by David Wong
Ah, look at that. His arm came off.
The man had a six-inch bloody hole on one shoulder now. The detached arm, on its own, whipped around my neck and coiled up like a python. No hint of bone in there now, the arm making two loops around until the ragged stump hung under my chin like a meat scarf.
I thrashed around, tried to pry the thing off. The armsnake was all muscle, tensed and wiry, slowly squeezing off my windpipe.
Colored spots flashed before my eyes, lack of oxygen shorting out the wiring in my brain. I blinked and saw the floor was closer than before. I was on my knees.
The mustache bat flitted around my head, taking stinging little bites on my cheek and forehead. It went after my eye, pulling at the lid, and I couldn’t get my hands up to swat it away. Arms not working right.
The meat scarf squeezed tighter. The whole room got dark. I was on all fours and I suddenly realized the best idea was just to lay down there on the floor and go to sleep.
I detected movement from the corner of my eye. The rest of the cop’s body. It was up, walking toward me.
Shit!
I crawled clumsily toward the door. Gordon reached for me with his remaining arm and I felt his fingers try to snatch my shirt. I flung myself toward the door, my face banging off it. I reached up, clawing around for the handle. I sucked air through a squeezed windpipe, my head felt like it would pop like a balloon.
Don’t be locked don’t be locked don’t be locked . . .
The handle turned. I banged open the door with my head and spilled out of the room—
—AND IT WAS over.
The thick bundle of armsnake had vanished from my neck, as had the flying mustache. I stood up, saw four guys hustling down the hall with an empty stretcher. I stuck my finger in my mouth, it came out bloody. I looked my cell phone over, saw it had the cracks and busted mouthpiece from its tour as a nose club seconds ago. I cursed at myself, sure that whatever freak-ass cellular conduit I just had with John was now cut off.
People rushed past me and I wanted to push my way through to see what was up with John, remembered John’s disembodied instructions. Taking advantage of the chaos, I strolled back through the police station, finally walking right out the front door.
I hit the sidewalk, my heart pounding. What now?
A fat man in a shiny business suit strode by without a glance my way.
Without trying, I realized that he was going to die in just two weeks, a heart attack while trying to knock his cat out of a tree with a broomstick.
A pretty late-model Trans Am gleamed past and I noticed from the posture of the driver that the car was stolen and that the owner was dead. The car’s fan belt was going to break in 26,931 miles.
Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.
Fine. I took a deep breath. Now what?
My car was two miles away at Wally’s and I didn’t have cash to waste on a taxi, even if one of the town’s three cabs should happen by at this moment. To my surprise, my cell phone rang. I put the broken thing to my ear, realized I owed some props to the engineers at Motorola.
“Hello?”
“Dave? It’s me.”
John.
“Where are you right now, Dave?”
“I’m on the sidewalk outside the cop shop, walking. Where are you? Heaven?”
“If you figure it out, let me know. Right now just keep walking. Go toward the park. Don’t freak out. Are you freaking out?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe this phone still works.”
“It won’t for very much longer. Half a block away, there should be the hot dog guy. Can you see him?”
I walked a dozen steps, smelled it before I saw it. The cart was plastered with right-wing stickers, and had a yellow-and-orange umbrella hanging over it. The hot dog guy was painfully thin, looked about one hundred and sixty years old. As much a landmark as this city has.
“Okay.”
“Buy a bratwurst from him.”
Questioning this seemed a waste of words.
The man and I exchanged $3.15 and a brat wrapped in a hot dog bun and a sheet of wax paper.
For a moment, I hesitated, then drew two fat, neat lines of mustard along its length. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Cell phone balanced between shoulder and ear, John spoke again, as if under water, his voice growing fainter by the second.
“Now put it up to your head.”
I looked down at the rivulets of oozing grease, congealing with the now dripping mustard and was thankful that I didn’t use ketchup or that brown hot onion sauce.
Glancing around, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead.
A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom.
As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money’s worth by eating the bratwurst while it was still hot, I heard it.
“Dave? Can you hear me?”
John’s voice, coming clear as day through the tube of seasoned meat. I glanced down at the cell phone and got the point. The display was black, the glass busted out of it. A green circuit board was poking out of the warped seam along one side.
“All right, all right. I’m hearing you through some kind of psychic vibration or whatever and not the phone. I get it. You could have just told me that.” I lowered the sausage and replaced it with the cell. “Okay, what’s next?”
Nothing.
I heard a faint sound coming from the bratwurst, put it back to my head.
“Dave? Are you there?”
“Yeah. I can’t get you through the cell now.”
“You have to talk through the bratwurst from now on.”
“Why—”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.
“—Okay. What do we do?”
“The only reason you can hear me is because you got some of the soy sauce into your system, from the syringe. But it’s not very much and it won’t last long.”
