The memory of Steph’s head suddenly appeared in his mind. Moaning softly, Brett gritted his teeth and forced the image away.
Flipping his cell phone shut, Brett tiptoed across the kitchen and pushed on one side of the refrigerator. It scuffed along the floor with a loud groan, moving only a fraction of an inch. Something rolled around inside of the appliance, jostled by the sudden movement. Brett opened the door and peered inside. With the darkness and his state of shock, he didn’t comprehend what he was seeing at first. A jumble of whitish-yellow forms filled the refrigerator’s shelves. Slowly, he reached out and touched one. It was dry and textured, and felt fragile. He picked it up and pulled it out for a closer look.
It was a rat. The refrigerator was full of rat skeletons.
Gasping in disgust, Brett flung the bones to the floor and wiped his hands on his cargo pants. As he closed the refrigerator door, he heard footsteps approaching. Rather than the powerful, plodding steps of the guy who had been chasing him, these were lighter. More hurried. Brett scampered across the kitchen and hid inside the pantry. He’d barely closed the door behind him when the other door on the far side of the kitchen opened and another figure entered the room.
Another one?
Brett’s fear grew strong again, threatening to overwhelm him.
How many of these freaks are in here?
The new arrival was carrying a lantern, and its soft glow filled the room. Brett peered through the slatted cracks in the pantry door, watching. This one was female. She was shorter than Tyler and Stephanie’s killer, and more misshapen. She was naked and hairless. Both her head and her vagina were shaved. Her breasts hung low and flat, stretching almost to her belly, and barely moved as she walked. Something was wrong with her skin. It seemed too smooth, too shiny. And there were strange black lines crisscrossing her flesh—around her waist, up each leg, down her abdomen and encircling her neck. He stared harder, realizing what they were. Stitches.
The woman’s skin wasn’t her own. She was wearing someone else’s.
Jesus,
he thought.
Is she even a woman?
As if sensing his presence, the freak turned toward the pantry, giving him a full frontal view. The tip of a pale, flaccid penis dangled from between the tanned, dead vagina.
Well, that answers
that
question …
The new arrival wasn’t a hermaphrodite. It was a man wearing a dead woman’s skin.
Maybe.
It was too dark for Brett to be sure.
Brett gaped, trying to keep as still as possible. The pantry was musty, and dust filled the air, getting into his nose and throat. His shoe brushed against something soft. He looked down and saw that it was a dead mouse—the carcass alive with wriggling, bulbous gray-white maggots.
The intruder shuffled closer. She/he raised its nose and sniffed the air. Then it was suddenly seized by a violent bout of harsh, ragged coughing. The figure doubled over, hacked up a wad of phlegm, and spat the fluid into its hand. It rolled the pinkish mucous between its fingertips and then wiped it on its human vest. Then it raised its fingers to its nose and inhaled.
Grunting, it stepped toward the pantry door. It was close enough now for Brett to smell it. The stench was cloying—an overpowering mix of sweat, feces, urine, and blood. It reached for the door and Brett tensed, ready to leap out and clobber it as soon as the door was opened. His only advantage was the element of surprise.
Before the creature could open the door, however, it was distracted by the sound of approaching footsteps. Brett recognized them immediately. They were the same footsteps that had been chasing him through the house.
The kitchen door opened and the hulk that had killed Tyler and Stephanie appeared. He walked backward, dragging their corpses into the kitchen. Each of his hands clutched one of their legs. Its hammer was slung over its misshapen back and tied with a length of frayed extension cord.
The other creature giggled.
“What you got there, Noigel?” Its voice sounded like someone gargling with broken glass. The tone answered for certain the question of its gender. Brett was pretty sure that no woman could ever sound like that. Besides, its shoulders were too broad to be a female’s. It coughed again, and hocked up another wad of phlegm.
The big one—Noigel—grunted in response. Then it let go of Stephanie’s leg. Brett winced as her foot thudded on the floorboards. He wanted to scream. Wanted to charge out of the pantry and kill the fucker who’d done this to her. Instead, he stood there, quaking. His terror filled him with shame and guilt. Javier would have fought back. He wouldn’t have let Heather be murdered like that. Tyler would have kept it from happening to Kerri. Brett felt snot and tears running down his face. What had he done to save Steph? Nothing. He’d been too scared.
He’d run away.
Enraged—at both himself and the killers—Brett looked through the slats again.
Noigel held up four fingers.
“Four more?”
Noigel nodded, then whined. Brett was reminded of a dog, begging for a treat.
“No,” the other one said. “You get those two down below. Let the others have some fun. Been too long since we had company. We let the little ones up to play. They haven’t had a chance to hunt in a while.”
Little ones,
Brett thought.
Children?
Noigel’s malformed lips stuck out in a pout. The smaller one crossed the kitchen and smacked him in the chest.
“Do what I said.” The smaller one bent over and examined the corpses. “Look at this, Noigel! You smashed their heads. That’s the best part. Why you wanna do that for?”
Noigel groaned apologetically.
“It’s okay, you big baby. Long as I get one of their hearts, that’s okay. Or this one’s dick. I could go for a good man-chew. Better than beef jerky! Come on, I’ll give you a hand.”
The man in the woman suit leaned over and grabbed Stephanie’s leg. Noigel whistled.
