Aftertaste

by Andrew Post

  “I have to have the seedlings. I need them.”

  “Fine. If you’re gonna be so stubborn about it, here.” Zilch winds back and as if launching a bowling ball, underhand tosses a bag over the muddy lawn to Patty. She fumbles as the work-lights on the porch blind her, her hands flailing, eyes squinting in the harsh electric light. The parasite in its volleyed bag slips right between her outreaching hands and the thing smacks right into her chest. The bag breaks open on impact like a water balloon hitting its target. The creature inside immediately grabs hold, suckers latching onto the hanging tendrils of Patty’s camouflage suit. And just as the first one latches onto her, Zilch lobs the second, hitting Patty low in the stomach.

  “Oh, my goodness—just look at them,” Patty says, staring down from chin to chest to look at the creatures fastened to her. Her hands come together, as if to hug them, stroking their slimy many-armed forms as they entangle with each other, reaching, their limbs telescoping, slow, like a worm moving over the ground, up around her neck, softly feeling for flesh. Patty giggles as they reach around her left ear, then her right. Drawing themselves up her chest, feelers extending to nuzzle her chin, their suckers pop and reaffix themselves in sequence, advancing.

  “Saelig …” Galavance says, unsure if she wants to watch.

  “Oh, they like me,” Patty says, cooing. “They’re trying to kiss me. Hello, babies. Hello there. My name is Patty.”

  “She asked for them,” Zilch says, taking a squishy step back. “Now they’re hers to do with what she wants.”

  Patty giggles as a tentacle touches her bottom lip, attracted by the warmth of her mouth, and tries to push inside. She pinches her lips together, laughing through her nose, but the things keeps pushing, working against her jaw, moving her head back. Patty’s eyes shoot wide as she suddenly understands their intent. “No, dear,” she says, muffled. “No, no, not me, heh-heh. I’m gonna to take you two home, so you can do this to someone else. Not me. Not me. Stop that now, stop. Stop. Stop.”

  One of the griddle-singed tentacles, flaking its charred crust as it reaches, probes her ear—driving its length inside, jangling an earring. Patty is pushing back now but the thing is like elastic, it just extends itself to match the length of her pressing arms, its feelers and tentacles and papillae still angling for the warmth inside Patty’s head. In its sudden eagerness, it slaps about Patty’s face, knocking her glasses off.

  Then, like Patty is sucking a large bundle of spaghetti—the entire thing disappears into its new host’s gaping mouth. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her knees buckle. She splashes into the mud, face down. There are a few gurgles and pops, inside her, muffled. Galavance watches the entire process, wishing she hadn’t.

  “Is she dead?” she finally asks.

  Zilch looks up and down the street, then back at Patty, her face planted in the mud, making bubbles. “No.” He flips her body over with his foot. She’s unconscious. Reaching out her nostrils and the corners of her mouth, two small strands squirm about, keeping guard over the entrances.

  “Won’t she turn into another were-amphibian?”

  Thwap. Patty’s head is flung to one side as an aluminum rod stakes her temple and her slow shuffling in the mud ends. Zilch lowers the harpoon gun. “Nope.”

  “What the hell did you do that for? She hadn’t turned.”

  “She hadn’t turned yet. Plus, I’ve tangled with a bunch of weird and wicked shit,” Zilch says, “but she was easily in the top ten.”

  “She was a human being, Saelig.”

  “Fuck that. She sold her soul a while ago,” Zilch says, and shrugs. “I don’t feel bad. Wait, lemme check. Nope. Not feeling bad at all. I don’t see why your knickers are all in a bind.”

  “This is fucked,” Galavance says, staring down at a very dead Miss Patty. Shapes push around under her ghillie suit, the parasites likely feeling deceived, their new home already starting to go cold. “I can’t believe you killed her.”

  “How many times have you imagined doing exactly that—or worse—to her? Be honest.”

  “A few,” Galavance admits. “More than a few.”

  “Then consider me your fairy godmother. I make dreams come true. Prang, dead regional manager, just for you.”

  “More like an asshole genie. And don’t put this on me—you murdered her.”

