The Damaged and The Cobra

by Anthony Cicerone

furry and half-cooked. It could have been anything, but Lark had a sneaking suspicion that someone was missing their dog that night. They growled and grunted at each other in some guttural, spit-flecked language she didn’t understand. It sounded like they were vomiting on each other.

  Soundlessly, Barnes produced a rocket propelled grenade launcher from his olive bag. He pulled out a rocket and loaded the weapon. Barnes looked at her and shrugged sheepishly when he saw her mouth was agape in shock. She was going to have to force him to let her see what the heck was in his basement.

  Barnes looked at Bob and motioned to the high roof of the building that hid them. Lark watched Bob run silently up the wall, like a silent ghostly spider, and disappear onto the roof. She felt like she was going to throw up. The surreal nightmare of where she was and what she was doing almost made her feel like puking. She felt the snowball of a panic start to roll downhill into her mind.

  Barnes, with his RPG in hand, leaned over and kissed her. He motioned for her to stay where she was, and she gripped her pistol like it was the antidote for whatever mental poison she’d let herself in for, her hands shaking with adrenaline. He smiled at her, eased slowly around the corner of the pile of junk, fired his RPG, and he was gone.

  Lark heard the explosion—the ridiculously loud explosion—and she heard inhuman screeching and screaming. The sounds were like unearthly music, and animals howling, and she heard Barnes’s voice, screaming some unknown language. She had to look.

  She dropped to one knee next to the corner and edged around pointing her gun toward the noise. The first thing she noticed was the light. The hobo fire had come alive, and one of the hobos was using it like a whip, tendrils of flame snaking out at Barnes and Bob, who were barely managing to avoid the burning lashes that beat the dirt in puffs of smoke. Another hobo stumbled around headless, out of the fight, his neck-hole a fountain of black ooze, his arms waving, his fingers clutching at the air.

  Barnes and Bob were yelling things at the fire-throwing hobo, and the words they were using, Lark could feel them more than hear them, like telepathic air horns and bass drums, the power of which made sparks and smoke erupt from their mouths as they screamed. She thought of magic words of lightning or fire from storybooks, screams that split mountains or boiled oceans.

  God words.

  The fire tendrils turned to snakes, and Bob was glowing blue and Barnes threw something on the ground that made him disappear in a cloud of black smoke. She had to look away. Just avert her eyes for a minute, that’s all.

  It was then that she noticed the last hobo, or at least his (Its) top half, lying on the ground not fifteen feet from where she was crouched. She could see his face. Looking at her. He laid on his back, his head craned at an odd angle, his wet eyes staring. His legs were blown away, leaking that black fluid, and she could smell his rotten smell from where she was.

  She slowly leveled her gun at him. She started to get to her feet so she could back away. The hobo’s face split into a wide, sharp-toothed grin, ripping his red cheeks like tissue paper, his mouth opening impossibly wide. A snake tongue slithered from his slobbering face and he screeched like a siren. He flipped over, dug his hands into the dirt, and he launched himself at her, flying through the air like a tattered half-banshee.

  She tried to scramble up as she fired, making it to her feet, putting bullet after bullet in that screaming, horrible face.

  One of the hobo’s hands closed around her belt, clasped into a fist on her lower abdomen, trying to pull her down. She continued to fire, struggling to stay on her feet, looking into his angry face as it absorbed nine millimeter rounds defiantly.

  He reared his other hand back and plunged it into her stomach, and for one moment, before the shock, before the pain, she could feel his filthy hand close around her intestines and squeeze.

  As she fired her last bullets at the laughing hobo, she watched him tear a handful of her out and stuff it into his mouth. She was eviscerated and he was eating her. She fell, and tried to scream, but the only thing that came from her mouth was a choking gush of blood.

  Images…then. Oh…the hobo…what’s wrong with my eyes? I hear my blood…can’t scream…can’t breathe. He’s eating me…handfuls of me…can’t…wonder what it…hope you choke on it you bastard…losing it…dark…dark. Barnes kneeling over me, oh look, there’s Bob, too. How nice they both made it. Hope they got them hobos good…heh. Gonna die…Barnes’s not crying…could at least cry a little. What’s…flipping a coin? Heads! Nope…he’s trying to call a coin toss…just quit that and kiss me goodbye, goofball. I’m dyin’ here…Heads! Nope. Boy he’s pissed at that coin…what’s he love…that coin more…cold………………….heads…Barnes’s smiling…

  Lark woke up with a start and grabbed her stomach and she screamed. Her stomach was fine. She was in her car. The car was moving. Barnes was driving the car. He turned and smiled at her.

  “Awake, sleepy head?” he said happily.

  “That thing was eating me, ripped my guts out…” She felt shock and panic coming on.

  “Is that what you thought?” Barnes said. “Don’t be silly. It was just playing mind games with you.”

  “No, it was real! He—“ Lark stopped and looked down at her stomach. Nothing. There was no blood on her clothes, her shirt wasn’t ripped. She drew her pistol and popped the clip. Empty! “If it wasn’t real, where’d my bullets go?”

  “Well, you unloaded into that thing, but it never touched you,” he said nonchalantly as he drove.

  “But…” She re-holstered her gun and rubbed her stomach. No pain, no scarring. She felt so tired, and the mental picture of that thing laughing and eating…

  “It’s just one of the ways they screw with people,” Barnes said. “You’re okay, sweet baby. I promise.”

  Later at home, after the showering, they huddled together in his dark bedroom, warm against everything that was cold. Lark couldn’t stop rubbing her stomach. Barnes held her in his arms and he kissed her on the cheek. He whispered something in her ear and she drifted off to sleep. Maybe he wasn’t so damaged after all.