by Scott Hale
Screaming, they ran for the second-floor door as the Maggot plunged itself on their flight of stairs. E.A.973 threw open the door, and Dario and Ruth hoofed it through.
The second floor was littered with bodies, some still breathing, most barely together. Doors and walls were blown-out; large, dark explosions of blood radiated outwards from the destruction, as if the tenants had been hurled like bombs back and forth along the hall. Those that were alive immediately spotted Dario, Ruth, and E.A.973, and then played dead. Their savior had betrayed them. Her speaker had told them nothing but—
The Maggot slammed through the stairwell’s door behind them.
Tripping over the strewn bodies, they hurried down the hall. The Maggot inched towards them, feet at a time. Sick, slurping sounds: Dario looked over his shoulder. Corpses, and those soon to be, were attached, no, hanging out of the Maggot’s body. With every tenant it trampled, the creature absorbed them into its body. The men and women and crying children were decayed upon contact; the Maggot’s greedy, gulping pores sucked up the stinking melt, sparing not a single drop.
There was a bend in the hallway, but the Maggot was gaining ground. Dario was out of breath; his stomach was flanked by cramps on all sides, and his legs kept giving out, one after the other. Noticing Ruth’s stumbles, he grabbed her by the sleeve of her blouse and urged her onward.
E.A.973 made it to the bend first. He stopped, cocked his head as he stared at them.
“What?” Dario shouted, but he didn’t need to shout, because the sound of the Maggot giving chase had gone completely.
Ruth had noticed, too. Simultaneously, they glanced back and saw that the beast wasn’t there. Where it should’ve been, there was a flickering patch of the Membrane—a small garden of white and blue flowers.
E.A.973 started to say something. And then the Maggot lunged from around the bend in the hall, slamming E.A.973 into the adjacent wall. It could have driven the butcher knife into the creature, but instead, staring at Ruth, it nodded, dropped the weapon, and let the Maggot break it down, until it was nothing more than a bloodstain in the larva’s gore-encrusted folds.
Dario and Ruth wheeled and ran back the way they’d come. Two men and a woman were darting between the apartments, carrying and handing-off TVs, laptops, tablets, and purses and wallets between one another. They weren’t taking them out of the Manor; they were taking them back to where they lived for later.
Making it back to the stairwell wreckage, Ruth threw the orb of light into it, to burn away the dark that had gathered there.
“What’s wrong?” Dario asked.
The Maggot was seconds away; arms and legs were protruding from it, catching on the ceiling.
Dario slipped past Ruth. The stairwell had transformed again, back into the sewage pipe it had resembled when the Membrane first took over the complex. The orb she had thrown was still falling downwards, its light growing fainter and fainter. The first floor they needed to reach was worlds away.
Dario grabbed Ruth’s hand—even now, it was cold to the touch—and ran with her to the stairs carved into the wall. As they descended into the dark, the Maggot bashed into the stairwell wreckage above, showering them in debris.
“Fuck.” Dario pawed at his eyes, where bits of stone had cut them.
“It will have been worth it,” Ruth said. She stared up at the Maggot as it loomed over them from the second floor. “You will have been worth it.”
Groaning, Dario slipped his finger through Ruth’s belt loop and tugged her towards him, with him, down the stairs. The Maggot, unable to fit on the steps in the walls, melted like the bodies it had consumed into the floor.
“It’s gone,” Dario said. He drew a sharp breath and held himself. “How… do we… get out of here?”
Ruth, still staring up at the second floor, didn’t answer him.
“What’s wrong?”
The Membrane exerted itself upon the wreckage above. The wood and stone and scattered concrete were converted into scabs.
“Ruth,” Dario persisted.
“Edmund…” She lowered her voice. “I’ll have to make another.”
Dario ran his fingers through his hair. He steadied his breathing. The ache was returning to his elbow. The skin around his left eye was getting tighter, hotter. New wetness drooled down his damaged shoulder. In a place without time, his body was the only way by which he could count the minutes.
“Ruth,” he rasped. “We have to keep going.”
