing, looked like he wasn’t too sure himself. I moved closer still, not understanding. Shitload stiffened his arm toward John in a “Heil Hitler” motion. This confused us for a second-before a slit appeared in his palm and something like a mouth puckered there. A thin stream of thick, yellow liquid dripped onto the floor, gathering in a small, smoking puddle that quickly ate through the floorboards with a soft hiss.
“Tell me,” Justin demanded.
I looked down at the label on the box. The package was addressed to John’s real name, to this house in this Nevada town. It was dated yesterday, sent via overnight delivery, with John’s own small, neat handwriting.
“Tell me, or I’ll melt your face, yo. What is it, like, a bomb?”
John shrugged, said, “Why don’t you open it and we’ll both find out?”
Shitload sat the box on the floor, said, “Take it outside.”
“Okay.” John bent over to pick it up.
“Stop! Leave it where it is.”
“Okay.”
He pointed to the wig monster and said, “Open the box.”
The thing apparently understood, because it trundled over and started tearing at the flap with its beak. After several long, clumsy minutes of this, during which I tried to show it the little tear strip all FedEx boxes have, it finally stuck its snout inside and pulled out a sheet of wrinkled notebook paper.
Shitload picked it up, saw scrawled on it in big ink pen letters: “JOHN LOOK BY THE BUSH IN THE FRONT YARD.”
The Justin monster turned to John and said, “What’s out there? A weapon? You tryin’ to gank me?”
John didn’t answer. Shitload pointed to the wig beast and said, “If any of you try to move, that thing will rip off all of your limbs, leave you alive and plant five hundred eggs in your belly. You down with that?”
We were. Shitload tossed aside the note and strode out the front door.
We could indeed see a bush out there, shivering in the breeze. Had John, under the influence of the sauce, somehow planted something out there ahead of time? How? And what? A gun? A pipe bomb? A trained badger? Nothing would have surprised me.
The creature formerly known as Justin White walked out to the bush and looked down, kicking around at the base of it. I glanced over at John, who waited with the same anticipation, apparently having completely forgotten the plan once the sauce wore off. The wig monster prowled around between us and I wondered if we should all try sprinting out the back door.
Outside, Justin had found nothing. He turned to walk back-
And was blown off his feet.
A thunderous boom echoed in the desert air, followed by a faint mechanical ka-chunk of a pump shotgun. A second shot sounded, then a third.
The wig beast in front of us hissed, bearing its teeth (yes, it had both teeth and a beak), seeming to know that something was amiss and that we should all be ripped to shreds immediately. We were frozen by the thing, all of us desperate to jump up and watch our salvation, but any slight shift of a limb would cause the wig thing to spin in that direction.
A figure moved toward the open door out in the darkness. The creature spun toward it and when I saw who came through, I found myself rooting for the wig monster.
SAY WHAT YOU want about Shitload and his disjointed pet, but neither of them either tried to shoot me or set me on fire. The same cannot be said for Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton, who strode into the house loading shells into a pistol-grip riot gun.
His eyes caught the jumbled creature on the floor. He raised the gun.
The thing turned toward him and meowed like a cat. It crouched, leaned his direction and vanished right as John screamed, “MOVE!”
Morgan spun and ducked off to his right.
The wig monster appeared in midair in the spot where Morgan was standing a half second earlier, flailing its limbs in his direction. The thing tumbled to the carpet. Morgan lowered the shotgun.
A blast thundered in the room. Bits of monster flew.
Morgan racked the shotgun, ejecting a blue plastic shell. “There any more of ’em?”
Jim said, “No, but that guy out there ain’t dead.”
We all got to our feet, everyone relieved at their rescue.
Everyone but me.
I still had a puncture in the middle of my chest like a third nipple, where the good detective here had shot me before trying to roast me alive. I wondered if they noticed Morgan didn’t exactly read Justin his rights before blowing a hole in him. I mean, I did the same thing but that’s why society doesn’t let me carry a badge.
Morgan started to speak, maybe to say, “I blew a hole in his chest the size of a football, jackass, I’m pretty sure he’s freaking dead,” but then his eyes locked on mine, realizing the other guy he’d shot in the heart this weekend was now standing and breathing in front of him.
There was a moment, when my eyes met Morgan’s, when once more I got a flash of his thoughts. Nothing coherent, just fear and exhaustion and cold, deadly purpose.
In that two seconds we shared, I knew the detective’s mind was working full time to crush any remaining doubts about what he had to do. He had a mission, and had traveled across the country to carry it out. He was saving the world, and in his mind that meant that anyone dumb enough, unlucky enough, or crazy enough to take the sauce, to risk becoming a conduit for whatever otherworldly invasion was waiting to use them as a doormat, needed to die.
Morgan had a decision to make. He glanced over his shoulder, squinting into the darkness for Justin. But he didn’t turn, and he still had the shotgun pointing in our direction.
Six of us, maybe we were hostages and maybe we were hives. Maybe he had thought he’d burst in and we’d all be in Alien-style cocoons and he could just torch the place and declare it mission accomplished. But here we were, exhausted and filthy and wounded. To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.
John leaned over and picked up the FedEx box. He peered inside, turned it over. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter slid out into his hand. He plucked one cigarette out, and lit it. He reached into the waistband of his hospital pants and pulled out a little bottle of some kind of brown liquor he had lifted from the truck, took a drink. I was surprised he hadn’t mailed himself a burrito, too.
I said to Morgan, “It’s a long fucking story but we’re on your side. John totally lured Justin out there for you, just now.”
Just don’t fucking ask me how.
Morgan turned, pushing back through the door, leading with the shotgun. I followed, careful not to step in the wig monster chunks scattered on the floor underfoot.
The cop was a lot more surprised than I was to see Shitload was no longer on the desert floor. He poised the gun in front of him, turning like a turret, then spun on the beer truck as it rumbled to life and rolled onto the road.
Morgan ran, ripped off three shots as the red taillights shrank into the distance. He stomped back toward us, said, “Shit!”
“I know where he’s going,” I said. “And I’ll tell you if you promise to take us with you. And not to shoot me again.”
He sucked in a breath, scanning the faces of our group. Finally he said, “Okay.”
“Luxor Hotel. Don’t ask me how I know.”
THIRTY SECONDS LATER we were all crammed into Morgan’s rental SUV like it was a clown car, pealing down the blacktop.
From the passenger seat I watched the headlights swallowing up the road and said, “There’s something like a massive séance planned. It’s a guy named Marconi. Apparently Shitload-er, Justin, has business there.”
All ten of Morgan’s fingers were clamped around the steering wheel as the speedometer crept upward.
“I know.”
“You do? How?”
Everyone in the truck lurched first right, then left as Morgan swerved to pass a car.
“Brock Wholesale reported the liquor truck missing yesterday. I happened to catch word of a gas station attendant in Missouri who said a beer-truck driver told him he needed directions to Las Vegas, then punched him in the balls and told him his daughters would be live meat cocoons for the leech pool. Man thought that was strange, phoned it in. I just followed the same directions he gave Justin, drove balls to the wall. Then I came up on this exit and just had a feelin’, you know, like an intuition.”
The mention of “intuition” gave me a cold feeling in my gut. I glanced back at John. It got his attention, too.
“I followed my gut and there was the truck, parked by that old house.”
Morgan scratched the side of his cheek, two-day stubble sounding like sandpaper. The engine growled, the scenery sprayed past my window.
I asked, “If this thing makes it to the Luxor, what happens?”
“Let’s just say I came a long way to make sure that don’t happen.”
From behind us, John said, “If you’ve been following us since we got kidnapped, you must have been up for more than two days.”
“More like fifty hours.”
We rode silently for a minute. Less than a minute actually, according to Morgan.
