Shallow Veins

by Brian Martinez

  “Who's 'we'?”

  Glass explodes on the men, a simultaneous blast from all sides. Shards cut their skin. Confusion clouds their thoughts. Butcher shakes the vision back into his eyes to see women crawling through the windows, their bodies contorted at impossible angles.

  “Freeze,” Butcher warns, knowing it'll do as much good as it did at the Robins house. Spines deformed, finger-claws dug into the window frames, their tongues gargle word-meat.

  "Grrab the kkeeper!"

  "Kkill the butcher!"

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Butcher doesn't bother asking a second time. He draws his gun, pops the safety and fires at the closest woman. The sound is deafening in the small space, yet better than hearing their greasy, decayed voices. The bullet catches the woman at the apex of her climb, her twisted body balanced halfway through the shattered window. It tears through her hand and knocks her back on her perched feet. He squeezes the trigger again. She takes it in the opposite shoulder and falls backward, out the window and to the ground with a loud screech and a thump.

  "That was easier than I thought." Butcher turns to find Father Curtis moving toward a door leading to his small office, with one of the women trailing behind trying to snatch at him.

  "Get back here," Butcher shouts, but the old man disappears out of view and into the backroom. Butcher shakes his head and takes aim at another woman, this one already crawled through the window and into the church. "I'll give you the chance your friend didn't get: stop where you are and I won't shoot."

  The woman chokes out a laugh. "Wwe don't need your mercy. Yyou nneed ours." She lifts her hands up palms forward. They split down the center and tear open forming jagged mouths, the boney teeth chomping away. Meanwhile, to his right, the remaining woman has mangled her way inside.

  "We want itt,” one hisses.

  "Wwe will have it!”

  “Then come and get it.” Butcher tightens his grip, takes aim at the woman with the grinning hands and fires. The muzzle blast is like a solar flare. To his surprise her head bursts like a rotten watermelon packed with firecrackers. It’s a force so far above the gun's caliber, it causes him to flinch and clamp his eyes like a rookie on his first visit to the firing range.

  Above the thing’s shoulders there are only remnants of black-lined skull left. Butcher holds the gun sideways, studying it with an incredulous look. It's as if someone replaced his weapon with a more powerful one when he wasn't looking, yet it didn't feel that way just seconds earlier.

  No time to think about it now. To his disappointment, even though he tore the head clean off the woman's body, she hasn't stopped coming for him. The skin on her hands bubbles and sprouts rows of tiny eyes around the lips. She stalks him on uneven feet, her odd body adjusting to the change, and he moves between the pews to escape her but finds another woman waiting at the other end.

  “Coming through.” He fires on her twice, punching holes in her abdomen and spraying the wall with black blood-stuff. It barely slows her down. Running out of room, he stands up on the pew and prepares to fire down on them.

  A loud boom. The unmistakable sound of a shotgun being discharged, from the back of the church. An unseen gunshot is always enough to make Butcher nervous- the sound of a raid gone wrong, control slipping between fingers. Fearing the worst, he calls for Father Curtis but gets no response. He calls out again. Still nothing.

  “The keeper is ourrs,” the women hiss, reaching up for Butcher. “He is part of The Self now. Wwe will know all that he knowws.” Their bodies shiver and shake, the headless one forming new growth at the top of her neck.

  For reasons Butcher can't grasp, the thought of the priest in the fanged and mutilated hands of The Self enrages him more than he would expect it to. Something in him wants, not just wants but needs to protect the old man, and thinking of him that way, murdered and taken in by these freaks, these monsters, made to play a part in their dirty flesh-game, hollows out some essential part of him.

  He steps over the pew and onto the one behind it, then the next, then the next until he's in the last row, and he jumps over that, too, back down to the worn, wooden floor. With both hands on the gun's handle, the shattered window to his back, he trains his gun on the two women, now side by horrible side.

  “You might have him, but you don't have me. Believe me, I'll make sure you regret it.”

