Snake Handlin' Man

by D. J. Butler

  The elevator door.

  “Uh oh,” he muttered. Over a cluster of bookshelves and a wardrobe he saw the waving, jaw-snapping head of the mutant snake-man Overalls. He couldn’t see the other monsters yet, but from the sound of many feet that Eddie heard, he knew that Overalls wasn’t alone.

  Then Overalls turned his head in the direction of Eddie and their eyes met, man to snake.

  “Hell.”

  “What?” Phineas Irving gulped.

  The Nehushtan froze.

  ***

  Chapter Seven

  Eddie hurled the pitcher at the mutants. It was a pointless gesture, except that it freed his hands for the shotgun.

  Jim leaped into combat in his crazy Zorro way. In two steps he was stomping on the springy center of a little kid’s bed set, grinding his heel into the eye of Fuzzikins the Slumber Bear, and then he hurtled himself upwards.

  Eddie didn’t wait for Jim to come down. He took three steps to the side to get a clear look at the elevator and raised the Remington.

  “Believe!” he shouted, and squeezed the trigger.

  Boom! He missed Overalls and shattered all the glass in the windows of an ornately scrolled but gaudy china cabinet. Shards flew in all directions.

  Jim skipped like a flat rock over water across the top of a high wardrobe, coming down through the air, boot heels first, on the other side.

  Bang! Bang! Eddie heard Mike start unloading behind him. He didn’t see what happened with the bullets, so either Mike was missing big-time, or he was shooting at the snakes on the stairs.

  Jim kicked down into the grinning human head of Many Arms, flattening the mutant’s ear in a spray of blood and knocking them both sideways in opposite directions. Eddie saw that all the snake-man thugs from the Church of the Redeemer Nehushtan were here—no, not quite, since the ones the Nehushtan had actually eaten hadn’t reappeared, but in the meantime, the survivors had picked up a few new friends. He also saw they looked fresh and uninjured; the limb he had seen chopped off of Many Arms was now small and stubby, but it was visibly growing back.

  At least with this many of them coming, he couldn’t really miss. Eddie pumped the shotgun and fired.

  Jim hit the ground on his shoulders and slid on the smooth floor, like a human toboggan skidding backwards and head-first. When he rolled to his feet, he came up swinging a blue lava lamp by its cord. The singer jumped back into the fray alternating swooping strokes of the lamp and sharp, quick thrusts with his saber.

  Overalls lurched at Eddie, jaws gaping open and down at Eddie’s head. Eddie found the creature’s persistence irritating, more than anything else. He jammed the shotgun into Overalls’s maw with his left hand, muzzle against the back of its throat. The mouth clamped shut, and Eddie narrowly missed losing his arm—the monster’s teeth sunk into the thick fabric of his jacket sleeve. The mutant snake-man’s beady black eyes glittered and he hissed. Having his fist inside the creature’s mouth made Eddie feel like one of those TV veterinarians on some PBS show, sticking his arm inside a cow to deliver its calf. He felt wet snake-slobber on his fist and a bad stink clogged his nostrils.

  Eddie squeezed the trigger.

  The back of Overalls’s big serpentine head blew out in a shower of red blood, white bone fragments and black and yellow scales. The velocity of the slug carried the monster back with it but didn’t open its jaws and, with a sharp tearing sound, Eddie’s sleeve ripped right off at the shoulder.

  Eddie had no time to mourn for his jacket. Snake Legged Man rushed at him, his snakes for feet hissing in protest as they were thumped against the floor. At his side came a barechested guy in a John Deere cap and corduroy pants who had a mass of snakes sprouting from his back and shoulders like wings. Eddie grabbed his Glock with his free hand, whipped it out, and started entertaining the company.

  Meanwhile, Jim whirled his lava lamp like a bola, tangling it around the neck of Many Arms and jerking the snaky son of a bitch sideways and off balance. Bob the repairman grabbed for Jim, trying to drag the singer and pin him against the nest of snakes writhing on Bob’s chest. Jim sidestepped and lopped off the entire bush of serpents in a single swipe—

  they dropped to the floor and kept swarming.

  The Nehushtan, Eddie thought. He needed the snake-on-a-stick to push some of these things back.