“Make that fifty hours and thirty-seven-point-two-three seconds. It’s the adrenaline, I guess. I ain’t really been tired. The thrill of the hunt.”
We drove in silence for a moment. Red taillights appeared up ahead. I reached out and gripped the dashboard.
Morgan said, “That, and those loud, piercing voices in my head.”
Morgan’s eyes exploded.
He shrieked as two sprays of blood flecked over the windshield. Jennifer screamed behind me, John and Fred bellowed “OH, FUCK,” simultaneously.
Little white rods poured down the cop’s face, swirled around inside the truck. He let go of the steering wheel. I reached over and grabbed it. We left the road.
We shook, rattled, bumped. The horizon and sky swapped places in the windshield and the roof of the car bashed me in the shoulder. Glass bits rained down in my eyes and ears and up my nose, the dashboard punched me in the forehead, the roof hammered me a second time, and Molly’s furry ass rolled over my face.
Finally, the vehicle banged to a stop.
Silence. Only a soft chittering over the desert breeze. And then came the voices.
THAT SUCKED. I pried my eyes open, feeling scratchy little bits in there that could either be sand or glass. I worked the lids open and found myself staring at dirt. Everything was upside-down; I was hanging by my seat belt. I felt like every single joint in my body had been wrenched painfully out of socket. It was agony from head to toe, so dark now that it took me a moment to realize that the massive, spreading pool down on the ceiling was not motor oil, but blood.
I craned my neck over and saw hunks of meat flying off what had been Officer Freeman/Appleton in juicy ragged pink-and-yellow layers, bone and ribs and a spongy mass that must have been lungs. Out from the meaty shreds came rushing masses of the tiny white demon-rod things, swirling around the interior of the truck like rice in a blender.
That’s not what caused me to panic, not that or the faint wet, ripping sounds next to me. No, what got me moving, what sent me clutching at the seat belt clasp, was the sound of the swarm.
Oh, that sound. Not something coming through my ears at all but a kind of shrill electricity in my brain, a million sharp, spiky, poison thoughts ricocheting around my head.
Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.
It blew every thought out of my head, tore my mind open. I was frantic, patting around for the clasp to the seat belt with hands shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. I could vaguely hear actual screams around me, right from the backseat, but they might as well have been a thousand miles away. These little white streaks were buzzing around my face now, past my ears, skipping over my skin.
I got my fingers around the little plastic box that held the seat belt but couldn’t find a button, couldn’t see it, pressed and pulled and finally just started clawing at the thing like a little kid in a tantrum. I felt this itching over my bare arms, and then little pricks like needles and I knew what it was, I fucking knew, and I started contorting my body to crawl free from the belt like an animal wrenching from a trap.
Movement, all around me in the darkness.
Glass shattering in the backseat.
Somebody getting dragged out.
Screaming.
I ran my hand over my forearm and a thousand of the rods scattered off into the air. I heard a resulting uproar in the voices, shrieks like teenage banshees at a boy band concert, except nothing like that at all. The sound-it was so massive and yet so compressed in my skull that it was a physical pressure against my temples. I thought I could feel wheezing, creaking fissures in the bone.
Then, hands were grabbing me, pulling at the seat belt. A hand came into view and with a flick there was suddenly a narrow blade there, a switchblade cutting at the strap. I fell free, crashed down. Four hands were dragging me out of the wreckage by the shirt and shoulders, my back scraping over a bed of glass bits.
It was Fred Chu and John, pulling me free. Everybody was yelling, freaking out. Molly was dancing around and barking-total panic at the sight of the little cloud of white insects blowing around me like pillow feathers.
The worms had settled on my arm again and were landing on my neck and face. I brushed them off, swatted at them in the air. John seized my arm by the wrist, dug out the brown bottle of alcohol from his pants and doused the arm with it.
This seemed to annoy the flying worm things more than anything, and my skin was on fire with their attempts to dig their way in. I sputtered, “That ain’t helping! The alcohol isn’t hurting th-”
John flicked his lighter and set my arm on fire.
I said before that my skin was “on fire” with the pain but being confronted so soon after that sentiment with the actual experience, I admit that other thing was nothing like my skin actually being on fire.
But even the white heat on my arm was nothing next to the pain that suddenly erupted inside my skull. Hundreds of the worms were burned alive and the psychic outcry was like shoving my head inside a 747 engine. It was a nuclear bomb of sound, earth-shattering, feeling like an explosion of razor blades in my cranium.
And then, silence. John was rolling my arm in the dust, patting out the flames. The skin was beet red and peeling in places.
I sat up, tried to focus my eyes, tried to get to my feet, fell back down on my ass. I saw John had blood running down his forehead and he was trying to wipe it from his eyes, the empty liquor bottle at his feet. He leaned over and puked. Jennifer was on her knees in the dirt, had a chunk missing from her upper thigh and her hair was matted to the side of her head with blood.
Big Jim was pointing and screaming. Molly was barking.
Fred.
Screaming.
Thrashing around as if on fire.
The swarm had found him.
The flying worms poured out of the wrecked SUV like a kicked hornet’s nest. All landed on Fred.
He was coughing, choking, the rods gushing into his wide-open mouth. In five seconds it was over.
Fred collapsed.
We all knew he wasn’t dead. Jim and John and Molly stared toward Fred in dull shock, a silence settling over the scene so heavy it was almost a solid thing.
Only Jennifer moved. She sprinted toward the dead SUV, a little squirt of blood jumping from her leg wound with each step. She crawled in, grabbed something, then backed out quickly.
Fred moved. He twitched, flopped onto his back, then clumsily got to his feet. Everybody flinched and took steps backward. I forced myself to my feet over the protest of my leg muscles. Fred-if it was still Fred-looked confused for a moment, then brushed himself off and said, “It’s okay, guys. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Jennifer ran up, and I saw what she had retrieved from the SUV. It was Morgan’s shotgun. The thing was gleaming in the moonlight with a layer of tacky blood. Without asking, Jim took it from her and checked the chamber to see if a shell was loaded. He laid it over his shoulder like he was suddenly the captain of this crew. He said, “We gotta get a car, guys. Somehow.”
Nobody moved. Jennifer looked at me expectantly. What was I supposed to do? I could barely keep my feet. I looked Fred dead in the eyes, searching them.
I said to Fred, “Go flag down a car.”
Jim nodded like this was a perfectly good plan and followed Fred as he walked toward the highway. Jennifer gave me an exasperated look, went up to Jim and tore the gun from his hands. He spun, asked her what the heck she was doing. She backed away from him and I half expected her to blow a hole through the infested Fred with the shotgun.
She didn’t.
Instead she went right to me and pushed the gun into my hands.
Very slowly and carefully Big Jim said to me, “What are you going to do with that, David?”
John, Jen and I stood side by side, facing Fred and Jim from about ten feet away.
Fred said, “Whoa, guys. Guys, we’re all shook up here. Okay?”
Jennifer said, “Jim, were you not paying attention to what just happened? That’s not Fred. Not anymore.”
“We don’t know what happened,” snapped Jim, glancing over at Fred. “Does anybody here understand this? Really? Screw you if you think you do.”
Fred said, “Guys, look, I don’t know what you think you saw but I’m still Fred in here. Ask me anything, I’m me. I mean, we were all in that car when the cop exploded. Any of us could be… infected or whatever, but we gotta hang together. We’re like, the fuckin’ good guys here. Right?”
Everyone looked at me. I was the armed one. I looked down, as if deferring to the shotgun. It was cold, heavy and sticky with Morgan’s blood.
A breeze blew past us. From my right, Molly let out a low growl.
I closed my eyes, let out a long breath and said, “Go flag down a car.” Big Jim and Fred turned once more and took a step toward the highway. I let out a breath, took two steps forward.
