Aftertaste

by Andrew Post

  “That’s fucked up. We’ve been together for a really long time. Like a really long time.”

  “I apologize.” He cheated on you. “I’m just trying to soften the blow, should the worst become unavoidable.” He cheated on you, a lot. “Only trying to help.”

  “I need your help to make him better. Not kill him. Did examining Chev’s body—or whatever you were doing out there—help you in any way?”

  “Not yet.”

  Zilch watches her character take a few punches before she fights back. Galavance beats the ninja to death, then moves onto the next one. “Of course I love him. What kind of question is that? And all I meant about not listening to your bosses is: you’re in the South, so where’s your rebel spirit?”

  “Don’t bring any of that The South Will Rise Again bullshit into it,” Zilch says. “A hundred and fifty years, guys, time to let it go. And … I can’t do anything about it, all right? They more or less own me.”

  “So? What happens if you say no? What if you just say you killed Jolby or say he got away?”

  “One, they’ll know if I don’t kill him. Two, I’m not going to risk that,” Zilch says.

  “But why?”

  Zilch draws a deep breath. “They’ll keep sending me until he’s dead. I get one go with this body. If this one gets too screwed up, or if they need to replace it before I finish the job, I’ll just get sent back in another one, with less in my head than I had the time before.”

  “Meaning you get stupider each time? That explains a few things.”

  “They leave the basics but they take more of … more of her, each time.”

  “Her who?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. It has to happen, Galavance. He’s a killer.”

  “He’s not though. It’s what’s in him that’s making—”

  She’s interrupted by deep moaning coming from the garage. Galavance and Zilch stare at each other. She says what they’re both thinking: “What the shit was that?”

  “Chev, I think.”

  “What? How? He’s dead.”

  “He is,” Zilch says. “He was.” He moves to the door leading out to the garage, pushing his ear close to listen. He can hear flopping around, the leg of a sawhorse grating across cement.

  “Then how is he making sounds?”

  “I don’t know. This is a new one for me, too.”

  “Go out there,” Galavance cries. “Do your job.”

  “Do I have your permission to get mean if I have to?”

  “Stop. That’s different. Chev is … was dead.”

  “And your boyfriend, a murderous frog-boy, killed him.”

  “Just go. Stop it from making that sound anymore, please.”

  Zilch steps out into the garage, closing the door behind him.

  “Chev?”

  The work light lies overturned, and the plywood operating table is knocked askew. Chev, on the floor, swivels his head around loosely so he is roughly facing the intruder with eyes looking off in different directions. “Dude, I thought you were dead.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Zilch says, keeping his distance.

  “What a load off, man. Your death was weighing on my conscious, big time.”

  “Well, I’m still kicking. Gonna have to try harder than that,” Zilch says and tries to laugh and it comes out a shaky hee-hee. “Say, Chev, if you don’t mind, could I ask you question?”

  The torso on the floor nods. “Sure, dude. What’s up?”

  Zilch spreads his hands. “Uh, how?”

  “How what?” Chev blinks, his features clouding. He looks around. “Why am I in the garage? And why is it so cold in here?”

  “I’m not really sure how to put this, Chev, but you’ve gotten a bit of a boo-boo.”

  “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!” Chev’s gurgles cheerfully, going cross-eyed.

  “What’s that, buddy?” Zilch leans in close. “What’s that about Sunday?”

  Chev coughs. “I feel funny.”

  “I bet you do. Focus, Chev. What was that about Sunday?”

  “Huh? Shit, is today Sunday? I gotta get home. Mom’s probably waiting on me to drive her to church.” Chev wriggles, like he trying to sit up, but can’t, and finally his head knocks back on the cement floor, defeated. “Did we take some shrooms or something, bro? I feel super weird.”

  “Where’s Jolby, Chev? I need to talk to him.”

  “Last time I saw him …” Chev starts. His features flatten. “Dude.”

  “Things got heated and you guys got into somewhat of a tiff.”

  “Was that real?” Chev says. “It feels like a dream. Because it was like we were talking then he … dude, I’m starting to freak out here. Am I dead? Are you God?”

