by Dan Darling
I considered sharing my thoughts with Meat Shoulders but decided it would be too exhausting. Instead, I passed out for a half second and hit my head on the window. I woke back up, blinked, and hit my head again.
“Meat Shoulders,” I said.
“You mean me?” asked Meat Shoulders.
“That’s your name, isn’t it? We’ll call you Meat for short. I need caffeine.”
“I have a thermos―”
“None of that Typhon Industries swill. It’s made of blood. There’s a gas station in Cedar Point. Best coffee in the world. Gourmet. It said so on the Styrofoam cup they served it to me in.”
“I’m not authorized to stop, except for drive through. And only in Socorro.”
“Meat,” I said, “you need to listen to me. I want coffee and only from one place. We’ll stop, and you’ll see. Get out with me. Smell the pines. Use their pay phone. Drink a cigarette and eat a coffee or two. A young woman works there. You’ll fall in love with her consonants.”
Before he could answer, I blinked a big one. When my eyes opened, we were facing the volcanoes. Buildings sat in low clusters on each side of a freeway that, as my fog cleared, I figured out was I-40. I was confused about what day it was and why I was in a car with another human. I mumbled a little nonsense and then recognized Meat Shoulders. It all came back to me.
“How long have I been out?” I asked. “Did I miss anything?”
“Twenty minutes or so. Go back to sleep. We’re only in Albuquerque. It’s gonna be a long ride.”
I tried to determine our exact location on I-40 based on the superstores we passed at any given moment, but to no avail. Every superstore cloned another superstore. Then Wyoming Mall, a dead shopping mall populated by specters of capitalism, whisked by on my right. Wyoming Mall had been systematically destroyed by its competitors in the cruel battle of commerce. The mall sat like a ghost town in the middle of the city. That’s how Albuquerque worked: with unlimited space, you didn’t need to renovate or rebuild the structure of a bankrupt business. You gutted it, left the corpse to rot, and moved on. That was the way of the desert.
The motorcade swooped left up a ramp that took us a couple hundred feet above the earth and dropped us onto I-25 going south. We clogged up traffic. People rubbernecked at us as if a crash of rhinos were trying to merge with normal motorists. We blasted our horns and cut people off. Our convoy managed to stay in a relatively unadulterated strand, and only one irritated driver showed his middle finger to our particular vehicle. I got a kick out of it. He’d displayed his longest finger, a fragile appendage of skin and bone, thinking that would somehow change the nature of the world.
The sun began to set, draping the long gentle shadows of the volcanoes over the city below us. On the elevated freeway, we enjoyed the last vestiges of day while the rest of the city drowsed in dusk. It slipped from us inevitably, like a garment gravity tugged from our bodies.
I saw the spotlights first. They dragged their thick yellow fingers across the sky, clutching at the cosmos for help. The universe, a playground of predator and prey, didn’t help anyone. It had no favorites. The big top of the Gamut Circus sat in a globe of light at the conflux of the golden beams maybe a half mile distant. I braced myself. I tugged at my seatbelt and checked Meat Shoulders’ too.
I wouldn’t have noticed the line of vehicles that formed in front of us, shoulder to shoulder, blocking the road, except that the blue hippie van pulled directly in front of us. They packed themselves across all four lanes leaving no space to go around, and slowed down in tandem, as if preparing to execute some acrobatic feat. Meat Shoulders squinted. Maybe he thought the fresh dusk shadows were playing tricks on him. He rode the tail of the blue hippie van. He punched his steering wheel, and the hood of his vehicle bellowed a mighty challenge.
All at once, the back doors of the hippie van and its three friends swung open. Figures crouched inside, roped to the walls, clad in mismatched black trousers, sweaters, masks, and gloves. They looked like bank robbers who’d raided thrift stores for their gear. Several buckets stood lined up above the bumper. The other vehicles held similar figures hovering over buckets, all roped in to keep them from falling into traffic and getting ground to dust.