I raised the shotgun and blew Fred’s head off his shoulders.
Blood flew. I saw it mist in the moonlight, for a split second frozen in the air like a snapshot. There was that feeling again, the sparks in my head, the old violence high, the electricity of it shivering through me.
Fred’s body slumped to its knees, then fell flat on its chest.
Blood.
Screaming.
Panic.
The old familiar sights and sounds.
I had been here before.
Big Jim recoiled, splattered with Fred’s blood, yelling something I couldn’t hear. Everything was dull, slow. I craned my head to see John and he had an expression I had seen there a few times before, something like fear, and pity. I wanted to put the butt of the shotgun through his face. I loathed that look. It said, “You are what you are, Dave, and that’s that.”
I caught a glimpse of Jen, her hands clasped over her mouth. This seemed like such a fucking good idea ten seconds ago, didn’t it?
There was movement out the corner of my eye and it was Big Jim, stomping toward me, rage lighting up his face. That was a familiar look for him, too, seen in a dozen high school fights, his fists about to come loose like fighting dogs tearing out of their cages.
Yeah, Jim, you can quote the Bible to me but you and I got the same sickness.
I aimed the shotgun right at his face.
Jim looked into the barrel, took two more steps, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
He stopped.
His eyes never moving from mine. He said, “The day after the Hitchcock thing, back in school. I saw you, you and your buddies, laughing. Laughing in the hallway. Not twelve hours after Billy died. I know all about you, Dave. You got the Devil in-”
I pumped the shotgun.
“This is not a conversation, Jim.”
Every muscle was tensed. We faced off that way, seemingly forever, the trigger pressing into the skin of my finger.
Shoot him. Shoot everybody.
John broke the moment. He sprinted up toward Fred’s prone body, grabbing and dragging it. “Get him to the truck!” Jennifer went to help him, but the two of them were making slow, halting progress pulling the deadweight through the sand.
John said, “Dave! These things are starting to come out of him!”
Jim stared me down a moment longer and then turned and walked toward them. John muttered something to him but Big Jim knocked both him and Jen aside. He dragged Fred’s body back to the wreckage of the SUV and laid him against the rear door. A familiar fuzzy cloud was emerging from the ragged stump that had been Fred Chu’s head.
Jim stomped toward me and, with a quick, impossibly strong motion, easily ripped the shotgun from my hands. He turned and aimed at the gas tank of the SUV.
I flinched from the expected explosion, had the sudden crazy urge for a ball of fire to spew out and reduce all of us to ash.
Nothing. Instead there was a patch of little holes in the metal, a heavy rain of gasoline splattering down the rear and onto the prone body of Fred Chu. John stepped up to his corpse, flicked open his lighter and tossed it down.
Fred Chu went up in a ball of flames. The fire licked up the trunk of the SUV, reached the gas tank and ignited the contents with a heavy, metallic THONK, sending us flopping to the ground, little bits of metal plunking softly into the sand around us.
Jim got to his feet and walked toward me again, the shotgun pointed at the ground. The adrenaline was draining from me so fast I thought I’d be sitting in a puddle of it soon. So tired. So tired.
Two feet away, Jim raised the gun.
Man, just do it. Just do it and let me sleep out here in the sand until the sun goes supernova and turns the whole world into a charred memory.
He threw the shotgun in my gut, and walked away. The barrel was warm. We all got to our feet and watched thousands of the little particles swarm out of Fred, burning like sparks over a stirred campfire. In my head, the concert of damned voices faded and died.
John said, “Do you think that’s all of them? The worms, whatever they are? Do you think we got all of ’em?”
I didn’t answer.
“Because I got a feeling that if just a few of them get away, hell, if just one of them gets out and gets into a body, they’ll multiply. Lay eggs and do what they do.”
Nobody answered. What was there to say?
It took us fifteen minutes to flag down a car. I convinced Jennifer to stand out by the road alone, shivering and mussed and looking victimized, one shapely leg coated in crimson. Soon a shiny new SUV pulled over, driven by a young guy and his wife, on their honeymoon or whatever.
As soon as their passenger door was open I sprinted out and put the gun in their face, forced them out while Jim apologized profusely, swearing we would bring it back. The five of us and the dog piled in and we drove into the night.
“I DON’T LIKE it,” said Jennifer softly, as if afraid the looming, dark thing on the horizon could hear us.
She was looking at the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, a pyramid jutting into the night sky, big and black and geometric, like something from the year 3000. We were parked in the lot of a massive neon-lined steakhouse maybe a quarter mile away, all of us beaten and stinking of smoke and looking like war refugees.
We had ducked into a truck stop restroom just outside of the city and washed as much blood off ourselves as we could. Jim spat out two teeth. John was pretty sure he had a concussion and would still be vomiting if he had anything in his stomach. I had double vision in one eye, and in general I felt like I had been run through a wood chipper. We bought four first-aid kits and fixed ourselves up as best we could; Jennifer patched her thigh with a roll of Ace bandages and a tampon. We bought armloads of convenience-store food and sat eating as we drove around looking for the Luxor. This parking lot was as far as we got before somebody asked what the plan was.
“The Justin thing is in there. Right now,” Jim said, nodding toward the Luxor. “So what are we waitin’ for? This whole thing, it could be going down right this minute for all we know and we’re out here doing nothing.”
John said, “If he summoned Satan, we’d see it from here, right?”
This was the most any of us had spoken since the accident and the ensuing clusterfuck.
I said, “First problem is we got to get into this thing. Guy like Marconi, probably attracts a lot of nutjobs. Got to think the doors will be guarded and I don’t particularly feel like shooting my way in there.”
Jim said, “Think, David. The séance or whatever it is is happening inside a casino. You won’t get five feet inside the door with a gun before nine guys in suits tackle you.”
“And shove your head in a vise,” John added, helpfully.
I said, “Well, I don’t like our chances without the gun. Unless Jim wants to try to quote Bible verses at it.”
Jennifer put up her hands, said, “Guys, let’s not make this a dick-measuring contest, okay?”
There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.”
Silence again.
“That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.”
I sighed and said, “John, I don’t think anyone in this vehicle is in the mood to-”
“John, let me make one thing clear,” Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. “Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, then I heard Jen start laughing so hard I thought she would choke.
“Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”
Jim tried to suppress his laugher, and failed. One more victim, sucked in by John. You get in the room with him and you just fall into a warm pool of beer and video games and penis jokes, staring out at the universe with him and saying, “Do you believe this shit?”
I thought, not for the first time, that John could start a pretty fucking successful cult.
I looked down at the shotgun in my lap, a heavy, cold, hateful thing still coated in grit and blood. I noticed something else, a broad lump in my pants pocket. I dug into it and pulled out the folded envelope of cash I had gotten from the alley guy yesterday. I wondered if I wound up not using it if I should go find the guy and give it back to him. From behind me, Molly barked.
John was looking off across the parking lot now where a massive, customized RV sat like a beached whale. Behind it was an eighteen-wheeler, painted white with neon outlines, some kind of logo airbrushed on the side. He asked, “I wonder what’s in there.”
Big Jim said, “Shipment of fags probably.”
The asshole’s a comedian all of a sudden.
This seemed to anger Molly, who stared out the windshield and went into a barking frenzy. I reached back and, for the first time in my life, smacked a dog across the nose with an envelope full of cash. Jennifer said, “Thank you.”
John said, “There might be some clothes in that RV. We could change, look normal. Get Dave an overcoat to conceal the gun. Then charge into the Luxor, find Justin and open a can of kill-ass.”
“We can’t break into somebody’s RV,” I said.
John squinted at the logo on the side of the truck.
“That RV doesn’t belong to a person. It belongs to Elton John. You know, the band.”
