Skin Deep

by Alan Brennert

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” was playing on the jukebox, filling the Menagerie with its cool syncopation as the clock ticked toward two a.m. Trina, wending her way through tables carrying a tray of drinks, hated working the late shift. Most of the nats were long gone, leaving only the drunkest of jokers, and the drunkest were also the grabbiest—but none grabbier than a cephalopod. She felt a lithe tentacle trying to looping around her waist but managed to wriggle away from it even as she balanced her wobbling tray.

  “Bongo, please,” Trina said in exasperation, “stop kidding around?” ”

  Bongo K. was a skinny kid with reddish-brown skin, wearing dungarees and a gray sweatshirt with holes for his eight happy-go-lucky tentacles: one was holding a shot of Jim Beam, another was coiled around a bongo drum, and a third drummed in surprisingly good time with Brubeck’s horn. Bongo was usually rather shy, but after two drinks he became a bit frisky—and loquacious:

  “Baby, I dig you, that’s all,” he said imploringly. He used a fourth appendage to snap up some abandoned flowers from a nearby table and waved the bouquet in Trina’s face, forcing her to stop in her tracks. “J ust listen to this poem I’ve written in testament to your ever-loving beauty—”

  Beauty? Trina wanted to puke. She didn’t know which she hated more: men who were repulsed by her face, or those who found such deformities arousing. She pushed aside the flowers, her exasperation flaring into anger.

  “Doug!” she called . “A little help here?”

  Doug was the club bouncer. Sprawled on the floor next to the bar, he resembled the top half of a giant jellyfish; unlike Bongo he had no tentacles but a compensatory telekinesis that he was using to scoop beer nuts off the bar and pop them into the orifice that passed for his mouth.

  >Gotcha!<

  Bongo started to object: “Hey, cool it, man, I—”

  Doug wrested Bongo’s tentacle from around Trina’s waist using invisible tendrils of his own. He forced Bongo to put down his Jim Beam gently on the table but let him keep his hold on the bongo drum. Then, as if it had been yanked aloft by a winch, Bongo’s whole body was jerked up into the air with his tentacles pinned against his body, hovering like a helicopter without rotors.

  The chromatophores below the surface of Bongo’s skin turned him literally white with fear. “Aw, man—”

  >I’ll take him home, Trina. Almost quitting time anyway.<

  “Thanks, Doug.”

  >Later.<

  Doug floated up off the floor and toward the door, with Bongo trailing him like a tethered balloon. Trina went to the door and watched them head up the boardwalk to the building that was once the warehouse and loading dock for Santa Monica Seafood but was now a hotel for most of Los Angeles’ amphibious jokers, with easy access to the ocean and to refrigerator units for those tenants sensitive to heat.

  In minutes Trina was off duty herself and outside taking a deep breath of the cool, briny air. It was a beautiful summer night, a full moon floating above the Santa Monica Pier. The food and amusement concessions were all closed, deserted except for the carousel, where one or two desperate joker hookers straddled wooden horses, smoking cigarettes as they waited forlornly for johns. A pair of masked jokers—one wearing a royal-purple cloak and hood, the other a cheap plastic likeness of Marilyn Monroe—staggered tipsily past the merry-go-round, giggling and pawing at each other as they headed, presumably, to one or the other’s accommodations.

  During the day Trina sometimes wore a mask herself to hide her face from tourists, but at this hour of the morning the tourists were long gone. Rather than returning to her apartment above the carousel, Trina climbed down a side ladder, onto the sand. Under the pier, she kicked off the three-inch heels the manager made the girls wear along with her tacky cocktail dress. Beneath it she wore her swimsuit; excitedly she padded out from under the wooden crossbeams and pylons that supported the pier and onto the beach. It was empty this time of night and the rippling moonlight beckoned from across Santa Monica Bay. Here there were no nat eyes to gape at her misshapen face in horror or laughter; no screams from children too young to understand what the wild card virus had done to her.

  She dove into the water and immediately felt calmer, at ease. She swam toward the distant moon, then flipped onto her back, floating on the night tide. Here she was a child again at play, or a teenager swimming out to meet her boyfriend Woody—after fourteen years his tanned face, bright blue eyes, and blond crewcut still tender in her memory—as he straddled his surfboard waiting for the next set of waves, smiling at her as she swam toward him. He kissed her as she swam up, running his hand along the side of her swimsuit, giving her gooseflesh.

  She could barely remember what a kiss felt like.

  She swam for the better part of an hour, until, exhausted but happy, she returned to the beach. She retrieved her shoes and clothes, scrambled up the ladder, and headed for the Hippodrome, the castle-like building that housed the carousel. The old Looff Hippodrome dated back to 1916 and was an architectural goulash of Byzantine arches, Moorish windows, and Spanish Colonial turrets, all painted a bright mustard yellow. Trina hurried inside a side door, up two flights of rickety stairs, through narrow corridors to one of the seven small apartments above the merry-go-round.

