Eat'em

by Chase Webster

  Every person that walked by was another of Kempter’s mice. My mind went wild with the thought of them turning to me, revealing their darkened eyes, judging me for what I had done to disrupt their unit, whatever it should be called. Family. Cult. Colony. I pictured them as fire ants and I kicked their pile.

  Val said he wasn’t going to school, and I figured he’d have been by to pick me up already, but still I waited for his Mustang to round the corner into the school’s parking lot.

  “What is this?” a notebook slapped against my lap. My notebook. My sketchpad. Dixie stood at the other end, pointing down at a picture I drew during our philosophy class.

  The picture was of Dixie sitting on her bed and myself with my arms flung wildly over my head. Dixie’s finger pushed down on the pad, extended in the direction of a little character I’d drawn on the floor, looking up at me with large sorrowful eyes. It was Eat’em.

  “What is this?” she said again, not a hint of emotion in her cadence. “This thing right here. You drew it. I want to know what it is.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, snatching the book from her, closing it and shoving it into my bag.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing. It definitely didn’t sound like nothing. So what is it? Some sort of gremlin?”

  “I am not a gremlin,” Eat’em screeched. He climbed my pant leg and stood at the edge of the bench where I waited for Val’s car. He pointed to her with a long bent finger and said, “You can’t feed a gremlin after midnight! You can feed me anytime you want to, yes. Tell her, Jacob!”

  “This thing,” Dixie said. “This is what you were yelling at. What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Look, it’s no big deal, okay.”

  “Not a big deal?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s a metaphor.”

  “I’m not a metaphor!” Eat’em said. “I hate you both!”

  “This is not a metaphor,” Dixie reached for my bag, but I pulled it away and tucked it behind myself. She jabbed me in the chest. “You weren’t yelling at a metaphor. What were you yelling at? Tell me. I deserve to know.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said, “myself. I was yelling at myself.”

  “For what?”

  “For, I don’t know. For not kissing you back.”

  “Oh that’s just adorable,” she didn’t sound like she meant it. Whatever word she substituted with adorable was probably four letters and rarely uttered by nuns. “Scoot over.”

  I made room and Dixie sat beside me, forcing the demon onto my lap.

  “I kept your secret, didn’t I?” Dixie said. “Even from your uncle, by the way, who’s quite the little interrogator, you know? I think I deserve to know what’s in your little drawing.”

  “No,” I said, “no, no, no. I’m getting a little tired of everyone asking me questions all the time.”

  “Can we get donuts?” Eat’em asked, pointing across the parking lot to a bakery that just lit up with a sign reading Hot Donuts Now!

  “No!” I yelled at Eat’em.

  “See!?” Dixie said, “What was that?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Nothing? You just yelled at your pants. What’s on there?” She swiped her hand over my jeans and Eat’em rolled to the side, letting out a “What the? Hey!”

  At the risk of Dixie’s frisking, I stood and stepped away from her, keeping myself between her and the demon.

  “Why are you afraid of me?” she asked. “You told me you were involved with a murder that’s all over the news, and did I go to the cops? No… No I didn’t. And when Valentine grilled me did I tell him? No.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Why haven’t you? Because you like me? What happens when you don’t anymore?”

  “What?” she shoved me. “Because I like you? And when did you become so full of yourself? What happened to Mr. Humble? Mr. Uninteresting?”

  “He’s still uninteresting,” Eat’em said, keeping cover.

  “For your information,” Dixie continued, “my not telling anyone has nothing to do with whether I like you, which I don’t know why you would still think I even do after you stormed off on me and haven’t spoken to me in weeks.”

  “What then?” I asked.

  “Well, stupid, let me think about it for a second. Maybe it’s because I believe you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “Look, honey, why shouldn’t I believe you? It’s not like you’re the only one in the world who’s seen weird things.”

  “And what have you seen?” I asked.

  “I saw a grown man breakup with an invisible gremlin once,” she said.

