Rust: One

by Christopher Ruz

  She only had a moment to scream before Bo jumped on her. He weighed almost nothing, like bones wrapped in paper, but she couldn't kick him off, not with her hands and ankles fixed in place. He kissed her on the cheek, his lips so dry they scratched her skin. Something tickled below her eye. Feelers reaching through Bo's open mouth, probing her face.

  Kimberly retched, and Bo jerked away. For a moment that black feeler hung from between his teeth, and then it retracted, sliding back into the ruin of his throat.

  "I thought you liked me?" he whispered. "Jacinta, you... Do you remember when I cut my hand?" He coughed. There was blood on his lips. "I wanted to kiss you. Really did. I think I missed my shot, huh? Got that feeling. I..." He coughed again, lungs rattling in his chest. "I don't know. It's all gone now."

  His hands fell down to Kimberly's sides, cupped her waist, tracing over her ribs. "Lots of space," he said, and this time Bo's voice had changed. It was a scraping sound, like flint being drawn across rock, the sort of voice that started brushfires. "Space to grow. Good little nest. Soon." Bo's breath was sour, rotten. The stink of dying organs. "The others didn't fit. You fit. Good to walk around in you. Soon."

  Kimberly screamed.

  * * *

  "He was right there!"

  "Sir, I'm sorry, but he isn't there now."

  "I saw-"

  Detective Goodwell and Peter Archer had been circling the streets of Rustwood for the better part of an hour. It was almost nightfall, the sun dropping behind the damp peaks of the church and the old stone library, and whatever asshole had kidnapped Kimberly - or at least, induced her to run away from home and leave her husband in a state of panic - was nowhere to be seen.

  "We're doing our best," Goodwell insisted. "I have three patrol cars searching for him, and every other officer on duty has his plates. In the meantime, I could drop you home. Your babysitter probably needs a break. What was her name?"

  "Hink... Hinkermeier." Peter's hands were shaking in his lap. He checked his watch over and over, then looked to the darkening night sky. "What if she's dead?"

  Goodwell frowned. "Why would you think that?"

  "I just have a feeling."

  "Don't."

  "Don't what?"

  "Push it away, Mister Archer. It's not doing anyone any good." Goodwell hit Central Avenue and turned back towards Rustwood Heights. If he could dump Peter Archer back at home and get a mug of cocoa in the poor man's hands, he might have enough time to slink back to his own house and light some candles in the basement. Have a quick chat to the powers that be, get a lead on Mrs Archer, drag her home in time for a late dinner. So long as she was still in one piece...

  He thought of all those men and women vanished into the forests around Rustwood. The poor bastards dying from the blister sickness up at St Jeremiah's. The custodian dead on the floor of Rustwood High.

  The odds of recovering Mrs Archer alive were growing slim.

  And then, a squawk on the radio. Peter Archer was halfway towards snatching it off the hook when Goodwell slapped his hand out of the way. "You mind?"

  Peter shrank back into his seat as Goodwell thumbed the button. "Car two-two? Yes? Where? Uh-huh. Confirmed, or... Uh-huh. Much appreciated, officer."

  He hung up the radio and took a long breath. Beside him, Peter was twitching. "Does that mean-"

  "Yeah." Head-check, foot on the gas, U-turn, headed to the East End. "We got him."

  * * *

  Fitch could smell the decay, even through the rain.

  The East End was a bizarre mash of gentrified bungalows, bulldozed lots and old row-houses waiting for the paperwork to be filed before they met their maker at the hands of a wrecking ball. Tudor-style mansions rose up less than a hundred yards from weed-choked grassland, the ruins of burned two-by-fours and blackened bricks piled high. In a few years, East End would all be a sea of neatly-trimmed hedges and silver Mercedes', but for now there were hovels pressed up against the construction sites and rats building nests in the pool pumps.

  He could've picked the right house even without Mister Gull's map. A decrepit, slumping building, less a home than a fire hazard, with beaten-in shingles and windows like bruised eyes. There were five others like it in the same street, but they didn't smell the same way. The house had a peculiar gravity, like all the surrounding streets and alleys were sloping inward, propelling him down the slope.

  He couldn't have retreated back to his pickup even if he'd wanted to.

