Wetbones

by John Shirley

  If the old man couldn't open the front gate, Prentice thought, all this is for nothing.

  It was going to be a hot day. Some insect in the undergrowth made the sound of a monomaniacal marraca player; a lizard zig-zagged over a rock on the other side of the fence. Lonny's face was streaked with dust and sweat. He was angry and scared. Prentice found himself admiring the boy. "You're a pretty tough kid," he said. He had a need to say something sentimental to someone, now. Before going on with it. And probably getting his ass blown away.

  Lonny glared toward the Doublekey Ranch. He put his hand on the old Colt. 36 six-shot revolver that Drax had given him, stuck now in his belt. "Mitch is dead. You should've seen the look on Orphy's face, too."

  "How you know Mitch is dead?"

  "Drax said so. After a while, you get to believe him."

  "You've probably done enough here, Lonny," Prentice said dutifully. He hoped the kid wouldn't take his advice, as he went on, "You could split now. Make your way back to town."

  Lonny turned the glare on Prentice. The look was one unceasing outpour, unwavering as a cop's flashlight. "Mitch…" He wasn't capable of saying the rest without breaking down – or bursting into a screaming rage.

  Prentice nodded. "Yeah. Well. Come on over. It's almost time."

  It was daytime, but it was night. Garner felt the hair rise on the back of his neck when they stepped into the fog. The stuff was almost as dark as smoke, but it wasn't smoke. You could breathe it, though you were sorry to; it left a faintly repugnant taste on the palate. Garner now carried the pistol that had been pointed at him a few hours before. Jeff Teitelbaum carried an Uzi – but not quite a real Uzi. It was a semi-automatic variety that gun-lovers could buy legally through the mail. Each trigger pull let go a round, but it didn't spray bullets. "I always knew they should ban these fackers," Teitelbaum had said, getting it out of the trunk of his car. "I'll vote for a ban. But I wanted to get mine before the ban came down. For once, I'm glad I'm that kind of sicko. It'll be useful, today, seems to me…"

  They'd found the front gate unguarded – Teitelbaum had seemed surprised at this – and they'd popped it with a crowbar, then climbed over the black iron inner gate. Now, prowling through the brush not far inside the iron fence, inside the cloud of dirty fog, they could no longer see the main house. There was only a thirty-yard visibility here, in the shadow of the trees and brush, and the closer they got to the house the thicker the fog seemed, the darker it got.

  "Maybe this fog shit is some kind of toxic leak from somewhere," Teitelbaum said, as they moved slowly along the brick path.

  "It's not making us cough," Garner pointed out. "And if it is, we've had such a thorough dose by now…" He shrugged.

  Was Constance here? Was she alive? It might be better not to find out…

  Up ahead, to one side, was a sort of tunnel of roses. Climbing vines from rose bushes had crawled thickly over a trellis passageway. Through a gap in the roses, Garner glimpsed something moving.

  Garner had used a gun, in his pre-pastoral years on the street, but mostly for bluff. Once, he'd shot a guy in the leg. He hadn't wanted to kill him. But this time…

  Am I really going to be able to kill someone? Garner wondered. It was the last time he wondered that.

  They'd walked up close beside the trellis. The smell of roses was cloying and mixed revoltingly with the fishy stink of the fog.

  A hand darted through a gap in vines and closed around Teitelbaum's neck, jerked him against the trellis so that rose petals showered and his Uzi barked into the ground before he lost his grip on it. The gun fell clattering on the brick as Teitelbaum shouted a name – it sounded like " Lissa! " – and Garner rushed to his side.

  He saw their attacker through the gap in the roses. It was a woman. Lissa, he assumed.

  Her head had been smashed open, just above the left temple. The crack in the skull could be clearly seen, splintery and deeply gashed into the tissue beneath. There was nothing in her eyes. And as Garner struggled to pry her hand free of Teitelbaum's throat and struggled with his own rising terror, he was pretty sure that she was dead.

