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.