by Andrew Post
The only available change of clothes in the house is a pair of Jolby’s smaller shorts, destroyed Chuck Taylors, and one of Chev’s shirts. It’s only after she’d put them on that she pauses, realizing she’s wearing a dead person’s clothes. Could a T-shirt be haunted? But, out of a lack for anything else, it will have to suffice, haunted or not.
Galavance glances at herself in the mirror; she looks like she just got home from camping: sunburnt and filthy. She meets Zilch outside, and he gives her an odd look but says nothing. She feels bad about having shoved him, and when she apologizes for it as they walk toward her car, he cuts her off halfway and dismisses the whole thing, mumbling something about having had it coming.
On the two-lane heading up out of the sticks, their bearing trained on the interstate, Galavance notices Zilch looking out the window as they fly past a house with an overgrown lawn. She knows the place; it was a frequent stop for her friends when she was in high school. Rumor went it was haunted. They’d visited a few times, late at night, but never saw anything—spent most of the time breaking what little furniture was left in the house or using someone’s dad’s old spray paint to write things on the wall. Galavance never contributed, but also hadn’t protested when Jolby wrote some gross thing or drew a giant dick on the wall. Back then, she’d probably found it funny.
“Something wrong?” Galavance says.
They shoot past the house. “No,” Zilch says.
“What’s her name?”
“What was her name, and I’d rather not discuss that, if it’s all the same,” he says.
“Come on, you know all the sordid details of my relationship. Share.”
Zilch pauses. “Susanne.”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“Wife,” he says, looking down at his left hand. She glances from the road to look, too, and notices a pale indent around the base of his ring finger.
“Is she still … ?”
He shakes his head, uses his left hand to scratch his belly. She kind of wishes he’d changed clothes too, since he’s got so much of Chev’s blood on him, but she figures her car will have to be burned, same as her house, when all’s said and done. “A few months before me,” Zilch adds, finally.
“What was she like?”
“Patient.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say Jolby and I aren’t exactly cut from a different cloth.”
“You said you cheated on her, huh? Real nice.”
“Among other things.” Zilch takes a smoke from Galavance’s pack sitting in the cup-holder without asking. “Not to sound like I feel sorry for myself but I think once I’m done they’ll still press the button marked for the basement.”
“Wait, I thought you said they take away memories of your wife each time you mess up.”
“They do. I’m sure she and I had some good times, but at this point, the bad memories are the only ones still crystal clear. Sometimes it feels like they want me to give up, if I’m being honest, that they’ll keep taking memories from me until I look back and all I can ever remembering was living in misery. And once that happens, when these jobs are the only things I have left, I’ll have successfully been beaten into submission.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wouldn’t be,” Zilch says. “Not to get all woe-is-me about it, but it’s really not worth the energy.”
They drive for a while in silence. Coming into the suburbs surrounding Raleigh, it’s all strip malls and big box stores. Even though it’s early Sunday morning, they still get stuck in traffic, waiting three rotations at an intersection. Zilch takes another cigarette from Galavance’s pack—she doesn’t protest—and he smokes, scratches his belly occasionally, and stares out the window at nothing.
Every other car they’re sharing the road with, to Galavance, looks like Patty’s rental.
They park and go up to the front of the Mega Deluxo Super Store, only to nearly walk face-first into the front doors. The place hasn’t opened yet, so they stand out in the sun, Galavance’s skin feeling weird and tight from having used the Lava soap in the shower back at the house, because that’s all Jolby had. Zilch watches the traffic across the parking lot, eyes squinting into the searing dawn sun, hands in his pockets.
The doors unlock, automatically clunking open at eight o’clock.
In the sporting goods aisle, Galavance watches Zilch pick up an item from the shelf. “A harpoon gun? Seriously?”
“Best we’ll be able to do without a waiting period,” he explains, then takes down some fishing nets, explaining they might be able to cut them apart and stitch them together into one big net with some fishing line, which he also throws into their cart. “I thought you’d be happy. A harpoon gun might only give him an ouchie.”