  Teitelbaum had told Garner about the Akishra. Had repeated Kenson's story. Which Teitelbaum had come to half-believe himself. So Garner knew about the worms. And he believed – in some intuitive way he'd always known about them. And somehow Garner knew, without doubt, that the blow on her skull had killed this woman.

  And he knew that only the worms were keeping her going.

  They were moving through her easily, through this once beautiful woman, like snakes through water, weaving in and out of her. Leaving her skin bruised but unbroken where they'd gone. Others waved around her head like the ring of slippery stingers bristling from a sea anemone. Somehow, in taking her over, becoming more corporeal. Operating her. Moving her about. It was something you could see in her unnaturally sinuous movements; the animalistic suddenness of her attack.

  Garner, trying to yank the flailing, bubbling Teitelbaum free now, felt something wet winding itself around his wrist. He let out a childish yell of revulsion and jerked away, slapping the thing off him, then jerking the gun from his waist band. He thrust it through the gap at the woman, and pulled the trigger. It was harder to pull than he expected. The gun boomed and recoiled, knocking Garner's hands up to impale on inch-long rosebush thorns. He hissed between clenched teeth in pain and pulled his hands off the thorns, drew back from the bush. The woman had fallen back; Teitelbaum was kneeling, clutching his gun to him, making hacksaw sounds as he gasped for air.

  Garner forced himself to move toward the entrance to the rose tunnel. Just at the edge, he saw the woman woven into the vines. The dark fog slithered past her in wisps that were like the ghosts of the vines that held her. She spoke hoarsely, barely audible, "Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me and fuck you fuck you forever"

  Garner acted instinctively. Whispering, "Go with God," as he pointed the gun at the woman's head, and blew her brains out.

  She slumped in the vines. Then the worms started to show themselves… She began to wriggle free…

  He heard Jeff Teitelbaum calling hoarsely to him but he moved on, around the corner…

  Someone was running up the alley of roses, with a gun in his hand. Nearer, the woman was getting to her feet. No: The worms were raising her body to stand. Using the meat of her, collectively driving her remains. Beyond her, a man was coming toward them; he wore a yellow shirt and yellow pants and a gold chain.

  And spun around, smashed by bullets, when Teitelbaum fired three rounds at him in two seconds, firing through the bushes. "Dammit!" Garner shouted. 'You don't know who -"

  "It's fucking Sam Denver!" Teitelbaum shouted. "He's -"

  He didn't finish saying it, maybe seeing Denver get up – though the top of his head was shot away. Walking toward them with a side to side swish that might have been funny except for the blood masking Denver's face and the worms emerging from him, far more than in Lissa, coming out like a carnation blossoming in fast-action, the thin petals writhing with urgency. The fog – looking gray green, now, as if moving into some new stage – patterning itself in the air around Denver, responding to the changes in him, creating an etheric, vermiform aureole around him like the mandala behind some tusked Hindu deathgod.

  Five more licks of fire and five cracks from the faux Uzi, and Denver danced backwards and fell flat. Then began to get up once more, springy and eager.

  Lissa was missing most of her face, but she was reaching, now, for Garner. He fired once more into her neck, hoping that if he snapped the spine…

  She went down. And immediately began to get up

  God – had they done this to Constance?

  Garner turned and ran after Teitelbaum, who was trotting toward the main house, crying like a child – and waving the gun around like a small boy playing Army.

  Garner tried to remember a prayer from the Bible. And couldn't.

  Somewhere behind them, he heard the rumble of an old vehicle, a big
engine that coughed and missed and sounded as if its engine would give out at any moment.

  The gunshots had come from the West, Prentice thought, near the front of the place. He and Lonny were off to the South. "Probably just playing with guns and whoever they got now," Lonny said calmly. 'It's too soon for it to be Drax."

  They were dragging the cable like a firehose, Lonny taking the head of it, working their way through the brush to the inner fence. They'd moved deep into the fog, though the stuff reeked wrongness, and they could make out the bulk of the main house beyond the fence and the screen of trees…

  "Oh God," Lonny said, pausing with the cable hitched up on his hip, pointing at something to one side.

  Dogs. Parts of the dead guard dogs he'd told Prentice about.