“What is it, John? The sauce . . . it was alive. I swear it—”
“Listen. You gotta get over to Robert’s place. There aren’t any cops there now, but there will be. We have sort of a narrow window here. Take a cab to Wally’s and get your car, then go to Shire Village on Lathrop Avenue. It’s a trailer park, south of town past that one candy place. You should be able to get there in twenty minutes with any luck.”
“I don’t have any cash. I had five bucks and I just spent three of it on the bratwurst.”
“That bratwurst was three bucks? Holy crap. Okay. Give me a second. All right. Check between the sausage and the bun. You’ll find a hundred dollar bill folded up in there.”
Encouraged that maybe all this black magic could actually produce something positive, I fingered around under the sausage for a few seconds.
“Nothing here, John.”
“Okay. I guess I can’t do that. Do you have your ATM card?”
CHAPTER 4
The Soy Sauce
TWO HOURS LATER I pulled my Hyundai into Shire Village. The now-cold bratwurst sat on the dash, little smears of mustard on the windshield where the sloppy wax paper contacted it. I put it to my head.
“John?”
I was greeted with a burst of static, but then John’s voice came in, fainter than before.
“Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“What, did you drive under a bridge just now?”
“No. We’re at the trailer park. Finally. Which one is Robert’s?”
Static again. Then: “It’s wearing off. Don’t talk, just listen. Go inside and—”
Static.
“—and as long as you absol
utely remember not to do that, you’ll be fine. Good luck.”
“What? John, I didn’t catch the—”
Dead. The voice was gone, the static was gone. It was just a sausage again. I resigned myself to the hope that whatever I had to do next would be apparent from a look at Robert’s place.
His trailer was one of only two that had yellow police tape over the porch and door, and the other one looked like it had been abandoned months ago. Meth lab.
I parked off in the grass across the lot and walked toward Robert’s abode. Nobody was there, or at least nobody who came in a car. I knocked for some reason, then went in.
They had cleaned up the blood and guts. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, since I should have known they wouldn’t just let the entrails collect flies for twelve hours. Still, I recognized the room from the photos the cop showed me, the scene of Robert’s wet explosion. The carpet was still a few shades off from its original color and the walls were forever stained a faded reddish-brown. And there was a smell, awful and organic. Mildew and rotten milk and shit.
The walls were stripped bare, no family photos or framed landscapes from Wal-Mart or movie posters. Did the cops do that? No television. A sofa, a chair pocked with cigarette burns. Was he living here, or squatting?
I glanced into the open kitchenette at one end of the trailer, then turned and walked down a short hallway to the other end. I pushed through a closed door leading to what had to be a bedroom—
—and stopped. I was suddenly looking out over a snow-dusted field, a range of mountains spiking into a stunning violet sky from the horizon. Not a picture, that’s not how it struck me. It was like that end of the trailer had been chainsawed off to reveal the outdoors, only if that had really happened I would’ve only seen the neighbor’s rusty trailer and an abandoned Oldsmobile floating among the weeds. What I saw instead took my breath away.
I stepped backward into the hallway, dizzy, disoriented, afraid I would be sucked in somehow. It took almost a minute to realize what I was looking at.
It was a painting. A floor-to-walls-to-ceiling mural. He had painted the walls, the trim on the windows, the damned glass in the window. He painted over the curtains, painted the carpet, painted the sheets and wrinkled comforter on the unmade bed so that, when viewed from the doorway, the effect was beyond photographic. There was a half-full water glass on the nightstand, and a sprout of ice-coated weeds painted on the wall continued on the nightstand and onto the glass. There was a little crack in the glass and the artist incorporated it into the painting, the fracture becoming a glint of sunlight off an ice-covered leaf.
The effect was too much. It gave me a heaviness in my gut like the first time I saw a skyscraper when I was a kid. Picasso could not have done this, not if he had a lifetime to devote to it. Step on that carpet and disturb the texture, or brush against the comforter and the effect would be ruined.
Whoa. Just . . . whoa.
I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbing it, overwhelmed by the details.
There’s a deer, complete with little hoofprints in the snow. A happy little cabin, the family in the yard . . .
As I took in those little details, my amazement began to sour, congealing into a cold dread.
The cabin on the mountainside, that’s not a little tree out front. It’s a makeshift cross, with a man hanging from it. His legs have been cut off. The woman standing next to it . . . look at the infant in her arms. It has a single, curved horn coming out of its skull. And unfortunately for the old man, the baby still looks hungry. The frozen pond in back, those aren’t reeds sticking up through the ice all across the surface. Those are hands. And that deer? It has a huge cock, making a little trench in the snow behind it . . .
I closed the door, deciding to never open it again. I walked back down the hall toward the living room, passed a bathroom, then did a double take, leaning back to look inside. Nothing unusual.
The toilet is askew.
“So?” I said, out loud.
Damn my curiosity. I stepped into the bathroom, saw that the back of the toilet was indeed sitting a good foot away from the wall, where it ought to be. The stool was bolted to a square piece of flooring that was no longer neatly covering the square hatch below. I scooted the stool out to the middle of the floor, looked down the hatch. Basement access?