Jen said, “Seriously?”
Molly retreated to the rear and started biting at the luggage the newlyweds had stacked in it. They probably had packed some sausages in there or something.
John said, “Yeah, look at the sign. I bet the truck is their concert stuff.”
Jim said, “Elton John is a guy, not a band.”
“Please, don’t get him started,” I said. “There was that one video where he was in different outfits and-”
“For the last time, those were all different guys, Dave. I looked it up. They’re brothers.”
“Oh, Jesus, forget it. Who cares.” I gripped the shotgun and considered shooting myself in the head.
A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows.
“Dave, I have a plan.”
IF THE ALIENS who helped the Egyptians build the pyramids returned to Earth and opened a casino, it would look like the Luxor Las Vegas. The thing was a massive, gleaming, black glass pyramid with a line of white lights that pulsed up its four corners.
We had just pulled into the Luxor parking lot and were watching two cop cars and a tow truck messing with Justin’s abandoned beer hauler, which had been carelessly run up onto the curb. The cops and tow guy all looked a little confused by the scene.
I said, “Let’s go.”
We filed out of the SUV and strode toward the front entrance, giving the cops a wide berth. Jennifer looked up at it and whispered to me, “I don’t like this place.”
“You already said that.”
“It looks like-like the end of the world. Somehow. Like those huge, scary future buildings in Blade Runner, black with the fire coming out the tops and all that.”
Big Jim said, “Yeah, yeah, and those gigantic big screens with huge Asian women on them. I watched that movie when I was a kid and I started cryin’.” Big Jim adjusted his cape.
The entrance was ahead, opened wide like a maw, the guts inside showing gleaming solid gold.
“You know what else scared me?” Jen said, reaching up to scratch where a bundle of black feathers was tickling her neck. “In de pen dence Day. That alien invasion movie. The first part, where the aliens come and they look up between the buildings and the sky is gone and, like, all they see is metal. Just as far as you can see, that steel ship looming up there. I remember thinking, that’s what the end of the world will look like. It won’t be wars or a meteor. It’ll be something we never could have thought of…”
Awe choked off her voice. We all had entered the lobby and stopped in our tracks. The cavernous inner chamber of the Luxor was gold upon gold, gold floors, gold walls, gold ceiling. The place was a temple, and there was no question who God was.
The lobby was a pulsing crowd of people and we were pushed ahead by the current. Everyone stared at us as they passed, eyes flicking from me to Jen to John’s naked ass. I nervously adjusted the guitar strap around my neck.
The shotgun was at my side, concealed under my coat. We probably drew the eyes of a dozen security guys working the floor. But at the sight of us, not a single one of them was thinking, “gun.” They were thinking “retards,” sure, but not “gun.”
John said, “Over there.”
He had found an entrance labeled EGYPTIAN BALLROOM, outside of which were two huge stand-up posters featuring a smiling fifty something man who must have been Dr. Marconi, since his name was boldly displayed under the picture.
A lady sat at a table with a laptop PC and stacks of programs and brochures fanned out on a table. There were two guys in suits with thin cell phone headsets on, guarding the door.
We strode toward them. My heart skipped a beat. This is as far as we had planned.
As we neared I glanced through the partially opened door to see if anything was happening in there, such as Lucifer crashing up through the floor. He wasn’t.
What I could see was that the ballroom was huge, a floor like half a football field. In the center was an enormous ice sculpture that had to have been fifteen feet high. It was an angel with its wings spread, hands upstretched to the ceiling. It must have had water pumping up through it because a rain of liquid rolled off its crystalline wings like a waterfall, splashing into a pool at its feet. The crowd sat in rows of folding chairs around it. Every seat was taken. Each member of the audience had their eyes closed.
The amplified voice of Dr. Marconi drifted into the lobby:
“Okay, everyone. Settle down. I know this is frightening for some of you but what we’re dealing with is real, real as the person sitting next to you. But I need all of you, all of your concentration, all of that power, that openness of the mind for this to work. Now we’ve just heard from Betty, who says her husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances last year. His name is Harold Alexander. Let’s all concentrate on Harold Alexander. Now clear your minds. Each of you picture, in your head, an apple…”
I had left the six thousand dollars from my envelope with a ponytailed roadie who gave us fifteen minutes alone with the concert truck while he went off to smoke. The guitar slung over my back was made entirely of a crystal-clear glass or polymer. I was wearing a white leather overcoat trimmed in long, luxuriant green fur and an enormous white sombrero edged in a pattern of fiber-optic lights.
Jennifer had donned a tailed white tuxedo/ringmaster coat over her T-shirt and shorts, the coat long enough to leave only bare legs emerging from the hem. A black feather boa gave her an outfit that sort of looked intentional. Big Jim was wearing an incredibly tight roadie jumpsuit with a flashy Elton John logo on the back. He had a huge Casio keyboard under his arm and pulled a dolly behind him loaded down with two black boxes the size of footlockers.
John wore a black jockstrap, a pair of white chaps and a small purple Robin Hood cap that covered his groin. He was naked from the waist up save for a tight leather vest and a bundle of gold chains. We all wore sunglasses.
As we arrived at the table, Marconi’s voice boomed, “Now, now, everyone be calm. Who’s next? Does anyone else have someone they’d like to contact?”
The guards and check-in lady stared at us in confused amusement as we approached. The lady at the table, trying to suppress a smile, finally said, “Uh, do you have tickets?”
John said, “No. We’re Elton John.”
“We’re, uh, the band,” I said, cutting him off quickly. “We’re playing in there after the séance. Show us the back entrance and we’ll-”
“Dave!” shouted John. “Look!”
It was Shitload. He was at the far end of the ballroom, shuffling between seats, moving toward the stage. He wore an ill-fitting suit jacket, jeans and a cowboy hat that we knew covered a lumpy head wound.
“Yo, I gots an old homey I’d like you to contact for me, fool,” he said as he approached Marconi.
Dr. Marconi’s smile faltered at the sight of Shitload, limping with joints bent at odd angles, his body puffy and stretched as if ready to burst. The jacket didn’t completely conceal the gaping shotgun wound in his midsection.
Shitload said, “His name is Korrok the Slavemaster from the eighth plane, also known in some realms as Baa’aaa’aaa’aab and in others as the Lord Zanthk All-Bzzki’l Shadd’uuul’l L’luuu’ddahs L’ikzzb-lla Khtnaz.”
The guards and the door lady all turned their attention to him, not sure if this was part of the show but sensing something was about to go way, way wrong.
I stepped up to the door and ran my hand along my side, felt the long, rigid shotgun hidden behind my overcoat. I was about to tell Door Lady that we were in the midst of an emergency that only rock and roll could solve and thus had to be let in at once.
“GUN!”
It was the guard to my left. I looked down, realized six inches of shotgun barrel was exposed where my coat had folded back.
Quickly, I whipped it out and pointed it at his face, freezing him in mid-lunge.
John said, “It’s not a gun! It’s part of our act!” at the exact same moment I said, “I’m a cop! I’m undercover!”
Then, over the loudspeaker:
“AGGGHHH!! MY BALLS!!!”
I spun and saw Dr. Marconi fall to the floor, grabbing his punched groin.
Shitload loomed over him.
Gasps rippled across the audience.
I sprinted into the ballroom. Guards muscled past me, rushing the stage.
Shitload punched the first guard in the groin so hard it flung his body back five feet. The other retreated.
I raised the shotgun, leveling it at Shitload.
“FREEZE!” I shouted, for some reason. A lady screamed at the sight of the gun. Shitload turned his back to us and leaned forward. His pants split. A fleshy, puckering protrusion formed and pushed its way through the slit, looking like the end of a flesh trumpet.
FOONT!!
