With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  She nodded slowly, as if she was his confidante and was really objectively weighing his statements. “I understand. It all got out of hand. It’s not your fault. You didn’t want any of this to happen.

  “Can … can you let me go? I won’t tell anyone, I promise. No one would believe me, anyway.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I mean, I understand what you are saying, I do, and no one would believe you, but I imagine the police are already on their way, and they’ll believe what they see with their own eyes.”

  “You … can’t … yes, you can do that. But just let me leave.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, but slowly, with the weighing gravity of a henpecked father deciding whether to let his kid borrow his car, like he was asking for forgiveness as the subtext of his refusal.

  “Then … what are you doing with me here.”

  “I, I don’t know. I like you being here, I guess.”

  He took a step closer to her. He was perhaps a foot away now. “I don’t know, I don’t plan on, like, I don’t know. I like your company though. Do you think maybe you could take your shirt off, actually? I don’t know, it might cheer me up or help me think.”

  She swallowed hard. “Wh-at. I. I. If I do, do you promise to let me go?”

  Her attention turned to the entryway and she almost shouted with excitement. There stood Bryce. He just stood there, in plain sight, as if he came to a threshold after entering the doorway and couldn’t come any further. He was surveying everything he could — this horror show before him, and the structure of the kitchen he found himself in.

  Bryce was bad at estimates, but he was maybe six feet away from them, and felt the heat of boiling water and active pots and pans. Underneath torn vegetables, he saw metal shapes. Hopefully, those were knives.

  It took an additional beat for the bubbling mass that was Alexander to turn and face him. He looked disappointed and the air was tense with something other than murder, as if Alexander was an ex-boyfriend trying to keep his composure and sizing up her new lover.

  As if on cue, another person-of-sorts joined them in the kitchen. From another entry-way — this one leading from the cold storage room — came another form, making its entrance known with a sound approximating wet towels dropping on to the floor. Its entire aura was imbued with stagnant water — even when it wasn’t moving and stood there, staring, there was the sound and scent of tepid water, of slipperiness. It stood about five and a half feet — not particularly imposing — on two webbed feet, with its webbed hands extended slightly horizontally, as if planning to give someone an exaggerated hug. The details of its body were scarce, except that it shone a sickly form of green and its body was slick and long, almost like a seal. The details of its face were even worse, almost as if Bryce needed prescription glasses in order to understand what he was seeing. The face was vaguely humanoid, there were lumpen masses that might have been tentacles, but it was too indistinct to make out. There didn’t seem to be any mouth.

  Alexander pointed at the new visitor. “‘Zombies Ate My Neighbors.’ It has to be, right?” He wished he’d actually seen Creature from the Black Lagoon, because he knew the fish monster from Zombies Ate My Neighbors was inspired by that movie. This was a poor, low-budget facsimile. “Man, I haven’t played that game forever, but it has to be.”

  Bryce seized the opportunity. He grabbed the nearest pot by the handle and lifted it high over his head, ready to bring it down like a hammer. It was heavier than he expected, and the lid fell off with a heavy clunk and narrowly missed his foot. As he arched the pot over his head, he realized why it was so heavy: it was half-filled with boiled water. Miraculously, he lifted the pot fast enough and tilted it just so the water emptied out harmlessly behind his head, although he felt steaming water residue on the bottom of his jeans. Still moving on impulse, he leaped toward Alexander and swung the pot down as hard as he could on top of Alexander’s head.

  Bryce hit him square on the forehead. The impact wasn’t as dramatic as he expected — there was the forcible collision with bone, but also something softer, bone wrapped in marshmallow. Still, Alexander went straight down on his back.

  The Critters retained their look of voracious detachment, their mouths still open, their cat-eyes still frighteningly red yet immobile. Then — thunk — Bryce felt a reverberation through the pot. A cruel-looking quill was vibrating, half-deep, into the metal. Jesus, he’d gotten lucky again — if he hadn’t been holding the pot at around face-level, that quill would have gone straight through his windpipe.