  “I’m definitely not God. But you need to tell me if Jolby has another hideout besides this one, some place he might go if things got too nuts here. Across the swamp somewhere, maybe? Someplace out in the woods? Anything you can tell me would be—”

  “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!”

  “Yes, it’s Sunday, well done. Anything else?”

  Chev makes penetrating eye contact with Zilch. “The monster.” The exposed bone in his shoulder swivels, as if Chev is reaching out to take Zilch’s arm to ensure his words sink in. “On Sunday, Sunday, Sunday is when the monster will be complete.”

  “What monster? Jolby?”

  “No, dude. The monster. I’m part of the monster, too, now. That’s what Jolby said. He said … I could help contribute …” Chev goes even more ashen, maybe hearing himself. He tries sitting up again to look down at himself. He gasps. “Oh, fuck. Dude, what the fuck … why am I … ?”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. Tell me where he is.”

  “He kept saying incubator. Incubator and the monster. Am I gonna die, dude?”

  “Chev, tell me where he is.” Zilch is getting nothing on the pain compass. Chev is his only lead. “Help me find him.”

  Chev’s head drops back and his pupils dilate wide at the same time that he lets out a long sigh. He’s gone.

  Zilch thinks for a minute, then starts to turn around to return back inside when he notices Chev’s chest start to move again—rising and falling, but not with any rhythm. He isn’t breathing. There’s something inside him, squirming around. Keeping his eyes on the writhing half-corpse, Zilch reaches out next to him and takes up the first thing he finds within reach: a socket wrench. Better than nothing. He raises the tool overhead, ready.

  The young man’s chest continues to push up in outward shoves, swelling the skin around his throat, then higher up, his jaw starting to drop open, lips parting with a soft peeling sound. A pale yellow strand flops out onto Chev’s chin, then another, draping itself across his nose. Another strand finds his spiky hair and wraps around a strand for purchase. It tugs, and Chev’s jaw is pushed wider as a mass of pale tentacles swell between his lips, more and more spilling free. His head is erupting with new, squiggly life and Zilch stares, wide-eyed and frowning, socket wrench forgotten in his hand for a moment.

  Until the thing splits open its underside and reveals a circular mouth full of tiny barbed teeth.

  Zilch, with a shriek that’s so shrill it hurts even his ears, swats at Chev’s face with the wrench—he hears teeth break and an annoyed whine from the creature trying to bloom itself to completion from the dead man’s mouth. Zilch whacks at it again but the creature is relentless, it’s boneless body absorbing the blows as it continues to emerge. Some of its wax-yellow tentacles feel around along Chev’s cheek, then his ear, as it reaches for the garage’s cement floor. Thinking it might try to escape, Zilch stomps near it, and it shirks back but it keeps slithering, determined, pulling its wriggling mass behind it until a final dead push of air escapes Chev’s lips—as if the corpse is relieved that the painful process of mouth birth is over.

  The sentient mop head of tentacles scuttles toward the garage door. Zilch stomps on its slippery trailing strands and it shrieks again, but doesn’
t slow. Zilch, as much as he doesn’t want to touch the thing, grabs what he can of it—but it feels like cooked spaghetti and it keeps slipping out of his grasp, some of it breaking apart in his hands. It bleeds yellow, sap-like blood on him.

  More than halfway under the closed overhead door, it cannot be effectively grabbed, so Zilch presses one shoe on the rim of the garage door and pushes down with all his weight. The creature underneath, pinned, screams again in agony, its tentacles flailing around, snapping and slapping in desperation. Zilch stomps on the aluminum rim of the door until he hears something like the sound of a balloon wrapped in a towel popping from under the door and the tentacles go still.

  Panting, Zilch counts to three, watching for movement. He lifts the garage door an inch and sees the splatted creature, a pale yellow asterisk on the garage floor, lying motionless. He fetches a snow shovel down from the wall, scrapes the thing up, looks around, and drops it with a plop onto the workbench, finally stepping back to stare at the dead amorphous thing. It hadn’t given him any hits on the compass. No, it’s some kind of off-spring. Jolby got Chev pregnant, it would seem. Zilch picks it up nervously by one of its limp tentacles and carries it inside.

