“He’s about, sarge.”
“Oh ho. You usually aren’t that bad a liar. What’s the story?”
“Look, sarge, honest, he clocked in…”
He checks my face. He sighs. “I don’t know where the bugger is, and that’s flat.”
“So when did you see him last?”
“Couple nights back.”
That got my attention. “What the hell do you mean? He’s supposed to have been here, he’s on the bloody sign-in sheet. Why, I saw him myself…”
I was about to finish with “just yesterday” but didn’t.
“I dunno what to tell you, sarge. First night, I figured he was shacked up, you know? Or maybe sleeping it off.”
“Bollocks. Not our saintly Gordo. When was the last time you saw him drinking? And as for finding a girl, God help him, they aren’t making snowballs in Hell just yet.”
He grinned. “All right, I figured it probably wasn’t that, but what the hell, it could have been, right? Except that he doesn’t turn up again the next night, so I give him a call – by now I’ve got about three messages on his phone, none of ’em he answers – and all I get is voicemail. Again. But he’s not signed off sick, and I didn’t want to drop him in it, so I sign off on the sheets and keep eyes on.”
I’m thinking at a pretty rapid rate, I can tell you. The last time I’d seen Gordo, it was at Barker’s place. Then I’d said he should go on post, and off he went. Then I picked around at Barker’s for a while, then I went up as well. Except I couldn’t remember seeing Gordo after that. I don’t know why, and I didn’t think much on it because I had other things on my mind. I guess I figured he was bunking off, if I thought about him at all, which I didn’t make it my habit to do.
“Right, come with me. We’re going to have a look for Gordo.”
“You think he’s here, sarge? Why?”
“Never you mind why, you just follow. And don’t let me out of your sight, you hear?”
*
It is bigger on the inside, I swear to God.
So here we are, we’ve gone through the museum, and we’re poking around in what might be an officer’s mess. It was a room we hadn’t seen before, and I thought we’d seen them all.
It was put together on the cheap, whatever it was. There was what looked like it wanted to be a fancy candelabra hanging from the ceiling, as assembled by some colossal idiot who didn’t know the first thing about electrics, so when I flip the switch there’s a hasty fizzle, a brief flash, and a nasty smell. I take out my flashlight instead, not wanting to burn the building down.
“Who’s there?”
I throw the light around. “Sir? Could you step into the light, please?”
It’s Not-Quite, his great moon face all done up with worry. “Sergeant Johar? What’s going on?”
“Sir, why are you here? Did someone call you?”
“No, not at all.” He fumbles in the half-light. “I was hoping to find Barker. I came earlier looking for him, but he wasn’t in; and after the phone call I was worried, especially since he didn’t pick up when I called a second time. I thought something must have happened.”
“But you haven’t seen Mister Barker?”
“Not tonight, not yet. Why? Look, what is going on?”
A very good question. “Tell me, sir, how well do you know the building?”
“Very.” Touch of professional pride, there.
“If you wanted to hide something, somewhere where most people aren’t likely to go, where would you?”
That didn’t take much thought at all. “The cellars. We used them for storage, but nobody’s been down there in a long time, not after the unit moved all its records to Kent.”
So that’s where we head.
Not-Quite’s chattering all the way down, about the history and whatever, but my mind is elsewhere. I’m wondering where the hell Gordo ended up, because I’m pretty sure by this point that he’s not at home in front of the telly.
There’s just too much mess. You know how a place can get, when nobody looks after it? It’s a look, more than anything else: that neglected, nobody-cares look. Somehow a paperback or a broken bit of kit ends up on the floor, and nobody picks it up. Pretty soon the filth is thick, and you can’t move without getting it on you. But with nobody to move things about, stuff tends to stay where it’s put, you know?
Not this place. There’s old bits of God knows what all over, and you can see trails in the mess. Something comes through here, often. Making its nest in the garbage.