“It’s a harpoon gun. They kill sharks with those things.”
“I know you haven’t seen Jolby lately,” Zilch says, “so trust me when I say I believe this is the tool for the job. I’ll aim low, at his legs. Scout’s honor.”
Galavance turns and looks over her shoulder. A few shoppers are now milling around the Mega Deluxo now. Mostly everyone’s still at church, she suspects. But for the few a.m. bargain-hunters that are here, and with each one she sees, she worries it could be Patty. All her boss would have to do is look up Galavance’s employee records to find her address. Of course, there isn’t a trailer there in that lot anymore. But she does know about 1330 Whispering Pines—Zilch said he’d seen her. And if she’s already been hunting Lizard Men, bloodhounding a regular person wouldn’t prove much of a challenge.
“You should feel great right now,” Zilch says, steering the cart down the aisle, hopping on and riding it to the corner, fishtailing around the end-cap. “You learn your boyfriend cheats on you and now you have a perfectly good reason to kill him, carte blanche. And nobody will ever know you had anything to do with it; he’ll just disappear. Imagine if that offer was opened to every woman suffering while some idiot drains her soul to E. There’d be a line around the block.”
“I’m not his number one fan,” Galavance says, “if what you said he said is true, but it might be good to be prepared for other things we might need a weapon for.”
Zilch turns sharply around the next aisle. “Meaning your gun-totin’ regional manager?”
“Exactly.” They make another turn and down an aisle they’ve already traversed. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle in these big box stores,” she says. “Maybe this way?”
“Listen, we’ll get Jolby fixed, if we can. So whatever plan we end up using, there won’t be any reason for your boss to bug you anymore.”
“Bug me? More like kill me.”
“Poor choice of words. I admit it. But if Jolby’s unable to turn froggy, he’ll be dead to her, no pun intended. If that happens, we’re clear. I can go on my way, you can go about yours—with Jolby, without Jolby, your call—and that’ll be that.”
Galavance hasn’t considered how this whole thing might end. She kept imagining there’d be no other way out other than killing Jolby. She knew she could argue against it with Zilch, but deep down, she never thought it might actually work out in a way that Jolby would survive. And if his cheating turns out to be exactly like what Zilch says… then she really didn’t know how things would look after this was all said and done. Would she stay with him? Would they take whatever their bargain insurance would fetch from the house fire and go shopping for a new home? Would they move into Raleigh, rent an apartment? Would she, despite this whole cluster-fuck they’d been through together, stick with him just because of what they’d both survived, to honor the ordeal and let everything before he got sick be bygone? She couldn’t say.
They pile their purchases onto the conveyer checkout belt: a harpoon gun and the extra packs of aluminum bolts, four fishing nets, two rolls of high-test line. And from the shelf of candy right by the lane, a pack of Big Red gum. The cashier swipes everything over the scanner and doesn’t bat an eye.
Rolling t
he cart back out into the heat, Galavance folds a stick of gum into her mouth. She swallowed some swamp water and the burning cinnamon in her mouth quickly takes care of it. Big Red’s is what her mother used to chew after she quit smoking, always popping it when in deep thought. Galavance, though she’s tried, could never get it to make that loud snap like her mom could.
They’re back speeding along the interstate in short time. “You know, it’s weird,” she says to Zilch. “You see those real mystery shows on TV about women who murder their boyfriends or husbands and do all this work to bury them or hide their bodies, and it makes you wonder: if they were the sort of women that’d do such a thing, do you think they used coupons if they had them? How deep do you suppose that psychosis goes? Like, ‘Well, I’ve got to remove all trace evidence of Jim-Bob’s blood from the bathroom, so should I get two bottles of bleach or just one? After all, I am going to need it for Jimmy’s grass-stained football uniform.’”