With a bassy thump and a smell like burnt sulfur, Shitload farted himself far into the air.
The crowd went wild, chairs clanging down all around us. I tracked Shitload with the barrel of the shotgun as he climbed a hazy contrail of shimmery methane. He landed atop the giant ice angel. Shitload crouched on one wing, raised his arms in a “touchdown” motion and said something at the top of his voice that was probably very profound and ominous but was drowned out by the absolute bedlam in the crowd below.
I fired. Shitload exploded.
Hey! That was easy!
An eruption of blood and hamburger stained the wings of the angel red and pink. I felt a momentary euphoria of victory, ready to be carried off on shoulders. I should have known better.
Out of Justin’s guts poured, not the white buzzing worms, but a shower of black specks that could have been coffee beans. They bounced and flecked off the wings of the angel and plinked into the water below.
I edged up to the pool with the shotgun. Dark shapes started writhing and splashing below the surface.
Oh shit.
A soft hand landed on my shoulder and I turned to see the sharp, brown eyes of Albert Marconi.
“Son, I think we need to get the people out of here.”
Big Jim was behind him, still toting the keyboard. Marconi said, patiently, “Don’t you think? We haven’t much time.”
I turned, ran, fired the shotgun into the air and shouted, “Bomb! There’s a bomb in the fountain! Everybody run for your lives! Please don’t not panic!”
The words were completely lost in the stampede caused by my shotgun blast. I bumped into John in the crowd.
“Where’s the bomb?”
“There’s no bomb, there’s something in the-”
“Guys!”
It was Jen. She was yelling and pointing at the fountain. I turned just as one of the seven-legged wig monsters flung itself out of the pool, in a spray of water.
The beast landed on the carpet on its little baby-like hands, looked around, meowed, then disappeared. In a blink it was clinging to the back of an elderly black woman, scorpion tail buried down into the base of her spine.
Another of the little black beasts emerged. Another. Then three more. They crawled, leapt, clamped themselves onto victims. A fat guy went flailing past me with one of the things on his chest; a bearded man was trying to shake one off his leg.
One of the wig monsters ran and jumped at Jim. He swatted it like a baseball with his Elton John keyboard, then bashed the heavy Casio in half over its prone body in a spray of white and black keys.
Jen was on the other side of the fountain, kicking one of the beasts to death. I ran toward her, blew a wig monster in half, worked the pump and realized I had no more shots. I flung the gun at another one of the monsters, missed, hit an elderly man in a wheelchair instead, toppling him over.
I was kicking through the sea of blue chairs, closing on Jen. Two of the wig beasts were bearing down on me. No, three. One of them crouched and launched itself at me-
THONK
The beast was batted away by a folding chair, wielded by John.
He screamed “YEAH!” in a dead-on impersonation of pro wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage, grasping the folded chair by two legs. He swung again and flattened another of the beasts, screaming, “Have a seat, bitch!”
There were at least a hundred of the wig monsters bouncing around the ballroom now. Victims littered the floor by the dozen.
I flinched at the sound of a sharp gunshot, spun to see a middle-aged lady holding a little chrome pistol. She shot one of the things, killed it, took shots at another, missed. The beasts ganged up on her, three stinging her simultaneously. I heard someone shout, “Becky!” from behind me. A tall guy with a heavy brown beard pushed through the chairs. “BECKY! HONEEEEY!”
He punted two of the creatures off his wife with several furious kicks, then John ran in and chaired the last one off, screaming, “You’ve been sentenced to get the chair, motherfucker!”
The man helped his wife to her feet and said to me, “Those things! They’re blocking the exits!”
I spun around, saw black clumps surrounding the doors we came in.
“Shit!”
The woman looked dazed. The man asked her if she was okay. She nodded, then calmly reached over with her left arm and tore the right arm out of its socket. It made a slimy sucking sound, like tearing the leg off a Thanksgiving turkey. There was no blood. The wound was instantly sealed by a thin, black layer of the soy sauce.
She calmly walked back toward the fountain, casually carrying her arm like an umbrella. Her husband stood in dumbfounded silence. I heard John land two more blows with the chair.
Another bite victim lay nearby, a young man writhing as if in a seizure. Eventually his legs kicked themselves free from the rest of his body. The limbs thumped along the floor on their own like two giant polyester snakes with shoes for heads. Right behind them was a loose head stuck to a single arm, furiously biting and clawing the carpet.
I felt like we might not be in control of this situation any longer.
I heard a scream that I had come to recognize as Jennifer’s. She was on her knees with Fred’s switchblade, surrounded by five dead wig monsters all bearing ragged stab wounds. I sprinted that way.
I heard a metallic thump from behind me and heard John yell, “You wants the committee, asshole, then you best meet with the chair!” I pulled Jen to her feet.
Around us, the disembodied human limbs were piling up, forming a circle around the fountain, fusing themselves to each other like Satan’s LEGO set. A wet, pink disembodied spine slithered past us like a snake.
Dr. Marconi jogging toward us, shouting some instruction I couldn’t hear in the pandemonium. All around us the wig monsters were closing in, their dark shapes rolling in toward the fountain like oil down a drain.
One of them jumped onto Jen’s back. I flung myself at it, grabbed it in a bear hug and ripped it off her. One of its little fists came around and started punching me in the face.
I carried it to the fountain, stepping over a squishy pile of body parts. I shoved the monster into the water, held it under, screamed “Die!” or something to that effect. After a few seconds it stopped moving and black sauce oozed out of it like an oil slick.
Dr. Marconi got close enough so I could finally hear him. He said, “They’re trying to get into the water! Don’t let them!”
I looked back down at the spreading black pool, heard a splash as another of the beasts jumped in, followed by another, the creatures returning to the pool from which they had sprung.
Nothing good could come from that.
Marconi said, “Follow me.”
We sprinted toward a set of doors behind the stage, John smacking creatures with chairs as we went. Marconi unlocked the doors and we filed in. John stopped and spun in front of the open doorway. He faced at least half a dozen of the wig monsters, circling in on him. He whipped the chair around and actually split one of the things in half with the impact, spilling a spray of blood that was reflective, like mercury. John bellowed, “Anybody else want to donate blood to chair-ity?”
He ducked into the door, stopped, thought for a moment, then flung the door open again. He swung the chair and bashed one monster right in the wig, screaming, “There’s some dessert! With a chair-y on top!”
He came back in again, breathing heavily, slamming the door just as something thumped against it.
I said, “How about we just stay in here until they all leave?”
Dr. Marconi took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief.
John said, “What’s happening to them out there? The bite victims?” He looked at Marconi. “We’ve got friends who took the soy sauce, the, uh, the venom those things out there spit out. Almost all of them died but not like-”
“Out there you have a room full of true believers,” Marconi said, sadly. “There’s a shift that goes on, you see, physically and mentally and spiritually. They were ripe for this.”
Something hammered against the door and one hinge popped out in a burst of plaster dust. Big Jim and John leaned against the door to brace it.
I said, “Wait, you know what’s going on here?”
He gave me a dismissive look. “I’ll send you home with a copy of my book.”
Big Jim said, “He’s trying to break through, isn’t he?”
Marconi nodded. “He or his lackeys, yes.”
“Goddammit!” I screamed. “Did everybody else know this was gonna happen but me?”
“I most certainly did not know this was going to happen,” Marconi said, “or I would have canceled and issued full refunds. But when I became aware of the ‘sauce’ as you call it, I knew that it had only one purpose.”
There was a scratching from the opposite side of the door that I suspected was the sound of the beasts trying to bite through it.
“And that purpose is?”
“I offer people a window into the spiritual. Someone wishes to turn it into a door.”
A blue eye, in the darkness.
Jim whispered, “The Devil.”