  Galavance has her hands over her ears, still seated in the lawn chair with knees to chest, and looks over at him out of the corner of her eye when he enters. “Do I want to know?” She notices he has his hands behind his back. “What was it?”

  “Before I show you this thing, I feel I should preface what I’ve learned. I think there was some Darwinism going on in this house. Jolby used Chev as an incubator of sorts,” Zilch says, bringing the dead creature out ahead of him as Galavance goes wide-eyed, “for his new bun in the oven.”

  She nearly topples the lawn chair. “What the fuck is that thing?”

  “Chev was infected too. But Jolby killed him so he wouldn’t turn, I think, to spare him. But he still got infected.”

  “Don’t bring it closer to me! Stay over there with it. I can see it fine from here.”

  Zilch looks down at the thing lying in his hands. Some of its tentacles are thick as fingers, others are papillae, like drooping skin tags. “I think he wanted to grow one in Chev and then take it out, plant it somewhere else. I’m not sure.”

  “Plant it in what?”

  “You, maybe.”

  “So that’s what Jolby has in him?” Galavance gives a full-body shudder, then another, an aftershock. “Jesus.”

  “I think this is how it spreads. And I think Jolby’s the only one that makes … these delightful things. If I’m right, Patty doesn’t know about this aspect of their evolution. She thinks its spreading through the sausage—and maybe that is how Jolby got it in the first place—but it’s really coming from these things. Jolby is host to the impregnator.”

  Galavance’s mouth turns down. “Do you seriously have to put it in terms like that?”

  Zilch takes one hand out from under the squiggly critter to scratch his belly. “He might have a nest out there,” he adds, jutting his chin in the direction of the bog. “We need to find it before any more of these bundles of joy get introduced to the good people of North Carolina.”

  “You still think we have to kill him?”

  “If I’m right about him being patient zero,” Zilch says, “I’m afraid that’s a yep. Anything else on the video camera?”

  “Just them recording themselves playing video games,” she says, absent, knees still pulled to her chest.

  “Why?”

  “It’s popular online.”

  “You watch other people play video games?”

  “Yeah.” She looks at him, pleading with her eyes. “Is there seriously nothing I can say to make you not kill him? I know he’s not perfect. But we’ve been together for such a long time I … I don’t know what I’d do if he wasn’t around anymore. My house is gone, my folks are about through wanting to help me out. He’s a turd, but he’s my turd.”

  Zilch lets the dead critter slide off his hands and into the beer cooler. He kicks the lid closed over it and sets a couple paint cans on top of it, just in case it’s playing possum. “I think if you have somewhere to go, you should. I’m sorry, but this is how it has to be.”

  “Fuck that.” She stood from the lawn chair. “That’s bullshit. I think you know there’s something you could do—you’re just too goddamn lazy to try.”

  “I’m lazy? I’m not the one who’s been with some jobless, cheater piece of shit for half her life refusing to give up on him just because it’s comfortable.”

  The fury sloughs from Galavance’s features. “Cheater? Why did you say he’s a cheater? He’s never cheated on me. He wouldn’t.”

  “I just assumed,” Zilch says quickly, backtracking. “I was projecting. I stepped out on my wife and … well, I was just talking out of my ass. I take it back. He’s not a cheater, I’m sure Jolby, current circumstances aside, is a perfectly upstanding young man who’d never—”

  “You know something. Stop bullshitting. You know something. Tell me.”

  Zilch pauses. The cat’s out of the bag—there’s no use in trying to put it back in. “It’s why he never told you what’s going on with him. Because he’s afraid if he lets that one secret slip, it’ll all come out.”

  “What secret? That he’s sick?”

  “That, yeah, and the other thing … the women.”

  “He flirted some, sure, but … when would he have time? Between working here and all the time he spends at home, with me …”

  “Galavance, I heard him say—”

  Galavance rushes out outside, down the front steps, and is charging across the lawn. Zilch follows, calls for her to stop, but she’s already out into the swamp, the water up to her knees after only a couple strides.

