Flytrap

by Stephanie Ahn

  Like… being pulled apart. More and more. He demonstrates with his hands, putting them together and then separating them; his palms stick to each another and elongate, like a massive rubber band. Until snap. His fingers come apart.

  “Did it hurt?”

  Can’t remember.

  I look down, fidgeting with a duct tape roll I’ve left lying around. “Did I ever ask you how you died?”

  No.

  “Can I ask now?”

  He’s quiet. Then his head… narrows. Squishes, more like. And the illusion of his skull detaches from his neck.

  “…Junhyun?”

  His head rolls around the floor.

  Elevator. Freak accident. Closed on neck.

  I can feel the top of my head grow cold and the blood drains away. “Oh… oh no. And then it…”

  Moved. Yes.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, so that’s why the rent is so low here. Do you know anything about… after? Like, the beyond?”

  No. Didn’t get to see it before… he gestures at his head, then picks it up.

  “What do you think it is? Do you think there’s a heaven?”

  He puts his head back in place. It wobbles a bit, like a floating magnet sliding into place. Must be something.

  “Junhyun… I don’t want to die.” I bury my face in my hands. “I don’t want to die… I know it’s a selfish thing to say, but—I just—I don’t want to…”

  Don’t have to, do you? He sounds a little desperate, pleading. He floats forward, reaching for me again. People you can call. Friends. Sister. Vampires. Lilith.

  I shake my head. “If I care about them, I can’t involve them. This is my mistake coming back around to bite me. Too many people have already died. There was a girl—Chloe—she died not even knowing her own name, for a grudge he had against me. He’s not going to stop.”

  Junyun points to himself. Already dead. Let help. Please?

  “I wish I could. I wish you could help me. But I don’t think it works like that.” I drag the cello case across the floor and let it rest in front of me. “Ha. My mom always wanted me to play the cello. Said, it can’t be that much different from the guitar, right? She said she was going to send my baby sister to cello lessons, when she was old enough.”

  Had a baby sister?

  “She…” my face crumbles. “I don’t remember her name. I sold it.”

  Junhyun’s head cocks in confusion, his head swirling clockwise. I hug myself, cold again.

  “I… sold the memory of her name. In exchange for information about necromancy. I thought it was worth it at the time. To bring Johanna back. But now I’m going to die, and I don’t even remember my baby sister’s name.”

  Harry…

  “I sold my life to end up where I am now. My family, my home—and then when I lost Johanna, I sold everything again. I cut up the body of the woman I loved, dude. Who does that? I cut it up and spliced it together with a bunch of other dead people, almost killed myself trying to bring her back, and then lost my friends and family all over again. And then, I thought, I thought I finally had my shit together—and I met a girl, a really, really cool girl—and I had to let go of her too, because she has a life and I don’t. Luce saves people. Brian has a baby. Everyone has a life except me. All I have is… me, and him. Oh my gods, he’s all I have.”

  I start crying again. Junhyun hovers around me, chilling the air around my shoulders.

  Don’t go, he pleads. Somehow, hearing that is what motivates me to pick myself up off the floor, hauling the cello case onto my back, checking the pouches and tools I’ve strapped to myself with holsters made of duct tape.

  “Junhyun, I’m sorry. We both know you can’t actually stop me.”

  He still tries, tugging at my coat, standing in front of me with his arms outstretched—I walk through him, feeling the freezing cold of his body pass through me. He howls and pounds on my kitchen counter with a fist, making a toaster rattle.

  I sigh. “Junhyun, please. Can I just… get a hug or something before I leave? I know you’re upset, but I’m doing this no matter what. Please, just… I don’t want to leave seeing you angry.”

  He sobers up. Walks forward, and delicately puts his arms around me—it’s like trying to hug mist, but I curl my hands around where his back should be anyway, and welcome his cold touch.

  “Thank you.”

  Will miss you.

  “I’ll stop by and say hi, if it’s at all possible.”

  …As an afterthought, I take the stairs, not the elevator.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Retail Therapy

  I pull up in my rented van, right where the Welcome to Havenbrook Mall sign is. The abandoned mall is enormous, but it’s somewhat obvious which direction Beelzebub entered from; aside from the smoking wreckage of the car and the sign I saw in my dream, there’s a smeared trail of blood leading to the western entrance, and the doors have been reduced to a mess of glass on the ground. I check the maps of each level that I printed from the Internet and go around to the northern entrance, where I can take the stairs directly to the third story.