  “Why do I not hear singing?” he barked. “Onward, Christian soldiers!”

  “Cagado!” Mike shouted back, like that was some kind of answer.

  Eddie threw a look over his shoulder in between shots and saw that the Nehushtan leaned against the railing around the stairwell, and Phineas Irving worked his Enfield rifle, slamming .30-06 bullets alternately down the stairs at the snakes or past Eddie at the mutants. Mike had stuck his M1911 back in his pants and swung a club that might have been a table leg originally. He and Twitch swiped at the snakes that raged hissing up the steps, not making any progress. They might have already been overwhelmed but for the preacher’s mongooses, which bit through snakes’ heads with terrible efficiency and kept a frightened circle of serpent flesh milling away from them.

  “Twitch!” Eddie yelled. “Get us a way down!”

  “I already have one!” the fairy howled back as Eddie turned away to pay attention to the horde that rushed him. “It involves you turning into a bird!”

  Lady Legs charged, a hurricane of snakes. Eddie didn’t let himself get distracted by the biting mouths, and calmly aimed for one of her knees instead. Boom! The 870 chewed a coconut-sized hole right through the gabardine and punched the knee out backwards. Lady Legs toppled to the ground writhing and kicking, her half-disconnected leg spinning red out like a centrifuge.

  A white horse flashed in the corner of Eddie’s eye.

  And then John Deere piled into Eddie like a freight train.

  His fists were cinder blocks, and they both connected to Eddie’s jaw before Eddie really even saw them coming. Snakes bit at him and he shoved the Glock into John Deere’s belly—

  bang!

  John Deere slipped and fell in the gore, and as he dropped, one of the snakes on his back grazed Eddie’s bare arm with a fang. Cold terror lanced through Eddie’s heart and he leaned into his pistol, pushing it like a knife into the mutant’s belly and squeezing off several more muffled shots. John Deere flailed and shrieked, the sounds coming out of his mouth sounding more animal than human.

  Jim appeared, a television in his hands. The device dragged an extension cord behind it and its screen was jagged with rolling horizontal lines of static. Eddie looked up and saw that Jim had cleared a space the length of several wounded and shuddering mutants’ bodies. John Deere howled and clawed at Jim’s legs, and his snakes bit harmlessly at Jim’s boots as Jim raised the TV—

  smash!—

  and brought it down in a final hammer blow that threw sparks in all directions and obliterated John Deere’s head. The barechested mutant kicked his feet in one final moment of agony then was still.

  And then the silvery horse flashed past Eddie again, headed for the stairs.

  It pushed a bed, its chest pressing against the high headboard.

  “Go!” Eddie yelled. He switched the Glock’s selective fire mechanism to automatic and strafed the surging crowd of mutants with everything left in his clip. It didn’t last long. “Go!” he yelled again, then holstered the pistol, grabbed the Nehushtan where the preacher had laid it down and jumped onto the bed.

  Mike and the not-quite-Reverend Irving stumbled in with him. Jim threw his shoulder against the headboard and then vaulted over it as the bed tipped over the stairs—

  and began rattling down like a big sled.

  “Five little monkeys!” Mike hollered, his teeth rattling.

  It occurred to Eddie too late to wonder how high the bed’s legs were—if they were too tall, he thought, they might hit a step and tip over forward. He heard and felt the squishes of snakes being run over as the bed ba-ba-ba-ba-bumped down the stairs at a trot.

  Twitch
whizzed over the bed and ahead of it in falcon form, wings spread wide.

  “Four little monkeys!” Mike laughed.

  Eddie turned to look behind them and saw Lady Legs and Many Arms and a swarm of their friends lumbering after them. Including Overalls, dammit! How many times did these things have to be killed? He raised the Remington to add a few to the score before remembering that both his guns were empty.

  And the second story was coming fast.

  He shoved the Nehushtan into the hands of Phineas Irving and started singing. Jim joined in:

  “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war!”

  Eddie switched clips on his Glock and shoved shells into the Remington as fast as he could without dropping them, watching the floor rise up to meet them and praying, though he had no right to pray, that Phineas Irving would just believe. Clowns with fixed maniacal grins bobbed back and forth, and Eddie felt like they were mocking him. He twisted around as the stairs were coming to an end and let off three quick slugs into the ravening crowd on their heels.