“What’s my diagnosis?” Ruth asked, finally addressing him.
He stumbled down the steps, leaving her behind. “What does it matter?”
“It gives me something to work on, when I’ve finished.”
It’s too late, he wanted to tell her, but he was a social worker, and it had been beaten into his head that anyone was capable of a change, however small it might be.
“You’re psychotic,” Dario said.
Ruth’s eyes shined with enlightenment. Breathlessly, like a child repeating her parent, she said, “Psychotic.”
A white fissure shot across the stairwell’s wall. Light, hot and painfully bright, seeped in through the growing cracks and crevices. Rumbling; the deafening sound of heavy slabs crashing against one another. Heaving vibrations rolled like waves through the stairwell, causing the stairs to buck and buckle. Like sand falling through fingers, the stairs at their feet crumbled, and they were left with no place else to go.
Dario grabbed onto Ruth and held her tightly. With their bodies pressed into one another’s, he could feel the vermillion veins beneath her skin, nervously winding through her musculature. For what was probably the first time in a very long time, Ruth Ashcroft was afraid of something.
The walls split apart further. Crooked stretches of cement wavered and then fell outwards, into the light, outside the Manor. A watery sound, sloppy and sickening, like a throat gargling vomit, assaulted the stairwell from the bright place beyond. It was the Maggot, Dario thought as he clenched his jaw and waited for it to arrive. It couldn’t catch them, so it was going to bring the whole place down—that was the depth of its need to feed on Ruth Ashcroft. An insatiable hunger, one perhaps only the decayed carcass of God could satisfy—maybe there was some truth to what she had said about the Vermillion—
Dario and Ruth fell. The ground gave out from underneath them, and the light outside swallowed them whole. In the few seconds he thought he had left, Dario tried to confess for everything he had done, but before the first sin passed his lips, his ankle hit something hard, twisted, and broke with a loud snap.
“Jesus Christ!” Dario screamed, grabbing at the pulsating site. He rolled onto his side, sucked in the air, which tasted of fish and chemicals. Eyes still adjusting to the light, he could’ve sworn he was lying on a staircase.
Ruth jabbed her fingers into his side, said, “It’s okay, Mr. Onai. We’re going to be okay,” and then pointed to the glowing orifice that had once been the stairwell’s wall.
The Membrane was gone, and so, too, was half of Brooksville Manor. In trying to impose itself upon the place, the Maggot had bisected the building and most of the cliff it sat on. The thousands of pounds of ruin had fallen into the river below, causing the waters to almost stop completely against the blood-dusted dam. Brooksville Manor was exposed now, its insides and the horrible things that’d grown within them out for all the city to see.
And yet the city didn’t seem to notice. Standing there, at Brooksville Manor’s new, crumbling precipice, Dario didn’t see any police cars tearing through the streets, nor did he hear the chilling wail of a cavalcade of ambulances and fire trucks muscling their way through gawking traffic. In fact, there wasn’t any traffic at all. Across the river, the cars flowed at a steady pace, and the pedestrians on the sidewalks and crosswalks kept going where they were going, as if nothing had happened at all.
It wouldn’t last for long, though, Dario knew, turning around and heading down with Ruth to the first floor. The outcries and the outpouring
s would come soon enough, when the news story broke and social media said it was okay to care. And that was fine. It was a better kind of attention than what most of the surviving tenants of Brooksville Manor were used to.
Dario and Ruth made it to the first floor without exchanging much other than sighs and side-eyes. Silence was an extremely effective tool in the therapeutic process; it allowed for self-reflection, and for those who were uncomfortable with silence, it sometimes coaxed from them spontaneous, unguarded truths. There was nothing more Dario wanted to hear from Ruth. Today had been her admission, and her discharge. No, this silence between them as they prowled the brutalized halls was one for self-reflection, because they had both ended up here for a reason, selfish as it was. Now the question remained: had it been worth it?
They passed the door to the basement, which after everything, appeared completely unscathed. The picture of the black Jesus with the face-shaped blood drops and maggots in his hands was crumpled against the door, as if it were trying to get in, as if it didn’t want to be left behind.
