by Tim Marquitz
Molly stopped abruptly, her head jerked to one side, her eyes bulging as a rictus grin stretched her pale lips.
“—that He will send forth a redeemer!”
The voice was not hers. It was cold, hoarse, and though it was barely more than a whisper, it cut across the thick, static air and cast a shadow upon their hearts.
“Behold! Your Redeemer draws nigh!” She pointed a finger toward the field, and the mourners, clasped together like the children they’d lost, turned as one to see the arrival of Baird.
He dressed in white, which only added to the sense of infection that imbued him. He floated down to them, his hands pressed together in an attitude of prayer. Although the day was stifling, his breath was visible before him, a carrion shimmer, which snaked from his mouth as he chanted inaudibly.
As he passed each grave, there arose a distant beating, as of a tiny fist pummeling upon a coffin lid, followed by a childish cry. The noise grew deafening in the still air by the time he reached the end of the row. The cacophony of pain broke the mourners’ spell. They hurried to free their children, digging frantically, breaking their nails, their fingers, breaking their hearts. By the time they had exhumed their babies, they had died once more.
They stared at the tiny, contorted bodies, unable to comprehend, their understanding as blurred as Baird who was just a vague white dot on the horizon, floating in the non-wind.
~
“The children were wrinkled like prunes, their eyes and hair white, like old men, old women. Like the life had been sucked right out of them. I know you find that hard to believe. You’re thinking grief and loss do strange things. I only tell you what I saw. What we all saw.”
“Did you go after Baird?”
“We went straight home and grabbed every weapon, every holy object we could lay our hands to. We marched up to that big sprawling house of his within the hour.”
Hector got up and walked slowly out of the bar. As he opened the door the sunlight fell in like an eavesdropper, and the stranger could see that the barman was crying. For a moment, he almost believed him.
“You’ll have to forgive Hector. He lost three fine boys. I guess hearing it all over again was too much. Too much to hear an old fool like me talking as if I was some big shot hero marching up the Lonewalk Road that day. You see, truth is, when we’d ripped the house apart we found nothing. The only place left was the attic. There weren’t too many volunteers. There were noises, you see, and we all got to remembering how he’d looked, and Molly, and the kids … put it this way, no one was boiling their water to get up there. But Hector did. Halfway up he stopped, glared and called us all—”
~
“—yellow bellied whores! Damn you all to Hell!” Then he was gone, disappearing through the little square of midnight at the top of the ladder.
The others waited, hardly daring to breathe because the place smelt so bad. Damp, rot, and cobwebs, the usual houseguests of neglect, had taken up permanent residence. It looked like no one had lived there since Manny Robbins died. Hector was taking his time. They hadn’t heard the heavy clump of his boots in quite a while. Should they go up? What if something had happened to him up there in the dark? What if Baird … but there he was, climbing stiffly down, his face gaunt and pale.
“Well,” asked Artie, “was he up there?”
“No,” said Hector. “Just rats and pigeons. He’s long gone.” He surveyed the ruins of the house. “If he was ever here at all.”
~
Hector pulled the baseball cap further down over his eyes, and watched the woman play catch with her daughter. She was a fine woman, full of zest, full of life; nothing like the broken creatures left here. As he watched them, he opened and closed his fists, the leather of his gloves crackling, crackling. Crackling like Baird’s breath when he found him in the attic.
He had been lying in the corner, white suit luminous in the murk. He had seen what Baird really was, or rather the thing that had used Baird’s body, and now outgrown it, really was. When it surged toward him and entered his eyes, when it washed over his very soul, he had welcomed it.
Soon, he would be strong enough to leave here. The little girl would see to that. He would find another small town where he could feast unhindered.
He was so hungry.
In the morning, the girl would be dead, as would the part of Hector that would mourn her passing. Her parents would die, too, a little at a time, a withering of sorts that would take years.
The ball bounced before him and came to rest at his feet. The girl looked up, a question in her eyes. Hector took off his sleek black gloves and picked it up. It looked ungainly in his white, porcelain hands. He gave it to the little girl and patted her on the forehead.
“Say thank you,” he said.
Goldilocks Zone
Gary W. Olson
In the moment the stars vanished, Amita Prasad was neither sober nor drunk.
She could walk—carefully—and felt only a little nauseous. When the wave rushed through everything she could see, and then through her, she wondered if she’d more to drink than she thought. Then she realized the stars were gone.
What was left was a silvery haze that was not quite night, catching the rising light from downtown Detroit. Amita could not focus on what the change meant. She sat down hard on the curb in front of the nightclub. It was a warm summer night on Woodward Avenue, and she did not care what those walking and driving by thought. She tried to focus on the stars she knew had to be there.
“Amita!” someone called. “There you ... Amita!”
She saw Craig Marston threading his way through the crowd smoking outside the club. For a moment, she thought him as buzzed as she was, but decided he couldn’t be. She hadn’t seen him drink anything, even while telling her he was abandoning their partnership for a job in New York—the partnership that, only a year ago, he had convinced her to pour her savings into.
