by Graeme Hurry
At ten minutes, nothing. Same shit.
At twenty minutes, nothing really. Maybe they’re a little sillier, but that might just be the extra booze.
At about forty-five minutes, the bitchy little blonde from before comes down with the giggles so hard that she’s in paroxysms on the floor before she calms down again. The other parents, finding this about as funny as anything’s ever been, explode into peals of their own laughter, and at fifty-ish minutes, most of them are cackling together on the carpet. By the hour mark, they’ve all basically pulled it together enough to get back in their chairs. A couple of the ladies have excused themselves to the corner of the room where they’re very intently making out like teenagers. Randy thinks it could almost be sexy, except for the fact that they’re both clearly awful people. Nobody else in the room seems to have noticed them anyway—they’re all locked in their own worlds, riding whatever wave the Protex sent their way. He knows the look—glazed-over bloodshots, thin film of sweat, shallow breath, and what those bullshitty TV medical dramas call non-responsiveness to external stimuli—yeah, now that he thinks about it, in his tenured professional opinion, they’re all the lot of them stoned as fuck.
At an hour and a half, Randy heads out to the garage to swipe another one of Lisa’s husband’s fuck-awful light beers. Any port in a storm, he supposes.
Which is right when shit starts to go entirely wrong inside the house.
Because of course it is.
* * *
Dead people?
Shit, no, totally—Randy’s seen tons of dead people before. Okay, maybe not tons exactly, but he’s seen a few. He watched his buddy Stu knife a guy across the street from CBGB’s one time back in the day. Randy remembers how the guy’s blood poured out dark and thick like Hershey’s syrup in the February cold. Once when he and some other guys were living in Fort Lee, they were walking across the George Washington just as night was starting to bleed into day and saw some dude throw himself off into the Hudson. Randy counted a full thirteen before he heard the guy’s body slap the water far below.
Yeah, Randy’s seen some dead people before.
He’s just never had to stick around and deal with the mess of it.
* * *
He’s only one sip in when the screaming starts.
At first he doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t recognize it as human noise, but then another voice joins the first, then two more, then another four and he finally gets it and goes running for the living room like the fucking idiot he so clearly is.
Inside, there’s blood everywhere and most of the parents are stood in a circle, wailing at the ceiling in a way that sounds like their throats are going to rip clean away from their bodies while in the center of it all, the tiny blonde is beating Lisa’s head open with a table lamp, each swing precise and identical, as if she were made out of clockworks and gears. Her eyes are dull and flat and blank and through the chorus shrieking, Randy can hear the thwack-thwack-thwack of wood and ceramic splitting bone. She does it three more times, or six, or ten or twenty, and then Lisa’s head finally breaks wide at the crown and a spill of mushy gray gluts out and stains the rug underneath. Lisa’s done, and the little blonde grabs another one of the screamers, drags her down to the ground on top of what’s left of Lisa, and starts trying to crack her open next. The rest of the screamers standing just get louder to try and make up for the lost voice, and Randy—or part of Randy at least—is anchored to the spot, unable to do anything but watch.
His mind fractures here, cleaved into two equal, jagged halves like sections of a once-whole iceberg drifting steadily away from one another, pushed by opposing waves. Because he knows that he should do something: get involved, pull the tiny blonde bodily away, throw the beer at her, wrench the lamp from her hands, anything to stop her from doing what she’s doing, to keep anyone else from dying tonight.
But the other half of him just kinda wants to see how this all plays out.
He knows it’s sick. Objectively, he understands that. But he’s never seen anything even remotely fucking like this before, bad trip or not. Like, it’s already blown past bad and fucked up and is working its way well into atrocious, so smart money says it only gets worse after this. And anyway, Howe wanted him to study what that Protex shit did to people, didn’t he? See if there were any side effects worth mentioning? Well shit, if this isn’t a side effect, Randy doesn’t know what the fuck would be.
So he lets that asshole half take over for a minute and just stands there, watching the little soccer mom tear the other one apart, painting the carpet and walls and chairs and other parents with hot sprays of copper red. The smell is horrible, revolting, but, like the rest of the mess, weirdly compelling.