  “It was her or us.” Zilch retrieves Patty’s rifle from the ground and shakes the mud from it, pulls back on the lever, and turns the breach toward the work light. “This thing wasn’t loaded with foam darts.”

  “Well, I guess it’s too late to argue about it now. Still, though. Give me a warning next time, okay?”

  Zilch agrees with a nod. “Fair.”

  “God, I feel sick. What … what’re we gonna do with her?”

  Saelig glances around again. The rows of half-constructed houses all stare, silent and unoccupied. Far down the unpaved lane where it connects with the main road, a car passes. It doesn’t turn into the neighborhood. The crickets and frogs sing. The sky’s clear, and this far from the smog of Raleigh, every star shines unhidden. Under different circumstances, it would be beautiful.

  “She said were-amphibians are attracted to the meat of their own,” he says at last. “Jolby was lured in by the scent of the takeout Beefy Ben and his boys had, so that checks out. And she mentioned something about having a trunk full of the sausage, didn’t she?”

  “Okay, so we have our bait. But that still doesn’t answer my question: what about her?”

  “Put her inside, get the bait set up at the edge of the water there, and when Jolby catches the scent, we … you know, get him.”

  “Get him,” Galavance says and laughs. She nods over at Beefy Ben’s flattened racer, covered by a tarp, only a foot high from how it used to stand. “He has a monster truck. That’ll probably be our fate too if we try to just get him.”

  Galavance turns to look out into the swamp. The light on the porch only reaches to the edge of the yard, lighting up the still, dark water for a yard or so out. She can feel him watching. Perched out there in a tree, on the hood of the monster truck possibly. Maybe listening, if his hearing has also increased with his strength and insanity.

  She faces Zilch. “I think I know what to do.”

  The sun is coming up, and with it, the promise of a scorcher. The cicadas begin screaming and the crickets all pack it in. The hanging mist burns away and the dew darkening the deck fades, boiled off.

  Zilch wraps a strip of duct tape around Patty’s mouth, pushing hard to make sure it sticks. Galavance watches, her stomach in her throat; he’s so casual about the whole thing. She thought she knew him, but he’s proven himself to be more fucked up than she’d ever expected. He has Patty slumped mostly upright in one of the lawn chairs on the back deck, nearly spilling out of the thing, the harpoon still dug into her head. As he walks away, he pats Patty on her belly. The shapes inside, trying to push their way out, react with soft thrashes. “Don’t go anywhere,” Zilch says sarcastically.

  “Do we really have to keep her around like this?” Galavance says. “Can’t we put her in the garage with Chev or something?”

  Zilch tears open one of the boxes of the sausage Patty brought with her, his one remaining good eye going squinty as the smell wafts out. “She’ll serve as a container. The people I work for might be interested in a look, for research.” He coughs into a fist, looks at it, and goes back to rummaging through the box of sausage, tearing through the thick plastic bags as if on the hunt for some prize he might find under all of the thawing pink cubes of meat. “I might get some extra credit out of it.”

  With each passing hour, Galavance has noticed, his pallor changes. When she first met him, he had a slight olive tint. Now he’s gray as oatmeal. His hair looks thin at the temples, grayer in spots than it was before. When he speaks, she cannot help but notice his teeth are long, the gums flaring red and sunken down into his jaw. His remaining eye looks buried in a tunnel of his collapsing socket, ringed by purple
bruising. His hands are bonier than before, his movements rattling and unsure. Taking the rifle down off his shoulder, he opens it again, closes it, and sets the safety.

  “We all set?” he asks, and coughs.

  She nearly got sick getting the sausage out of the boxes and slopped with a ladle onto the TV tray they have set on the far side of the deck, near where the swamp is starting to creep over the edge. A few more inches higher and it’d likely start trickling into the house—one more bout of rain is all it’d take. Galavance shovels the meat cubes, trying to think of it like dog food—anything but people meat. Its juices are thick and syrup-like, the smell like a harbor on a hot day. “Is that enough?” she says.

  Zilch nods. “Turn on the fan.”

