Probably Monsters

by Ray Cluley

  If it hadn’t been for the demon we probably would have hidden like we usually did and waited for the strangers to move on. We probably missed out on a lot of good people that way, but we sure missed out on a lot of bad ones too and that was fine by all of us. This time, though, we came out and stood in the road until they were near enough to talk to. Not that we knew they were a they at that time. We thought it was just him. Frances.

  “Hello traveller,” Jones said. It sounded stupid, like he was pretending to be someone else. We’d not had much practice talking to anyone but each other, and there was never much need for hello with us.

  The man who would later tell us he had a girl’s name just stood, assessing the situation. He made no try to hide it. He looked Jones up and down, then Frank next to him. He saw me easy enough, over by the pump, and he took in both windows looking for others. There was only George, who he saw up on the roof. George knew he’d been seen. He stood up, put one foot on the wall, leaned over and spat. Then he raised his rifle, just enough for it to be visible. George always acted like he was cool and calm, like some kind of movie hero. He did it with us even though we knew better. Even though nobody gave a shit about movies anymore.

  “Just the four of you?” the big man asked.

  Frank seemed surprised. “Yeah.”

  “So no trouble.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said, but I reckon he misunderstood. Frances meant he’d find the four of us no trouble, that’s what I reckon.

  “What does he want?” George called down.

  “Water, if you have it. Food, if you can spare it. Somewhere to sleep, either way.” He said it quietly, addressing those who had spoken to him directly. “The wind’s picking up and this place looks like it might have a storm cellar.”

  “It does,” said Jones. “Only we haven’t been in there yet.”

  The man waited for more but neither Jones nor Frank were eager to spill it. They looked at each other instead, then looked over to me. I was already heading over, breaking the shotgun open to show myself harmless.

  “There was a demon,” I told him.

  I swear he didn’t move, yet suddenly his empty hands weren’t empty anymore. It was like the guns just appeared there. Both were cylinder loaders and looked to be full, unless he’d fashioned fakes to make it seem that way. Fakes wouldn’t be much good against a winged bitch, though, which said to me the bullets were real.

  “Quiet,” he said. Not to us. Then I thought I heard something else but he covered it with words of his own.

  “When was it here?” he asked.

  Me, I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun he was walking from and said, “Still is.”

  Just like that, one of the guns was gone. “Dead?”

  I nodded. Heard that something else again.

  “Ssh,” said the giant. Then, “You?”

  I was flattered he’d think so. I was also glad George couldn’t hear else there’d be some preening and showmanship before we could cut to the honest answer. “No. She was dead when we got here.”

  There was no need to ask if we were sure. We wouldn’t still be here otherwise.

  “Show me,” he said.

  “Alright,” said Jones, “But do you want to put that gun away first?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “It’s dead.”

  I thought I heard an echo of that, and judging from Jones and Frank and the way they frowned, so did they.

  “Who you got with you?” I asked.

  He said nothing, so it was up to her to make the introductions.

  “I’m Cassie,” she called out from behind him. Her voice was high, with the enthusiasm of someone about to play. “This man is my friend. He’s called Frances.”

  Frances squatted down in the road. There was the sound of metal on metal, the sound buckles make, and he stood again. From behind him emerged Cassie. A little girl about six years old. She reached up and his hand was there for her.

  I stepped behind the man Frances but he recoiled to keep his back facing away from me. It was only a reflex action. He turned back after and I could see a system of harnesses strapped around him. The girl had been fixed in, completely out of our sight back there and protected by the mass of muscle that was Frances in front.

  “This is Jones, Frank, that there’s George,” I said. “My name’s Charlie.”

  Nobody shook hands.

  S

  We’d found the place at around twelve. It took the best part of an hour to get close enough to see it seemed empty, and another hour on that to make sure it was. A two pump gas station, dust-blown and sun-baked, with a workshop and store and a single shell sign squeaking in a building breeze. That building breeze was why we’d risked an approach in the first place. Oklahoma was not a nice place to be out in the open, unless you liked flying kites. Tornado Alley, this stretch used to be called. I doubt there’s much of anyone left to call it anything any more, but that wouldn’t stop the tornadoes from coming.

  “Empty,” Frank had said and we’d all hushed him immediately. George slapped him across the back of his head.

  “Idiot.”

  “Sorry.”

  Frank said “empty” last time, right before three women popped up from behind the sofa and started shooting. Lucky for us we were quicker, though Jones got some splinters from an exploding picture frame. The time before that, someone was hiding in the refrigerator. I got a gun rammed into my mouth because of that, which is why the front teeth aren’t pretty. I drew my knife and that stopped things getting worse. I knew I could save my bullets because I knew he had none, and I knew that because there was still a gun in my mouth and not my brains on the wall. After two seconds he was backing away with his hands up and I was feeling in my bloody mouth to straighten my teeth. When Frank said empty it meant it wasn’t and that someone who wasn’t Frank was going to get hurt. To be fair, though, there was food or water to be had both times.