“M’okay,” Amita told him. “Called a cab.” She could imagine how she looked to him. Her black dress was her favorite for how it made the most of her underwhelming curves. Her shoulder-length black hair was a mess, and the tears from her eyes made her dark brown cheeks glisten. “A beautiful heap of miserable,” as her mother used to say.
Craig nearly tumbled to the curb, righting himself at the last moment. His short brown hair was disheveled and his glasses were missing, but otherwise he seemed impeccable in his all-black suit jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His left hand folded over her smaller right, just above her knee. The touch made her think of how he’d tried to make their partnership personal, and how only an hour ago, he had intimated the possibility of turning down New York if she would reconsider her rejection of him. He hadn’t been happy when she told him she preferred bankruptcy.
“Something happened,” he said, with a note of unease. “When I was coming out of the club ... it felt like being ... it felt like a wave.”
“I thought I was the only one of us with sorrows to drown,” Amita said, unwilling to admit she’d felt the same thing. “Why don’t you—”
“It’s not just me,” Craig protested. “Look.”
He gestured to the club. A blond man in an oversized baseball jersey was on his knees by the door, staring up. Two women in expensive-looking gold dresses helped another in a red dress having a seizure. The bouncer at the door looked ready to vomit.
“What ... what happened to the sky?” Craig asked, his voice now small and scared.
The stars were still gone and the gleaming haze was there, Amita saw, but what was beyond did not look as simple as darkness. Something twisted and rolled deep in that abyss. Amita’s chest grew tight.
“I—”
“Amitaaaa!”
She tumbled away from Craig’s sudden scream. He clutched at his head and yelled her name again. His body shook with intense spasms.
Adrenaline gave her the sharpness she needed to get to her feet. If her name was anywhere in what he bellowed next, it was lost in the flow of n
oise and pain. He writhed on the sidewalk, his eyes shut tight.
It wasn’t only Craig, she realized. The woman having a seizure was now clawing at her friends. From across the street, she heard more cries.
Craig’s groans stopped when he clamped his hands over his mouth. His body shook, and Amita heard several loud cracking sounds.
“Craig!” she yelled. “I’m going to call 9-1-1! Stay—”
The words died on her lips as Craig let his hands drop from his mouth, which was open in the shape of a scream. No sound came out. His mouth was filled with a massive eyeball.
Amita fell back onto the street. A car swerved to miss her, but she could not look away. Craig’s face grew red, as if he was gagging. More people screamed around them.
The visible parts of Craig’s eyes were all-white. What looked like tears streaked his cheeks, though the liquid was as white as his eyes. The black iris of the massive eye in his mouth expanded, then shifted to her. His teeth and gums came down without pulling his lips, clicking in a gross imitation of a blink.
“Ammmmmita,” he gurgled, though she could not see how he could still talk. “Ru...runnnnnn ... ”
Behind him, something sharp and black punctured one of the gold dress-wearing women. She screamed once before being silenced by the blood that choked her. Her companion shrieked and stumbled before another black lance sliced her throat.
The confusion of the people in the street shot into panic. Through the running forms, Amita saw the seizure woman rise. The lances of her arms retracted, pulling her victims toward her. With a series of snapping sounds, her chest split, revealing a dark red cavity where there should have been organs. What had been ribs were now teeth. They dug into the women, shredding flesh and snapping bones.
“Ammmiiiiiitaaaaaaa!” Craig roared. She realized the voice was coming from his chest. His eye sockets were empty, his liquefied eyes streaking his cheeks. The one growing in his mouth was on the verge of breaking his jaw. Blood dripped from where it pushed against his teeth.
She moved back, trying to keep Craig, the transformed woman, and oncoming traffic in her field of vision. She knew what she saw was impossible, and there was no reason she should not be like the ones yelling and running, but a heavy numbness settled over her—something more than her drinking could account for.
It was then she realized her feet were no longer on the ground.
~
“Goldilocks … ”
“What?”
“Goldilocks zone. We come through the soft places.”
Amita heard the voice slur in her head. She could not give it a name, nor see its source. Everything now was empty —
“Goldilocks zone,” the voice repeated. The darkness parted, revealing three cartoon bears and a golden-haired girl. It was an image she had seen long ago in her niece’s children’s book—not that she, or anyone she knew, needed words for the story. The short version was that Goldilocks, the serial porridge-thief, nearly ended up getting a lot closer to the bears than she wanted. For all she knew, in the earliest versions, the bears succeeded in making a meal of her. What it had to do with whoever was talking to her, she had no idea.
“What are you?” she asked.
“We make the soft places,” the voice answered.
“What do you mean?” she demanded. From within her numb heart, anger erupted. “What the hell is all this?”
The voice did not answer. The cartoon image dissolved, swallowed by the darkness. She cast rage into the void, her words no longer comprehendible, even to herself.
~
The children standing over Amita Prasad had gray skin and sharp smiles. Their clothes seemed fused to their bodies. Amita felt pinned to the ground, though nothing was on her.
Seeing she was awake, two of the children hissed. A third, whom she guessed to be a girl because of the shirt that proclaimed her to be a Disney Princess, stayed quiet as she knelt over Amita. The other two knelt as well.
