Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (24 page)

Suzanne’s eyes were slitted, locked. She was beyond feeling what was being done to her. Another orgasm hissed past her teeth, gutturally. Nothing more.

The skeleton key dropped from my trembling fingers and bounced on the hardwood floor. The thing on the bed had cranked its blood-slathered muzzle around to dismiss me. I was no big deal.

With a sidelong yank of its head, it worried loose some morsel anchored by stubborn tendons to the chest cavity. It was about halfway to its favorite part. The scraps it had sampled and discarded littered the bed wetly. If it had chanced across any tumors during its methodical progress toward the brain, I was sure it had crunched them up like popcorn. Piggishly, it lapped and slurped.

Suzanne looked at me as she came again, convulsing as much as her sundered body would let her. A thin stringer of frothy lung blood leapt onto her chest.

I kept my eyes in contact with hers as I snapped the trigger of the Remington, thinking how much I loved her.

The Nitro Mag load tore our bed to smithereens. Suzanne’s dead arm jerked up, flopped back. Bloodstained goosedown took to the air, drifting. I worked the slide one-handed and fired again. The French doors disintegrated. Rickrack jumped from the bedstands to shatter on the floor.

The creature eased out its caked snout and saw what had just befallen that part of the feast it had been saving for last. Its impossibly wide, hinged maw dropped open to screech at me, as though I owed it something and had reneged. I shot it in the face, as Dunwoody had years ago. It snapped at the incoming shot like a bloodhound at gnats, then obstinately sank its nose back into its grisly dinner.

Suzanne was no longer on the bed. The corpse was not identifiable as anything but dead, butchered meat.

I slammed the bedroom door hard; don’t ask why. There was an instant when I might have jammed the barrel between my teeth and swallowed that last shot myself. Instead, a pungent odor hauled me, staggering, to the stair landing.

Downstairs, the floor was wet and sloppy, glistening. Ormly waited for me, a ten-gallon jerry can of gasoline in each massive hand, smiling.

The buffeting heat was so intense that we had to back across the street to avoid getting our eyebrows flash-fried.

I watched the south window of our bedroom grow dreamy behind a sheet of orange flame. There was absolutely no exterior access. The thing had crawled up the front of the house like a fly, and clinging, had opened the window with one paw.

Neither of us saw it jump out, trailing sparks. The expression on Ormly’s face frightened me. It was the closest thing to a glimmer of abstract thought I’d yet seen mar his slablike, mannequin countenance. He stared, unblinking, into the skyrocketing licks of fire.

“Hotter,” he said. “Stronger. Better this time.”

By dawn we were down to smoldering debris. I did not want to scrutinize the wreckage too closely, for fear of recognizing blackened bones.

Ormly stood in the backyard, his face dead with a kind of infinite sadness. I followed his gaze to the ground, and saw a deeply-dug, charred clawprint. The foot that had embossed itself there had been so hot that the grass had been cooked into an unmistakable pattern.

Ormly’s mitt-sized hands pushed me toward my BMW, parked past the mailboxes. When I dug in my heels, he plucked me up and carried me. It was too easy to know why.

When night fell, the ground-glass shriek would waft down from the forest, and Point Pitt’s new god would return.

Back in the arms of the city, I waited around for fate to come crashing down on my head with charges of murder and arson. Civilized accusations. No one came knocking.

Like I said earlier, this morning I sat and watched a cat disembowel a rail lizard. I watched much longer than I had to in order to get the point. Then my eyelids pushed down to allow swatches of stop-and-go sleep.

The nightmares of my past replaced those of the here and now.

A week after I’d turned thirteen, the school sadist at my junior high decreed that the day had come to pound every last speck of shit out of my pasty white body. Ross Delaney was the eldest son of a local garbageman—to be fair, he took a lot of socially maladjusting crap just for that. He was coasting through his third encore performance at the seventh-grade level. A seventh-grader who had a down mustache, drove his own jalopy to school, smoked, and hung out with peers destined for big things: aggravated assault, rape, grand theft auto . . .