Marconi said, “Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”
I held up a hand in a “halt” motion and said, “How. Do. We. Get. Out. Of. This?”
Marconi placed his glasses back on his nose and said, “We’re like one German soldier alone on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, holding a sharp stick. I assure you, son, if any of us were capable of destroying such evil, the world would have killed us long before now. The world turns, son. And now it turns into the darkness.”
I said, “So, what do you suggest?”
“I am a retired priest. Did you know that?”
John asked, “Are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now.”
“No,” he said. “But I can bless water to make it holy. The ice statue, I mean.”
John’s face brightened and he said, “That’s perfect!” He thrust his index finger into the air. “We bless the ice, then we just have to somehow get all hundred or so of those monsters to go lick the statue!”
I stared hard into the face of the older man, said, “Okay, there is no possible combination of English words that would form a dumber plan than that.”
“We’ll need to buy time, of course,” he said, undeterred. “But if I’m right, if they’re doing what I think they’re doing, it’s most likely the only hope we’ve got. The travelers out there, the beasts I mean, they do have a weakness.”
John said, “We know. Chairs.”
“Uh, not exactly. They’re natural discordians. It’s a product of where they’re from, you see. When you live in a world of black noise, melody is like a blade to the ears. Angels and their harps and all that.”
I asked, “What does that have to do with-”
A hole exploded from the center of the door. A little pink fist and a segmented leg curled through, reaching around between John and Big Jim. John grabbed it by the wrist and Jennifer severed the arm with the switchblade. There was a feline shriek from the other side. John held the detached arm in his hand for a moment, then shoved it back through the ragged hole.
Marconi said, “I see you have your instruments. Can any of you sing? The old spirituals work best.”
John said, “I can sing.”
I said, “No, you can’t, John.”
“Well, I play the guitar.”
“So can I,” said Big Jim. “We have two guitars.”
I said, “This could not be any stupider.”
John said, “Dave, you remember the words to ‘Camel Holocaust’?”
“Ah, once again, you prove me wrong, John.”
Marconi looked down at the two carts stacked with amps and cables and said, “How long is it? I’ll need several minutes.”
John stepped around and lifted the guitar off my back, said, “ ‘Camel Holocaust’ is as long as you want it to be, my friend. I’m lead, Jim is rhythm, Jen sings backup. Jen, just repeat everything Dave sings, only like one second behind. The sound system will be on the stage. We duck out there and plug in and wail. Okay? Guys, this is just retarded enough to work.”
We set up, then faced the banging door. John said, “You know, I’m surprised the door stopped them, since they can teleport around like that. You’d think they could just blink right through it.”
There was sudden silence from beyond the door, a muttering like the creatures had just realized something. From behind me, Jim screamed.
One of the beasts was on his back. A second appeared on his chest, and in a blurred motion it snatched at his throat.
Jim collapsed on his guitar, the white instrument turning instantly crimson.
Jennifer lunged with the switchblade and stabbed one beast to death. She was good with that thing.
I said, “Jim? Are you-”
He rolled over, his throat laying open in shreds and flaps, as if it had been hit with a shotgun blast. His eyes were wide, his mouth working. Then, he was gone.
I opened my mouth to say something when suddenly my vision was obstructed by blackness. There were little pinches on my chest and belly, like something grabbing hold. My vision focused and I saw a dozen mismatched eyes staring back at me.
I fell backward, hit the ground, the wig monster riding on my chest. Its beak opened and I saw a pink, human tongue lolling around inside.
An electric shriek emerged from the ballroom. A guitar.
The creature closed its beak and turned toward the open door where John played, a look of intense annoyance on its face. It trotted away, two tiny hands over its ears.
Marconi said, “Good! Go!”
I stood and pushed through the open door. John played his ax with his legs spread apart, holding the guitar low to the ground. I sprinted around him, grabbed the mic off of the stage. For a moment, I was speechless.
The base of the fountain was now hidden behind a seven-foot-high circle of stacked body parts, the ice angel rising from the center. The remaining wig monsters gathered around the perimeter, facing inward, as if waiting.
There is no possible way this is actually happening.
Well, might as well go with it. I clenched my throat, filled my lungs until my diaphragm pushed out against the gold-plated belt I was wearing, and screeched:
“I knew a man
No, I made that part up
Hair! Hair! Haaairrr!
Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”
The creatures spun our way, donned some very disappointed frowns, backed away.
“Brilliant!” shouted Marconi. “You’re really annoying them! Let’s move!”
We pushed forward toward the fountain, the sound of the music thundering through the room, scattering the beasts before us like a leaf blower. One of the wig monsters spat at me.
“My melon soul
Crushed by your Gallagher of apathy
Sledgehammer! Hammerrrrr!
Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”
We reached the length of our cables, still some distance from the fountain. Marconi went forward with Jennifer in tow. They got within blessing distance of the angel and Marconi said, “Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament. At the very dawn of creation…”
“There’s a wolf behind you
No, wait, it’s just a dog
Oh, shit! Badger! Baaaadgeeeerrr!
Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”
We hit the first solo, John ripped into it. Several of the wig monsters were now chewing on John’s guitar wire.
The sound died into faint, pathetic guitar pluckings.
The monsters lurched toward us en masse. John, thinking quickly, ran over and snatched the microphone from my hands. He began making guitar sounds with his mouth.
“WAAAAHHHH wah-wah-wah-wah-wah, weet woo weet weet woo-”
I didn’t think that would work. I spun on Dr. Marconi, saw him stepping up over the human-parts wall toward the fountain itself. I followed him, climbed up, stepped on a face, a bundle of six hands, an ass.
The pool was black now. Not black like oil, but black like a cave, so that you couldn’t see any reflection or ripples in the surface, not even when Dr. Marconi waded out into it. A black rain fell off the angel’s wings above us.
John mounted the pile behind us, screamed, “WAH, DO-DO-DO-DOOOO-DO, DEE DOO DOO-”
Marconi, knee-deep in black oil, reached out and touched the icy surface of the statue. He said, “We ask you, Father, with your Son…”
John had reached the end of his solo, was now making up a third verse to the song.
“My hat smells like
lubricant, I don’t wanna touch it
Wait, this isn’t mine! And it’s not a hat!
Camel Holo-”
John’s mic cable was cut. The sound died.
“-on the waters of this font. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Marconi stepped back.
Nothing.
John turned to the waves of approaching monsters and said, “NOW LICK THE STATUE!”
The blackness in the pool suddenly rose, covering the feet of the statue, spilling over the edges of the fountain. I leaned over and pulled at Marconi’s jacket, pulling him back, not sure what was happening but certain we didn’t want to be standing in the middle of it when it did. He waded over to the edge of the pool. He raised one leg out of the blackness and we saw, with horror, that he had no leg. Everything that had been submerged was gone, his pants ending in a neat line with only empty space beneath-
– and then it was back, whole again. Like a trick of the light. The doctor suddenly sprang out of the pool with renewed motivation. I glanced nervously at my white patent leather shoes disappearing under the rising black tide.
John and Jennifer helped us clamber up the wall of human limbs, then we ran our asses off across the ballroom floor. There was a whistling sound, like wind howling through tree branches. I saw a couple of chairs scooting along the floor toward the fountain, suddenly felt a pull like I was running from an electromagnet with a gut full of iron pellets.
One of the wig monsters skittered toward us, but was suddenly lifted out of the air and sucked back to what I was fairly certain was a portal to Hell. The howling sound was loud now, deafening, the sound of a jetliner. Folding chairs were flying through the air as if propelled by dozens of invisible Bobby Knights. The five of us pushed our way forward, somebody screaming around me but the sound lost in the rushing noise. John grabbed my shirt and pointed me toward the small space behind the stage, room to crouch back there. Jennifer screamed something I couldn’t hear, something that sounded like “Todd!”