  The headless woman's new head is half-grown and moist as an infected cut. “Youu are not necessary,” the half-formed mouth says.

  “You'd be surprised how much I hear that.” A second shotgun blast sounds out, then quickly a third. “I think your victory was a little premature,” he says, allowing himself the smallest sense of relief.

  Hands clamp down on his neck. In all the confusion he made an amateur mistake, one that might cost him his life- the window he put his back to is the one he knocked a monster-woman out of not long ago.

  He tries to wrest himself from the hands but they only grip down harder, sending a wave of pain through his shoulders and down his back. He cries out as the gun falls from his hand and lands by his feet.

  “Tthe Self has no need for you other than your fflesh,” the woman gurgles into his ear. The skin on her right arm begins to shift, the bone and muscle underneath changing, reforming. The limb crackles and groans and grows longer, down the front of Butcher's chest and wraps around his stomach. Then the other changes, wrapping around and around the other way.

  Her arms become pink snakes. They pulse, coil and constrict around Butcher's torso until he can't breathe. The air trapped in his chest turns stale and dies.

  The woman's scaly skin rubs along his neck, flooding his mind with a wave of images so strong he forgets for a moment he's not breathing. Kevin's face looking back at him, not Butcher him but Self him. The man's expression is enough to turn Butcher's spine to ice. It's not the face of a man who fears for his life, nor the face of a hostage, a victim or a loving husband.

  It's the man's true face. The face of a killer.

  The shick-clack of a shotgun being cocked pulls Butcher out of the vision. At the opposite side of the church, Father Curtis holds a sawed-off shotgun. A spot of dark blood shines on his lapel.

  “Ladies, perhaps we can talk about this in a civilized manner?” He appears to be wearing black gloves on his hands.

  Butcher is happy to see the old man, joined a moment later by panic. The lack of oxygen burns at his chest, his lungs a set of squeezed balloons ready to burst. His eyes bulge and water in their sockets.

  “Ttell us where it is and he lives,” they tell the priest.

  “This is where you expect me to counter-offer, something like, 'How about you let him go and I'll let you live.’ Except I've dealt with your kind before, I know you don't value the individual. A hive-mind, I believe they call it.”

  “Wwe are parts of a greater, wwe can't be killed.”

  “Maybe not killed...” He tosses something wet to the ground. It bounces twice and comes to a slimy stop by the pulpit. It looks like a serving of raw liver dressed up with thick, articulated hair. “...but you can be stopped. Now take your wicked hands off him before I become upset.”

  Butcher sees the priest isn’t wearing gloves at all- his hands are covered in black blood. Christ, he thinks. He ripped the thing's heart out with his bare hands.

  “Evven if you stop us, The Self will win.”

  “The Selff alwways wins.”

  “The otherrs will come and take what we need from your mmind.”

  “Not if I destroy it first.” Father Curtis turns the shotgun and plants it underneath his chin. “You can't take my memories if I'm dead.”

  The Self women hiss and growl, angry he knows this truth. The snakes loosen on Butcher's chest and he gulps a huge lungful of air, then another, feeling the beautiful sting of it down his throat. He pushes out of The Self’s loose hold and picks his gun up off the floor, aiming it again at the women.

  “The next one of you things that touches me gets a cannon
up their ass,” he rasps. “Wherever it is you actually keep your asses.”

  He motions for the priest to join him. The old man carefully makes his way over, the barrel of the shotgun pressed firmly under his chin and his finger hovered over the trigger. The women watch him closely. They gurgle and grunt, skin shifting, waiting for the slightest mistake. "Unless you want this man's brains all over these walls, I suggest you let us leave quietly. If you pull anything weird I have no problem putting a bullet through his head."

  Father Curtis blinks. "Thank you, I think. What do we do now?"

  "I was kind of hoping you knew.”

  “You’re a police officer, don’t they train you how to handle yourself in emergencies?”

  “Strange enough they didn’t teach us about shape-shifters from other worlds in the academy.” Butcher studies each of them. “What are our chances of killing all three without getting seriously hurt?”

