Dweller

by Jeff Strand

  “What did they do with the bodies?”

  “Underground bunker. They studied them for a while but couldn’t figure out what the hell they were, so they froze the bodies until the technology could improve. They’re still there.”

  Toby laughed. “You’re a numbfuck. You’re telling me that in 2005 we can’t do an autopsy on a dead animal and figure out what it is? Your whole story is crap.”

  The man shrugged. “Hell, for all I know, they’ve already cloned thousands of ‘em and they’re gonna take over the planet. Not all information on the World Wide Web is reliable. But I’m just saying, it’s a big forest. One of those creatures could have escaped and hid out all this time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d love to see one.”

  “I bet you would.”

  “Come on, man, you can’t hold out. You’ve gotta share the wealth. I wanna see Aaron.”

  “It’s not Aaron, it’s Owen.”

  “You got a picture?”

  Toby took another drink of beer, swished it around in his mouth, then swallowed. “How do I know you’re not from that government unit?”

  “Man, if I were from a government unit like that, I’d be gettin’ some pussy right now, not talking monsters in a crap-smelling pit like this, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know where you’d find any soldier-killing supermonster. Good luck on the pussy, though.”

  “Man, I will blow every whistle I’ve got if you keep being selfish like this. I’ll have the Men in Black scouring those woods for your friend. Next time you see me, I’ll be on the front page of a Cryptozoology Today, grinning like a son of a bitch.”

  “I’m a drunken moron. Why would you believe me even if I said I did have a monster buddy?”

  “Because you’re still drunk, and now you’re denying it. And I’m drunk, too.”

  “Fuck it. Buy me a beer for the road and we’ll go.”

  The man never offered his name during the drive to Toby’s house, and Toby didn’t ask. Better that Toby didn’t know—it would make it easier to deal with the guilt when the man disappeared forever. Everything but his bones.

  Toby had done a lot of irresponsible things, but before now he’d managed to avoid driving while intoxicated. One more to add to the list, he supposed.

  What did the man think, he could threaten to expose Owen’s presence to the world and not die tonight? The vagrant probably wouldn’t make good on his threat; if anything, he’d spend the evening passed out in a gutter and forget he’d ever seen Toby by sunrise. But Toby wasn’t taking that chance. He had too much invested in his friendship to let this pathetic hippie scumbag mess with it.

  The man decided to start singing as they walked through the woods, which made his upcoming death even more essential.

  “You need to shut up,” said Toby.

  “Sing with me!”

  “You’ll scare him away.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I might.” The man stopped singing. “Did I tell you about when I went to Scotland?”

  “No.”

  “Went to Scotland just to go to Loch Ness. Well, that wasn’t the whole reason, I had relatives, but that was the selling point. Spent a week out there, staring at the water. Just wanted to see Nessie.”

  “Did you?”

  The man shook his head. “They say it’s fake. A lot of scientists and other people say it’s a hoax, and even the guy who shot that one movie said it wasn’t real. Why would you say that? Even if you could prove it was a fake, why would you take it away from people like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I spent seven days sitting there, watching the water. Never saw any hint of the Loch Ness Monster. But I bet he was down there the whole time, watching me. Best vacation of my life.”

  He resumed singing as they walked through the woods.

  They stood outside the shack. Toby shone the flashlight on the door.

  “Is he in there?” the man asked.

  “He might be. Hey, Owen, I’ve got somebody for you to meet!”

  The door opened, and Owen emerged. The monster rubbed his eyes sleepily, then frowned as he noticed the man standing next to Toby.

  The man stared at Owen in pure wonder, lips trembling. “He’s real,” he whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t believe I’m standing here seeing this.”

  Owen stepped out of the shack. Friend?

  “No,” said Toby. “He’s not.”

  “He’s not what?” asked the man.

  Toby ignored the question. “Do you want to touch him?”

  Twenty years seemed to vanish from the man’s face. “Yes!”

  The man apparently had no fear as they walked over to Owen. Maybe he wanted this to be his last moment. Or maybe he was just too drunk to realize the danger.

  Owen stood there, motionless, as the man ran his fingers down his chest, a tear trickling down his cheek.

  Toby grabbed the man by the back of his shirt collar and shoved him to the ground. Then he kicked him in the spine. “Kill him, Owen! Hurry!”

  Owen continued to stand there. The monster looked surprised and upset.

  “Do it, Owen! He’ll tell everybody! Rip him apart!”

  The man cried out and tried to get back up, but Toby tackled him and held him down. He grabbed a handful of hair and slammed his face against the dirt.

  “Owen, come on!”

  No.

  “This is food! I’m giving you food! For fuck’s sake, Owen, do something before he gets away!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” the man wailed.

  Toby slammed his face into the dirt again. “Eat him, goddamn it! He’s gonna tell the world!”