Then she notices him standing there.
At which point the rest of them do, too.
And there’s a moment, little more than half a second, really barely enough for anyone to even draw a breath, that Randy knows what they’re going to do next. Because of course. He’s seen movies, come on.
So instead of standing there like some jackass, waiting for them to pounce and rip him into tiny little pieces, or beat his head in next, or whatever, Randy just pivots back and goes running for the garage. It’s only seconds before he hears them behind him, growling and snapping like a pack of wolves. He pumps his arms, trying to move faster, feels cold beer slosh out of the bottle still in his hand and froth across his wrist. Doesn’t matter. Not important. He turns the hallway corner and sprints as hard as he can down toward the door to the garage. A tiny hand brushes down the back of his neck as if they were both standing still and it’s all Randy can do to not scream like a scared little kid. He hits the door, his free hand slapping hard against the white-painted wood, then yanks the handle down and pulls.
He’s just a little bit too late doing it.
Three different sets of teeth sink into him: his shoulders, the back of his arm, and deep into his left calf, well into the meat. Animal panic floods Randy’s brain and this time he does scream, thrashing wildly to get them the fuck off. Elbows one in the face, kicks another back, holy shit holy fuck holy shit, spins and swings the beer bottle at the first human head that he sees. It lands with a brittle pop like a gunshot and explodes in a burst of yellow speckled with shards of brown bottleglass and crimson. The dude—Randy isn’t sure of the guy’s name, and at this point there’s every chance in the world that he isn’t, either—stumbles back, clutching his forehead just underneath the brim of his red ballcap with the white print, blood already slipping from between his fingers. He doesn’t make a sound, he just falls back, eyes still wide and blankly predatory and locked onto Randy’s own. Like he’s not even human anymore. Like the drug took out whatever was left of them that made them people and only left the automatic kill impulse behind. Randy watches the guy go, then turns and heaves himself through the door, pulling it shut and locking it behind him.
Swamped in the immediate dark, Randy pressing himself against the door, holding it shut in case they try to come through, lock or no. He can hear them on the other side, scratching madly at the wood, making tittering little yips in their throats as they pant and chuff like animals. He slaps at the little green-lit buttons mounted to the wall beside him, does it over and over and over and over when they don’t work the first time, like he’s trying to urge an elevator closer to his floor or something. Fucking broken garage doors. Randy double checks that the lock’s in place, then switches the overhead lights on and steps away. Holds his breath. Counts to ten, expecting them to burst through, but they don’t. For now, at least for the moment, it’s just noise. Safe. He’s pretty sure. He’s like ninety percent sure. Okay, more like seventy. He gives it fifty-fifty. He limps over to the toolbox on the workbench and takes out a flathead screwdriver and a clawhammer. He likes his odds better already.
Randy kneels down to take a look at his leg and it’s worse than he though: that crazy little asshole didn’t just bite him, she took a whole chunk out, and the gaping wound
left behind doesn’t look like it’s going to stop bleeding any time soon. He can see a ring of fleshy little serrations around the edges, outlines of where her individual teeth cut through the denim and skin. Inside that, it’s a holy fucking mess, slathered in wet red that keeps pumping out in an arterial rhythm, staining his jeans leg a heavy dark. It doesn’t hurt. Why the hell doesn’t it hurt? Is that shock? Fuck, fuck, fuck. He pulls off his outershirt and uses it to tie off his leg, hopes that’ll be good enough. For a second he forgets that he left his phone on the coffee table inside, searches frantically in his pockets for it like it’s about to be his saving revelation. Then he remembers, and everything’s that much more horrible again.
Jesus fuck. Jesus shrieking fuck.
He slumps to the ground, suddenly woozy. He holds as still as he can while the world tilts and twirls around him, as if he’s pinned to the side of a coin set spinning. He tries to close his eyes against it, will it away, but it’s no good. Really, just makes it worse. He opens them again, tries to focus on breathing, and on finding a way out of this stupid garage that doesn’t involve going through that strung-out gang of psychos again.
For the record, he gets that this is all basically his fault.