  I check the scene out, from the comfortable distance of the third-tier balcony that rings the bare, flat expanse of the first floor. I’m glad I didn’t go to the second floor; Beelzebub is on the first, but he’s right behind the dead escalator that ramps up to the second. He’s hunched over, tearing into a body, making strange, violent sucking noises followed by loud cracks. He’s snapping open the bones and sucking on the marrow. I can’t see all of him behind the escalator, but it’s unmistakably him.

  I put down some of my stuff, quietly, and take another trip to the U-haul for a chunky, Bluetooth-activated boombox. My footfalls are quieter than usual; I’ve padded my shoes with gaffer tape. Over my usual white collar shirt is a red sweater, one with a good bulk and texture for keeping Gorgeous’s shoulder holster and my improvised duct-tape harnesses snug against me, and over that is my black trenchcoat. The coat is only moderately stealthy, but it’s familiar, and I… I need familiar right now. Part of me is hoping that, since I’ve survived so many near-deaths in this coat, it’ll grant me some kind of muscle memory that makes me faster, slipperier, more dangerous. Or maybe I’m just being superstitious, hanging onto a tailored scrap of fabric like a lucky rabbit’s foot soaked in Borax. Or maybe I just think I look nice in it, and my shallow ass wants to look presentable on my merry way to the afterlife.

  I step into a prepared climbing harness, triple-checking that the attached rope isn’t tangled and that the carabiner at the end is still working. A stiff particle mask from my duffle bag goes over my face and ears. I anxiously quadruple-check that my wheeled tub is still filled with bottles of grain alcohol corked with soaked rags, a kitchen blowtorch, and three rocket fireworks. Strapped to one of my hips is my crowbar, and to the other, a kitchen knife taped to the end of a sturdy wooden dowel. As the finishing touch, I have the cello case from the Typhon Group on my back, the harpoon rifle inside set for use. Whatever that case is made of, it’s stronger than it should be; I tried smashing it, knifing it, standing on it and hopping up and down, and it didn’t even dent. I figure it can double as a shield.

  Beelzebub is still at the west entrance. I set the boombox down to the east, so that to approach it he’ll have to move further into the building, out from under the awning formed by the second story balcony. I take the rest of my supplies to the westernmost balcony, still tiptoeing.

  I lay my phone on the floor and press the screen; the boombox starts blasting the voice of a washed-up celebrity introducing a generic Christmas playlist at max volume. The cracking and sucking noises pause. Heavy, muffled footfalls echo on the mosaic floor, coming closer.

  Beelzebub enters my line of sight. At first I only see a gnarled foot, big-toed like a hippo’s, but many-jointed and still somewhat resembling a baby’s hand. So I don’t expect the mass that follows behind—
and follows, and follows. He just… keeps swelling into view. An elongated, massive muzzle, like a hippo’s jaw but longer, almost like a platypus bill. Compound eyes bulging to either side, barely contained by the eyelids. Big, drooping ears with torn edges, and small tusks coming out from below like splinters, skin swollen at the place of puncture. Wrinkles across its pale, hairy back, lumps shifting under the surface like crawling parasites. And, finally, a heavy tail dragging behind like a wedding train caked in mud.

  I can feel my breath draining as my heart stops. He’s… at least the size of a tractor by this point. Of an elephant. I don’t know if I’m prepared for this.

  But I have to be. Nothing in the plan has changed. As I light the Molotov cocktails with the kitchen torch, the boombox blares the first cheery chords of “Jingle Bell Rock.” When Beelzebub is directly beneath me, I tip the tub over the balcony railing.