  One of the Critters changed its position and was back on its hind legs. So that was the fucking bastard culprit.

  “Fuck you,” Bryce screamed, this time swinging the pot like a tennis racket at the big wide target that was this Critter’s face. Now that was satisfying — the impact literally lifted the round fat ball of quills and teeth off the ground and sent it on a curving trajectory toward the stovetop.

  The other three Critters hissed and growled and made high-pitched noises.

  Womp. The fish monster lashed out at one of the Critters with its claws, and one swing was enough to take it out. It followed up with three, identical strikes on the now clearly-dead Critter. It now looked at another one, but its facial expressions didn’t change, and its movement was rote and almost mechanical. It swung its arm back again to make another horizontal strike, and as insane as this all was, Bryce could not help but realize that this strike looked identical to the previous strikes, as if this creature had only a certain range of programmable actions and was doomed to a life of infinite repeats.

  A quill flew into the mid-section of the fish creature. It flinched and flashed white for a brief moment, and continued moving forward. It was struck with two more quills and it flopped down and died, in a surprisingly efficient and unlabored death. One second it was marching forward, then it was down on its back in a heap, and then it was simply gone.

  But that was enough time. When the firing Critter turned around, Robin was already upon it with a sharpened kitchen knife. She sunk the knife into its fleshy stomach. Again, and again, and again, she plunged her knife, and the screaming was almost intolerable, so reminiscent of a pleading, wounded dog or tortured cat. Bryce felt almost sick to his stomach, as if they’d just done something unrepentantly inhumane.

  She stopped stabbing it only when it rolled onto its back like a cartoon tortoise.

  The last Critter launched itself at Bryce. It made no gestures that indicated it was about to leap. It was just suddenly in the air.

  It bit hard into whatever its teeth came in contact with. Unfortunately for it, that whatever was Bryce’s trusty hammer-pot. The Critters looked almost like giant brown Koosh balls, and this one played the part as it soared through the air. It landed with aplomb against the industrial-strength refrigerator door.

  The creature took a moment to regain itself, then shook itself into convalescence. It bit at the air for whatever reason.

  Robin ran beside the struggling creature, kicked it toward the refrigerator door, and slammed the creature between the door, again and again and again, to the point where she was actually able to close the refrigerator door fully while the top part of the creature thrashed and chomped futilely, emitting the same disturbing, dog-like shriek of its stabbed brethren. It spasmed a couple of times, and when the door opened back up, there was a pool of green blood and a distorted mass of gore between its stubby legs and the rest of its body.

  Bryce ran over to Robin and pulled her back from the refrigerator. She relaxed in his arms for a moment, then grabbed the pot — now substantially dented — and ran over to the Critter that had first shot the quill at them and which Bryce had subsequently punted across the room. It lay prostrate on its side — from viewing just the fuzzy back of it, it was almost cute, its back looked like an innocent wooly brown bush — but such concerns didn’t slow her down at all: she smashed it
, again, and again, and again. Three times she smashed it, until she was sure it was dead.

  “Robin, I’m so glad you’re alive.” He ran toward her and noticed that — that green fish creature, it had been here before, right? Where could it have gone? It was gone, just disappeared.

  “There — there was a green, fish-like creature-thing there before, right?”

  “Right, you’re not crazy.” She spoke slowly and deeply, catching her breath. Her tone was too brusque, not as warm and relieved as he’d like, if he had his druthers.

  He held onto her back, coaxing and comforting her.

  “Wait — there’s still him … ,” she signaled toward the increasingly-humanoid form of Alexander. His forehead and the area between his eyes were deeply bruised and a lightning bolt scar ran made its way down between his eyebrows. Harry Potter, Bryce thought randomly. Under the bruises, the monster’s face had become identifiably and unremarkably human.