“And here I thought I had a dark sense of humor,” Zilch says. He laughs, but it soon becomes a cough and then degrades even further into a full-bodied hack that pitches him forward in the seat as he thumps a fist against his chest.
“It wasn’t that funny,” she says, freeing one hand from the wheel to slap him on the back, though it does nothing.
The coughing eventually subsides on its own, and Zilch rolls back in the eight-point harness, clutching his belly. He’s shaking his head side to side with his eyes scrunched closed, plainly in some sort of terrible torment, sweating profusely.
“What is it?” Galavance asks between glances at the road. “Is it your nano-bites or whatever?”
Zilch manages to say: “Pull over, please. Please. Pull over. I do not want to do this in your car.”
“Do what in my car?” She cuts off a SUV to take the upcoming exit.
“When I was doing Chev’s autopsy,” Zilch says between shallow huffs, “some of his goo got on me. It must’ve found a way in.”
She pulls into a McDonald’s and throws on her four ways. Zilch has his door open before they’re even at a full stop. His shoe drags on the rocky ground, pebbles flying everywhere. She jams the brake, and he stumbles out, nearly falling, and begins jogging up to the front doors when he stops, still bent at the waist, turns, and goes running through the line of cars piled up at the drive-thru window, to the back of the lot.
Even from where she’s parked the car, she can hear him getting violently ill. She kills the engine and steps out to check on him.
Around the fenced-in Dumpster shed, Zilch is bent forward, his shirt pulled halfway up his back, and he appears to be either jamming his hand down the front of his pants or vigorously rubbing his stomach, Galavance can’t tell which. She moves off the trash-strewn road and onto the grass.
“Saelig? You okay?”
His head twists around, looking at her over his shoulder. His hair hangs in a soggy, sweaty mess over his forehead. Something black dribbles out of his nose. She sees something spilling out from between his legs—is he peeing that out? What is that?
Zilch wheezes: “I think your boyfriend knocked me up. But it’s okay. Just stay back there for a minute. I’ve almost got it,” he says. Is it just her, or does his skin look a touch green?
“Is there something I can do to help?”
“Are you actually offering or just being nice?” he says. “Because I’d be careful doing that—someone might take you up on it one day.”
“Do you need a stick or something?”
“No, I think I’ve … almost … got it … there you are!”
Zilch stiffens up straight and pulls with both arms above his head. He twists around, losing his balance on the dew-slick grass—and that’s when she sees it, when he’s spun by the thing fighting to crawl back inside him. It looks just like the thing Zilch pulled out of Chev, except very much alive, clinging to him, wrapping around Zilch’s arms to the elbow—it’s either going to strangle him to death or crawl back inside his warm innards. Maybe both.
Galavance’s wad of Big Red tumbles out of her mouth. She hears, on the nearby street, tires screech and the crunch of a fiberglass bumper. So she hasn’t snapped. She’s not the only one seeing this. That’s good, I guess.
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Zilch moans, taking a step forward and then two back. The thing erupting out of his torn belly is as thick as her arm. It looks like one, too, except instead of just having fingers at the end, it has them all over. Like a tree, except made of a soft membranous flesh the color of whipped butter. It stretches up and out of his belly, seemingly turning on its host. Zilch throws a hand up in front of his face as the thing tries to throw itself down his throat, any port in the storm. It only manages to paste him with a damp kiss of sorts, leaving him with the tastes of low tide.
He stumbles and thrashes, ramming himself into the enclosure surrounding the dumpsters, trying to crush the thing to death. He falls out into view of the patrons waiting in line at the drive-thru. The minivans disperse quickly, tires squealing. Zilch fumbles and rolls around on the hot asphalt of the parking lot.
Galavance stands by, hands out, and he can tell she wants to help him but can’t bring herself to do it, scared that the thing growing out of his belly might actually win. It’s putting up one hell of a fight, that much is for certain.