  “With the cross of Jesus …” Irving’s voice rose to join his and Jim’s in a warble.

  CRASH!

  The wood of the bed splintered on impact, throwing splinters in all directions and hurling Irving out of the bed. The lanky man rolled forward into a hissing wall of snakes, clutching the Nehushtan on its pole—

  and the snakes parted.

  “Three little monkeys!” Mike laughed, short of breath. A bobbing clown with two buck teeth in his yawning mouth bowed low and touched foreheads with the bass player. “Mierda!”

  Eddie jumped off the bed and staggered to drag Irving to his feet. “Mierda is right!” he yelled. “Run!”

  Sheets of blood ran down the walls and Eddie’s combat boots stepped on a floor of heads. Damned souls stood beneath his feet, stacked shoulder to shoulder like sardines, so tightly that they made a solid floor. The flesh on their heads was worn from treading feet all the way down, exposing cracked and oozing skulls under the tatters of hair and skin that remained.

  Eddie ignored them. He jammed the muzzle of his 870 up the stairwell and squeezed off a couple of rounds, and then he half-dragged, half-kicked Phineas Irving into the Toys Department.

  Mike was right on their heels. Jim jumped from the demolished bed to the banister of the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie saw the big dark-haired man slash three times at the pell-mell mutants before leaping over a shelf of sagging plush giraffes to join them, landing on his feet light as a cat.

  Twitch touched down in man-shape as they raced through a depressing junkyard of dusty fire trucks and no-name action figures, but immediately took to the air again as a falcon. Eddie saw why and pumped the shotgun. “They’re bad enough when they stick to the ground,” he muttered, and pulled the trigger.

  Two flying snakes in the way of the Remington’s slug exploded into shuddering meat. Two out of a thousand.

  Phineas Irving sang louder and he sweated rivulets of salt, but he was still singing.

  The wall of flying snakes hit the Nehushtan’s bubble of faith—

  and bounced back.

  “Yee ha!” Eddie shouted. “Onward, Christian soldiers!”

  They rounded out the back of Toys at the top of the next flight down in a no man’s land between shrink-wrapped wire crates of fake plastic food labeled to look like off-brands on one side and a pallet of two-by-fours on the other.

  “Down!” Eddie barked, and pushed Irving and Mike forward, after the flashing horse’s tail of the falcon Twitch.

  He joined Jim at the back. The singer ducked under and wove around a hedge of snakes that snapped and hissed at him from the floor as well as from the bodies of the mutants—Lady Legs charged at him, along with Bob the repairman and others Eddie hadn’t yet bothered to recognize.

  Eddie squeezed the trigger of the 870, letting off several rounds into the horde and setting them back a few paces.

  “Don’t mind us back here!” he yelled to Irving, retreating from the serpents in a quick skipping shuffle down the stairs. “Everything’s under control!”

  “Forward into battle …” came the indirect reply.

  They hit the ground floor, and it was ice. Heads protruding from the ice surrounded Eddie, and he was close enough now that he could see the words they were mouthing.

  Save us, they said, and I’m sorry, and Soon you too will join us.

  Eddie turned with Jim to see the late afternoon sun through the glass doors. He saw more heads out in the parking lot, but he saw cars, too, and with half his heart, he wanted to ditch Adrian and run like the devil.

  Then the snakebite he’d got from John Deere’s wing-snake itched, fiercely. It stung. Eddie scratched at it, and saw that Mike and Irving were hesitating, too. “Go on!” Eddie bellowed, channeling his Inner Sergeant. “The basement, Twitch said!”

  They ran through racks of brassieres and panties. Mike’s choice, Eddie thought. Guy can’t stop thinking about tail, even when he’s getting shot at. He could hear the sound that Twitch had been talking about now. It was a chanting, with a drumming mixed in, the shaking of metal rattles. If it counted as music, he thought idly, it did so only barely. It sounded like the crap he’d played for Sharon back when she was in college and he was just back from Iraq, and he wanted to impress her with his sophisticated interest in things African.