Ruth supporting him, keeping him off his broken ankle, Dario strained his ears as they made for the front doors, to see who was left and who was left alive. And there were people still alive, still behind their locked doors, rummaging through the wreckage that’d become of their lives. But no one was leaving the Manor. Dario had half a mind to knock on the doors, to escort them out of the shock of being freed from Ruth’s shackles, but he knew they wouldn’t listen to him. That was a job for the police, for the medical professionals; for the politicians who would soon uproot them and transplant them to another Brooksville Manor, in another city just the same.
Ruth pushed opened the front doors. The scorching heat was just where he’d left it, except this time, Dario welcomed it. He was freezing; he’d lost too much blood, and he’d spent too much time in the Membrane. He’d been so close to Death that he felt Death in every inch of him. The ordeal was over, and he was dangerously close to being over himself. His injuries—his left eye, his broken elbow and ankle, and hammer-mauled shoulder—re-activated at once and reminded him of how much they could hurt. The pain hit him like an overdose, and he went stumbling outside, underneath the skybridge, and into the parking lot, where he grabbed the nearest car and dry-heaved over the windshield.
“It began here,” Ruth said.
Collapsed over the car, seeing the setting sun in its glass, Dario became aware of what time it was and what needed to be done. He pawed at his pocket, felt the bulge of his car keys through the fabric. Steadying his breathing, he pushed himself off the hood and headed for his car parked in the boonies.
“You were part of it, Mr. Onai.”
Dario’s foot dragged behind him as he practically hopped across the parking lot.
“You were complacent, Mr. Onai.”
He stopped, fished the car keys out of his pocket. Complacent. Never was there a crueler weapon in an enemy’s lexicon. It was everything he was, and everything he hated. It was Darnell, Mark, and Brad, and the blood in their palms from the faces of the children they beat in his stead. It was MichaelIndomitable crying out for his mother as he was hacked to pieces to be fed to the Maggot that’d been grown and guided by Ruth’s hand. It was every fight Dario had run from him; every argument he refused to have. It was every lie he told his wife, every smile he faked for his daughter. It was every needle he’d stuck into his veins, every pill that passed through his throat. It was every reason he was here, when he should’ve been anywhere else. It had never been about the clients, and it had never been about him. It had been about stasis, and the maintenance of mounting madness. Until he did something, right here, right now, it would have all been for nothing.
Silence was one thing, but self-reflection? It was a mean son of a bitch.
“What time next week?”
Dario did some breathing exercises, squeezed his keys as if they were a stress ball. Car a few feet away, and not wanting to turn around to face Ruth, he said, “What?”
“What time is our appointment next week?”
In his other pocket, he had the hammer. He took it out, but still didn’t turn around. A foul smell broke over him, probably from the dam breaking in the river below.
“I know that I am a sick woman, and I need help.”
“Are you going to stop the killing?” he asked, hearing her approach.
“No, I don’t think I will. But I won’t kill as many as I have before. And that’s progress, isn’t it? Every little bit counts, doesn’t it?”
Dario squeezed the hammer’s handle. Ruth Ashcroft was never going to know the punishment she deserved for what she had done over the years. If he killed her, would anyone care? He turned around and—
Ruth and the Maggot stood inches away from one another, her small frame dwarfed by its viscous mass. Out in the open, out of the Membrane, the Maggot’s existence solidified itself in Dario’s mind. There was no denying it now. Ruth’s god-killer was real.
“I… I…” Ruth stuttered. “Dario… h-help.”
Dario glanced at the hammer, and then pressed it into her hand. “A social worker merely gives their clients the tools to forge their own path,” he told her.
“Coward,” Ruth whispered.