“I wish you’d learn to talk. What’s wrong now?”
Noigel held up four fingers again.
“It doesn’t matter. Not like they’re gonna escape. Only way out is down below, and they’ll never make it past the rest. Besides, the little ones will find them long before then. They out searching the house right now.”
The thing called Noigel grunted. His friend cackled with laughter, which in turn gave way to another bout of coughing.
They dragged the bodies out of the room. Brett caught a glimpse of Stephanie’s corpse, and hot tears streamed down his cheeks. The two cannibals left the room, disappearing through the second door that he’d noticed when he first entered the kitchen. The door slammed shut behind them. Brett could still hear the guy wearing the woman’s skin talking, but now it sounded like they were beneath him. Brett assumed the door must lead down to a basement level. Brett listened to their footsteps fade, but when the silence returned, he stayed inside the pantry, too afraid to move. Noigel’s friend had mentioned that there were more of them inside the house and “down below.” Brett assumed that meant in the basement. How many, and more importantly, where were they right now? The man wearing a woman’s body had said they were searching the house. Were they on this level, hiding in the shadows, waiting for him to pass by? Hunting his friends?
He had to find Javier, Heather, and Kerri. Had to warn them. Had to escape. But when he willed his feet to move, they rebelled. His knees trembled. His balls tightened and shrank. He glanced back down at the dead mouse and wondered how long it would be before the maggots started working on Tyler and Steph.
Then he imagined them going to work on himself.
Damn it. I can do this. I can’t just hang out here in the closet and wait for them to come back.
Brett reached out with one shaking hand and pushed the pantry door open. Then he hurried across the kitchen, heading back in the direction he’d come. He reasoned that if there were other hunters on this floor of the house, they were probably in other areas and rooms. Otherwise, he’d have seen them during his escape from the foyer to here.
He took a deep breath, exited the kitchen, and tried to remember which direction he should go. He felt like crying.
SEVEN
Leo leaned forward in the chair and peeked through the curtains.
“How many times you gonna stare out that damn window?” Perry asked Leo. “You think the police will show up any quicker if you keep looking?”
Shrugging, Leo let the curtain fall back into place and slumped down in the chair.
“Gawking out that window,” Perry continued, “ain’t gonna do nothing but attract unwanted attention.”
“Leave that boy alone,” Lawanda scolded her husband. “You were doing the same thing just a little while ago.”
Chris, Dookie, Markus and Jamal chuckled in the corner.
Perry took another swig of beer and shot his wife a dirty look over the rim of the can. It had been fifteen minutes since they’d called 911, and so far no one had responded to the call. Perry had suggested the boys wait outside for the cops to show, but Lawanda had shut that idea down in a hurry, inviting them to wait in the living room. Now he was stuck entertaining them when he should be getting ready for bed. On the television, a studio audience laughed as Tyler Perry ran around in drag. Perry groaned, wondering why the man had to dress like
a fat woman in all his shows and movies. He hated Tyler Perry’s sitcoms, but he watched them because Lawanda usually controlled the remote. Every evening, he resigned himself to episodes of
Dancing with the Stars
and bullshit sitcoms.
“The cops ain’t gonna show,” Markus said. “We’re wasting time, yo.”
“Maybe,” Leo agreed. “Maybe not. But at least we did
something
.”
“That’s a good outlook,” Lawanda praised, offerring them a plate of cookies. “You’ll go far in life if you keep it.”
Leo smiled, but Perry could tell that the youth was merely humoring Lawanda.
“Go where?” Jamal asked. “The next block? Shit, Mrs. Watkins. There ain’t no escape from this place unless you can rap or play basketball. Or want to sell drugs.”
“You got that shit right,” Dookie said.
“I’d appreciate it if you boys wouldn’t curse in my house.” Lawanda set the cookies down. “Mr. Watkins does it, but that’s because he’s old and set in his ways.”
“Sorry.” Dookie slumped down.
“That’s okay. And listen to me. Don’t be saying that there’s no way out of this neighborhood. Don’t think that way. There are always opportunities. There are always doors. You just have to wait for the right door to open. Y’all can be anything you want to be. People said there would never be a black president, and they were wrong, weren’t they?”
“He ain’t black,” Jamal said. “His momma was white.”
Lawanda frowned. “Show some respect. The man is your president. Do you know how hard he had to struggle to get to where he is today? You should look up to him, instead of these rappers.”
“Maybe,” Jamal agreed, “but that don’t change the fact that his momma was white.”
“So what if she was?” Lawanda said. “It doesn’t matter. He’s as black as you or me.”
“He’s damn sure blacker than Chris,” Markus teased. “Ain’t nobody more yellow on this street than Chris.”
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Chris said, raising his voice. “Knock it off. I told you before about that shit.”
“Yo,” Leo shouted. “She asked us to watch our language, you dumb shits. Now quit swearing!”
Perry took a deep swig of beer and silently cursed his wife’s sense of charity and community responsibility. He glanced at the television again, then added her choice of quality entertainment programming to his list of things to curse.
Headlights flashed across the wall, bleeding through the curtains, tracing across framed photographs and the clock that Perry and Lawanda had received as a wedding present. Leo pulled the curtains back and glanced outside again.
“Is that the po-po?” Markus asked. “They finally show up?”