Up close, their eyes seemed loose and liquid, though they still moved as if they were in use. Their fingers were hard-shelled needles, red at the tips. Amita had a second to gasp before the one to her left—a boy in a blue and silver jersey—stabbed her, piercing her upper and lower lips and the gums beneath them.
Pain rippled through her, but it was dull and distant. Whatever numbness had settled before was still with her. The child’s anchored needles, spreading like scissor blades, opened her mouth wide.
The girl leaned close and opened her own mouth. Something warm filled Amita’s mouth, causing her to gag. The shirtless boy stumbled back and hissed as she thrashed. The jersey-wearing boy pulled his needle-fingers out, while the girl clapped her hand over Amita’s lips.
The meal tasted like rancid meat, though it had the consistency of a milkshake. Amita shuddered once, took a large gulp ... and was amazed as an ecstatic wave roared through her. She gulped again without conscious intent and the children were eclipsed by a pulse of light.
When it faded, Amita was on her feet and the children were on their backs, as if thrown by Amita’s sudden rise. They hissed as they rose, but didn’t seem angry. Their razor grins suggested otherwise.
Amita realized she was on a rooftop, though she had no idea where. The city was dark, lit only by the churning silver haze that replaced the night. She could just see the children, the far edge of the roof ... and something else that froze her where she stood.
Two feet above the cement, a corpse floated. At least, she hoped it was a corpse—its left leg was missing, and a good part of its belly had been ripped away. What had been a suit and tie were fused with its bloody skin. Most of its face had melted and run down its front. The girl leapt at it, her legs making popping sounds as they pushed off. She caught its remaining leg and bit into its thigh. The meat made no sound as it came off the bone.
Amita turned away, horrified at both the sight and her reaction. Instead of nausea, she felt a hunger, which stabbed through her lethargy, and nearly made her double over. She knew what the gray girl had fed her, and that it had been better than anything she had ever eaten before.
She ran to the edge of the building and peered into the dark city. Though there was no light, save the silver her eyes still adjusted to, she could see buildings, cars, and even people. They were all varying shades of gray and silver, like the children. Only their shadows gave them shape.
On her right, in the distance, she could see the Ambassador Bridge—the steel suspension bridge that spanned the Detroit River to connect the city to Windsor—filled with stalled traffic. Several cables dangled free, and the structure sagged in the middle. To her left, much closer, was the five-tower rosette of the Renaissance Center, dark and silent for the first time in her memory. Behind her, close to where she had been before she passed out, were Comerica Park and Ford Field, homes of two of the city’s sports franchises—and now, things far more bizarre.
A massive gray thing slithered over the wall of Comerica Park. It was not a tentacle, exactly, if only because its end was rounded and sprouted tentacles of its own. It pushed through the scoreboard, but where Amita expected the sound of breaking glass and steel, she heard only a wet tearing sound. Liquid poured down the back of the board as the grotesque being writhed.
Creatures swarmed the city, tearing into fleeing people and one another. A segmented tube with six eyes inched its way into the smaller building across the corner intersection—an art deco structure she recognized as the Penobscot Building, where she had once worked. On the street, ten stories below, a naked man with a ragged beard made thrusting motions with his crotch, shooting thick explosive projectiles into a glass and granite high-rise. Bloated cicada-like beasts swarmed the Greektown churches, shops, and the casino further away.
The monsters were people transformed in ways that defied logic and science. Those who changed first made meals of those who were tardy, and those who were strong crushed the weak.
There were exceptions, Amita reminded herself. The three little mons
ters around her, for some reason, decided she should be fed, instead of devoured.
Something struck her back, sending her over the edge. Arms and legs wrapped around her, and needle fingers pierced her legs and her belly. She heard the children gurgle with delight as they tore into her.
So much for benevolent monsters, she thought. Now that she was up, she was fair game.
They did not fall. To Amita, it felt like sailing through liquid, though it still seemed like air to her lungs. The jersey-wearing boy sank his teeth into her left breast. She screamed, more from surprise than from any sense of pain.
The back of the boy’s head burst open, as a wave of burning liquid shot out. She dimly realized her breast was the source, and wondered when she’d started lactating acid. To Amita’s revulsion, having the boy’s head blown out did not stop his chewing. She drove her fingers into his neck, and was surprised to feel his torso fall away from his head.
The other children pushed away from her, hissing as they floated off, as if they were the ones betrayed. She ripped the boy’s still-gnawing head free and held it up. His eyes were gone, but his mouth was open. His spiked tongue undulated.
Amita bit into his skull, sinking her teeth in where his right eye had been. What should have been bone was soft and delicious, and everything went white.
~
“We come through the soft places.”
The voice in the dark was back, stronger and clearer. She knew it was in her head but not much more.
“We make more soft places,” the voice continued. “We make them from the hard places. That is why, Goldilocks.”
“What does that mean?” Amita asked.
“Your word for it,” the voice answered. “Your ... story for it. Goldilocks ... zone. The hard places must be made soft, but there must be soft places to come through first.”
“Soft places?”
Anita wished she had not asked. She feared she knew the voice’s answer.