And with that, the Maggot struck. It drove its head into Ruth. She dropped the hammer, didn’t make an effort to use it. The Maggot reared its head, and her body went with it. She was stuck to it, like a fly to fly paper. Her flesh liquefied; her muscles turned to mush; her bones broke through her softening frame. Her limbs twisted under and over themselves—her legs over her shoulder, her arms between her legs. Handfuls of organs dribbled like jewels down the Maggot’s bulk. Intestines unspooled. When there was nothing left except a bubbling sum of what she’d been, the vermillion veins she’d harbored for over one hundred years exploded outwards, like scrabbling claws trying to find purchase on the clouds of heaven above. But they were no match for the Maggot’s touch of decay; like everything else, they dissolved, and eventually, disappeared into the creature’s body.
But unlike its previous victims, the Maggot bore the mark of its final consumption. On its front end, above and between the eye-like chevrons there, Ruth Ashcroft was immortalized in an upside-down crucifix rendered in vermillion red.
The Maggot considered Dario, and then, leaving behind hissing secretions, made its way back to Brooksville Manor. When it reached the apartment complex, he thought it might go back inside, to finish off the tenants who’d once and probably still worshiped it. But instead, it went past Brooksville Manor and over the cliff, into the river, where it submerged in the waters and the wreckage and christened itself in the substance of this world.
Dario limped his way to his car, unlocked the door, lowered himself into his seat, locked the door as fast as he could, and broke down. Head to the steering wheel, one hand on the dash, he cried until his dehydration had dehydration, and all the windows were fogged from the airs of his suffering. Snot and spit dribbled out of his nose and mouth like wax from a ruptured candle. He tried to think of one thing, but instead thought of everything, creating a horrifying collage in his mind that made him feel as if he were imploding. He teethed the rubber of the steering wheel, made childish mewing sounds.
Minding his broken ankle, Dario moved his legs to the gas and brake pedals. He pushed the key into the ignition and started the car up. He gave the Maggot a moment to return, and then Dario left Brooksville Manor.
On his way home, Dario passed Ødegaard’s Health Clinic, Isabella Ødegaard’s, and her husband, Fredrick’s, rapidly growing and soon-to-be Brooksville’s premiere hospital. He thanked Isabella under his breath for the referral of Oblita Vesper, and then choked down the taste of bile in his throat.
Close to his own apartment complex, Dario began to notice police cars and a single ambulance headed back the way he’d come. They were taking their time.
Dario pulled up to his apartment, parked the car on the street, and fell onto the pavement trying to g
et out of it. Struggling to walk, he crawled out of the street, onto the sidewalk, and up the steps to his apartment which was, thankfully, on the first floor. A few kids that looked like Michael laughed at him. They would all look like Michael from now on.
Inside the apartment, he left the front door open, dragged himself the TV, turned it on and to the news, and then, with the help of the arm of the couch, managed to get to his feet. He checked the time on the TV—6:10 PM—cranked the volume, and shuffled into his bedroom.
“Tragedy has struck Brooksville today,” the newscaster rumbled from the television.
Dario dropped his head against his closet doors. Clenching his teeth, he slipped off his shoes, unbuttoned his pants, pulled down his underwear, and shook the both of them down until they were around his ankles. He tried to take off his bloodied, dirtied shirt, but his broken elbow screamed at him, and he stopped.
“Brooksville Manor, an apartment complex that housed over one hundred low-income families, partially collapsed for reasons unknown.”
Dario’s legs were the color of blood and bruises. He could still smell Brooksville Manor in his skin—the stench of the river; fried food, cigarette smoke, and marijuana; and the underlying aroma of incense. It made him feel as if he had never left.
“City Planner, Mark Donaldson, issued a statement moments ago stating that, despite Brooksville Manor’s location on the cliff overlooking the river, the land was deemed safe, and the building itself up to code.”
Dario opened the closet, found the baggiest dress pants he could find. He dropped them to the ground, stepped into them, and pulled them up, like a clown putting on its costume. He didn’t bother with socks. His foot was too swollen for that.
“We will be coming to you live from Brooksville Manor, shortly.”
Dario slid the empty hangers aside. Maybe it was because he had spent too much time in the Membrane, but the act reminded him of butchers and how they sent meat on hooks down the line. Finally, at the back, he found a dinner jacket. He hadn’t worn it in years, on account of the fact that it still smelled faintly of his wife’s favorite perfume.