  “He’s not a gremlin.” My cheeks burned bright with embarrassment. I wanted to reach out and grab my words, put them back into my mouth and swallow them forever.

  I sighed and took a seat once again on the bench. Dixie sat beside me, closer now, and said, “Then what is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Eat’em climbed onto my lap and extended his hand in the international gesture for a handshake. “I’m an Eat’em, yes!”

  “He’s a demon, maybe,” I said begrudgingly. “His name is Eat’em. He’s been with me as long as I can remember.”

  “A demon?” Dixie asked dryly.

  “Yeah, but not an evil one,” I said.

  “Of course not.”

  Eat’em cleared his throat and thrust his hand out further.

  “He wants to shake your hand,” I said. I felt stupid. Like I was introducing my imaginary friend to my crush.

  “Of course he does,” she said, “where is he?”

  “He’s standing on my leg.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Eat’em,” she said reaching out, greeting the air like a lunatic, pretending to shake with the demon four inches from her hand. “I’m Dixie.”

  Eat’em grabbed hold of her pinky. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Oh my god,” Dixie’s face turned pale beneath her heavy rouge. “He’s really real.”

  Chapter 34

  “You’re an idiot,” Val stormed through the living room like a hurricane. He ran his hand through his copper hair, further devastating its already hacked appearance, then he grabbed a glass from the coffee table and threw it into the wall.

  “Whoa!” I said.

  “No, don’t you whoa me! You’re a damned fool. Why would you tell her? Of all the stupid things you could possibly do. Why in the world would you tell her?”

  “I’m sitting right here, you know.”

  Dixie and I were sitting at the dining table. She sat in Val’s chair and I sat in my usual. We were on forced timeout. After working his magic in Trevor’s apartment he finally came to pick me up a couple hours behind schedule. I invited Dixie over for dinner and figured I’d let Valentine know what I told her. All except for the demon, which I still hadn’t gotten around to letting Val in on. He listened calmly for what it was worth, but the moment it was his turn to speak he turned into Mt. Vesuvius.

  “I see you are,” Val said, “Whoopdy freakin’ doo! Maybe you can be a good girlfriend and tell my nephew here what an imbecile he is. Oh, that’s right, because you encourage his maniacal behavior. Yippee freakin’ dee!”

  “Whoopdy dee!” Eat’em shouted gleefully. He’d found a new perch on Dixie. I was still mind blown it didn’t bother her. He must have felt like a poltergeist. I’d never seen him warm up to someone else. Truth be told, I never let him.

  “What,” Dixie said, “and you don’t?”

  “Absolutely not,” Val attempted to strangle her using some Jedi force trick and then returned to stomping around the small room. “No! If someone you care about starts killing people you don’t tell him to keep doing it.”

  “That’s a little obtuse coming from the person who just cleaned up after him.”

  “Oh ho ho,” Val said. “Look at the bi
g vocabulary on her, would you? I bet she knows other words too. How about informant? Huh? Or snitch? How about that one?”

  “Shut up,” she said. She squeezed my hand. “Is he always like this?”

  I shook my head. “Only when I’ve been killing people.”

  “Great, Jake-tard,” Val said. “Just great. Nothing like a little levity to warm you up for the standup routines you’ll be doing on death row. Do you have any idea how stupid you are? Any at all? I hope you plan on freakin’ marrying this girl because she’s a one way ticket to a gas chamber if you don’t.”

  “You’re being absurd,” Dixie said.

  “Am I? Am I? Because, what? I’m smart enough to think of shit doughy eyes don’t?”

  “No,” she said, “he did think about it. He asked me the same stupid questions you did.”

  “And it’s not like I wanted to tell either of you,” I said.

  “But you did,” Val said, “because you’re an idiot.”

  Val plopped down on the couch, propping his legs up on the coffee table and burying his head in his arms. He mumbled almost inaudibly, “I’m going to jail.”