This is a trailer, dumb-ass. Probably just a dope hidey-hole down there. The question is whether he kept pooping in this toilet after he disconnected the drain . . .
Two feet below the hatch was the gravel and dirt surface under the trailer, interrupted by a hole that had been dug into the ground wide enough for a man to drop through.
An old well? Wait a second . . . there’s light down there. Did this man get his shovel and just dig himself a trailer basement some weekend?
There was a roll-up ladder leading down the hole, the kind some people keep by their bedroom windows in case of fires.
Yeah, climb right down there, dumbass. It’s not like a man spontaneously exploded just feet from this spot or anything. Go down and be a meal for the infamous Midwestern Tunneling Explodebear.
But John sent me here for a reason. Maybe a retarded reason, knowing John, but I had come this far. I thought about him, thought about spending the rest of my life without him, and a moment later I was sitting on the linoleum floor, dropping my legs down through the hatch. I tried to look down the hole, could only see that, as I thought, there was an open, lit space down there. I grabbed the floor and dropped my body down the mouth of the hole, finding the ladder with my feet.
The rungs were slippery with mud, and the dirt stank like mold all around me. As I went down, I was hit with another smell so strong it seemed to generate its own warmth. Sharp and rotten and fecal.
The hole went down about twice the length of my body before my feet were hanging in a dim, earthy chamber that seemed big enough to stand in. The stench got stronger, and when I dropped down my feet splashed in a slimy puddle of Robert Marley shit.
I stood straight, kicking crap off my shoes. My head brushed a surprisingly smooth ceiling. The room was almost perfectly round, a diameter about the width of the trailer. The light was coming from one of those camping lanterns, on the floor next to the curved wall on my left. An odd, low, rumbly sound emerged from somewhere, seemingly from every direction at once in the round room.
I looked around quickly.
Shapes, on the floor.
I stepped over and picked up the lantern, scanned the room, fully expecting to find at least three corpses. All I saw was a pile of junk off to one side, including a broken television and what looked like yard compost with something like twigs sticking out here and there. There were a couple of empty jars along the wall near it, faded pickle labels on each. There was something that looked like a long duffel bag lying against the wall on the opposite side.
I stepped slowly toward the duffel bag thing, saw with horror that it was something like a huge, fat caterpillar, leathery and probably five feet long. It was segmented like an earthworm, the end a puckered circle of tiny teeth. I would have run away shrieking like a banshee at that point, but the thing was so over-the-top gross that I was sure it was something he made. A sculpture or whatever. And it wasn’t moving, obviously. I would have mentioned that by now.
Just to be sure, I stepped forward very slowly and nudged the worm thing with my foot. Nothing. Maybe a novelty pillow of some kind. I watched it for a moment longer and then carefully backed off toward the junk pile. On the way, I took a glance at the walls, wondering if this dirt chamber was going to collapse without supports. Covering the strangely smooth dirt was a clear, wavy substance like glass or ice. I can’t tell you what it felt like because I didn’t even consider touching it.
I glanced nervously at the worm pillow one last time, then stepped back and slipped in something slimy again. A little wet pile of what I thought were sausages. On closer inspection, I saw they were fingers.
Four severed digits, along wi
th strips of flesh and bare bone. They all had an odd, misshapen look, as if they were somewhat melted.
My windpipe closed. My heart tried to punch through my sternum.
I took two steps backward, covered my mouth with my hand and tried to calm myself.
Get out get out get the fuck out—
I took long, slow breaths. I tore my eyes off the mess on the floor and walked to the other side of the room.
I arrived at the large pile of random junk, including the gutted television. I was startled to see the TV was on. There was a shot of what looked like a view through somebody’s intestines, like when doctors send those little cameras in there.
Then the shot changed to a picture of a twentysomething guy with long blond hair who looked vaguely familiar. He was sitting casually in a living room chair, talking to someone off-camera who was referring to him as “Todd.”
The scene flicked again, showing a blurred, uneven first-person shot of a car moving down a residential street.
The rumbling stopped. I stood straight, looked around. The worm thing—wasn’t it closer to the wall before? Nah.
I turned back to the TV setup. I couldn’t see a power cord leading up and out of the chamber but figured maybe there was a car battery or something hidden in there somewhere. I looked closer at the pile of what I had mistaken for twigs and saw it was a sticky collection of some unknown, uh, something. The back of the television had been removed and a strip of what looked like red seaweed led out of it and into a large, dead fish. The gut of the fish had been slit open and bulging out of it was a pink, wet mass of something the size of a basketball, like its innards had swollen to fifty times its normal size. Close to it was an aquarium tank filled with a thick, yellowish substance that could have been slug slime and at the bottom was a wrinkled grayish mass that could have been a human brain or possibly a meatloaf.
I had the awful realization that I was looking at a machine of some kind and just when I thought nothing here could surprise me, I looked into the television screen and was proven wrong.