We’re passing steel doors now, and I reckon this is probably where they used to store the munitions, when this was a working building. I stop in front of one of them because I see a shadow and I want a closer look at it.
With Phillips backing me, I enter, and find it wasn’t a shadow at all, it was a reflection in a tall mirror. Phillips laughs, nervous, but I’m not in a laughing mood. There’s a table across one wall, with a set of mannequin heads on it. Along the other wall there’s a rack of what look like costumes. All sorts, men and women both.
“Sarge?”
Phillips has his light on one of the mannequin heads, towards the end of the row.
I look and see Gordo’s eyeless face staring back at me.
The mannequins almost all have faces, except for two at the other end, both empty heads.
Heads carefully taken, carefully preserved. Besides Gordo’s, I don’t recognise any of them. I think one of the ones next to the empty heads must have been there a long time, it was too badly stretched, flaking, but I don’t know how long is too long for those things.
I can hear Bob. He’s all around us, him and every cousin he’s got, and Bob’s family is large. They’re rattling away underfoot, under the floors, behind the walls.
“We could go deeper,” says Not-Quite.
“You what?” says Phillips.
“Deeper. This is just the upper cellar, dug out in, oh, 1820, I think. The building’s much older than that, and there are levels below us, many levels. Would you like to see?”
I move to Not-Quite’s left, as if to go past him and out the door, but he’s large, and he puts himself in the way. He’s got a good two inches on me, easy. He’s smiling.
I reach out and grab his right wrist. Without giving him time to react, I strike at the inside of the elbow, bending the arm, and then I swing round beside him, twisting his arm behind him. Now he’s bending forward, because if he doesn’t his arm will snap, and I’m leaning all my weight on that right arm of his, grabbing forward at his collar.
“Get that thing!” I tell Phillips. Bright boy that he is, he goes for Gordo’s mannequin head. My duffel’s on the floor, with the bags in it, so he reaches for that.
Not-Quite doesn’t feel right. Too soft, not enough angles. He’s looking back over his shoulder at me.
“You should have left it alone,” he says, and then he dissolves.
Dissolves is the only word I can think of that fits. It’s like he comes in bits, breaking up, grey bodies escaping from the bulk, crawling out the arm holes, the mouth, the eyes. Hundreds. Maybe thousands, I can’t tell, scrabbling over each other, over me, swarming up my jacket, hairy muzzles at my face.
They’re going for my eyes. They’re climbing up me, biting and clawing at everything they can reach, but not my face. That they leave alone, unmarked, as they swarm up, digging only for my eyes.
I let go of what’s left of Not-Quite and I’m banging away, getting them off, but there’s too many, too many, then Phillips is swinging, stick out. I get a breathing space. I run for the door.
If only I’d brought that bloody duffel. I know none of this will sound right, I know it won’t make sense. If I had that mannequin head, if I had Gordo, it would make you believe me, I know it would. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it would have just gone missing, like the Barker mask. Maybe nothing I could have done would change things.
I don’t get the duffel. I barely get out.
I don’t know what happened to
Phillips. I thought he was behind me, swear to God.
*
So I sign the statement. It’s eighteen long. I hand it over, knowing it won’t be believed.
Soon I’ll leave. I’ll go home.
People keep saying you’re never more than six foot from a rat at any time. That’s bollocks. But there are millions of the bastards, all over the city. There are some in the block of flats where I live. I’ve seen them in the bins, in the back alleys. I’ve seen them at crime scenes. I’ve seen them at the takeaway.
At night, will I hear them?
How far are they away from me?
Special Needs Child by Keris McDonald
My beautiful baby boy was born nearly three weeks after the levees broke.
We were checking out a street in the North Ward, just Austin and me, looking for bodies. It was over eighty degrees and seventy percent humidity and it stank. You have no idea how bad that city smelled. I had menthol gel smeared across my upper lip and it still felt like that stench was crawling down my throat. Mud and rotting weeds on fucking everything – on the smashed houses and the fallen trees and the tossed cars – and the mud was half sewage because the drains were fucked, and all mixed in with the smell of rotted garbage and dead fish and dead pets, and sometimes dead people.