Sparks blew out from the ceiling lights, and we were cast into darkness.
A few small banks of emergency lights clicked on, faintly glinting off the wings of the ice angel in the center of the room. We stumbled back behind the stage, huddled down like tornado victims. We waited.
Silence. I risked a peek back at the dark well. From the blackness, there was movement. Dark shapes rose up out of the portal. They were like freestanding shadows, vaguely human, long and lean figures, eight or ten feet tall each. Their only features were a pair of tiny, glowing eyes like two lit cigarettes.
One by one they slipped out and into the dark room, a crowd of them, shoulder to shoulder, flowing out of the portal. They shambled out like a spreading pool of spilt oil, perfectly silent, filling the room, a constellation of little red flickering eyes.
They were around us now, closing in just feet away, making their advance in perfect stillness.
And then, the silence was broken. There was a low, screeching sound, like steam escaping. Plumes of smoke or steam rose from the base of the ice angel, a bright, white light down there like it was a rocket about to take off.
The sound grew and grew and grew, became animal, a scream of pain.
In the dim light of the emergency lamps, the holy water angel sank, descending into the black hole.
There was a thunderclap, so loud I thought it would split me in half. I clenched my eyes shut, covered my head with my hands, begged God to forgive me for accidentally bringing an end to all of creation.
There was a jolt, then a bodiless, weightless feeling like drifting out of a dream.
A hand touched my shoulder. I flinched as if gouged with a branding iron. Things were quiet again. How much time had passed? I felt like a man waking after a nap to complete darkness, confused about the time of day.
I opened my eyes and it was Jennifer, with John and Marconi standing behind her. Lights were on. She helped me up and I turned to the center of the floor.
Nothing there but empty, red carpet. No fountain, no bodies, no black hole. The room was completely vacant except for us and a few random toppled chairs still scattered about. I sat down on the floor, suddenly exhausted. John and I looked hard at the spot where the fountain had been. We each extended a hand toward it, and gave it the finger.
The doors burst open. Suits and cop uniforms poured in.
Molly the dog came bounding in with them, a bundle of chewed-up papers in her mouth. She dropped the stuff in front of me, barking her head off. I looked down at two tickets to the Marconi show, which she had presumably gotten out of the young couple’s luggage. I nudged the tickets aside, saw a CD labeled: Amazing Grace: The Brooklyn Choir Sings the Gospel.
A bearded man wandered over, looking dazed, and I recognized him as the husband of the woman we tried to save before she dismembered herself and everything went to Hell.
I said, “I’m sorry. About your wife. What was her name? Becky.”
He looked at me, confused, said, “No, I’m not married. What happened in here?”
I couldn’t answer. I lay back on the floor, my body shutting down even with shoes shuffling all around me. I hadn’t slept in forty hours, every muscle screamed in pain. I had flown off the cliff of a gargantuan adrenaline rush and was crashing fast.
Somebody said my name, asked if I was okay. I didn’t answer, the sound of the commotion dying around me as the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.
DARKNESS AND WARMTH, and then the nasal EEEK EEEK EEEK of an alarm clock. I had a taste in my mouth, smoky, like I had licked an ashtray. I felt something itchy and thick around my mouth. I shot my eyes open. Where the hell was I?
I sat up in bed. Not my bedroom. I looked over at a watch on a nightstand. Not my watch. A nicer one.
I looked around the room, the alarm still screeching its complaints from the nightstand. I found a mirror. There was something dark on my face, and I slapped my hand up to it. Hair. I climbed out of bed and walked toward the mirror. I had a thick, full goatee.
What the hell?
I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Whose room was this? A voice from behind me said, “Are you going to get that?”
I fumbled around and found a button on the alarm. Jennifer Lopez was in the bed. And I mean the actress.
Oh, wait. No, she rolled over and it was just the local Jennifer Lopez. She got out of bed, wearing a tank top and underwear, and she sleepily walked off to what I guess was a bathroom. She had a faint, white scar at the top of her thigh. She farted softly as she closed the door.
I stood, found a cell phone among the stuff on a nearby chest of drawers, dialed John’s number.
Operator recording. “This number has been disconnected…”
I was in a slow-burn panic now. I glanced out a window, saw a tree in the front yard with leaves turning fall colors. I went back to the phone, scrolled through the quick-dial numbers. I found an entry for John-a different number than I knew-and dialed it.
I heard water running in the bathroom. I held my breath as the phone rang four, five, six times. Seven.
“Hello?” John, sounding sleepy.
“John? It’s me.”
“Yeah. What’s goin’ on?”
“Oh. Nothin’.”
After a moment, he said, “You don’t remember the last six months, do you?”
“You, too?”
“No, I’m okay. This will be the fourth time it’s happened to you, though. You lose everything since that night. Is Vegas the last thing you remember?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it’s a side effect of the sauce. Come to my-well, you don’t know where my apartment is now, do you? Meet me at Dairy Queen.”
Jennifer came out and, much to my surprise, we kissed for several minutes. Ashtray.
I went out, took in the neat little white bungalow-style house and was a little relieved to find my familiar Hyundai in the drive.
I drove and found John sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, a brown DQ sack in his hand. I observed that he, too, had grown a thick goatee.
I said, “This sucks.”
“You say that every time.”
“Do I have to, like, work today? Where do I work?”
“Wally’s. You get Sundays off. This is Sunday, by the way. Come on.”
John walked me to a very nice motorcycle. He jumped on, slapped the seat behind him. I looked at it for a moment and then walked to my car, said, “I’ll follow you.”
As we walked down the hall to John’s new apartment he said, “It was a big deal, but not, you know, the real big deal. The story that came out was that five hundred people freaked out at a Marconi show, rushed the doors, one kid got killed in the stampede. That would be, you know, Jim.”
We stepped through the doors and I said, “One guy? What about the dozens of people who-”
I stopped, taken aback by John’s place. He had a brown leather couch, a matching armchair. He had a big-screen plasma TV sitting in the middle of the room; hooked to it were four video game systems, with game boxes littering the floor. A fairly nice DVD player, a one-hundred-disk CD changer in an entertainment center.
“John, are we crack dealers now?”
John opened a drawer on a writing desk and pulled out a big manila envelope. He extracted a bundle of papers, newspaper clippings, a couple of folded-up tabloids, a glossy magazine called Strange Days with a picture of a UFO on the front.
He said, “No. Nothing like that. Out in Vegas, we met a guy. He was a pimp. We made quite a bit of money as male whores. They used to call you Rocket Rimjob. You won the gold at the Greater Nevada Sodomy Olympics back in July, landed a bunch of endorsement deals. You own that house you and Jennifer live in. Paid cash, I think.”
He looked dead serious when he said this. I said, “Are you messing with me?”
“No. You really own that house. I made up the whoring thing, though. I like to add a little bit to it each time. Seriously, what happened is Molly won a bunch of money at the casinos.”
“John-”
He pulled out a newspaper, a color “Lifestyles” section from the Las Vegas Sun, headline blaring “Dog Wins Quarter Million Playing Slots!” There was a picture of John with Molly in his arms, struggling to get away from him. He had his right hand out, making the shape of a finger gun and pointing at Molly, his mouth wide open in a drunken “that’s my dog!” expression. Jen and I were visible in the deep background, trying to hide our faces.
“The thing with the Marconi show, the panic, there was a big investigation and everything,” he said. “Cops thought he had slipped acid to everybody, freaked ’em out with a light show or something. Everybody called him a fraud; it was kind of crappy the way they treated him. But he came out okay. The death hasn’t come out as anything but an accident and all of a sudden his book is a bestseller, people desperate to get to his shows. You’ve, uh, tried to contact him a couple of times, but he won’t take the calls.”