Meat Shoulders hit the brakes, but too late. Each second-hand bank robber had already picked up a bucket. They poured waterfalls of steel spiked orbs the size of baseballs into our path. I put my palms against the dashboard, and yelled as if I were actually surprised. Our tires turned to confetti. We spun. A calamity of shattering glass and shrieking steel spun with us, first from behind, then from the front, then from behind again, as our convoy had its legs torn from under it. The city did pirouettes around us. The sunset looked prettier with every turn. We collided with another Humvee and careened into a guardrail. Our vehicle stood on two legs for a second, then settled back onto all four shredded feet.
I held myself in place with a hand on the dash and the other braced against the windowpane, my feet pushing hard into the front floor space. The windshield had crackled into one big spider web. The red sunset poured blood into every jagging crack. The engine had died, and our truck sat eerily silent. Meat Shoulders clutched the steering wheel as if he thought the truck would start spinning again if he let go. A mouth of jagged glass teeth yawned through the driver’s side window, but I didn’t see any blood on him. Outside, hell had broken loose. I knew I’d have to go out there.
Meat Shoulders turned toward me. He looked at me with the eyes of a scared kid. His elbows quivered and his knuckles looked like they might break through the skin.
“You’re okay,” I said.
He blinked at me. “You are too. Are you?”
I relaxed my body. The crashing and squealing of our convoy turning into a street salad had stopped. Horns and muted shouting blared outside the Humvee’s windows. And then another sound cut the air.
“Was that gunfire?” Meat Shoulders asked.
I opened the door, tried to get out, but my seat belt yanked me back. It clung tight against my hips, where it had locked during the accident. I hit the release and blood flowed into a belt of bruise across my lap. I tried to get out of the car a second time. This time it worked, though the world teetered as I unfurled my body to its full height, my head reeling from the impact of the crash, lack of sleep, or both. Our score of vehicles was a helter-skelter blockade of twisted, smoking metal and glittering glass. Beyond it, the southbound freeway teemed with cars as far as the eye could see.
Men had begun to climb, stagger, crawl, and drag each other from the wreckage. Cerberus’ lonely howl sailed into the sky from somewhere in the mess. Our Humvee had spun some yards away from the pileup. One of the horse trailers had come unmoored from its cab and lay on its side across two lanes of asphalt. I stumbled toward it. A long high-pitched peal snaked from the shadows inside, sounding like a rabbit’s death cry. More joined it. I moved closer. The cries became a chorus. I was looking at the gremlin truck, full of dark rats wearing party favor noses, plated with beetle chitin, and thirsty for human blood. I wondered if it’d be better if they’d been mashed into paste or merely scared. Assassin bugs were tough. I guessed there would be plenty of survivors.
A hundred yards or so away, the Captain limped from the wreckage. A streak of blood ran from his temple, and he brandished a pistol. He waved his arms at me. I walked toward him. He yelled, but I couldn’t hear the words over the din of the gremlins screaming their heads off. He waved frantically. I moved my legs. I ate up some yards with my long strides. He yelled and gestured, and I had no idea how to interpret any of it, so I just kept moving.
Off ahead and to the left, another burst of gunfire sounded. Bullets hammered against metal, and some animal or man shrieked in agony.
The Captain was right in front of me. He shoved me in the chest and shouted. “What’s wrong with you? Get away!”
I deflected his hand and shoved him back. He staggered and fell to one knee.
He braced himself with t
he muzzle of his pistol against the asphalt and rose. It looked like it hurt. He faced me again, and I got ready to shove him back down. “Don’t you see? Get away! You’re making it worse!”