  "You do that to their bodies?" Prentice asked, without thinking.

  "Dude, you think I'd mess with them like that?" Lonny replied, disgusted by the suggestion.

  The dogs had been gutted; their entrails hung like Christmas ornaments from the branches of the small pine standing close by; the purplish, dried-out guts dripped with maggots. The remaining corpses of the dogs, on the ground, had their backs broken, were twisted into

  Oroborous circles of rotting flesh; still attached to the necks, their heads were shoved down under their ribs and back between the hind legs, snouts forced up and out through ripped rectums, the entire head crammed through to the ears. Through his disgust, Prentice marvelled. It had taken someone considerable time and effort and it seemed supremely pointless. The fog swarmed almost imperceptibly around the wrecked carcasses. The sight made Prentice's stomach feel as if it were turning inside out, too.

  He turned away and they stumbled on, dragging the cable to the black iron fence. It was lower than the other; Lonny scrambled easily over it, dropped to the other side, and pulled the cable through. Prentice made the climb, with significantly more difficulty, and dropped to the other side just as the old Ford pick-up, its one working headlight making a tunnel of dull light through the fog, jounced through the brush, its tractor wheels finding purchase in the thick mesquite and grinding through. Old Drax grinned in the cab of the truck as he pulled up with the rear of the truck close by them. Looking closer Prentice saw that the grin was more a rictus of fear. The old hippie was as scared as they were. Wearing overalls now, Drax came huffing out of the idling truck, hands shaking, and ran to the back…

  "I saw some of 'em, saw some of 'em, had to run one of 'em over," he chattered as he dropped the tailgate of the truck and reached for the cable. He and Lonny muscled it up to the spool fixed to the pick-up bed.

  It was a wooden spool with another, similar length of cable attached to it. The spool was bolted down onto the bed of the truck. He ripped away the black tape on the cable end, glancing over his shoulder, obviously expecting someone to come after them at any moment. "You do that shooting?'' he asked Lonny, as he worked. He took hold of the cable on an insulated section and with the other hand unscrewed the cap. The exposed copper spat fine sparks into the fog.

  Lonny said, "Uh uh. We thought it was you…"

  There was a noise from under the truck. A very soft noise. Prentice thought maybe it was just Drax's foot scraping something.

  Drax took the end of the cable on the truck's spool, and attached it to the cable coming through the fence, screwing an insulated clamp down onto it. "I hope to Mescalito that holds," Drax said. Shadows in the fog moved over his pale face as he dropped the cable -

  Something jerked him off his feet. Prentice jumped back and looked at the ground. Lissa!

  Oh God it was Lissa, just enough of her face left to recognize, and a deep tyre tread printed into her back, one arm tangled up with the axle like a piece of bloody rope. Her free hand clutching the fallen Drax's ankles as he scrabbled back from her his face twitchy with horror.

  For a long moment Prentice felt a profound pity go through him – and then a veil of fog drifted away and he saw the worms fluttering around her head…

  Lonny's gun banged and echoed and most of Lissa's head exploded. Drax was up, running back from the cab of the truck with a shotgun. "Get back! Ricochets!" He yelled. They scurried back as he fired, the shotgun smashing her tangled arm off at the shoulder, freeing the truck of her. Lissa's body tried to climb from under the truck but seemed to have difficulty organizing its few working parts…

  Prentice looked away. As Drax ran to the cab of the truck and climbed in, threw it in gear, Prentice tried to tell Lonny he'd had enough, he was leaving. But he couldn't quite say it. His tongue seemed numb in his mouth. He felt as if he was going altogether numb inside. He wanted to go back but he was not at all sure he had the strength to climb over the fence. And then Lonny swung his gun around to kill Jeff, as Jeff loomed up in the fog, a bearded stranger at his heels.

  Constance lay passively under Arthwright as he rammed into her, each thrust of his hips driving her a few inches farther along the terrace, to the edge of the pool. Now the top of her head thrust out over the vitreous, secretive surface. She heard things moving down there. She could sense them, all of them, and she sensed more: all the worms moving excitedly in the soil, under the surface of the earth. Nothing like the Akishra, but somehow communing with them; she sensed things hovering in the air around her, unseen; she sensed the huge psychic gravitation of the Magnus lowering itself over the pool. It hadn't gone far; it had only withdrawn to wait.