It was coming back to me as he told it. Everything was hazy, drunk memories. He handed me the UFO magazine, pointed to a little header in the bottom left:
Legend of Fred Chu:
Is this dead youth haunting his Midwestern hometown?
One local man says “ABSOLUTELY”
There was a noise above me.
I looked up
My heart skipped a beat.
It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands. The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head. It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.
“Uh, John-”
“Oh, now you see it.” He stood, grabbed the Dairy Queen sack, pulled out a sausage-and-egg biscuit and unwrapped it. He set the sandwich on the floor. The thing picked it up with two hands and bit into it.
“When you came in that night, that first night when I called you, it was standing on the wall. You walked in and of course you saw nothin’ at all. And, you know, when I told you not to move or make a sound? The thing was on your back. It had jumped on you and you just stood there like nothin’.”
The wig monster turned about five eyes up to me as it ate. It paused in its chewing, vanished. The sandwich fell softly to the floor.
I said, “Did I spook it? I mean, does it still, like, attack us or anything?”
“No, not since that night. It bit right through my shoe that night, though. I had been kicking it at the time so I call it even.”
The beast reappeared, one arm wrapped around a thirty-two-ounce Coke. It had a wrapped straw in its beak. John pulled out the straw, unwrapped it and poked it into the cup lid for it. The wig monster sucked on the straw and picked up its sandwich again.
“So, can anybody else see it?”
“No. My mom came by last month and it was right in the middle of the floor. She didn’t acknowledge it at all. But get this: a week later she left her cat here because she was going on vacation and the cat could see it. It hissed at the thing the whole time. The monster would pick up wads of paper and stuff and throw it at him. The cat died the next day but it was unrelated.”
I said, “So the paper said we won a quarter-million dollars. What did I do with my share? I bought that house? Did I save any?”
“I dunno. We really don’t see each other that much now. This is actually the first time we’ve talked since, oh, probably August. You and Jennifer, you uh, don’t leave the house a whole lot.”
“Oh. I’m… sorry, I guess.”
“No. Trust me, you’re not.” He gestured toward the television. “Wanna play hockey?”
I STOPPED TALKING, only to notice Arnie Blondestone was staring at me in wide-eyed, silent horror. Not the kind of horror you feel when you find out the universe is full of real monsters, but the kind you feel when you realize someone else’s idiocy has just wasted your entire day. I glanced down at the tape recorder, saw that it had stopped long ago. Arnie rubbed his hands over his face like he was washing without water.
“What?”
He looked at me and made a polite effort to hide his deep, pure disdain, but didn’t respond.
“Do you, uh, want something to eat? I’ll buy.”
“No thanks,” he said, twisting his face into a pained fake smile. “Let’s just wrap this up and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Now, just to clear a few things up, if you don’t mind. First of all, let’s confirm that that’s the little pill bottle there?”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s empty now.”
“Because you took the last of the, uh, the soy sauce before you came today.”
“That’s right.”
“So you don’t have any left to show me. Let me see the stuff crawl around on the table and all that.”
“Oh. No. I guess I should have saved some.”
“No problem. I mean, that would have been physical evidence to back up your whole story, but we won’t worry about that sort of thing.”
Asshole. I should cut that smirk off your face with my butter knife.
“And I guess you forgot to tell me that you took the pill bottle with you when you left the trailer? Because you have it now, but in your story you left it behind. You know, when your dog drove by in your car and picked you up. Hey, that would have been something else to show me, the car-driving dog.”
“I went back to Robert’s place afterward, found the pill bottle among the debris. Completely unburnt.”
“Of course.”
“I can show you where the trailer was, by the way. I mean, there’s another trailer there now but if you look at the ground you can sort of see where something might have burned there once. We can drive out there.”
“Uh-huh. And what about the dozens of deaths from the dismembered fans at the Marconi thing? I’m surprised that wasn’t bigger news, a crowd of people disappearing like that.”
“There’s actually a very good reason for-”
“And you told me Jim hauled in a dolly of sound equipment to the Luxor, but later on there were two carts of equipment there.”
“Of everything that I told you, that’s the part you have trouble believing?”
“And in your story you kept losing track of how many people were with you. At some point you said something like, ‘The five of us and the dog piled into the car’ when it was only four of you at that point, by my count. You, your friend John, Big Jim and the girl, Lopez. But you probably got mixed up.”
“It’s hard to exp-”
“You were probably forgetting you had killed Fred already. Meaning Fred Chu, the guy whose head you blew off with a shotgun.”
I didn’t answer.
“So there really is a guy named Fred Chu and he’s really dead? I could look him up?”
“He’s missing. Officially.”
“Okay. So is there more story, or should I pack up? Do you have any documents you’d like to copy me on, like your tax returns from the year your dog won all the money at the casino? Which form does the IRS have you fill out for that?”
I took a deep breath, said, “Look, not every little single thing in the story is true, but the meat of it is. I swear it. I admit I get silly when-when the truth is hard to explain. It’s my way. But those people in the Luxor, they did disappear, Arnie. And I mean they totally disappeared. That guy with the beard who lost his wife? He came back later and said he had no wife and, you know what? He didn’t. He didn’t have a wife named ‘Becky’ and there was no ‘Becky’ at the show. They went down the guest list; everybody is accounted for.”
“So she was never there. Okay.”
“Would you please stop doing that? Patronizing me? You saw the wig monster out there in my truck, in the cage. That’s what it was, you saw it.”
“I saw something. I saw what you wanted me to see. Some people are manipulators, I know that much. Oh, hey, you said those monsters, they ooze the soy sauce, right? So you can go out there and get some?”
“You seriously want to go try?”
“No, I don’t. Let me ask you, did they do any psychological testing on you when you had your incident in school? The one that got you sent away? And the report they wrote, did it have the word ‘sociopath’ on it?”
I groaned.
“Don’t make this about me. The people in Vegas, the ones who vanished? They never existed, Arnie. No, listen. This is hard to understand, but the moment they were sucked into that hole, or whatever it was, they didn’t just stop existing in the here and now. They were erased from the past, too. That’s why there’s no report of them being gone. At that moment, they were never born. If I had fallen in there, you’d be able to go back and see that my mom never had a male child and she never named him ‘David’ and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
“Assuming this is true, which, incidentally, I’m not drunk enough to do, how can you possibly prove that?”
I took a breath.
Here goes…
“I have dreams, Arnie. And in my dreams the whole thing from the Luxor plays out, only we’re with another guy. And I know his name. Todd Brinkmeyer. A year older than me. Long blond hair. In the dream he’s with us, he’s toting the second dolly of sound stuff, he’s with us in the SUV. He’s carrying the second guitar-”
“Okay, okay, back up-”
“I heard her say his name, Arnie. I heard Jennifer shout ‘Todd’ plain as day. I think that was him getting sucked into the hole, the vortex thing. And as of that moment, he was gone, he got sucked in and he was zapped out of the past, present and future, out of our memories. They have that power somehow. But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn’t happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it’s like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there’s places, holes where I know Todd should be. He was there and he helped us, Arnie. He fought with us. And I’m not even allowed to remember him, to mourn his death. At least Jim got a funeral. But Todd, I can’t find his picture in the yearbook. Can you even imagine what that’s like?”
Arnie sighed and for a quick moment looked genuinely sympathetic that someone could dream up something this elaborately sad. He said, “We both got places to go tomorrow. Is there any more?”
You act bored, Arnie, you act like you’re miles above it all. But you’re still sitting here, aren’t you? You’re still listening. I know you got reasons but I don’t know what they are yet. God knows I would have split by now if I were in your shoes.
I said, “You gotta understand… Vegas was just the beginning.”