We'd come in with the Louisiana State Guard. We both had experience in civil order establishment, though as search-and-rescue for the living was over by this point and the National Guard had been evacuating the last inhabitants since September 6th, we weren’t expecting to be dealing with anyone living and we were even pretty chill about leaving the Hummer parked out in the open. The die-hard hold-outs were gone, and the Ward was silent. Not even any birds. I guess the winds had killed all those. Just the fucking flies for company. Flies everywhere, even trying to eat my Vicks VapoRub.
We'd been told – the details were sketchy – that there'd been a corpse reported out back of one of the houses down this street, so we'd gone out with a body-bag and were searching the whole row. Some places in the city the wooden buildings had been wiped clear off their concrete bases by the waters, but here they were standing, sort of. A lot of trees had come down, so we had to pick our way through the tangle of branches and planks with their crusty curtains of silt and shit. We split up to cover more ground, and moved slow and cautious.
I kept my Glock out as I worked my way through to the back of another house that'd never be a home again. In two tours in Iraq I'd never killed anyone myself – I'm a medic foremost – but though I'm not making any such claim on Austin’s part, it wasn’t humans we had to deal with that week. Austin had put a lot of dogs out of their misery by that point. Dogs starving on chains in yards, trapped on garage roofs, wandering the streets injured and hungry. There was nowhere to take them, no way of feeding them, and nothing for them to eat but each other and the bodies. Austin – two hundred pounds of muscle and beard and tattoos – is soft when it comes to dogs.
I found the corpse in the back yard, as reported. They’re sometimes more difficult to spot than most people'd think. Once they stop looking alive they can just sorta merge into the background, the familiar human outline blurred by decay. But this one was pretty obvious, even under the shade of a sagging lean-to roof that had once been a barn of some sort, back before it was crushed by a toppled live oak.
The flies around here were thick and persistent and the ground for yards around was crawling with maggots.
The body’s pelvic area had been completely eaten out by insects but I assumed, based on the filthy remnants of a flower-sprigged dress rucked around her shoulders, that she was female. She'd been swept in and dumped over a metal frame that I think was the support structure of a fallen table. Ass-up; there was no dignity in death for her. Her head and arms, which were flat against the ground, were skeletonised. Her lower legs, which hung in mid-air, were in contrast sort of mummified, the skin shiny and pitch black, even the soles of her bare feet.
It was the bits in between that bothered me. Her abdomen was hugely distended.
Now, there’s not much about dead bodies that worries me these days, and even less that surprises me. I've seen a fuck-ton of corpses in my life, and they do not always act the way they are supposed to. The dead will at times fart, and vomit, and groan, and bleed. They get hard-ons. They'll occasionally move around – and it’s all to do with gas pressure building up inside. They'll shed their skin to reveal bright pink layers of sub-dermis. They'll inflate and then pop, like water balloons.
That was what I was worried about here. This lady had a severe case of bloat and if we tried to bag her, chances were that swollen belly would burst and spurt rotted innards all over us. It’s yellow, by the way, like chicken soup. I've seen that. I don’t eat chicken soup any more.
I had white paper overalls on over my guard uniform, but that wouldn’t help a whole lot.
I sighed, and considered calling in Austin on the walkie-talkie, but reckoned I should deal with the immediate problem. Puncturing her with a gunshot was a possibility, but seemed cruel. Finding a long slat of wood, I duct-taped my clasp knife to the tip to make a crude spear, and – standing as far back as I could – I gave the belly a prod.
The knife-tip was sharp, and made its hole. Skin split. Nothing slopped out. There was no pfrrrt of escaping gasses. She was dry.
I withdrew the spear point, surprised.
That was fucking nothing to what I felt when a tiny white hand emerged through the rip.