  “So that’s the problem,” Dixie stood from the dunce table. “You’re selfish.”

  “Selfish?” Val stood. For a moment they’re in one another’s faces and I can feel my leg twitch as I hold myself from joining in the fray. Val’s words come out in splashes of saliva, which Dixie does nothing to avoid. “Do you have any idea what I did for that little bastard today? Selfish!?”

  “Yeah, selfish!” she spit back.

  “Since when is self-preservation selfish? Furthermore, since when is protecting my nephew selfish?”

  “It is if the rest of us depend on him!”

  “Depend on him for what?”

  “For fighting these things. For… I don’t know… postponing the apocalypse or something.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Val scoffed. “Oh, okay, yeah, well, how about, you know what… Screw you! Screw you both! Jacob, I hope you’re happy with her because this chick is going to turn you into a little Charles Manson.”

  “Quit belittling him!”

  “Who?” Val pointed at me as he veered toward his room, pausing at the door. “Wicker Man Jake-Nasty? Him? Maybe he needs belittling. Did he ever tell you where those gnarly looking scars came from?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “I figured you would have seen them already,” Val said. “Know this—Jacob got them the first time he tried to play vigilante. See how that turned out for him. He lost his mom and dad and almost lost his own life. And Jacob couldn’t remember anything but his mom’s face and that the room seemed to breakdown into trillions of magical little particles. That’s what happens to vigilantes. Eventually they die. I hope for your sake he doesn’t take the rest of us down with him.”

  Val glanced toward me before finishing. His eyes filled with something too heart sickening to be rage and too wrathful to be sorrow.

  Val shut the door on us, closing himself off in his room.

  Dixie yelled behind him, “And what about what you saw?”

  Muffled but still clear enough for the words to resonate, Val answered back. “I saw a blind man who wasn’t ready to die.”

  Chapter 35

  With what little I learned from Professor Kempter and what I learned for myself over the following months, my vision became ever clearer, yet remained agonizingly convoluted. My tormentor was a microscopic bug, an infection capable of spreading the experiences of one person to another without need of passing it down either genetically or through any amount of time required to learn. Confined to one body, instead of many, I only had one set of experiences to work from. And from what I could tell, I wasn’t up against a group of monsters. They were more akin to super powered cultists. They contained the singular belief that people don’t have a right to their own lives.

  Making matters all the more unsettling, in death their progeny did become monsters. I saw it first hand with the curly-haired roommate of Trevor Schrekengost. Or what had been Trevor Schrekengost. The only way for me to come to terms with my actions since first running into Louise Parsons in the planetarium restroom was to acknowledge that the three people I killed weren’t the three people they were supposed to be. They were doppelgangers of real people. Like the film They Live! they were merely shells of who they once were. They were harbingers of something dark and evil. And with the possibility of creating an army of feral cannibals by killing whatever infected individual loomed at the top of their peculiar food chain, it was too much a risk to kill’em all guns blazing.

  Reality seemed grim and strangely oblique. At no fault of my own I became aware of something that might just be the end of humanity. Or at best the upheaval of uniqueness. I wasn’t privy to the concept of a soul, as to whether one existed or if human cognizance came from a physical part of the brain, but I knew whether mind or spirit, the infection replaced it with something else altogether.

  Val knew it too now. He didn’t want to admit it but he knew as well as I did what he saw, and when Dixie left for the evening he finally came out of his room and told me. He even went as far as to offer his help the moment I was over my head. Which, of course, was a moment that already came to pass.

  I told him I needed to start from the ground up. Work at the bottom of the chain and make my way toward the top. If I only struck the most recently infected I wouldn’t have to worry about causing an outbreak of something much worse. I needed to avoid ‘breaking the chain’ as Kempter had described it.