  Bullshit, he snorted now. Gimme a fuzzed-out, wailing guitar solo any day. That’s the music of my people.

  He forced himself to ignore the freezing heads, and charged straight through them. They flinched as he struck them, but of course he didn’t feel anything. They were ghosts, figments in a vision. Still, it was strange that they seemed to see him back. By a rack of underpants printed with fading images of Space Ghost and Quick Draw McGraw they turned again, and charged down towards the basement. Eddie wasn’t sure what to expect, and whatever it was he might have imagined, it wasn’t what he saw.

  He stopped, several steps from the bottom, and stared. The basement was thronged with people. It might have been a Kitchenwares Department once, but the shelves and tables of merchandise had all been shoved to the walls to make a great empty space in the center of the floor. In the center of the floor lay a dog on a low-end kitchen table, a charcoal barbecue grill full of smoldering incense, and two figures.

  The mongooses stood beside Eddie on the steps, rearing up and hissing.

  Miriam was unmistakable.

  She towered above him, voluptuous and dark and naked. Eddie gulped, trying to concentrate and not be distracted by the sheer lush sexual power that oozed out of her full lips and breasts, her thin neck and large eyes. It helped that from the hips down she became a huge, blue-scaled serpent. Her human body was ordinary in size, he realized; it was the serpent half that coiled up and pushed her off the floor, made her tall and menacing and monstrous. Her hair helped bring him back to his senses, too—it was a sleepy, rustling mass of blue snakes. In her hand she held a long flake of glassy black stone over the dog, like a primitive surgeon about to cut into a patient.

  Aaron was almost as easy to identify. He looked like Phineas, a tall, gaunt, blond man wearing a trench coat. Only where human hands should have protruded from the sleeves of his coat, Aaron had snakes’ heads instead.

  The ceiling was a sheet of ice, and white, naked bodies hung from it by their necks. A buffeting gale that Eddie could almost feel chewed at their flesh and made them sway back and forth like human wind chimes.

  The two lovers stood in a central space empty but for the dog on the table. Surrounding them was a crowd, chanting words Eddie didn’t recognize, beating small hand drums and playing sistra. A sistrum was a brass rattle from ancient Egypt that looked something like the hollow metal head of a hairbrush with loose rods jammed through it. Eddie knew what they were because of Bible class, way back when, and he knew what they were because they were related to the tambourine.

  Damn tambourine. Should have said guitar player.

  At t
he edge of the crowd, standing in four points that approximately made the four corners of a square, were totem poles. They were wooden and crude, and each had only one figure carved on it. The nearest looked like a monkey’s head, and, taking them in at a glance, Eddie thought he saw a dog and a bird and a human. They looked vaguely Egyptian, or at least they looked like someone’s bad imitation of Egyptian art. All of them had long strips of cloth bandaged around their eyes.

  Eddie’s arm really hurt, and he didn’t know why.

  The dog on the table whined, and only then did Eddie register what was actually going on in the scene in front of him. The dog was alive, but its ribcage was cracked open, exposing heart, lungs and other things Eddie couldn’t immediately identify, in a soupy mass of blood, organs and living flesh. Ropes held the dog to the table, but it might also be sedated—it wasn’t struggling. A row of stone bowls lay on the table beside the animal, and each bowl held a little puddle of meat, like sorting bowls for a butcher.

  Miriam—the lamia, Eddie forced himself to call her in his mind—stooped and grabbed the heart out of the dog’s chest, severing the connecting arteries with a single swift slice of her stone knife.

  “Ayayayayayay!” she wailed, and in a single gulp she devoured the heart while it was still beating.

  The dog’s whine became a yowl, but then Aaron leaned over it, the snakes’ mouths that served him for fingers snatching what must be a heart out of one of the bowls and massaging it into the cavity from which the dog had lost its natural organ. The replacement seemed to fit, and the dog still moved, though its new heart looked smaller to Eddie’s eye.

  It’s a snake’s heart, he thought. Were they replacing all the dog’s natural organs with a snake’s parts?

  “We consecrate thee Wepwawet, opener of the ways,” Aaron chanted. “Thy heart is pure in the ways of the serpent. Thy breast nourishes all his words.”