  “Slim. The first thing we should concern ourselves with is luring them away from the church. I can’t tell you why, but it’s imperative.”

  “If I call for backup I can have twenty-”

  “We can’t trust anyone, I’m afraid. Not even your own men.”

  Butcher’s face drops, the enormity of the situation hitting him on the jaw. Together they decide to make a run for the car and figure out the rest later.

  The two men sidestep to the front door, both their guns trained where they need to be. Without turning their backs for a moment, without blinking, they open the door and back out of it, out of the church and into the daylight.

  **

  "Ahh, crap."

  The front of the church is littered with car parts- spark plugs, fan belts, hunks of bent metal and lengths of stripped wire. In the middle of it sits the cruiser's hood, ripped off and tossed away like an old bandage.

  "He gutted it like a damn pumpkin," Butcher says.

  "Who?"

  Shots ring out- gunfire from the trees. Butcher and the priest duck for cover. They run in the opposite direction of the gunshots, keeping their heads low, weaving between car wreckage. The shots come in steady succession like a machine on autopilot.

  Plastic crunches, oil splashes under foot. Butcher takes up a position against the church and presses the old man to the wall with his arm.

  He looks around, clearly troubled. "What's wrong," Father Curtis asks.

  "The third woman.”

  Father Curtis looks left, then right for the woman.

  He looks up.

  Faster than a scream, a pale length of muscle descends from the roof with a single, glistening fang at the tip. The serpent arm whips at the old man and strikes just below his shoulder. The sharpened bone becomes a needle that pierces through the skin and muscle, straight through the front of the man’s arm and out the back.

  The priest lifts off the ground, pulled into the air by The Self. His body flails and he screams in pain.

  Butcher knows if Father Curtis is dragged up onto the roof he's as good as dead, and he can't allow that; not this way; not any way. This old man may be the only thing standing between The Self and total, dark victory.

  Butcher holsters his handgun and grabs the shotgun out of the man's hand. He steps away from the church into open ground where bullets still zip overhead. He ignores them and takes aim at the woman-thing crouched on the church roof, aiming high to make sure he doesn't hit the priest.

  Through his sights her face is wild, teeth swimming in her mouth, eyes mad from the taste of the priest's blood.

  One shot left in the shotgun, he figures. He knows he doesn't have many chances at this, and he knows what's at stake if he misses or worse. This town, the next town, every town could be lost to these things. The world could be lost, but worse than that, his son.

  Butcher fires. The shotgun jumps in his hand, the force of the blast magnified the same way as before. The shot erupts from the muzzle like a volcano letting loose after years of built-up pressure. Like nothing Butcher has ever seen, the shotgun blast tears through the woman-creature. From the waist up she's obliterated; tissue, bone and sinew are lit on fire, turned glowing red before they blacken and crumble to black dust.

  Father Curtis falls to the ground, flopping into the grass with a tangle of heavy, useless tentacles on him, followed by the dead thing's legs landing by his side with a wet scrunch and one, final twitch.

  The old man doesn't move. His frail body is lifeless. Butcher has the horrifying realization that for all the fireworks he was too late to save the one man who might have offered a chance to understand just what was happening to him; his guide through a world infinitely larger than the one he knew.

  But then the priest stirs, and Butcher breathes again.

  Father Curtis pushes the dead arm-snake off his chest. He takes a look at the pile of legs next to him and says, "That's one way to take a girl's top off."

  Butcher helps the man up, the Self-woman's arms and legs crumbling at their feet. "After we get out of this, we're going to have a little talk about your sense of humor.” He looks at his dead cruiser. “That's if we make it very far without wheels." He moves the old man's hand to cover the bloody hole in his arm, showing him how to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.

  "We can take my car." Father Curtis motions to the small garage off to the side. Across the field, where the gunshots have stopped, Banks walks steadily toward them. His gun at his side, The Self in his eyes, there's no doubt what his intentions are.