  Jamming the fan’s plug into the extension cord, the oscillating fan they have set behind the TV tray with its pink bounty sitting ready begins to spin on its highest speed. Galavance and Zilch, standing to either side of Patty’s corpse baking in the morning sun, watch for any movement in the distant willows, for ripples in the water, for the grunt of a monster truck’s engine sparking to life.

  Galavance leans over the railing with her elbows on the wood and stares out. Out there in all that muck and terrible nastiness is my boyfriend. It’s a shitty thing to think, especially given that she can still hear Tammy Wynette in her head. Once she knows the truth—direct, from Jolby—maybe then a new song can be allowed to start. Maybe Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

  She thinks of the cartoons where they turn smells into visible fumes and pictures red wisps drifting out over the bog, scouring for Jolby like a heat-seeking missile. The fan blows around her hair. She sweeps it behind her ears—and hears something.

  She turns off the fan. In its silence, as if playing along, the swamp’s fauna goes quiet. Even the wind seems to still, holding its breath to listen. The second of quiet is broken by a far-off rumble, an engine waking—terrible, loud, and angry.

  With a sick feeling in both her stomach and heart, Galavance makes sure the harpoon gun is wound. She doesn’t want to use it. Looking out over the swamp, filtering up through the tops of some trees across the way, white smoke rises in a stirring fog. Headlights spark bright between the trunks, like eyes opening. The engine bellows when the gas is hammered, and churned swamp water sprays out from Jolby’s hiding place—a spot Galavance had passed her eyes over many times before without noticing anything. Broken limbs snap and tumble as the monster truck, with terrifying ease, makes the swampland bow down to its might. It emerges from the copse of willows, moss and bark sliding away from its asymmetrical front end, its grille like a broken, grinning mouth. When the tailpipe is lifted from the water, it gurgles free some of the water that’d snuck in and a coughs a plume of black smoke into the sky.

  Zilch presses his remaining eye to the rifle scope and flicks the rifle’s safety off.

  “Thar he blows.”

  Heart hammering, Galavance watches the truck rumble closer, submerged in the water up to its cab, a white wall of water pushing out ahead. The thing seems to grow as the massive tires climb the shallows. Only when it’s nearly a stone’s throw out from the deck does she realize Jolby has no intention of slowing down.

  “We might consider removing ourselves from the present location,” Zilch says and pulls her back closer to the house and away from the railing. Patty’s belly swells, the creatures inside—perhaps with their own type of pain compass—sensing their father drawing near.

  The still-moving truck’s windshield flops up like a mail slot hatch, and Jolby—green and dressed in rags—climbs over the wheel and onto the hood of the vehicle, squatting there poised on the edge of the grille, his head cocked back, nostrils flaring and narrowing.

  The truck, though now driverless, continues to roll forward closer and closer. By the look on Jolby’s face and the cascading lines of saliva falling from the corners of his mouth, he’s honed onto the location of the scent.

  Zilch lefts his finger back onto the rifle’s trigger. Even as Galavance’s sensible side calls her an idiot, even though she can think of a hundred different reasons to stand back and let the cards fall where they may, she just can’t. She steps forward, putting herself in front of Zilch’s scope.

  Swinging the barrel away, Zilch’s eyes are wide, trained on Jolby, but he glances at her long enough to blurt: “What are you doing?!”

  They would’ve tussled over the rifle, Galavance would have said something about not wanting Jolby hurt right now, but all of that becomes a moot point because Jolby seizes the moment of confusion and springs from the hood of the truck, launching himself ahead of it—too impatient to wait any longer for the treasure sitting on that TV tray. Zilch shoves Galavance aside and steps into Jolby’s arc—right between him and the pile of cubed sausage.

  When Jolby connects the two go tumbling backwards in a pile of grunts and oofs, the were-amphibian pressing its feet into his chest and taking Zilch’s head in its hands. Galavance picks up the fallen rifle and cracks Jolby on the side of the head with the stock. Jolby doesn’t so much as flinch.

  Zilch screams as a cracking sound rises from his skull, and one of the teeth from his crushed jaw tumbles free. Galavance hits Jolby again, this time winding up. Jolby takes one web-fingered hand off Zilch to swat her away. Twisting to glare at the annoyance, his large eyes double in size—there’s something over her shoulder. Before she can turn to look, a shadow splashes across the deck.