  The stink only grew stronger the closer he got, along with the familiar tug. The pull in the centre of his chest, finally returning, weak but unmistakeable.

  He could only hope it was tugging him towards Kimberly and not her corpse.

  The rain came down heavy on the back of his head as he circled the building, peering in the shuttered windows. The back door was locked, the cat flap roughly boarded over. He got low and pushed the flap as far as he could. Kitchen tiles, or maybe a laundry, steel fittings shining in the evening light. He kept moving, peeking in windows one by one. The lights inside were off but he could just make out a figure shifting in the shadows, a man perhaps, shuffling through the darkness. He pressed his ear against the glass. Slow, dragging steps. A sick man, then.

  Sick or not, Fitch would have to put him down.

  He cast about the yard for something heavy, finally finding a hunk of timber amidst the weeds. Then he crept back to the window and squinted through the gap in the shutters.

  The man was gone.

  "Goddamn." Fitch hefted the chunk of wood and inched around the front. He knew how he'd look to anyone passing by - a filthy vagrant in an old coat searching for an easy entry. Police would be there soon, and he'd bet a dollar that they'd find some way to tie him to the murder in the woodshop. After that, cuffs and a cell... and a quick visit from whatever ran the town. Would it drag him into the mines? Drown him in the river? Or eat him right there, lick the blood from the walls and suck the marrow from his bones, leave no trace that he'd ever been arrested, ever lived at all?

  He had to move fast.

  The shuffling man must've gone upstairs. That, or slumped behind the sofa. Maybe he'd known he was being watched. Maybe he'd come out the back and was circling as well, the stalker now the one being stalked.

  That thought kept him moving. A scrubby hedge grew at the back of the building, the leaves gone brown with age and disease, but behind the hedge was the glint of glass. Fitch got low, pushing branches out of the way with his stick. Yes, a window at ground level, loosely boarded over, leading to... a wine cellar? A basement?

  He yanked the wood away and pressed his face against the glass. The blackness on the far side was almost absolute, but when he squinted he could make out piles of garbage, water pooling on the concrete, and...

  A woman against the wall, hands behind her back, knees drawn up. Her head hung low, chin against her chest. For a moment he thought she was sleeping, or dead, but then he saw how she jerked rhythmically, trying to pull her hands free from whatever knots secured her there.

  A fighter. Fitch grinned. That was always a good sign.

  He checked over his shoulder one last time to make sure nobody was standing behind him, and raised the hunk of wood.

  Chapter 15

  It felt like all the skin on her wrists had chafed away, the flesh peeling back from her fingers, but Kimberly almost had her left hand free. She hadn't seen Bo in nearly half an hour, but she'd heard him shuffling about upstairs. Even that sound had stopped now. With the sun gone down, the basement was almost completely black. For all she knew the bastard had crept back down the stairs to watch her. He could've been in the room with her, sitting inches away, and she wouldn't know.

  What she did know was that she had to move.

  The thing in Bo's throat, whatever it was - a parasite, a sickness, some childhood deformity - was getting bigger. When she'd run into him on the mountain trail it'd been bulging over the back of his tongue, but now it looked like he was having trouble keeping his
mouth closed. How huge would it be the next time he came to peer at her? Would he even be able to speak? God, maybe he'd do her a favour and choke to death on the thing.

  It was all impossible. A bad dream, just like everything else in the fucked up town. But you didn't wake up from bad dreams by wishing. You had to fight your way back to the surface.

  So she tugged and tugged and tugged until she felt blood running down her fingers, and then finally, with a great sucking noise, her left hand pulled free.

  She almost sobbed with relief. Her elbow and shoulder were painfully stiff, and she felt tears on her cheeks as she held her hand up close to her face and wiggled her fingers. Her hand was swollen, purpled, strings of Bo's strange glue clinging like webbing, but it was free.

  She started working on her other hand, the glue already made soft by her hours of effort. She twisted until it felt like her right shoulder would rip out of the socket. Her hand shifted, millimetre by millimetre...