  “We need to make sure he’s dead, we can’t take any chances. He caused all of this out there. He’s a monster, a literal monster.”

  “Agreed,” Bryce nodded. He took the pot by the handle, hesitated, gave it back to her and took a butcher knife. From the way he held it, you could tell he didn’t have a lot of experience cooking chops for himself. He choked up on the handle, holding it more tightly, resolutely.

  “Ok,” he said, and moved in closer to the recumbent body. Alexander was splayed on his back, arms spread on an invisible crucifix.

  Bryce prodded the shape in the left rib cage. The shape groaned but did nothing else. This would be a lot easier if the guy shocked back to life or something, and he could get this over with in the heat of the moment.

  “I think, I think he’s out cold.” Bryce knew that sounded stupid, if he were watching this on a movie screen he’d be screaming “fucking c’mon, man do it!” and then complaining loudly that the witless character was asking for it when things inevitably went awry.

  “No. We can’t allow him to escape. He needs to die. You saw what he did. He killed all those people. He was going to kill me. He was going to rape me, even. He caused all these … all these things … It’s a fucking massacre out there.” She stopped herself from breaking down completely but exhaustion was clearly eroding her.

  “I know.” He got down on his knees and straddled the body, chopping knife at the ready.

  He didn’t know how to bring the knife down. A hard thwack into the skull, as if it were a watermelon?

  “Can you give me like, a cutting knife?”

  She brought him a sharpened blade. Used for fine cuts, he thought, which took on a sinister connotation.

  He put the blade to the bastard’s throat. It helped to think of him like that, a bastard, a murderer, he killed all those people.

  “You fucking bastard. You fucking, piece-of-shit murderer.” No response. “You, you fucking killer, how could you?” He was speaking unnecessarily loud. Can’t this guy wake up or move or something, so he could kill him and pass it off to himself as self-defense? He wished he had a gun, although he’d never shot a gun before in his life and wouldn’t even know what to do with one.

  “Do it!”

  Bryce gracelessly pushed the blade into where the center of the man’s throat should be. He envisioned a tactile slice, one quick slash, a controlled seepage of blood, and that’s it. Misfire. He put only a quarter of the blade in and found resistance, grimaced — he was committing the throat-slitting equivalent of slowly tearing off a Band-Aid — course corrected and overcompensated, plunging the knife at an awkward angle. Blood sprayed wildly, the knife was partially buried and obscured, like he’d dropped the blade into a cooling cake.

  “Aww God. He’s dead, he’s dead: he has to be dead.” He stood up, covered in warm, coppery blood, the opening of the wound actively gurgling.

  They stood there, both panting. Several wordless moments passed between them. It was over, he felt. This was a natural concluding point, the curtain to fall, the credits to appear. The weight of the whole day made itself evident, a feeling of nausea and frazzled disconnection came over him, and he fell to the floor. She bent down at first to maybe help him back up, but collapsed upon him in what became an affectionate embrace.

  >< >< ><

  Eventually the outside din made itself physical. They were soon being assisted by more police and emergency officers than he’d ever seen before. The conflict wasn’t over, exactly, and he was oddly grateful for that. He half-expected everything to just disappear, and for the authorities to find just this hideously slaughtered disfigured body in the kitchen, the placid presence of undisturbed restaurant-goers undercutting his entire cockamamie story. That was selfish, he thought. It would be better if this was a dream, an unreality. Then there wouldn’t be all these bodies.

  There was a shoot-out that took place out of sight, and one shooting directly in front of them that was particularly shocking for being so abrupt and bathetic. That gorilla creature from before moseyed out from somewhere, spotted the officers and grunted. It picked up and threw a nearby body part at them, apathetically, as if following a pre-set program.

  It went wide, wide enough that no one needed to dodge. One of the officers fired. The beast clutched its left shoulder with its right hand, pivoted, groaned, and slowly walked toward the officers.