He looks around the garage, pivoting his head back and forth as slow and steady as he can to keep from puking. Gotta be a way out of here. Side door, skylight (as if he could climb it), something. Anything. Opening the garage manually, another non-option: even if he wasn’t half-gimped, the big garage doors are broken and locked up tight. He couldn’t force them if he wanted to.
Okay, think. There has to be a third way out of this stupid house. Except, he realizes, with a slow dawning horror, there’s really not. No side door, no skylight. No anything but to sit here and wait ’til Lisa’s douchebag finance-bro husband comes come. Randy’s actually pretty sure the met once before, at a school play or something. Dude would not look up from his phone, the white glow of it stark and painful in the dark of the auditorium. Randy doesn’t want the dude to be his last chance, but at this point, he’ll take what he can get. He retightens the shirt around his leg and lays down on the cold cement floor and waits, listening to the demon daddies and monster mommies still scrabbling at the door. A little while later, there’s screaming and wailing and a sound like fabric ripping that he hums away and pretends he can’t hear until it’s over.
Then the scratching starts up again.
* * *
When they finally break through, Randy’s not even paying attention. He’s off in his own world, floating on wings of blood loss through memories that don’t matter because they can’t help him now anyway. At first it’s the same old scratching, regular enough by this point that he doesn’t even hear it anymore. But then the scratching turns into an insistent scraping, which turns then into a thumping, then a cracking, and by now Randy’s back and paying attention again but it’s not like he can do anything to stop it anyway. He just sits up and turns and watches it happen like a goddamn idiot.
The door shakes, breaks, then just sort of crumples inward, falling apart in pieces. Then they’re inside and they’re on top of him with their clawed hands and inhuman expressions and it feels like a dream or something and there are less of them now than there were before, the other ones orbiting the bloodthirsty little one and none of them are even bothering to look at his hands because they don’t expect him to fight back like he’d just go belly-up or something and that’s their fucking problem, not his, because if he’s going to die here he’s not going to do it like some broken animal, he’s nobody’s prey, and he drives that point home with the flathead, through the little one’s eye and deep into her brain.
She staggers back, her face a slack mask of surprise, blood pouring out of the fresh hole in her skull and hooking along her jawline, and suddenly Randy remembers: Her name’s Leslie and when we met tonight she told me she likes musicals and before everyone else showed up and she switched over to that noxious groupthink, she looked so fucking lonely.
But it’s too late, now.
Leslie—or maybe, the thing that used to be Leslie—stumbles side to side like a drunk trying to stay upright, so shocked that she just got killed, then topples over and thwacks against the cement and doesn’t move anymore, ever. The rest of the creatures start to go shithouse, but Randy’s already swinging the hammer, trying to clear some space so he can get up and run. It’s not like he actually connects with any of them, but it’s enough for him to lurch up to his feet. Some faint part of his brain notes that he can’t feel his bit leg anymore, but that’s somehow less important right now.
He keeps swinging the hammer, keeping them at bay, moving hitchingly toward the scrapped inside door. He steps slowly over Leslie, wondering idly if he should risk yanking the screwdriver out of her skull, just in case he needs a backup weapon, but decides against it. Keep moving, stupid. Randy knows that however much time he’s got until one of them gets ambitious and tries to rush him, there isn’t a lot of it. He keeps his eyes on the crowd and shuffles backwards through the debris, moving back into the house and when Randy sees, he sees everything.
It’s sick, the things they’ve been doing to each other in here.
Randy winds his way through the mess, trying not to inhale the hot, putrid air filling the place up. Everything inside is stained black and red, the carpet gooshes like a crushed wet sponge under his shoes. He can’t look too close at all of it or he’s afraid he might puke. It’s not like a slaughterhouse, fuck that, it is a slaughterhouse. All the windows reflect the yellow lamplight back at him and as he moves he catches a glimpse of himself in one of the darkened panes, trailed at no long distance by the remaining parents, their features blurred and warped into something blank and bestial. Randy hazards a look back over his shoulder, just to see: they keep getting closer. He pauses midstep to swing the hammer back at them a few times. It cuts through the air with a nasty swish, but they keep coming at him, undeterred, unafraid. Shit.