  There is the sound of wood breaking, of a chrome bumper making contact with the railing. It splits and the monster truck is still advancing, sending the TV tray and the meat on it flying. Patty’s corpse slumps out of the lawn chair and is taken by the swamp. The deck, under them, begins to buckle as the truck starts to lever the wooden planks. All of them are now sliding down as Jolby’s creation of stolen steel and sheet metal tries to pull itself up out of the water.

  Galavance pulls Zilch to his feet and in through the back door of the house. Jolby drops into a squat and shoots himself with a jump up over the house. Galavance watches through the open back door as the truck overtakes the deck. She hopes the back of the house is strong enough to stop it, or even just slow it.

  The home shudders as the vehicle makes contact, and she hears something upstairs fall over. Next to her, a crack darts across the wall, a black lightning bolt in the dry wall shooting across the kitchen and into the living room. A thin dribble of dust falls from the ceiling. Zilch’s teeth are red and his gouged eye has started to bleed again. “We need to get out of this house,” he says, mush-mouthed.

  They backpedal into the living room, watching Jolby’s creation continue to push its way closer to the house, the shattered deck throwing planks of wood going every which way, geysers of brown water pushing in through the back door in pounding gouts. Upstairs, or maybe on the roof, they can hear Jolby shrieking and growling. To Galavance it sounds disheartened, as if something of great value has been irretrievably lost. For a lightning-quick moment she’s sad, because she thinks it’s her that Jolby is upset about losing, but then remembers the bait, the sausage bits, and how they just got run over by the truck and were probably ruined, falling into the dock wreckage and swamp water.

  The churning tires show no signs of stopping. Outside the kitchen window, over where a double sink might’ve been one day, they’re still advancing, the nubs in a constant downward spin like a waterwheel after a big rain. The house around them moans and shakes, things knocking loose, beams in the ceiling buckling and snapping, portions of the wall crushing in on themselves like accordions, pipes bursting and water bleeding out from the house’s injuries in hissing sprays. Together, Zilch and Galavance take another step back, watching in horror.

  “That thing can’t get all the way through … can it?” she murmurs.

  As if in direct reply, the vehicular abomination finds a weak spot in the wall and pushes against it. The entire house leans.

  “We should probably get outside,” Zilch says.
>
  They turn and make for the front door just as it shoots up, the entire living room lurching. They slide back, away from the door and toward the truck’s maw as it patiently continues to push its way into the house. With the living room floor now at nearly a forty-five degree angle, the entire place raises up onto its end. The front door lifts, showing sky as the makeshift door swings open on its hinge.

  Galavance charges toward it, running uphill with arms and legs pumping, but it’s too difficult. Zilch cups her hands and boosts her up to the front window as it becomes a skylight. Below them, as the rear of the house shatters apart and they can only see the turning wheels of the truck, he gives her a shove with what little strength he has left and her fingers snatch onto the window sill. Outside, the entire house shaking under her, she reaches back down. Zilch leaps, grabs her hand, and she screams from the effort of hauling him out. They run down the front of the house as it continues to pivot, capsizing, and jump. The soggy yard breaks their fall.

  Zilch helps her to her feet, then they turn and watch as the truck, locked with its gas pedal at a full tilt, finally hits something immovable, then rears and upends. The wheels spins freely and the engine, somewhere down inside the house it’s being swallowed by, roars. The entire structure, meeting its breaking point—not built correctly to stand upright, let alone at this irregular tilt—breaks free of its foundation completely and the truck, essentially wearing the house, tips, and together they stand upright like a sinking ship, nose high in the air. For a heartbeat there is the impossible sight of a house on its end, balanced as gracefully as a dancer pausing en pointe, before gravity has had enough of this unnatural display and brings both crashing into the swamp. Zilch and Galavance are hit with the splash, drenching them.

  They stand staring at the crumpling mountain of broken wood, splintered drywall, and snapped plastic siding standing and smoking in the bog. Once everything settles, deep underwater, they can hear the monster truck putter out, drowned. Surprisingly, a section of the house has remained intact, one side of the place hasn’t broken and forms a sort of crooked ramp, a new roof.