  The explosion is big enough that I feel the heatwave two stories up, shielding my face from the blistering, choking distortions in the air. I have to move as the smoke reaches me; the particle mask helps, but my eyes still sting and water. I think I slowed him down—

  He’s not slowing down. At first I just see what looks like a barreling cloud of smoke—then in a blink he’s all the way up the escalator ramp, covered in a layer of black char but still none the worse for wear, heavy feet pounding on the metal—ah, crap! He’s already on the second level when I get my three rocket fireworks out, surging up to my level while I light them with my torch. He takes time to turn around the corner, but then he’s on a direct path to me along the long balcony. He’s thundering, building momentum, coming at me like a bullet with legs and churning muscle—my instinct is to turn tail and run, but I plant my feet and point all three rockets at him.

  They go off individually; one spirals off in an errant direction, toward the grimy glass ceiling letting in equally grimy sunlight, but two of them hit dead-on. They make blunt impacts against his face—they don’t even slow him down, not really, but the brutal rhythm of his feet falters. Theoretically, that’s all I need to hide the fact that I’m racing toward him, drawing my spear improvised from a meat knife.

  I kick my legs out from under myself, going into a home run slide under his belly. The second I see the drooping mass of cyst-like flesh, I jam my spear in—and almost wrench my arms out of their sockets. Damn, damn! I was hoping there would be a weak spot or something, but the flesh just sucks up my knife and dowel like putty. Beelzebub is still chugging forward, dragging me with him; I let go of the spear and cover my head, and by some miracle I don’t get trampled as he passes over me. I can hear him turning around, coming back—I can’t fight him this close, I need to get distance again—so I scramble to the railing of the balcony, clip my carabiner to it, and jump headlong over the railing.

  I try to slow my fall by holding onto the rope that’s now uncoiling above me, but my palms burn too hot. I lose my grip before I run out of rope, and then—

  “Ahh, FUCK!” My pelvis gets the shock of a lifetime as the harness around my hips stops me short, and then I slam into the balcony wall of the second story. I groan, hanging, quite literally, by the seat of my pants. I grope blindly for the second story balcony, anything that I can hang onto—but the rope vibrates ominously, and I look up to see Beelzebub’s tree trunk of a tail smashing onto the railing I’m hanging from.

  The railing gives, just enough for me to jerk a few feet closer to the floor. I fumble with the attachment to my harness, twisting mid-air—Beelzebub smashes the railing of the third story again, and I go crashing about ten feet to the bottom floor, barely protecting my face as I land on my elbows and knees.

  If I thought Beelzebub was fast coming up the stairs, it’s nothing compared to his downward speed. I’m still getting up, vaguely noting that the boombox has now begun to play “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” when a crushing weight slams onto the cello case on my back. My face smashes back into the floor. I kick and flail, weight shifting above me like someone’s trying to wrap me in a concrete blanket—I get a glimpse of those godsdamned baby hands, covered in thick, pale hide, dirtied by soil and asphalt and crust-dried blood and guts. It takes Beelzebub a while, but once the cello case shifts enough, he crushes my hip and waist in a clumsy, moist grip, claws curling to dig into my stomach.

  Beelzebub lifts me to his face. The blood orange compound eyes roll, focusing on me with some difficulty without a singular pupil. All the objects I’ve strapped to myself dig into me, and they hurt. My coat sleeve is pinned down on my left side, but with my right I can reach into my breast pocket, into a metal canister stuffed with bubble wrap and Christmas ornaments.

  The first ornament I produce is a classic red globe the size of a juicy apple. As Beelzebub opens his maw, he reveals a massive tongue carpeted in spikes, flat, wall-like teeth in crooked rows, a ridged, purple roof like the ribbed vaults of a church—what I imagine Jonah saw of the whale’s mouth. I pitch my red ornament into that abyssal opening, watch the twinkling of it get swallowed up in the undulating darkness.

  I have just enough time to pull another ornament from my canister before the red one explodes inside Beelzebub with a THOOM. The red ornament was a shrapnel hex, a modified version of the energy-filled jars I usually throw; right now, it should be filling Beelzebub’s insides with all the nails, glass shards, and razor blades I could fit inside that bad boy. He screams shrilly, sounding oddly like a sick human child.

  The ornament in my hand is shaped like an ivory horse; I hold it close to my heart as I crush it in my hand. The thin, glitter-scrape shards slice into my palm and fingers, and the slivers of blood magic I normally use as daggers burst from my vertebrae in a deadly, spiked line. The grip of the baby hand loosens, and I tumble to the floor.