  A scraping echoed in the dark, like fingernails being drawn across slate. Her breath caught in her chest. She squinted into the gloom. Was Bo there, creeping down the stairs? She tried to make out his silhouette against the piles of debris, the tangles of severed limbs. Nothing moved there. She turned her head as far as the glue would allow. The window above her head was boarded shut, and the boards there were flexing. Something black flashed in the gap between the boards. A hand forcing itself through, bending the wood back.

  She bit back a scream as the wood crunched and splintered. The hand withdrew. Then a whisper. "Hey, lady. You alive?"

  She knew the voice. The hobo with the dirty jacket. Fitch. The relief was overwhelming. "Help me," she hissed. "He's somewhere inside!"

  "Jesus Mary and Joseph." Fitch peered in, teeth shining in the gloom. "This is gonna make a lot of noise. Need to muffle it. Hold on."

  "Don't-" He was already gone. She waited, tugging against the glue, bile rising in the back of her throat, waiting for the familiar shuffling drag of Bo returning. Every time the wind picked up and the house creaked in its foundations she had to clench her hands into fists and bite her lower lip to keep from crying.

  "Couldn't find anything." Fitch was back, peering through with eyes narrowed to slits. "Duck your head, eh? If you can."

  She only had a moment to tuck her chin against her chest before the glass exploded inwards. Splinters stung her cheeks as Fitch bashed the window open and clambered through, one gangly limb at a time. There was a tearing sound as his jacket caught on the rough edges, and he clutched his left jacket pocket tight, as if there was something valuable inside.

  Finally, Fitch dropped to the ground, panting. "Too much running," he said. "Haven't sat down all day."

  "Just get me out!"

  "I'm trying!" Fitch groped behind her, running his fingers over the spitty resin. "Jesus, what is this? I'm gonna need a knife."

  "You didn't bring one?"

  "I was in a hurry!" Fitch swore under his breath and cast around in the piles of garbage. "Those people... were they alive when you got here?"

  Kimberly shook her head. "I don't think so. You know them?"

  "Might've bumped into a few. All start to look the same after a while." She could see how he grit his teeth before rummaging through the rotten piles. Something gave wetly, and Fitch came up with a red pocket knife on a keychain. It was barely as long as his little finger, but to Kimberly it looked like salvation.

  "Quickly!" she hissed. "He's messed up. There's something in his mouth-"

  "Careful," he whispered, pressing a finger to his lips. "Don't wriggle."

  He began sawing through the resin coating Kimberly's feet. Fitch stank of gunpowder and brine but at that moment she couldn't think of anything she'd rather smell. At the very least, it cut through the stench of rot. "He keeps saying he's gonna fit in me, something crazy-"

  "Everything's crazy here." The first wad of gluey vomit parted with a snapping sound like a rubber band breaking. "This town is always thinking up something new."

  "How'd you find me?"

  "Called in a favour." The second wad curled back beneath his blade, and Kimberly gasped as blood rushed into her toes. "He hurt you?"

  "I can still run, if that's what you're asking." It was a lie: after so long glued to the floor she had no idea whether her legs would function under pressure. "He's not normal."

  "And you are?" Fitch started pruning the glue binding her right arm to the pipe. "Gotta be quick. Made a lot of noise there, and I don't know if I can fight the bastard." The blade caught in the treacly glue and Fitch swore as he struggled to tug it free. "At least this thing comes at you straight. Not like those dead-eye kids or the blisters... Ah!"

  The blade jerked free, and Fitch wasn't quick enough to pull his hand out of the way. It slashed across his thumb, and as he raised his hand to his mouth to suck on the wound Kimberly saw, for the first time, the nub of a sixth finger growing beside his pinkie.

  Fitch met her eyes. Slowly, he stuffed his left hand back into his jacket pocket. "No big deal," he said. "Just hold still."

  She swallowed hard and tried not to cringe as the blade blurred past her skin. The way the glue curled back from the point of the flick-knife made her shudder. Like dried muscle. Like the skin of the dead men Bo had chewed and vomited out.

  Just protein, she thought. Pretend it's just protein.

  "Almost," Fitch whispered. "Don't wriggle!"

  "I'm not wriggling!" She bit her tongue as the blade sank deep into the glue and scraped along her skin. "Just hurry! He-"

  The creak was low, strained, wood grinding against wood. Kimberly's breath seized. "He's awake."