  “Yeah,” Butcher says, starting to walk backward, “let's do that.”

  The church door swings open and the two remaining Self-women come barreling out all limbs and shrieks. Butcher and Father Curtis limp-run to the garage before the beasts have a chance to catch up and then, once inside, Father Curtis fumbles to lock the wooden door with an old padlock as fast as his hands can manage. He succeeds just as the two women slam into the door with the entire weight of their borrowed bodies, shaking the door in its frame.

  “Back away from the door,” Butcher warns a moment before a black, fleshy blade jabs through the space between planks, missing Father Curtis by inches.

  “I see what you mean.” He takes three steps away from the rattling door and into the darkness to find the light switch while the Self-women begin to beat on the door with unimaginable appendages.

  With a loud clack and the sizzling buzz of electricity, light floods the old garage from a single spotlight hanging at the center. Dust falls from the rafters and into the light, settling over the shiny, black paint-job.

  "That's your car," Butcher asks.

  Father Curtis hobbles around to the passenger side and opens the door. "The key's under the visor."

  **

  With bone and claw and scissor mouths, the two Self-women rip and tear at the garage wall. The weathered but sturdy wood is the only thing that stands between them and their mission, and therefore it must be destroyed.

  That's the one and only way when dealing with lesser creatures, they understand- do not negotiate. Do not talk. Do not hesitate to kill and absorb and take it all, the same as the humans level trees and exterminate vermin.

  Already holes are forming in the wood, splintered holes they pull at with makeshift hooks and arterial winches. Victory is close.

  They stop punching and scratching at the wood. A sound has caught their attention, something which sounds far off at first but they quickly realize is closer than first assumed, like the growl of something angry and old; a cornered and wounded animal lashing out with its final push.

  It's very close. On the other side of the garage wall, in fact.

  The wall explodes around them, releasing the tires and grill of a roaring, black hearse. The car plows through the women. One of them is sucked under the tires and spit out the back, chewed up and used, while the other takes a direct hit to the chest, pulling her head down at such velocity her head cracks off the hearse's hood. Her replicated skull splits open on the chrome hood ornament.

  Butcher holds the
wheel tight and drives the hearse over the bumpy terrain the Self-women have to offer. As wood and teeth bounce off the windshield, he can't help but enjoy it just the smallest bit.

  He pulls the wheel to the left to avoid a collision with the church, and as he steers the hearse toward the road he spots his former partner, the delightful Officer Banks, standing on the church's doorstep. Butcher tries to steer the hearse back to the right and toward the man-thing, but Father Curtis stops him.

  "You can't hit him without hitting the church," the priest warns.

  "I'll buy you a new one."

  "No!" Father Curtis grabs the wheel and jerks it back to the left. As they pass Banks, the man opens fire on them again, a rapid volley of gunshots which make a staggered line down the side of the hearse.

  The car clears him, and Butcher steers it across the rest of the lot. "Don't ever take the wheel from me again," Butcher says. "Do you hear me?"

  "The point wasn't to save the church- it was to save us."

  Butcher pulls the hearse onto the street.

  “I'm sorry your partner is dead,” Father Curtis says, his face paler than usual. With one black-blooded hand he keeps pressure on the puncture wound.

  Butcher frowns into the rear-view mirror, where one of the mangled Self women is already by Banks' side. “It hasn't made him any less of an asshole,” Butcher says.

  On the front of the hearse, buried in the grill, a Self hand grows legs and slips into the darkness of the inner workings.

  **

  Less than an hour later, with the sun already past its highest point in the sky, Franklin Butcher makes his way down the open-air corridor, past the dozen, bile-green doors of the Sweet Haven Motel to Room Fourteen, where he fishes the key from his pocket, looks over his shoulder and opens the cheap lock.

  Father Curtis sits on the edge of the hard bed, his arm bandaged up with torn strips of bed-sheet. “Have you noticed yet,” the priest asks.

  “Noticed what?”

  “You haven't had a drink all day. You're fulfilling your purpose.”