  “I’m not! I swear!”

  Toby twisted the man’s arm behind his back until something snapped. The man screamed in pain. He deserved it. He was going to destroy everything.

  “Owen, please!”

  The monster let out a roar and lashed out with his right claw. A large piece of the man’s bloody scalp remained stuck to one of his talons as he did it again. The man’s scream became much higher pitched.

  Toby moved away from the man as Owen pounced upon him, raking his talons across the man’s back. He opened his jaws wide and took the first bite, ripping off a large chunk of meat from the man’s side.

  “Make him stop screaming!” Toby shouted.

  Owen rolled the man over and bit off his jaw.

  Toby sat against a tree, shivering, and watched Owen devour the man. He wasn’t sure when he actually died. He guessed that it didn’t much matter.

  “Had to be done,” Toby whispered. “Right? You threaten my friend, you die. That’s the way things work around here. Right, Owen?”

  Owen ignored the question and continued eating.

  Toby had some blood on his shirt. Head wounds definitely did their share of bleeding. He touched each spot.

  “We probably shouldn’t have done this,” he noted with a slight giggle. “Not a wise idea at all. Nope. But that’s you and me, Owen, a couple of kids always getting into mischief…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Toby’s hands, arms, and face were covered with lacerations, but he didn’t care. It was completely worth it.

  He’d placed every single bottle of beer in his refrigerator—at least twenty of them—into the kitchen sink, stacking them in a nice neat pile. Then he’d taken a claw hammer and smashed them to bits, bashing over and over until he had a sink full of glass shards.

  It felt good when pieces flew up and cut him.

  When he was done, he wasn’t quite far gone enough to just reach in there and scoop up the glass with his bare hands, so he got a towel and carefully moved the pieces from the sink to a cardboard box. He’d drive it to the dump and safely dispose of it there.

  He should be a spokesperson. Travel to schools: Hey, kids, you should never drink alcohol. I did, and I woke up next to a mutilated corpse! It goes without saying that when the f
irst thing you see in the morning is a hollow bloody eye socket, you’ll realize that your life is moving in the wrong direction.

  He’d thrown up the entire contents of his stomach (including, it felt like, the lining) and crawled away from the sight of Owen leisurely chewing on the man’s stillglistening intestines. When he felt that he could finally speak, he’d shouted at Owen, cursed him for what he’d done. Then he’d sobbed and begged his friend to forgive him.

  Owen had growled at him when he tried to take his food away, so Toby decided to leave it alone for the time being. “I’ll be back,” Toby had promised. “Eat as much as you can now, because I’m burying the leftovers.”

  When he returned that evening, there wasn’t much left on the bones. It was amazing how much Owen could eat. Toby dug a hole, now wishing that he’d saved the symbolic bottle-breaking act for after he needed to use his hands for manual labor, and hid the bones and scraps of the poor old man who just wanted to see a monster.

  No, the old man who wanted to ruin everything.

  The rest of 2005 was spent trying to cope with guilt while sober, and frantically trying to predict when the police would burst into his home.

  Nobody even questioned him. Toby knew that it was probably because the man had no job, no relatives, and nobody would ever miss him, but he secretly liked the idea that the man might have been part of some top-secret government agency, working undercover, and that his disappearance would be discovered after the deadline arrived for him to file his report on the bizarre Owen-creature that had befriended a human.

  2006

  Toby’s cell phone rang while he leaned against a tree, sharing a bag of gummy worms with Owen. Wow. The phone company had promised outstanding reception, but it had never worked out here before. He glanced at the display and didn’t recognize the number. Probably a telemarketer—naturally, they’d have the technology to boost the signal to try to sell him a magazine subscription out in the woods.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is this Toby Floren?” The voice sounded young, like a college kid.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Steve Crown. You probably have no idea who I am, but I run the website Three Window Giggle Fits.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “We’ve been around for about a year, and our hits are going up every single month. It’s all original content. Right off the bat I want to say that we can’t pay, yet, but it’s great exposure and Kirk Hart who does our strip Wheelies just got a major syndication deal.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “It’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard. I supplement my income by reading slush, and I was clearing out boxes of stuff from years and years and years ago that they were going to throw away. My job was just to make sure that they didn’t have some old strip by Gary Larson or something that could be valuable. So I was looking through some of it, and I found Rusty & Pugg, and there’s this weirdness to it that I really tapped into. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and I don’t even get all of the punch lines, but it’s got this odd, enchanting charm.”

  “You want to publish Rusty & Pugg?”

  “Yes. Online.”

  “Every day?”

  “It doesn’t have to be every day, but some sort of regular schedule. Fleece is weekly, and Crush Manhattan is three times a week, but Wheelies and most of our other strips are daily, although Wheelies is the only one that does a Sunday strip.”

