Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  “I hope it doesn’t hurt. What’s this mark here?”

  “That’s nothing, leave it. And of course it doesn’t hurt, she’s dead.” He shook his head.

  “That looks like—”

  “I said leave it.”

  “Is that Dad’s ring? Fuck, Dan, did you hit this girl?”

  “She already had the spots, Greg, she was as good as dead already. I needed her to come to the lab. She was raving, she wouldn’t listen.”

  “So you killed her?”

  “I brought her here to watch her die, to see how it happened.”

  “You’re sick. She’s lying here in Dad’s room with Dad’s ring punched into her face, and you can’t even see how sick this is.”

  “That still bothering you, Greggy? That Dad didn’t want his ring pawned for booze? You think you should have it now you’re cleaned up?” He pulled it from his finger and held it out. I smacked it out of his hand. It bounced, ringing, rolling into the glue trap in the far corner.

  “Wouldn’t fit you anyway,” he said, bending back to his work. “There was no saving her, but I could learn from her. It’s for the greater good, Greg.” He pulled one side of his mouth back in a crooked smile.

  My fingers flexed. I could feel my heartbeat in my temples. My tongue scraped the dry roof of my mouth, sticking to my clenched teeth. I counted and breathed. Thirty down to one, a breath every five seconds. I can’t change this, I can’t change him.

  “Did you run more tests? On Alan?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Alan!” Another ten seconds, another two breaths.

  “Right. Yes, look.” He went to a cupboard and pulled out a tray of black vials. No. Vials filled with black. “The liquid samples have turned to gas. It appears that the lack of oxygen in the vials slows the reaction, but it doesn’t stop it. However, there’s no increased pressure in the tube. The reaction doesn’t seem to have released any energy.” He held the tray under my nose, his eyes rolling with excitement.

  “So . . . ”

  “That’s not possible. All reactions have some sort of energy exchange involved. You can’t go from a liquid to a gas without it—this is outside the laws of chemistry.” Saliva collected at the corners of his mouth as he spoke faster, fogging the glass vials with his rapid breath.

  I took a step back, tearing my eyes from the tray of dark tubes, and looked for the clock. It perched hidden in the shadows, high up on the wall.

  “I need to get back to work. I can’t be late again.”

  Dan lowered the tray, sneering. “Or what? Another job you can’t hold down?”

  “No. I promised Miss Bessley lunch today.”

  Dan shook his head, turning to put his tray of dark of vials away.

  Collecting The Village body bag, folding it, I watched the girl on the table.

  “What was her name?”

  “Don’t know,” Dan said.

  Alice Stowe ate three pounds of gravel from the garden. Sometime in the early hours she left her room in her best dress and hat, sat in the gazebo, and ate rocks from a chocolate box. She died that evening, without a single tooth left.

  I clocked out, changed, and went to the clinic. She was there, in the cooler, in one of my black bags. I rolled her out and unzipped the bag.

  The spots were already there—huge, this time, and swollen. The skin felt cold and taut under my fingertip.

  It ruptured. The dark liquid spilled over my finger, filling the space under my nail and pooling in my cuticle. It felt like my finger had been encased in ice. The black smoked off my finger with a soft hiss, the vapors sucking in toward my mouth and billowing on my breath.

  I slapped my other hand over my mouth and ran, slipping over the waxed tiles to the sink. Cranking the hot water lever as far as it would go, I held my hand under the steaming stream. The inky shadow mixed with the steam, one swirling around the other, a cyclone of hot and cold. The heat returned to my skin in an agony of needles as vessels rapidly dilated and burst.

  When all of the black had washed away or turned to smoke, I breathed again, panting through my tight throat, a high whine echoing off of the sterile walls and steel cabinets. The battery taste of the toxic smoke mixed with the chlorine cleanliness of the clinic.

  My fingertip swelled white like a maggot soaked in water. The back of my hand blistered with red, angry burns.