Zilch lurches to his feet, his hands embrangled with tentacles. The creature backs up, then shoots itself forward, causing Zilch to take a few involuntary steps in retreat—colliding with glass. The window of the McDonald’s spider-webs. The creature spins itself around in the socket of Zilch’s gaping abdomen, and works like a leg to kick off the ground, propelling Zilch all the way through the cracked glass. He tumbles into the restaurant, his back crunching against the broken glass all over the floor. There are screams, overturned soft drinks, and trampled Big Macs as the customers flee for the exits.
“What do I do?” Galavance screams at him, having run in through one of the doors.
“Salt!” Zilch roars, pointing at one of the tables still littered with burgers and soft drinks. The creature has opened itself up, pinning him against the condiment stand, sending out tentacles to the edges of the table and pulling itself down, crushing him. The back of his head knocks the ketchup dispenser pump, and red goo spurts out onto his eye—not helpful.
Galavance slaps a salt shaker into his palm. Zilch begins shaking it like he’s frantically dispersing holy ashes. Even just a few granules sprinkled onto the creature make it twitch horribly in pain. Zilch takes this opening to push himself off the condiment stand but he uses too much force and launches himself toward the counter. The visor-topped employees in the back scatter as he comes hurtling across the barrier.
Galavance follows behind him, shouldering aside the pimply-faced line cooks. She’s worked in fast food long enough, and has contemplated murdering her wait-staff enough times, to know exactly what in a kitchen could easily double as a weapon. There are many options.
She lifts the basket of uncooked fries from the fryer and sends it clattering across the tiled no-slip floor. She grabs Zilch by the nape of his jacket—one of the few places the tentacles haven’t enveloped him—and turns him around. “Here,” she says, offering up the open, burbling maw of the deep fryer.
“Uh, I think not,” he grunts.
“What? Why not?”
“I’ll get cooked too.”
“Over here then,” she says, pulling Zilch by the shoulder of his coat to the griddle. She takes the spatula and flings aside a few of the greasy meat patties, giving Zilch a clear space to work. He turns, wrestling the thing as it slowly comprehends what’s in store, and before it has a chance to launch any sort of coordinated defense, flings himself chest-first onto the greasy metal, body slamming the creature as it flails and slaps at him in a scrambling, panicked flurry of its tentacles.
A couple of punches and jabbing elbows help to stun the thing. Its hold on Zilch seems to weaken, and taking immediate advantage, Zilch—with a two-handed
grab, balled fistfuls of squiggy awfulness—presses with his whole weight, kneeing occasionally just for the trouble it’s put him through, the sizzling and crackling like eggs cracking over an overheated pan. It takes a moment, but soon the thing is blackened, its membranous flesh charred, and only when it lies still does Zilch slide himself off, dragging the thing off the griddle with him, letting it hang from the socket in his gut like an extra appendage, smoking and limp.
With a knife from the prep area, Zilch saws the creature loose from his belly, then reaches in and with one quick jerk, pulls loose its roots, gathering up all of the dangling strands and flaccid, steaming lengths of the thing, then doffs the whole balled mass under his arm.
“Thanks,” he says. His gaze shifts around to the stunned, silent diners at the McDonald’s all staring at him, some with their phones out. “Think we could get back on the road?”
Galavance apologizes to every set of eyes they meet on the way out, Zilch leading the way with the limp, dead thing still under his arm. They go out to the car, get in, and drive off. She watches him free up a place to deposit the creature by moving all their purchases from one bag to another. Despite it being dead, he still ties it up with double-knots.
Galavance, once she could take a full breath without receiving a full-body quake, asks, “Did it make that hole? In your stomach. Did it do that?”
“Actually, I did that,” Zilch says, matter-of-factly.
“You did that? Why?”
“I scarfed. To break up a fight. I had to talk to Chev, and some rednecks were gonna beat him to death any second unless I did something.”
“So you decided to scarf. Right there. Why not just yell ‘Hey!’ or ‘Please stop’?”
“I had to get their attention. By the way, thanks for the bringing me up to date on trending youth pastimes. It really helped.”