  “I’m in.”

  “May I ask how old you are?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “See, no offense, but you’ll never get a major syndicate to pick you up. Me, I think that’s awesome. I’m going to use that as a selling point.”

  When the conversation ended, Toby slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned to Owen. “Three Window Giggle Fits. What a shitty name.”

  Yes.

  “But people are going to read my strip!”

  Toby went out that afternoon and bought a computer. The salesperson, a girl in her early twenties, thought that it was unbearably cute that such an old man wanted to learn how to use a computer. He was pretty sure she sold him features that he didn’t need, but the whole thing was gibberish and he pretty much just handed over his credit card.

  The next week, he began taking classes.

  2007

  Kirk told him that Rusty & Pugg was getting 700 hits a day.

  “Is that a lot?”

  “Third highest-rated strip on the site.”

  2008

  Toby had yet to receive a single check, but quite honestly he didn’t care.

  Kirk sent him links to some online discussions about the strip, and Toby didn’t care much about those, either. He’d started to register for the first site, decided they wanted too much personal information, and didn’t bother completing the process.

  He was happy just to write and draw the strip and know that it was out there.

  Owen was happy for him, too. Toby had the software to draw the strip directly onto his computer, but he stuck with paper and ink and a scanner, and mostly drew the comic while spending time with the monster.

  2009

  Kirk called him to let him know that he was shutting down the website, effective immediately. It wasn’t a decision that came easily, but advertising had never really picked up the way he’d expected, and the site was one big time sink for him.

  However, he had a friend who was looking for original content for his own website, and he’d already expressed interest in Rusty & Pugg.

  Toby was fine with the switch. One month in, he was told that the hit count for the strip’s new home was “through the roof,” though the actual number meant nothing to him.

  Still no check, but he didn’t care.

  His hands hurt, all the time, and he didn’t care.

  He could feel that something was wrong inside of him, but he didn’t go to the doctor. He knew what it was. They’d give him chemotherapy or radiation treatment and he’d be too sick to draw. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He had an audience to make happy. A faceless audience, but still an audience.

  He introduced a hairy monster into the cast, and apparently it was a big hit with readers, especially when it ate a couple of bullies named Larry and Nick.

  A car pulled up in front of his house after dark.

  Toby cursed. He was soaking his hands in warm water to ease the pain, and didn’t feel like being bothered so that some inconsiderate jerk could ask him if he believed that he would be ascending to the kingdom of heaven.

  He looked through the peephole, and then opened the door. A twenty-two-year-old boy stood there and gave him a nervous smile.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  2010. 65 years old.

  “I wish you’d called first,” said Toby. “When someone’s reunited with their son for the first time in twelve or thirteen years, it’s nice to be able to shave and clean up the house.”

  “I thought about it, but I don’t know, I thought it would be weird. I’m not a phone person, I guess.”

  “You look good.” Toby was telling the truth. Garrett had grown into a handsome, healthy young man. Opposite of his dad, that was for sure. He wore a nice watch and a wedding ring.

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s Hannah?”

  “She’s fine. Got into some trouble but worked through it.”

  “And your mom?”

  “She’s fine, too. You know she got remarried, right?”

  “Haven’t heard a word from her. But that would make sense. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yeah. She’s actually been married for quite a while now, but, you know, it’s not important.”

  Toby nodded. “So why’d you decide to pay me a visit?”

  “I hate the way things ended. The way we left you alone like that.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid.”

  “I’m not a kid now, though. Marianne and me…here, let me show you a
picture.” Garrett handed Toby his cell phone, which had a photograph of a lovely brunette girl. “We’ve been married three years already—”

  “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  “Nope. We just ‘got’ each other, I guess, and didn’t see any reason to keep shopping around. But we had a really long talk last weekend, and we decided to start trying to have a kid.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. I mean, we haven’t succeeded yet, as far as I know, but we want to do this. The fringe benefits are definitely nice. But a decision like this is the kind of thing that makes you evaluate your whole life, and I look back at the day I got hurt and think, ‘I can’t leave things like that.’” He pulled up his sleeve and showed Toby his arm. “Look at that scar. That’s how I met Marianne. I told her I was in a knife fight.”

  “You ever tell her the truth?”

  “Oh, yeah, she called me on my bullshit in about three seconds. That’s when I knew I wanted to marry her. I mean, I just told her that I broke through some wood, not about, you know…”

  “Owen.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  Toby grinned. “Sure is. Chatty as ever.”

  “Still in the same shack?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can we…” Garrett looked as if he were going to cry. “Can we go out there and…fix the place up? I know it sounds like a stupid reason for me to make a six-hour drive, but…”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid at all.” Toby got up off the couch. “We should go now. He’ll love to see you.”

  “Well, we don’t have to go right now. It’s dark out.”