  I groped the darkness. The air swarmed thick with shadows that flowed and eddied on unseen currents. My stomach burned as I swallowed the acrid cloud. Black smoke poured from Alice’s face, billowing up as if from a chimney, burning the fuel of the darkness inside her.

  With my good hand, I grasped the bar of the gurney and shoved her back in the cooler, slamming the door shut.

  I swept my hand in front of my face, trying to clear a path through the shadow. It sighed as my hand cut through it, swirling back in to fill the space, caressing my cheek and whispering.

  My legs crashed though steel carts of equipment on my way to the back door. I pushed out into the air. The daylight split through me, savaging my eyes, the setting sun hot on my burned hand. Lying on the pavement, I coughed shadow from my lungs.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket to call the front desk and tell them to seal the clinic.

  There was a text message from Dan, from that morning.

  Not waste, eggs. Faces are spawning. Get me out. Nine hours ago.

  I rolled over, forced myself up and rushed to the clinic van. It was just a mile down the road—a mile and nine hours too late.

  Darkness filled the windows of the funeral home. Pulling up to the back entrance, I turned the headlights on bright and pulled a flashlight from the glove box, using it to break the grimy window by the back door. Wisps of shadow licked the jagged edges of broken glass. Reaching in, my injured fingers fumbled to unlock the door latch, my armpit scraping against the sharp glass.

  The high beams penetrated three feet into the darkness and hit a moving wall of shadows. Shapes appeared in the shifting darkness. Faces and shoulders and hands and thighs emerging from the cloud, beckoning. I walked into the middle of it all.

  It stung like jumping into a deep lake at midnight in February. The shadow clung to me, sliding across the surface of my eyes, dragging itself over my skin. Whispers started in one ear and finished in the other, too many of them, fading in and out, incomprehensible. I held out my hands and walked toward the basement door. My knees knocked into a stack of caskets, sending the tower crashing, lids flying open. I dropped to the floor, dodging corpses, digging my fingernails into the carpet fibers, tracking the familiar geometric patterns of my childhood. I followed its diamond floral maze to the back wall, sliding my fingers along the chair rail, searching for the door.

  I found it. When I pulled it open, the whispers turned to moans.

  Clinging to the banister, I felt the edge of each splintered step with my toes.

  Halfway down, the thick cloud broke. Above my head, a cumulous of shadow roiled. I thundered down the remaining stairs.

  “Dan?”

  He wasn’t there. Alan, Mr. Brunner, and the young girl were lined up on tables. Their faces concave, drained, covered in black ash. I walked over to the girl. No one would ever recognize her now. It was as if her face had been dead weeks before the rest of her. I turned, gagging.

  There. The window of the walk-in freezer gleamed black, opaque as a submarine porthole. Dan’s face pressed against the glass. The skin around his eyes was torn apart by erupting fonts of shadow, his eyelids flayed back. His jaw hung open, askew.

  I retched. Fell to my knees and puked. Choking, coughing up gobs of tar. Moans rolled out of me, building deep within my center, rattling my bones. I pushed myself back from the caustic puddle, away from the window. The back of my head banged against the edge of Mr. Brunner’s steel table.

  Mr. Brunner? I forgot to tell The Village.

  The cloud on the stairs had risen further, concentrating itself in the highest reaches of the house. I press
ed through the thickness of it, feeling cold fingers rake my skin, malevolent hissing in my ears.

  The headlights hit me like a hurricane wave. I swam through the light and climbed in the van.

  A mile back and too late again.

  The Village seethed, a pit of hell. Each lost in their own shadow world, they ripped each other apart—some already bursting at the face, filling the air with spawning smoke.

  I took a long roll of plastic wrap from the kitchen.

  I held their frail frames as they ranted nonsense and I wrapped their heads in plastic, sealing in the darkness, stemming the flow of shadow. Their eyes pressed against the clear film, rolling in their sockets, spilling ink into the folds of membrane.

  I wrapped them up and zipped them into my black bags, dragging them to the clinic, piling them up in a squirming heap.