Randy doubletimes it as best he can back to the circled chairs for his phone, the house looking like they had a motherfucker of a red paint fight while he was away, and he can’t ignore the horrible thing in the middle of the room: it’s a kind of altar, but rendered from the lashed-together bodies the parents had previously pulled apart. It’s a lurid, cruel icon fashioned from torn flesh and strips ripped from clothing no longer needed. Legs and arms plucked from sockets serve as the supports and struts, a disc of nude torsos the surface. It’s hard to tell at first, but there’s another body positioned atop the altar, stripped bare and sloppily headless: Lisa. She’s been tied down and it looks like someone—Leslie, probably—has been at her with a blade, carving symbols into her flesh that make Randy’s vision pulse with white migraine flares to look at for longer than a second or two. But he looks anyway. And he falls into it.
The wounds on her body unfold like red letters, unfurling at the seams, growing wider and deeper and wider, subdividing Lisa’s remains ever thinner until the bleeding sheets of her hit some unspoken near-vanishing point and begin to reassemble themselves into a sort of shape Randy’s never seen before. It’s beautiful, perfect in its imperfections, in the way it shifts and reconfigures, never still, never finished. Randy drifts further into its reach and feels himself pulled apart by the eyes, his vision forcibly widened that he might finally see. Hidden in the meat and the blood and the sickeningly tiny things that make up both, there is an island, a dead city, a cold arcology wrought in plates of flesh. Randy tries to scream, but his lungs are frozen pulp. A horrible rumbling—the dread voice of something gargantuan and ancient—comes from beneath the great structure, catastrophic in its sheer force and magnitude, so primal and elemental that it cuts through the all of him like shark teeth and all Randy can do is close his eyes and pray it ends soon.
When he opens them again, he’s back inside the house, standing before the ghastly altar, crying like a child, his chest sore from the sobbing.
What the fuck did that drug do to the
m?
What the fuck even happened to Randy’s life tonight?
He starts, without really meaning to, to list all the shouldn’ts he’s racked up this evening: I shouldn’t have let Carrie talk me into this, I shouldn’t have agreed or even shown up in the first place, I shouldn’t have gotten bored and shitty. I shouldn’t given them the fucking Protex.
All I want is to go home.
That’s when the knife sinks into his back and everything just goes cold. There’s a warm, wet depressurizing near Randy’s spine, and in the seconds before he collapses one last time, his mind spinning wheels in the mud, he thinks, Shouldn’t have stopped to stare.
Then his legs drop out and the ground snaps up to meet him and Randy crumbles all away.
* * *
Callum makes his way home from work, dodging all the (admittedly not bad) reasons he has for staying any later than he already has, drunks and other overtimers on the NJ Transit train back to Jersey, the ridiculous amount of traffic clogging the roads between the station and his front door. Traffic—hell, the whole city—has been getting worse for years, but I swear to god I can’t deal with it like this anymore. Just this afternoon he was listening to the radio in his office when he heard a report about a couple of clockpuncher assholes snapping entirely off in a Garment District coffee shop and stabbing like eight people before both getting gunned down by the cops. Probably drugs or something. It’s always the junkies that do this shit. In his private moments, Callum fantasizes about moving away, to somewhere quiet and low-key. He fantasizes about a lot of things. Getting back to painting, spending more time with the kids. Alexis in Accounting’s legs. The usual stuff.
Not that he’s really upset that he stayed late at the office tonight, far from it. The kids are spending the night at his sister’s, and he got a text at lunchtime from Lisa reminding him that she’s holding the monthly PTA wine and cheese mixer at their place tonight, and the last thing Callum wants is to be anywhere near that mess. He signals a left into their neighborhood and checks his watch as he turns. 10:30pm. Late enough that it’s probably safe to show his face again. Lisa’ll be upstairs asleep already, and if Callum’s really lucky, none of her friends (would we even really use that word to describe them, though?) will be passed out on the couch or puking hot chunky wine all over the downstairs half-bath. Literally anything that’s not that would be preferable. Especially after last time. The smell of it was unholy.