  She saw shapes unfold and fold and reshape again in the fog overhead; intricate geometrical designs, like Mayan carvings; ugly variations of mandalas; constellations forming and reforming: one shaped like a scorpion, another like a spider, a third like a hangman.

  She watched all this only distantly – her hair dangling in the wet surface now, sucked slowly through the waxy ooze over the pool as Arthwright fucked her along the slippery ground. Now her shoulders were over the stuff and soon her torso would dip into it, her head upside down in the water, her eyes greeted by the swarm that waited down there…

  They were neatly detached, these perceptions, capering beyond a druggy haze. She barely felt Arthwright's penis in her; she felt mostly the swelling boil, the pustulent buboe, of her own pleasure: the Reward they were jolting into her, using up the last of her ability to feel as they shot it into her in time with his triphammer thrusts.

  If she just concentrated on the glow of Reward…

  And didn't pay attention to the hallucinations, the signs. The tarantula with a body shining like a hairy lightbulb; the corkscrews of blue fire pursuing one another endlessly through the fog; the imploring faces of Ephram and Elma Stutgart Denver and the boy who'd died on the bed: these she could see scribbled in the air to one side, sketched in shadowy fog. In the background: the far away screaming of Eurydice where someone was raping her by the old fireplace, pushing her head into the fire as they raped her. The Madonna record they were playing at a speed freaked Minnie Mouse 78 RPM. The vagina lined with seeking worms that opened in the sky: inside it, a window into Hell that opened with the squeal of tortured glass…

  Arthwright's detonating head.

  It blew up, his head, she saw through slitted eyes. It shattered upward and outward, close in front of her, taking most of his face with it. Then she heard a familiar voice cursing and ending with a sob: "Oh shit I shouldn't have done it that way -" the voice said. The voice was very familiar but she couldn't quite make out who it was.

  Then Arthwright's corpse was flipped summarily away from her and she was dragged back from the edge of the pool and a man was pulling her to her feet and she sagged down on knees weak from disorientation and the sudden, vicious cessation of Reward…

  "No, no, no, don't," she told the man. A bearded man, who looked a little familiar. Who was he? It didn't matter who he was. 'No don't, you stopped it, you stopped the Reward I have to find it again…" She turned and ran to the edge of the pool.

  He caught her by the wrist and dragged her back, just as a big ugly red machine roared around the corner of the main house, s
mashing through a corner of the cactus garden as it came toward the terrace, its one eye shining…

  Something vast screamed with frustration.

  A drain opened up inside Constance and she want down it.

  Garner caught Constance as she fell. He tossed the gun onto the terrace next to the shaking body of the man who'd been raping her. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the way of the crazy old man with the truck. He had a three second sweeping vision of the scene on the terrace before the truck hit its objective.

  He saw Jeff Teitelbaum shooting a gun at someone who was holding a girl's head over a fire at a stone barbecue, as the one they called the More Man glided around the corner of the house, moving in that oozy walk that meant the worms were guiding what was left of him; something flopped out the door of the back house and it was too late to warn Jeff as the thing moved onto his back – a shapeless wreckage of probably-human flesh that was furred with worm-heads, tendrils that flittered around its broken bone-ends and torn tissue, muscle and flesh mixed – Wetbones, Garner knew. Reanimated, guided by the tendrils… tendrils that reached up from it to the thing that manifested in the churning fog over the pool:

  A vast thing, up there, at first looking like a partly-filled hot air balloon, then a tapering head, its nearer end bifurcated into a worm-edged mouth opening to show a terrified remnant of face – its tendrils reaching out to puppet the starfish of smashed human flesh that closed around Jeff Teitelbaum and broke his neck -

  Reaching out with other tendrils to embrace the six men and two women who stood naked and blood-spattered around the body of a woman near the back of the main house -