“Shit!” I'd thought I was immune to corpse-related shock, but I nearly fucking wet myself at that moment. I took a step back and shook like a spooked horse, suddenly drenched in sweat. It hadn’t occurred to me that the dead woman had been pregnant. Poor bitch. Poor -
The hand clenched and flexed.
No! I thought
The tear in the blotched, putrescent skin widened. The little arm thrust out through the gap and waved around. I stood frozen as very slowly, almost gracefully, the entire child emerged through the tearing flesh and slithered onto the maggoty floor, the stretch of its umbilical cord saving it from hard impact.
It was pale as the Pillsbury Dough Boy. It kicked its legs and rolled its head.
This could not be happening, I told myself.
I staggered closer. It was a little boy, quite whole and sound under the fatty gunk that slathers newborns. He opened sleepy eyes that were the most beautiful clear green that I'd ever seen, and he yawned.
His mother’s ruptured belly hung like an empty sack.
Okay. Let’s be honest here. I never, not even in those first moments, thought that this was right or normal. Corpses do weird shit but one thing they don’t do, cannot do, is incubate a live baby without blood flow or oxygen for three weeks, while they rot around it.
But there he was. And he was perfect.
I couldn’t bear to see him lying there in that filth. I scooped him up with shaking hands. He looked up into my face with his huge wise eyes, and gave a hiccupping giggle.
By the time I made it back out to the Hummer, Austin, summoned over the walkie-talkie, was waiting there for me. He frowned at the bundle in the crook of my elbow.
“What the fuck is that, Gina?” he asked, puzzled.
“It’s our baby.”
*
You'll think I'm crazy.
But what was I supposed to do? Hand him over to the authorities? A newborn – what the hell chance would he have of survival if I did that? They wouldn’t know where his family were or even if any of them were alive; the evacuees were scattered all over the country by now. Hey, I'd seen our care systems in action, and I had no faith in human nature. I'd seen people left dehydrated and starving on bridges and in the Superdome while officials pretended ignorance and washed their hands of all responsibility. I'd seen those motherfuckers at Gretna turn back refugees at gunpoint. I'd heard stories about the director of some nursing home who’d fucked off and left all ninety of his elderly charges to drown.
There is no subst
itute for a mother’s love.
So we took off. Austin was sorta reluctant, because he was enjoying the work. Don’t judge him; I know exactly how he felt. For maybe the first time since Iraq we'd both felt we were doing something useful, something we were trained for and no one else could do.
But Baby’s needs come first. That’s what it’s like when you become a parent. Austin understood.
Getting away was surprisingly easy. The hard part for the first few days, of all things, was finding baby formula, since the supply chains were fucked and the shops emptied by hoarders. In fact by the next day I was so frantic I was ready to check in at an emergency shelter just to get my hands on supplies – even though that would have meant records being taken and the risk of a postpartum examination that would have found me out.
But Austin solved it. He suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and dodged out, and when he came back from the scrubby verge he had a dog in his arms. A skinny little bitch with dangling teats. She didn’t struggle – she looked too dispirited for that.
“Here,” he said, loading her into the back seat and climbing in beside her. He gave her the stub of a Slim Jim from his pocket, which she snapped up ravenously. “Pass him over.”
“Fuck’s sake – that’s dirty, Austin! Look at her! She could be carrying anything!”
“You got a better idea?”
The bitch didn’t like the smell of baby at first – she whined and flashed the whites of her eyes and tried to kick free – but when Austin held her firmly down and stroked her ears with his thumb she seemed to resign herself. The baby latched on to a leathery canine dug as if it was exactly what he was waiting for.
We kept the dog, and called her Lady. We fed her high-protein foil-wrapped survival rations and crackers, and she fed the baby. You know, he never cried during those first days, not before we found him his milk and not afterwards. I am not shitting you here, he never cried, not once, as a child. When he was distressed he'd sometimes make this high-pitched meeping noise, but he never bawled like most kids. He was one in a million. A real little soldier.
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 3