  “Jolby!” she shouts. “Jolby!” She doubles over, pitching her shouts out over the dark water. “Jolby!”

  Zilch watches as she takes another step out, then decides to follow.

  Galavance’s voice is getting reedy with each scream. “Jolby, come back, I wanna help you!”

  “Hey,” Zilch says, sinking up to his knees as he catches up. “Stop, before we both drown.”

  “But I need to help him. He’s not okay right now, but I can help.”

  “He isn’t worth it.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I know enough. And you’ll be no good to anybody dead, Galavance,” Zilch says, daring to advance further out. The water is surprisingly warm. “Come on, we need to go get some supplies if we’re going to do this.”

  “Supplies? For what?”

  Zilch presses his lips together, sighs out through his nose.

  “If you took that thing out of Chev, maybe you can take it out of Jolby, too.”

  “He’s too far gone,” Zilch says. “He’s killing people. That and I’m telling you: he isn’t worth all of this.”

  Galavance turns away from Zilch and shouts again: “Jolby!” Another step. “Jolby, come out of there!”

  Zilch stays behind, watching. She’s up to her waist, then her ribs. She hits a sudden deep spot hidden under the cloudy water and sinks to her chin. Zilch feels the secret boil out of him, hot and awful: “He cheated on you.”

  She stops walking and stops screaming, just bobbing, her golden hair floating on the water the only bright spot out on the moonlit swamp. Whether she’s actually listening, he doesn’t know, but at least she’s quiet and not walking out any further for the moment.

  “How many?” she says after a long moment, only the crickets and frogs filling the silence.

  “Eleven.”

  She spins around again, nearly losing her balance in the water, then comes out toward him, water falling away, her tank top and pants soaked through with swamp. She has tears in her eyes. “Lying to me isn’t gonna make me give you permission to kill him.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  She shoves him, actually shoves him, hard, with both hands. The impact of her palms on his chest hurts, and he stumbles b
ackwards, not expecting it. Suddenly there’s a memory of Susanne, but he remembers that she never actually shoved him or slapped him, just raised her hands as if she was going to. He remembered how self-hate would redden her cheeks, how she’d grind out a growling kind of sigh and leave him wishing she had just hit him and gotten it over with.

  Galavance shoves him again and again, all the way until they’re on a drier portion of the muddy lawn. But apparently not dry enough—she slips and he catches her by the arm. She tears herself away with too much oomph and slips again, this time actually falling with a quiet splorch. She stays down, sitting on her knees, cursing under her breath, and flings some mud off of her hands with jerks of her wrist. “Were they girls I know?” she finally asks, looking up at Zilch, embarrassed.

  “He didn’t say.” He offers her a hand.

  She shakes her head and stands as nimbly as someone new to roller-skates. “I feel really stupid.”

  “Love will do that. Look, I’m sorry it’s going to have to come to this, with him. And if you want to just head somewhere, stay with a friend while I deal with this, I’d understand. I’ll try my best to make sure I sneak in a punch or two on the guy for you when I catch him.”

  She smiles faintly. “I’ll stay.”

  “We can try to make him better,” Zilch says, “but we’ll need his cooperation. He has to want it.”

  He can see there’s an ember of care for Jolby she’s still nurturing, coaxing it with soft, careful breaths even as it’s doing its best to go out for good. “Maybe if this thing’s got a hold of him,” she says, “maybe it’s not him that’s doing the cheating, maybe it’s the thing, you know, his other side, controlling him, making him … cheat.” She doesn’t look at Zilch when she says this, focusing on her hands, scraping the mud away. She’s filthy from her toes to her neck.

  “Maybe,” he says, trying to sound hopeful.

  “I’m gonna go inside, take a shower. Then we can go get stuff you need. What were you thinking?”

  “Guns,” Zilch says. “Maybe a net too. Might need to borrow your credit card, if that’s okay.”

  Saying nothing, Galavance gives him an unreadable look before turning away to slap her wet feet up the front porch stairs and inside. Zilch remains out in the yard, watching the sun rise. When the cicadas start their ratcheting riot of noise in the surrounding trees, singing this early, he thinks, you know it’s going to be one hellishly hot day.