  Parsons was the first I’d come into contact with. Schrek came a few weeks after. Before then the only thing I had to worry about was feeding an insatiable demon and appeasing my uncle’s education requirements. If the parasite was in its infancy, I guessed there must have still been dozens out there, and counting. The longer I waited, the more there would be. Dixie hypothesized there might be hundreds if not more… possibly countless. Val insisted I consider having already done my part, though I knew he couldn’t believe that. And, needless to say, Eat’em said he could hardly tell the difference between one of us and one of them anyway, so we might as well embrace our new Grotesque overlords.

  And that’s how we came to start calling them Grotesques. It caught on with Dixie and Val. And before long we started getting together and imagining how I would go about saving the world.

  They’d ask me how they could determine for themselves whether someone was infected. But I had no idea myself. The two I’d seen for sure had large pupils, inhumanly large, but they didn’t stay that way. There were definitely moments that their eyes retained their normal shape and coloration. They looked dull, without reflection, as if they absorbed all the surrounding light, but to get close enough to see that would put them at risk. I’d only ever seen the two… there wasn’t much telling whether that was a trait in all of them. Other similarities were in the irregular pulse beneath their skin. As if their blood flowed faster and harder than what would be considered normal. Again, the only way to notice such a thing would be to get up close to someone. I tended to see things from afar that most couldn’t see if held directly in front of their face. My stellar eyesight wasn’t constant, but at least it seemed to work when I needed it to.

  I suggested they stay away from people that can jump across buildings and run as fast as a wildcat. To this Val said, “Great, I tend to do that already.”

  We started to have regular meetings where we would discuss the infection. None of us had any idea how long the infection had been around or where it had originated. There was no way to know how many Grotesques could be out roaming around. So we began the exercise by observing. Throughout our daily lives we would people-watch. Try to notice strange behavior. They would bring me lists of people they thought might be infected based on the symptoms I had discussed with them. Sometimes they were correct, sometimes it was just a strange soul that while not infected probably presented a threat to someone. We began trying to piece together a hierarch
y based on how the people were connected. Some of them were easy, it made sense that Trevor had been infected by the gas station manager. Parsons was a little harder to figure out. Eventually we were able to track his infector to an ex-girlfriend. This took a combination of questioning acquaintances and using social networking websites to put the pieces together. Once we were confident that we had the hierarchy correct, I would act. Finding new and creative ways to rid the world of another parasite-ridden host.

  The troublesome part was that it was much easier to climb up the hierarchy to discover who infected a particular target than it was to know how many others that person may have also infected. For instance, it was easy to figure out that the gas station manager had infected Trevor, but it was difficult to know how many others the gas station manager might have infected. Through due diligence, in most cases we were able to track down each existing branch from the infected. However, occasionally mistakes were made. It would usually turn up in the news several days later. Another ‘zombie-attack’ would show up and the police would inadvertently clean up my loose ends. I justified it as collateral damage in my attempt to save many more innocents. And so we did our best to postpone the apocalypse.

  Chapter 36

  Lieutenant Bellecroix bites at the bristles hanging from his upper lip. The nature of court is redundant; they’ve asked him the same series of questions over and over, varying from script just enough to drive one as mad as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

  Bellecroix takes to the cameras like a dying man takes to chemo. His anxious hair pulling, mustache eating and nail biting would make him bald, bare and nubby in a matter of days. He chews on his lip as Gomes questions him.

  “Describe what you saw when you walked into the home of Trevor Schrekengost.”

  “No victims were present, of course,” Bellecroix says. “We had a missing persons report, same kid who picked a fight with Mr. Brook. ‘Course we don’t know that yet either. All we know is some convenience store clerk ain’t showed up for a couple weeks and suddenly he ain’t paid his rent. So a couple our boys showed up to investigate and called in that the apartment smelled an awful lot like a morgue met a zoo. And by the time I get there that’s what it looks like, too. Animals are all over the place. Squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, a fat little coyote, a few possums, cats, birds, some snakes, frogs and flies. Some of them are alive. Most are dead. As you can imagine, at first the food chain worked its magic, then starvation began to take the remainder.