Ross had made me loan him a pen once in study hall and he’d dismantled it after scrawling on the back of my shirt and laughing like I was the world’s biggest a-hole. My buddy Blake and I had discovered a bunch of disposable hypodermic needles while scrounging for intriguing goodies in the trash dumpster of a health clinic, reasoning that it was against some law for them to throw out anything really
dangerous
, right? Those hypos made primo mini-squirt guns, and that’s all Blake and I thought of using them for. They were tech, they were cool. They were enormously appealing to Ross, who threatened to put out my eye with a Lucky if I didn’t give him one. Right before lunch, Ross was scooped up by Mr. Shanks,
El Principal
of the humorless specs and full-length gray plastic raincoat. Needles in school were serious business, and I soon found myself being paged for an interview. I denied everything. Ross’ eyes, yellow-brown, settled on me like a pronouncement of execution by hanging.

He laid for me in the parking lot. There was no way around him. He loomed above me. I wanted to say something pacifying, babble that might exonerate us both as rebels cornered by an unfair system. Ross’ brain lacked the logic links such a ploy needed to work. Trying to appease him had always been a pussy’s game with an automatic loser. Guess who.

The next thing I knew, I was catching Ross’ hand with my face.

My neckbones popped as my head snapped around, and my hand made the mistake of contracting into a fist. My left eye filled up with knuckles and stopped seeing. He snagged a handful of my hair and used his knee to loosen all the molars on the side of my head nearest the pavement. I bit tarmac and tasted blood. I curled up. He stared kicking me with his Mexican pimp boots, shouting incoherently, his face totally glazed.

My deck was discarded, so I called for my mom. I honestly thought it was my moment to die, and so reverted to instant babyhood, bawling and dribbling and yowling for my mother. Ross’ cohorts ate it up. What a queer, what a pussy, he wants his momma. Ross kicked again and I felt a lung try to jump out my throat. He yelled for me to shut up. Something cracked sharply inside me.

Then something
burst
inside me.

It wasn’t my liver exploding. It was something slag-hot, bursting brightly outward, filling me, popping on full bore like sprinkler systems during a fire, or an airbag in a car crash. The only sensation I can compare it to is the time my cardiologist broke an ampule of amyl nitrate under my nose, to test my pump. Only my internal ampule was full of something more like PCP. I was flooded to the brim—WHAM! My fingertips tingled. Both hands locked into fists. I scared the crap out of myself; I think I yelped. Instead of stopping the tip of Ross’ next incoming bonebreaker, I rolled out, stood up, and faced him.

Then I kicked the shit out of him, impossibly enough.

Hesitation scampered behind his eyes when he saw me get up. But there was no mystery in it for him. The medulla section of his primate mind saw an opportunity to stomp some serious ass and would not be denied. If I could stand, the massacre would just be more interesting. Ross roared and came in like a freight train. His fist was black and sooty and callused.

I snatched that meteor out of the air and diverted his momentum, planting my elbow in his mouth, then whip-cracking him into a one-eighty snap that left his gonads open to my foot. They decompressed with a squish and he hit the pavement on hands and knees . . . and then
I
was kicking
him
, blood flushing my face. Every bullshit, picayune adolescent injustice ever suffered now rushed home, and I went at Ross like a berserk wolverine spiked on crank. Ribs staved inward. Snot and blood lathered his chin.

And I felt
good
.

Mr. Shanks, the principal, yanked me off of Ross Delaney, school tyrant. He was too horrified by the damage he saw to wonder how I’d done it. I got my fine white ass suspended.

That school had been my introduction to life in the city. Since then, the city had treated me right. My apartment never got robbed; my car never got boosted. Degree. Master’s. Wife. Promotion. Child. Success. Suzanne and Jilly had been excited by our move to Point Pitt; I had been the reluctant one.

Now my city had repudiated me. I’d come crawling back after giving it the finger, and the only thing it would show me was an ugly orange tabby tearing the intestines out of a lizard that wasn’t dead all the way yet.

In its reptile eyes, the suffering as it was eaten.

I wanted to file a complaint. To protest that none of this was my fault. I didn’t want to leave; they made me do it. That would be like trying to make nice to Ross Delaney. Too late for that.

I had spent the night in a parking lot and there was dry snot on my lace, from crying. Returning to the city had not erased Suzanne or Jilly or poor old goddamn Brix. So much for the snapshot.

The BMW’s motor caught on the third try. I noticed blood staining the walnut of the gearshift as I backed out of the alleyway.

I wanted my mommy. But she wasn’t around this time, either. Not here.