  Beelzebub is backing up on all fours, shaking his head like a wet dog, coughing through his shredded throat as his jaws open even wider. He vomits blood and gore swimming in yellow bile onto the floor—I scramble backward as the bile makes sizzling noises against my boots. This is as good a chance as I’m going to get. I slip the straps of the cello case off my shoulders, clawing open the catch and opening the whole thing flat onto the floor.

  The silver harpoon’s tip shines, winking at me. I yank the gun out of its case and steady myself on one knee, facing my shaking and spitting enemy. I put the rifle butt up against my shoulder, letting it slot comfortably against the muscle—I don’t know how I know to do that, but in the moment I just do—and I pull the trigger smoothly, deliberately, as though the trigger wants to be pulled and is simply using my finger to achieve its end.

  For the second the harpoon spends soaring through the air, I’m mesmerized. It looks almost, almost as though the shot’s gone wide—but the Typhon Group doesn’t sell duds. As Beelzebub shakes his head one last time, right into the path of the harpoon, the barbed point THUNKs dead center between his eyes.

  The shaking stops. One of his thick legs buckles at the knee, tipping him over—and he’s collapsing one level of flesh at a time, from the bottom up, like the stories of the Twin Towers. He lands with an impact that makes the whole floor quake—I stumble, landing on my hands and knees. When I look up, he’s spread across the floor like a beached whale.

  The bile on the floor bubbles. Distantly, the boombox finishes up the last notes of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” A few stray fires left from the Molotovs flicker and gutter. Shaking, I rise on unsteady feet, clutching the empty rifle to my chest like a comfort object. Holy fuck. Did I do it? I wait a second. The particle mask feels like it’s suffocating me, so I rip it off, then step closer. I can’t hear or see any breathing in his wide nostrils, nor any twitching in the torn, flat ear. The wrinkled eyelid is shutting over one dull eye. I move closer. Holy… fuck. I did it. I—

  An enormous hand SLAMs me to the floor. The rifle crushes into my ribs—as I cough, dropping it, a claw rips into my thigh.

  I let out a hoarse scream at the pain, then an
other as Beelzebub rises in front of me, slowly yet inevitably, like a tidal wave, like a drowning tsunami. I have just enough presence of mind to draw my crowbar, hold it like a baton, and smash it into the claw embedded in my leg. The impact jars me to the bone, sets my teeth on edge so badly I want to piss myself—but the claw breaks off right where I hit it, splintering into brittle split ends like charcoal.

  I scramble backward but my leg, my leg is fucking useless now, limp but still shaking uncontrollably from the pain. Beelzebub advances on me, eyes opening individually, nostrils flaring, harpoon jutting out of his head like a unicorn horn. I fumble with the shoulder holster Gorgeous gave me, pulling out the pistol—safety off, safety off, you’ve been shot so many times you should know this—and I squeeze off a shot into his face. The gun jumps wildly in my hand; I almost drop it. One. Two. Three-four-five. Six. The bullets impact, leaving ripples in the meat—then they sink in, disappearing without a trace. One of them even goes into his eye, and the red splits like an orange peel where the bullet enters, then splits again into six segments like a tangerine, all those lines getting lost in the cross hatching already there—

  The mouth opens again. I reach for my metal canister of Christmas goods and toss a green ornament at him; it bounces off a flat tooth and lands on the floor, shattering to release a yellow gas that makes my face burn and my eyes fill with hot tears. I pick up my crowbar where I dropped it and lunge forward, thinking to prop his jaws open—I guess that only works in cartoons, because I barely snatch my hands back before Beelzebub snaps his mouth shut. When he opens them again, I see my crowbar disappearing down his throat.

  And then I have nothing. The sun is setting through the glass ceiling, darkening the inside of the mall. More darkness falls as those jaws advance on me, the buffalo teeth closing around my head.

  In my last moments of life, I think, well—all in all, this isn’t a bad way to go. I always thought I’d die in a fight, but this is more epic than I anticipated. Lord of the fucking Flies, who would have thought? Of course I’m scared. Oh, I’m so, so fucking scared. But I’m tired, and ready for it to be over. And of all the musical send-offs I could have asked for, Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” is a top-tier choice.