  She opened the door to find her cat, Ace, waiting. He greeted her with a familiar miaow that Trina knew meant both “Where have you been?” and “Feed me!” She went to the kitchen, opened a can of Puss’n Boots, and smiled as he attacked the food. Then she went into the bathroom to take a shower. The room was the same as it was when she moved here fourteen years ago, except for the vanity mirror, which she had taken down soon after moving in.

  It was an airy, one-bedroom apartment, and the living room—inside one of the building’s turrets—enjoyed a view of the surf lapping at the beach. She ate a sandwich as Ace finished his dinner, then sat down on the divan next to the windows. Ace jumped into her lap, purring as she stroked his orange fur. She gazed out at the waves rolling to shore, their white crests iridescent in the moonlight, and at the beautiful but forbidden lights of Santa Monica. She was born and raised in this city but was now virtually an exile from it, like a blemished princess hidden away in a high castle.

  Trina picked up her subscription copy of Time magazine and grimaced at the lead story about Richard Nixon securing the Republican nomination for president. She didn’t know much about his opponent, Kennedy, but she remembered Nixon’s venal attacks—as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee—on the legendary Four Aces, heroes whose lives and reputations were casually destroyed by HUAC. Trina was willing to don a mask and walk over hot coals, if necessary, to the polls, in order to cast a vote against Nixo
n.

  The other news story that caught her interest told of how the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina—the subject of sit-down protests for the first five months of 1960—had finally capitulated and would allow Negroes to join white patrons at its lunch counter. She was happy for their victory but despaired of any similar civil rights movement for jokers.

  Ace rubbed his head against Trina’s chest and purred.

  Tears filled her eyes—her human eyes, one of the few human features remaining in her face. Why couldn’t people be more like cats, who didn’t care what you looked like as long as you were kind to them?

  When she finally went to bed, Ace curled up against her hip, the two of them sharing each other’s warmth as they slept.

  * * *

  Prior to September 15, 1946, Trina Nelson’s world was a quietly ordinary, if privileged, one. She was a pretty, popular sixteen-year-old who lived in a ranch-style home on Ashland Avenue in Santa Monica; was an A student at Santa Monica High School (known as “Samohi” to students and faculty alike) and a cheerleader for the school football team, the Mighty B’s, on which her boyfriend, Woody, played as a halfback. The war was over and no one Trina knew had been killed in combat. Life was good, and everyone was expecting it to get even better.

  But on September 15, Trina’s world expanded explosively to include a cosmos of horrors darker than her worst nightmares, delivered to the Nelson home by the big RCA console radio in the living room. Trina and her parents, Harry and Karen Nelson, listened in astonishment to the news bulletins of a battle raging above Manhattan between Jetboy and someone in a weird blimp-like airship that was said to be carrying an atomic bomb. But when the airship blew up, no mushroom cloud blossomed over Manhattan, and briefly there was celebration that Jetboy had saved the city (though tragically died in the effort).

  “Oh God, no.” Trina had Jetboy’s picture, from Life magazine, taped up on her wall alongside one of Frank Sinatra.

  Then came the other deaths. Massive, widespread deaths radiating like shock waves across the city and the whole Northeast.

  And not just ordinary deaths. People were dying in the most horrifying ways, ways never before seen on Earth. They burst into flame and were incinerated instantly. They dissolved into puddles of protoplasm or died screaming as blood poured from every cavity in their bodies. It sounded so outlandish that Trina’s father doubted at first that it was really happening—thought it a hoax, like Orson Welles’s invasion from Mars. But it was on every channel: CBS, NBC, Mutual, ABC.

  And then the news that we had been invaded, not from Mars but definitely from outer space, and what had been released over Manhattan was some kind of alien germ that was killing thousands of people—and even worse, transforming others into monsters.

  Chaos erupted in New York and all that people on the West Coast could do was listen helplessly, disbelievingly.

  “This is impossible,” Harry said. “Things like this just don’t happen.”

  “All those people,” Karen said softly. “Those poor people…”

  Soon there were scientists on the news talking about this virus—they called it the “wild card” virus—and how it had likely been swept up into the jet stream and was by now on its way eastward, across the Atlantic. They could not rule out the possibility that some of the viral particles might circle the earth on winds of up to 250 miles an hour, eventually arriving on the West Coast in perhaps three or four days.

  That was all it took to spark panic and chaos up and down the coast. In Los Angeles there was a run on grocery stores as people bought up, then stole, food against the coming apocalypse. Military surplus stores were quickly stripped of their supplies of gas masks. Fires and looting broke out across the city. Doomsayers and kooky cultists—of which L.A. had a ready supply chain—declared that the end was nigh, and it was the doing of either God or fugitive Nazis planning a comeback.

  Some families piled their belongings into station wagons, slapped a MOVED sign on their houses, and headed south for Mexico—with no guarantee the virus wouldn’t find its way there too. Others flooded into air raid shelters or began duct-taping shut the doors and windows of their homes so that the virus could not get in. Trina’s family was one of the latter: she helped her parents tape the smallest crack in the house even as she wondered whether they would die of suffocation before the virus could even get to them.