  “You go first,” Jones said to Frank.

  And to be fair, Frank always did.

  He came out from round the back of the building backing up. His gun was out but he wasn’t really pointing it at anything.

  “Frank?”

  “You should come and see,” he said. He pointed with his weapon. It trembled in his hand.

  He showed us a demon nailed to a door.

  She was an ugly bitch. None of us had ever seen one up close before. Obviously, because we were still alive. But we’d all seen them in the skies at some point, and I saw the carcass of one once in a ditch at the roadside but its wings had been pulled off and taken and so had the head and claws, so it wasn’t much more than a mutilated female torso. Seen that way the purple skin isn’t much different to mottled bruising. This one, the one Frank found, its skin still had a vibrant brightness even though it was dead, the pale lavender colour of its body darkening into violet at the arms and legs. The wings were stretched out to full span and pinned to the door with knives, railroad spikes, and even a couple of forks. They were a rich purple. The claws, two big scoops where the hands should’ve been, were a plum colour so dark it was almost black. She was the colours of dusk given fleshy form, hairless and vile.

  “Nice tits,” said George, trying to sound like the movie star tough guy he wanted to be.

  The tits were plump and round and firm-looking but they were hellish in that they were hers. All that suckled there was demon or doomed.

  “She looks like your momma,” said Jones. I guess he was tired of George’s shit.

  George knew better than to fight with Jones, though. “She’s got better teeth.”

  Its teeth were like a shark’s, sharp triangles folding back from the gums in double rows. Too many teeth.

  “What should we do with it?” Frank asked.

  The door it ha
d been impaled on had long ago been torn from its hinges and rested now against the sloping hatch of a storm cellar, maybe as some kind of warning, maybe as some kind of victory mark. Jones and I took a side each and pulled it face down into the dirt.

  George jumped on it and we heard her bones crack. He lost his balance and fell on his ass and something else broke in the bitch under him. It was pretty funny.

  S

  “How did it die?” the big man asked, following us round.

  “Various shots to the chest,” Jones was telling him. “A couple very close range.”

  “You showing him our demon?” George called down from the roof, trying to take credit.

  “Yeah.”

  I waved him down.

  “Here she is,” said Frank. He took hold of one edge and flipped it over, though that makes it sound easier than it was.

  A bone stuck from its flank and its nose was broken flat, otherwise it looked much as it had. The skin had picked up some of the sandy dust from the ground. I thought the stranger might shelter the girl from the sight, but he actually steered her towards it. They looked at it together.

  “See,” said Jones, pointing to the chest area. Just beneath the breasts was a mess of bullet holes of different calibres. He pointed to where the skin was puffed and scorched. “Close range.”

  George was with us by then. “Nice tits, huh?”

  Everybody ignored him. He spat on the body. He liked to spit. “Give you nightmares, little girl.”

  Frances pointed to the cellar doors. “You’ve not been in there?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “The demon was on it,” I said.

  “You think there’s another one in there?”

  It sounded ridiculous when he said it. “Maybe.”

  George pulled back the slide of what he liked to call his piece, just for the dramatic impact of the noise. “Only one way to find out, eh?”

  Jones said, “You weren’t so eager before.”

  “If it’s loaded you can come,” said the giant. He was checking the barrels of his weapons, spinning them, snapping them shut. “That shotgun would be handy close range, too.”

  I offered it to him.

  “Going to have my hands full,” he said, raising his revolvers.

  “God damn it,” I muttered, but I went to the doors.

  “I’ll stay with the girl,” said Frank.

  “Me too,” said Jones.

  “Good,” said Frances. “Stick close to her down there, but keep her behind us.”

  Frank looked at Jones. “She’s going too?”

  Jones merely shrugged and turned the cylinder of his own thirty-eight, lining it up so the four shots he had left were ready to fire.

  “I have to,” said the girl. “Frances might need me.”

  Frank went to the left door, Jones to the right. Each grabbed a handle. Frances stood in the middle, both guns pointing down at where the stairs would be. George and I were on either side of him doing the same. The girl was behind us.

  “Alright,” Frances said, “on three.”

  But they were already opening the doors.

  “Shit.” I brought the barrel close to aim, panicked by the sudden opening, and caught myself in the cheek with the stock.

  Stairs led down into gloom. Nothing came out. Nothing moved. There was no noise.

  Frances went in.

  “Shit,” I said again and followed him down into the dark.

  S

  There were beds. About a dozen of them. We stood in the slant of sunlight that had come down with us, but the room went way back into a darkness black as oil. The beds we could see clearly were occupied. There was a woman bound to each of them.

  “Penitentary,” Frances said.

  “What?”

  We walked slowly, inspecting each bed just enough to tell us the person on it was dead. I said, “What?” again but nobody else said anything.