  Tracy stood at the nurse’s station, naked, writing notes across her stomach. Her hair hung loose, crimped from the tight braid. The twitch-line by her eye flowed like a river delta of liquid evil. I wrapped her up—all of her, in case the darkness found another way out.

  I closed the clinic door and taped around the edges. I poured out the bottles of ethyl alcohol and rolled the carts of oxygen tanks from the gas storage and barricaded the door with them. Down the hall in the kitchen, I lit the burners on the stove, turned on the oven and left it open.

  I ran. The air, already dark from those that burst before, swarmed me, raking at my skin with icy fangs. The shadow slithered up through the bowels of the building, collecting on the third floor, a writhing mass of nightmare. Moans echoed down the stairwell.

  Walking out into the night, backing away from the building, I watched smoke surge from the chimney, streaming into the sky, obscuring the stars. Out of the corner of my eye, every shadow moved. Black tears ran in smoky tracks down my aching face.

  I turned my back and walked, a mile down the road and too late. The ground concussed, a gold light spreading, casting my shadow at my feet. A hot wind flew up behind me, pushing the shadows ahead. I chased them.

  Sirens ripped through me, scattering red lights cutting through the dark. They streaked past me toward the gold glow.

  I stumbled into the back door of Dad’s mortuary, Dan’s, mine. I shuffled down the stairs, to the corner of the basement, and pulled the ring from the dusty, sticky glue. I pressed it onto my little finger, forcing it over the knuckle, twisting it into the groove at the bottom joint.

  I pulled open the freezer door, catching Dan’s body as it fell. He hardly weighed a thing with the evil boiled off. I carried him to a table and laid him out.

  I took my knife from the tray. Just like Dad, like Dan. From each shoulder to the base of the manubrium and down to the navel, I cut him open, separating the ribs from the breastbone, laying wide the chest cavity. I pulled the heart from its place and weighed it.

  sarah read

  ’s short stories can be found in black static, revolt daily, vine leaves literary journal (where she received a pushcart nomination), and in the suspended in dusk (books of the dead press) anthology, among other places. she writes, reads, and knits near rocky mountain national park where she lives with her two sons and husband. she is an affiliate member of the hwa and is editor in chief at pantheon magazine. follow her on twitter

  @inkwellmonster.

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  W.P. JOHNSON

  Dale drove through the marketplace while Stewart pressed his nose to the window of the black Cadillac and stared at the faces, the hot breath of his nostrils leaving a snout of fog. Dale glanced over his little brother’s shoulder while keeping a hand on the wheel, pointing out one girl or another. Tufts of dirty smoke rose from a cigarette lodged between his fingers, stretching thin as it snaked throughout the car and shed its gray skin.

  “How about that one?” Stewart asked, pointing at a blonde sipping hot cocoa with her parents.

  Dale shook his head. “Too young. Plus her nose is flat.”

  Stewart took out the picture and exchanged glances between that and the girl sipping hot cocoa. Her nose was a bit pugish, while the girl in the picture had a slightly sharper nose. As far as Stewart could tell, they looked similar enough.

  “Think he’d notice?”

  Dale nodded. “He’d notice right away. And then what? No money, maybe not even a job after,” Dale groaned and shook his head. “It’s better to wait, have patience. He’d rather have the right girl tomorrow than the wrong girl today.” There was a block of silence and Dale trailed a finger down the pale white scar that crossed his cheek. “This isn’t a game to him.”

  “How long did it take last time?” the boy asked.

  “A few months. Once, it took me nearly a year to find the right girl.”

  Stewart frowned and stared at the picture again. The girl was young, around fifteen years old, with freckles on her nose and milky white skin. She had curly blonde hair that dangled inches from her shoulders and thin lips with crooked teeth. Dale pointed out all of these things to Stewart, adding that she had to be tall and skinny with thin legs, yet she would have to have thick thighs, like a dancer.

  “You get it right, you’ll take over for me and I’ll take another job. More responsibilities, but more money,” he said, turning left at the end of the block, then another left after that so they could circle around through the marketplace. “Find the right girl...you can have this car along with half of what he’ll give me. Then you’ll work full time.”