Cerberus howled and howled. I had a vision of him pinned beneath a crushed truck, bleeding and scared. From north to south along the divider between the two halves of interstate, the streetlights blinked to life one by one. A dense form shot up from the wreckage a dozen yards distant, sailed through a cone of yellow light, and swooped off to the west. It trailed the cries of a tortured sheep behind it. The scrabble of claws on metal sounded from behind me, where the gremlin trailer lay overturned. I turned to see carapaces swarming out a hole in the corner. They formed a carpet of gleaming black on the asphalt, spreading toward where the two of us stood.
“God save us.” The Captain brought up his pistol arm.
I took his wrist in my hand and raised his arm up, as gently as I could, until the pistol pointed skyward.
“Goddamn you!” the Captain sputtered. He struggled to bring his arm down. He grabbed my wrist with his other hand and tried that out. He couldn’t budge me.
“Find your happy place, Captain. They’re not coming for us.”
He didn’t stop struggling, so I continued to hold his arm up. A few of the gremlins gathered around my shoes and tickled my ankles with their proboscises, but most of the swarm passed us by, scuttling under the guardrail and into the weeds on west side of the freeway. When the Captain realized that, I let him go. He almost fell down.
“If they’re not after you, then where are they going?” he asked.
My gaze was already on the circus tent. It sat a mile or so distant, pitched in the empty desert that lay to the south of Albuquerque. A makeshift parking lot sprawled on three sides of the tent, packed with cars. Floodlights drenched the sides in light and made playful sweeps across the settling night sky. A winged form sailed through one of them.
My plan was working perfectly. I didn’t know whether to feel satisfied or guilty.
“They’re headed for a galloping good time at the Gamut Circus and Freak Show.”
“Sweet Christ.” The Captain turned on me. “Don’t stand there! Do what you’re here to do! Use your summoning powers and call them back.”
“I don’t have any summoning powers.” My voice sounded a thousand years old. I felt like lying down on the asphalt and waiting for the paramedics to arrive and collect my body. “They like me because I’m a monster―like them. The human part of them can recognize one of their own. But I’m only one guy. There’s a tent full of misfits a short scuttle away.”
The Captain gave me a disgusted look. “I knew you were a waste.”
“We’re all waste.”
He spat on the ground and turned away. He swung his legs a couple times and set his foot directly on a ball of metal spikes. Letting out a yelp, he rolled to the ground and grasped at his boot.
I’d been lucky not to step on one myself. They littered the highway from one side to the other. There must have been hundreds of them. I picked up the closest, a bunch of long sturdy spikes bent around each other until sharp points stuck out in all directions. Someone had fired a welding torch at the center where all the middles of the spikes intersected, fusing them together. It was a simple little weapon, born of my brain, a foreign invading weed, and some Good Friends with a metal shop.
Meat Shoulders stood beside me. He had a submachine gun in his hands and looked like he wanted his mom. The sky was littered with dipping, diving hydras, their bodies undulating as if snakes had always been meant for flight. They filled the night with their terrible cries. The air hummed with the buzz of harpies, dotting the night in compact swarms. They were a wind of stingers and mandibles and thrumming wings. That wind blew west.
“What do we do?” Meat Shoulders asked.
There was nothing we could do. You can’t eradicate an insect population without carpet bombing its habitat with DDT or poisoning its food supply. I could have told him to blow some gunpowder. Throwing lead in the air might have made him feel better. I could have told him that we should try to grab a few of the critters with our hands and stuff them into cages. If John White’s theory was correct and I was some sort of beacon, they’d all eventually swarm back to me. I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. Without me, they’d probably disperse into the desert. Since they were all outfitted with GPS signals, it was theoretically possible that the Minutemen could track them down, but it would be Herculean work. Whatever the outcome, my plan had ruined the Minutemen’s capacity to sic their animals on any border migrants in the near future.