  Another officer fired, this shot low, around the groin. The creature repeated the movement as before: clutching its left shoulder with its right hand and groaning. Several more shots. The same movement, the same animation, and then the creature practically hopped backward to land on its back, where it outstretched its arms and its tongue and just stopped moving. Everyone stood, blinkered, and no one said a word.

  A minute later, the beast was gone.

  There was one other lasting memory that stood out to him. A burly, mustachioed officer was speaking animatedly with this hands, giving directions to his cadre. He moved his hands in a chopping movement while he talked, like he was doing the Braves Cheer. Suddenly, like a moray eel, a red-and-white spotted plant shot out of an unremarkable pipe against the wall, soundlessly chomped into his finger, and disappeared — finger and all — back into the pipe.

  Bryce and Robin were ferried out amidst the commotion, and they never stepped into the Deer & Fox ever again.

  >< >< ><

  Robin breathed heavily and her breasts heaved metronomically. They showed nicely through what appeared to be a stylish, form-fitting white blouse. No, something more threadbare than that — he could clearly make out the contrast of the maroon bra she wore underneath.

  The disfigured man reached out toward her. His face was orange, puffy and indistinct.

  The man pulled Robin forward. Her breasts pitched upward from the force and jiggled vigorously as she stopped short in his grasp. He grabbed around her, trying to dominate her, get leverage on her shoulders. The man squeezed one of her breasts painfully. She pushed him away, and his fingers were crumpled up within her shirt, so when she pushed her shirt extended, exposing her deep décolletage.

  Bryce’s erection flooded full and sharp, pressing hot against his pants. It was his first glimpse of her perky breasts, but also not, because underneath the dream he registered that he knew what her breasts looked like, but there was something powerful and erotic about this sight, the thrill of a slip, the power and control of the image.

  He charged and knocked out the disfigured man with one straight blow.

  Bryce woke up next to Robin. Actually, next to her was not fully accurate — she was already half-up and getting ready for work. He only saw her back. His stomach sank and that was enough to know the vitality that radiated off her was limited to the dream world. The only thing that carried over from the dream world was his erection.

  He laid awake in bed while she prepared for the day. He felt her staring at him impatiently to get up — they often tried to leave for work at t
he same time — and there was something satisfying in staying in bed for a bit, the slightest form of obstinacy he could muster without overtly riling her. The covers were still over him, and he rested his hand on his privates, the erotic elements of the dream still in mind.

  He looked up at her brushing her hair. She looked back at him, looked away, looked back at him, and gave him a slightly annoyed look to show that she didn’t see the point in breaking and maintaining eye contact. She wasn’t going to give him a goofy or warm smile just because. She wasn’t his cheerleader.

  He groaned and got out of bed and let his half-erection jut out from his boxers. She didn’t acknowledge it. He let it hang, untouched and unremarked-upon. He felt he was making a statement of some sorts.

  It had been about almost a year since that defining date at the Deer & Fox. They’d lived together for the last six months, and they hadn’t been physical with each other for the last two.

  “I’m going to shower,” he told her.

  “Ok.”

  “What time is it?”

  She looked at her phone, and said, in a phlegmy, impatient way: “8:30, no, 8:35.” They normally wanted to be out the door by 9:00 a.m. so they could get in to work sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m. They were running late.

  “You don’t have to wait for me, I guess.”

  “Yeah, I figured. I wish you would have told me earlier, I wouldn’t have waited.”

  “I figured. Sorry. I can get in later than you though.”

  She made a testy sound. “I know.”

  She was already half-way dressed.

  “I left two wheat bars out for you if you want to bring them to work. I bought some for us, as I don’t have time to make breakfast.”

  He mentally rolled his eyes and revealed this by giving a sarcastic woe-is-me, okey-dokey head nod.

  She maintained her frigid distance, zipped something up, and left the room. She was wearing a black bra and still needed to decide what to wear up-top.