  Stewart grinned. The black car, a 1972 Cadillac, was one of the first things Dale bought when he started working for Marcus Winters, kingpin of the north. As they coasted through the marketplace, it left clouds of dissipating smoke and the engine’s low groan sounded like a growling beast that slowly lumbered through the streets stalking its prey.

  It struck Steward that he didn’t even have his license yet. Would Dale teach him that as well? Or would he have to take a driver’s test? His reading wasn’t so good, but then again he never needed it much in school (when he bothered going) and whenever there was a test he would just close his eyes and focus real hard on Tommy Johnson, the smart kid that sat up front. After a few seconds he would feel what the answers were as if Tommy were sitting right next to him, holding half the pencil in his own hand and jotting down words and sentences that Stewart only had a vague understanding of.

  “When are we going back home?” Stewart asked after a half hour of driving. They had skipped breakfast and he was starting to get hungry.

  “We’ll look another hour, then get something to eat.”

  “Okay.” He looked at the picture again.

  This isn’t a game . . .

  Stewart treated the situation like it was a game he was helping his big brother play. At first he had asked who the girl was, why Marcus Winters wanted her, but all Dale ever said was that he wouldn’t understand, that he was too young (or to keep his mouth shut and don’t ask questions). Sometimes when they drove he closed his eyes and tried to feel Dale, thinking maybe there would be something there, an explanation for what they were doing. But every time he did this with his older brother he found nothing, like he was reaching into an empty box of cereal.

  He returned to watching the marketplace, smelling the stench of ice-packed cod, the thin odor of dirt from a vegetable cart, the syrupy smell of overripe fruit and the hot breath of car exhausts. A hundred strangers milled in and out of a dozen storefronts. A skinny blonde girl rushed across the street between the gap of slow moving cars. Dale eased off the gas and watched her skip past, hopping on to the opposing sidewalk.

  “Too short,” Stewart said.

  Dale gave a light smile and scruffed up Stewart’s hair. “Yes little brother, too short.”

  The boy blushed, keeping his nose pressed against the window, wiping away the fog so he could watch the girl as she walked down the sidewalk. For a brief second, he closed his eyes and felt her, catching the briefest glimpse of her thoughts. She was hun
gry but wasn’t sure what she wanted, only that it couldn’t cost more than five dollars. She felt in her pocket, feeling a few wrinkled bills and some loose change.

  Stewart let himself go, feeling faded memories that went back seconds, minutes, hours, days, letting himself fall deeper and deeper into this stranger until his own thoughts became distant and numb, a shard of sunlight on the water’s surface leagues above him.

  What a wonderful life she lived. What a wonderful life she would live.

  Opening his eyes, he let it all slip away. Then he returned to the streets, searching for the right girl.

  They returned home after an hour, sitting down at the kitchen table and drinking burnt coffee. Their mother fussed about them going out without eating breakfast and started cooking them sausage with peppers, onions, and brussel sprouts, filling the room with a noxious smoke that made their eyes wet and their stomachs growl. Stewart wanted pancakes, but he said nothing. Before Dale started working for Marcus Winters, they ate nothing but rice and dented cans of beans.

  “Eat,” their mother said, setting the two plates down. She dragged the portable heater over and set it next to Dale’s feet.

  “Thank you, Mama,” Dale said. Stewart echoed the sentiments and they ate quietly until she left the room. Dale took off his coat and shifted the heater back towards the middle of the kitchen.

  “After this we’ll look till dark,” Dale said, shoveling a hunk of food into his mouth. “Maybe try north under the subway stations.”

  “Okay.” Stewart brushed aside the brussel sprouts.

  “Eat everything,” Dale said, gesturing at the food with his fork. “I paid for those sprouts.”

  Stewart frowned, then slid his fork under the brussel sprouts along with some onions and peppers, shoveling the whole thing into his mouth.

  Dale smiled. “Being picky is a luxury. When we didn’t have any money, you used to eat whatever was on your plate.”