  "You don't know that." Fitch worked fast, slicing away great fleshy curls of the glue. "Think happy thoughts."

  Another creak overhead. A slow dragging of feet, moving towards the stairs.

  "Don't be scared. Nothing to be scared of in this town." Fitch grinned, but it was a terribly false smile, one that gave Kimberly no confidence at all. "Almost there."

  "Please-"

  Dust sifted down atop Kimberly's head as the footsteps crossed the house. The basement door groaned, rusted hinges protesting as Bo forced it open. His shadow stretched across the wall, grotesquely distorted, spider thin.

  "Jesus, hurry!"

  "I'm trying!" The blade caught again. The first stair creaked beneath Bo's weight. Fitch was sweating, his brow shining in the gloom. He twisted the knife, trying to pry it free, but it was stuck fast. "Fuck! It-"

  "This isn't real," Kimberly whispered. "It's a dream. It's just a stupid dream." She closed her eyes. "I can wake up. Come on, come on!" She opened her eyes. The knife was still buried in the glue and the shadow was growing longer. She could see Bo's legs now as he staggered down the stairs. The man was naked, his skin pale and filmed with grease. He cast a long, skinny shadow, almost skeletal, and where his head was supposed to be...

  A twitching silhouette of spider-limbs and mandibles.

  "Please!" Kimberly said, and Fitch's blade jerked through the last of the glue. Kimberly gasped as her hand came free, and she jumped to her feet, wobbling on unsteady legs. The window was far overhead, the sill lined with jagged glass. No chance she could climb out without slicing off her fingers.

  The only way out was up the stairs, and Bo was blocking the way. He came off the last step and as he stepped into the light breaking through the window she saw him properly for the first time.

  Bo's head was tilted back unnaturally far, so far that his neck must have been broken. His jaw was distended, teeth splitting from his gums, his tongue swollen over his lips. And hanging from his open mouth...

  She couldn't understand what she was seeing. It was slick with blood and spit, flailing razor-thin limbs, chitinous and studded with rosebush spines. Tiny black eyes atop pencil antennae. A mouth filled with twitching cilia.

  She fell back against the wall, her stomach turning, unable to swallow or breathe or blink. "What the fuck is that?"

  Fitch
passed her the knife and hefted his chunk of wood. "You think I know?"

  "What do we-"

  Fitch leaped forward, swinging the wood like a baseball bat. Bo jerked back but Fitch was quicker - the club caught him in the gut, doubling him over. The black thing squeezing from Bo's mouth clicked and chittered, its legs rubbing together with a sound like a blade being drawn across a whetstone.

  "Hit it again!" Kimberly said, but Fitch was already raising the club overhead. Bo twisted away as he brought it down, and the wood shattered across the nurse's shoulder. The creature screamed, high and wordless, so loud that Kimberly thought her eardrums would rupture.

  It grasped at the air, claws scissoring spastically. Fitch's club was broken, leaving him holding nothing but splinters. "Stab it!" he called. "Cut the fucker!"

  She couldn't move. Fear had seized her limbs. The creature lunged, snapping, and Fitch threw his hands up over his face as its mandibles slashed across his forearms. Kimberly reeled back, the hot spatter of blood across her cheeks. She tasted copper.

  "The knife!" Fitch screamed. "Kill it-"

  She barely heard him. The knife was in her hand, blunt blade turned outward. She'd never held a knife before but somehow it felt right, the weight of it, the cold laminate against her palm.

  Fitch had his hands over his face in a boxer's stance but Bo was faster. He swung like he'd been jerked by invisible strings, faster than any man could throw a punch, and Fitch was smashed aside. Bo staggered towards her, the fingers of his right hand shattered and bent, head flopping on his broken neck, the black thing dragging itself from his throat.

  It was panicked reflex. A shove with a knife hidden inside. She struck out.

  There was a slick sound, and then Bo fell back clutching himself, the knife jerked from Kimberly's hand. Fitch was staggering to his feet, shoving her toward the stairs. "Move!"

  Bo grasped for her as she ducked past, his fingers scraping against her bare arm. She shrieked and Fitch drove his elbow into Bo's throat, throwing him to the floor. They scrambled together for the stairs, leaping over the tangled corpses.