  The women were drawn and wasted, skin over bone, dressed only in shadows where the flesh was sunken. They’d starved down here. All of them were manacled with homemade cuffs and chains, and all of them had deep dry lacerations that spoke of attempts to escape. One woman I saw had scraped her flesh down to the bone trying to pull her way out and I stopped looking at the others after that.

  The girl—I’d forgotten her name—was muttering prayers for them.

  Pushed against one wall was a plastic crate filled with bottled water, the huge types that refilled office coolers. I hadn’t seen one in years and here there was four of them, plus one half-empty on its stand. Or half-full, depending on your philosophy.

  “Whoo!” George cried, and he did a little dance step, “jackpot! Look at all that!”

  At that moment we were attacked.

  A woman leapt up from the foot of the cooler, not at all hidden but missed because of the distraction water is to thirsty men. I yelled for George. Jones grabbed at him, pulling him round just as the woman’s nails raked at his face. She’d been going for the eyes but thanks to Jones only managed to scratch thin strips across his cheeks.

  “Fuck!”

  “Don’t!” Frances called. I’m not sure who to.

  I barrelled forward, pushed the shotgun firm into her stomach, and fired. Her back splashed against the wall and she flopped down in two pieces near enough.

  “Was it one of them?” George cried, “Was it a demon?” He was patting at his wounds, probably hoping he weren’t poisoned.

  “No,” said Frances, slipping his guns away and rubbing his face with his hands. “Just a woman.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “Just a woman,” Cassie repeated, looking at me where I leant against the wall taking shaky breaths.

  Fucked if I was going to feel guilty.

  S

  The cellar doors had a place to slide a bar across but no bar. Up in the store section of the gas station we took down a regular door to saw into pieces the right size. The wind had picked up some by then. I’d started to clean up the mess I’d made but Frances pushed me away and said he’d do it. He was very firm about it. I think he was pissed with me for some reason.

  “What if they’re taking the water?” George asked, laying the door in place across the counter. The slices down his face had dried into crusty lines.

  “They’re not taking the water,” I said.

  “He’s got that harness, he’d get one in that alright.”

  “I don’t think even a guy his size would want to carry one of those on his back,” said Jones. “And Frank’s with him.”

  “Oh, Frank. Great. Everything will be fine then.”

  Just a woman. I kept hearing that in my head. The way the girl said it.

  “She must have been crazy,” said Jones. “Down in the dark like that when she could have come out. Doors weren’t locked.”

  “The demon was leaning on them.” George pushed and pulled at the saw. It bit its way through the wood reluctantly. It was old, that saw. We’d been carrying it around a while, blunt teeth and all.

  “It don’t weigh so much you can’t push it down opening them doors out.”

  “Maybe she was too weak,” I said, holding the door steady. “They looked starved.”

  “She was just a woman,” George said. As if that explained everything. Or as if it didn’t matter so why keep talking about it.

  These last unnumbered years have been hard for everyone of course, but the women got it hardest once the demons came. Maybe before then.

  There was a group I used to belong to. They stuck together like we did, safety in numbers, and they gathered up women they found along the way. Mostly it was the purpose I alluded to earlier, but sometimes it wasn’t only that. There were other ways to fuck a woman, like callin
g her demon. They were always female, see, the demons, so it made sense that they were once women. Women who turned into hellish carnivores that flew with the wind-blown ash. Accuse a woman of turning, smack her around a bit for some convincing purple, and you had Salem all over again. I’ve seen women strung up worse than the demon we found on the door. Shit, I even believed it once.

  “Hey, Charlie, where you going?”

  I ignored George, but I told Jones on the way out I was going to speak with Frances.

  S

  Frances had seen places like this before but he wouldn’t tell me anything more until we had the place secure. That meant tossing the bodies outside, making barricades of the rusty metal bed frames, and taking an inventory of remaining ammunition. I thought that was a little pointless. I was the only one who’d fired.

  “He does it every time we stop,” Cassie told me.

  George and Jones managed to make a sturdy beam for the doors, halving the door from the store and binding the pieces together. I helped them carry it.

  “Oh, now you decide to help,” said George.

  “I’ve been busy,” I said. I pointed to the pile of bodies as Frances shrugged another two from his shoulders. We were going to burn them, the best funeral we could manage and more than most people got these days. The wind tossed his hair back with the tail of his long coat in a way I knew George must have envied. It was getting so we had to shout to be heard or our voices were snatched away too quickly. The gas sign rocked back and forth, screeching a rusty protest.

  “How many more?” I called, but Frances ignored it. He stood looking up at the sky, letting the wind do its thing, and I thought oh shit, another George.

  Cassie came up out of the cellar. She was dragging one of the bodies (just a woman). I heard it bump, bump, bump, up the steps. Jesus, she was five years old.

  “Frances,” she said.

  “I know.”

  All of us turned to see.