  And then all that was to be done—was to wait.

  One, two, three days of waiting for the end of the world, or something like it, to arrive. Listening to reports of the virus infecting the passengers and crew of the ocean liner Queen Mary in the mid-Atlantic, turning it into a literal death ship. Then sporadic reports of outbreaks in Europe—followed by a day’s silence that raised Trina’s hopes that perhaps the virus had blown out to sea, might never arrive here…

  Until, on the fourth day, the sirens began screaming.

  Air raid sirens, police sirens, fire and ambulance sirens … a rising chorus of wails both near and far.

  Her parents were upstairs; Trina ran to the living room window and pulled back the drape to look outside. Ashland Avenue was deserted and peaceful, at odds with the blare of sirens in the distance. But within moments she could hear people screaming up the block, and as Trina looked up the street, she saw what they were screaming at.

  Running down the street was a coal-black wolf—but it was enormous. At least ten feet long by four feet high, with legs longer than Trina’s arms. And yet that was not its most salient characteristic.

  The wolf had two heads.

  Two identical heads, both with wide jaws open to expose long razor-sharp teeth … and it was howling. Not a snarl of aggression but a howl of confusion, of pain, as if it was trying to communicate with anyone who could hear it—

  A police car, siren blaring, came speeding down the street and screeched to a halt only about ten feet away from the wolf, which came to a sudden stop. SMPD officers jumped out of the car, weapons drawn.

  The wolf seemed to understand. It did not advance on the car.

  Trina’s heart pounded in her chest, but she couldn’t look away.

  Now a second police cruiser careened around the corner of Ashland and 21st Street and stopped on the other side of the creature. Two officers burst out of the car and leveled rifles at the beast.

  The wolf’s two heads took in both cars at the same time, and Trina was certain she saw an almost human fear and helplessness in its eyes.

  It howled, crying out in terrible knowledge of its own fate.

  The police fired. Dozens of rounds of bullets ripped into the wolf, blood spouting from its wounds; the animal staggered, fell to the ground.

  Tears filled Trina’s eyes as she listened to the creature’s death howl.

  “No! No!”

  A woman came screaming up the street, running toward the fallen animal, then collapsed at its side. With no fear she put her arms as far around the wolf’s torso as she could, and Trina heard her sob:

  “Henry…Henry…”

  Trina’s heart seemed to stop as she took in the words and what they implied. The woman’s tears fell on the soft fur of the wolf’s body.

  By now Trina’s parents had come pounding down the stairs and were standing in the vestibule.

  “Trina, get away from the window!” her father shouted.

  Trina closed the drape. She couldn’t bear to look anymore.

  Then, behind her, her mother screamed.

  Trina turned—and was horrified to see that her mother’s arms were dissolving into some kind of blue vapor.

  “Karen!” Harry cried in horror. “Jesus Christ!”

  “Mom!” Trina ran across the living room toward her.

  It only took seconds for Karen’s arms to dissipate into plumes of blue mist, and then her feet and legs began to evaporate. With nothing but smoke to support them, her head and torso fell to the floor.

  No, no, Trina thought, this can’t be, it isn’t real! She and her father fell to
their knees beside what remained of Karen’s body.

  “Karen! Honey!” Harry grabbed onto his wife’s torso as if to halt the spread of whatever was consuming her. Through tears he said, “Hon—”

  As her torso was dissolving into wisps, Karen had only seconds to look at her family and gasp, “Harry … Trina…love you both … so mu—”

  The last of her dissolved before she could finish—leaving only a blue mist behind.

  Trina was in shock. Harry sobbed helplessly, taking in deep breaths of the blue vapor, all that was left of his wife of twenty-two years.

  Harry started coughing … then choking.

  His hands went to his throat as he struggled to take in air.

  “Daddy, no! No!” Trina screamed, slapping him on the back as if he had something caught in his esophagus. But it was no use. The blue toxin that was once his wife was poisoning him, and in seconds he collapsed. He was no longer breathing.

  Unlike what it had done to his wife, the wild card virus had not vaporized him, but had killed him just as quickly.

  “Mama … Daddy…” Trina held on to her father’s limp hand and sobbed, weeping and calling out for the parents she loved. This isn’t happening, please God, let me wake up, please God please!

  She wept unconsolably for fifteen minutes, torn between grief and disbelief … until, unable to bear the sight of her father’s body or the absence of her vanished mother, she stripped off the duct-taping around the front door, flung it open, and ran out.

  She ran to the home of their next-door neighbors. Emma and Lou Boylan, both in their fifties, were standing on their lawn (as were other neighbors) gaping at the dead two-headed monster in the street being loaded into a police truck.

  Trina embraced Emma and wailed, “They’re gone! Mom and Dad—Mom is gone, there’s nothing left, and Dad—Daddy—”

  Emma enfolded Trina in her arms. “Oh Lord, Trina, what—”

  “They’re gone. They’re dead!” And she broke down sobbing again.