The blackened garbage dump that, yesterday, had been my new home had cooled. If anyone had come out to investigate, they were gone now. Birds twittered in the forest, above all this folly.

Dunwoody finally spotted me and came out; I have to credit him for having that much iron left. He motioned me into his squalid little home and we sat drinking until the sun went down. I watched Ormly shamble about. Such a waste, there.

The shrieking I expected began to peal down from the woods after dusk. My hands quivered on the arms of Dunwoody’s dusty easy chair. They had not stopped shaking since last night.

“You forgot your pumpgun,” said Dunwoody. “Had Ormly fetch it. Only two loads innit though.” He drained his schnapps glass and burped, half-in, half-out, a state he clearly wanted to maintain.

The clear liquor trickled into me like kerosene. I thought of it as fuel. I noticed the barrels of the shotgun were warm; that seemed odd, somehow.

Clutching the Remington, I left limping, favoring my gashed foot. Breathing was a chore. My eyes pulsed in time to the pounding of my metabolism as I picked my way to the center of my burned-out grave of a home. One end of the barbequed sofa jutted from the debris like the stern of a sinking ship. Here was the banister—fissured, carbonized, its stored heat energy bled free. Over here, smashed shards of terra cotta from Suzanne’s conservatory. Skeletal junk, all exuding the reek of an overflowing ashtray. Soft clouds of soot puffed up with each step I took.

On the border of the feeder road, the streetlamp sputtered blue, then white, throwing tombstone shadows down from the row of mailboxes. The residents of Point Pitt had drawn their curtains. The houses on the hillside were dark against whatever might come in the night. Not secure. Just lacking light and any form of human sympathy.

Dunwoody was the exception. I saw his drawn face appear in a crack of drape, then zip away, then return. I’d lost my Cartier watch, so I used Dunwoody’s periodic surveillance to mark time. I couldn’t recall losing the watch, not that it mattered. Night vapors tingled the hair on my arms. My last bath had been yesterday afternoon, eons ago, and by now I was as aromatic as stale beef bouillon.

“Come on, come
on
!” I lashed out at a fire-ravaged plank and it crumbled into brittle charcoal cinders. My voice echoed back from the treeline twice.

Lava-colored eyes emerged to assess me from behind the still-standing brick chimney. Chatoyant pupils tossed back the street light in dual crosscut shapes.

A conventional defensive move would draw it out, confident of its own invincibility. I chambered a round as loudly as I could. “This is for you! Come on—it’s what you want, right?”

Motion, hesitant, like Ross Delaney, unsure. There was a smear of bright bronze as the eyes darted to a new vantage.

“Come on, bag of shit!” Fuck reaction time. The gun went boom and a mean bite leapt out of the chimney. Pointed chunks of brick flew into the creature’s face. It did not blink. The Remington’s report settled debris all around.

I dropped the gun into the ashes.

Its outer tissue was pinkish, as though battened with blood from an earlier feed. The alien eyes blazed. When it saw me lose the shotgun, it decided, and in three huge bounds the distance between us was reduced to nothing. I saw it in midair, rippling, its thorny claws extruded from their cowls and coming for my face.

I braced myself, the memory of grabbing Ross Delaney’s deadly fist still hot. I spoke softly to the woods, to the forest in the distance, to the sea behind me.

“Help me. Mother.”

It smashed me down like a truck pasting an old lady in a crosswalk. The opaque talons sank to their moorings in my shoulder. I grabbed, to keep the jaws from my throat, and its fangs pierced the palm of my hand, one-two.

“
Mother! Help me!
”

I got my other hand up and seized its snout, which was feverishly hot. Stale blood-breath misted into my eyes and the black lips yawned wide for me. Those lips had caressed my daughter’s face as they engulfed her. They had made an intimate, ghastly smorgasbord of Suzanne.

I clenched my fist. It tried to jerk its paw back to slash me into confetti, but the claws were trapped in my muscle tissue and would not slide free. The X-shaped eyes dimmed in surprise. It backpedaled, preparing to dig in with its hind legs and free my intestines.

I sat up with its movement, taking a firmer grip and twisting until its lower jaw came away in my hand. Think of halving a head of lettuce; that was the sound it made. Think of pulling a drumstick from a whole tom turkey. It jammed, then wrenched loose, dripping, trailing ruptured tatters of sinew.