As we stood looking over the guardrail, Goliath burst from behind a dead Humvee and galloped at full tilt down the freeway. His eely skin gleamed in the street lamps. His big bear body jiggled and danced as he crashed his paws lopsidedly along. He was limping. Black blood slicked his left flank. His tongue dangled from his sucker mouth and his eyes were human with fear. Several goons took positions clear of the wrecked vehicles, aimed their weapons, and let fly. The Captain yelled from where he lay lamed on the street for them to stop, but they didn’t listen. Their guns drilled Goliath with a dozen holes and battered the sky with their rattling. Goliath ran until he couldn’t. The goons fit a few more bullets into him. When they were done, he was a mountain of meat on the asphalt.
The world housed one fewer unique being. Only a handful of us were left.
t was time for me to flee the scene and let chaos do its work. As I stepped over the guardrail, planning on walking north until I could hail a cab, I spotted a figure far out on the bare desert between the freeway and the circus. The figure ran full tilt toward where the big top sat in its globe of lights surrounded by a sea of cars. It wore all black like the rest of the Minuteman crew. An orange ponytail bounced between the figure’s shoulders. They belonged to Abbey. Her love for a mutant bat was driving her straight toward a blood bath.
Meat Shoulders hovered on the other side of the guardrail. He’d attached himself to me like a scared kid sticks by his mom.
“C’mon,” I groaned. “Let’s go save the circus.”
I slid down the gravel embankment with the grace of an arthritic ogre. The terrain between the freeway and the circus was flat and covered only sparsely with weeds and cacti. Meat Shoulders and I made quick work of it. Halfway across, a hubbub floated up from the tent amidst the lights, but I couldn’t tell if it was circus glee or monster terror. We overtook the tide of gremlins grumbling and squeaking and scuttling amidst the weeds. As far ahead to my left and to my right as I could see, the ground twitched and skittered with gleaming black carapaces. In Albuquerque, we were used to cockroaches carpeting the dirt in the summer months. The gremlins were black and shiny and only around ten times bigger. Maybe the city would get used to them. Maybe in a few years’ time, we’d wake up and find a rat-bug in our kitchen sink. We’d sigh. Oh, this again. With a cockroach, you rinsed it down the sink or whacked it with a shoe or sprayed it with Raid and watched it gyrate. We’d have to adapt our methods―a hot poker through the torso would do the trick. Or a pot of boiling oil. Or, if all else failed, we could all walk around our houses armed with .22 pistols. Many of us routinely packed higher calibers already, so it wouldn’t even put us out.
The gremlins gave Meat Shoulders the heebie-jeebies. His trigger finger looked itchy. I tried to set a good example and appear unfazed as we tap-danced amidst the netherworldly horde. The flying creatures had already covered the span from road to circus. Swarms of feathered snakes circled high in the floodlights. Dracula was nowhere to be seen.
“What are we going to do when we get there?” Meat Shoulders asked.
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “You’re the one who’s trained for this.”
We crossed a slow and steady rise in the land. The ground crunched with tumbleweeds, dried out over a long winter. We steered around the big ones and marched over the smaller ones. They made good shadows for gremlins to hide under. We had to be careful
where we put our feet, and it was slow going.
“Maybe they won’t do anything. They might be disoriented. None of them have ever been free in the wild before.”
“Oh, they will,” Meat Shoulders said, puffing a little from the climb. I guessed it wasn’t easy getting around with all the body armor and hardware he had strapped to his body. “They’re starving. We haven’t fed them for days.”
“What possessed you to starve your animals?” I growled. The answer was obvious: to make them hungry for immigrant blood. The question in my mind was whether the chupacabras would see the circus people as fellow monsters worthy of veneration―as apparently I was―or misfits to be singled out and fed upon―as had been the whooping crane, albino rattlesnake, and Esposita the painted turtle.
We were a hundred paces away. Abbey’s ponytail had vanished. The circus band fired on all brass cylinders inside, punctuated by bursts of laughter from the crowd. The show went on, apparently. I paused outside the tent and glanced around. It took me a minute. The variation between the darkness low to the ground, the dull glow of the stars, and the floodlight beams made it tricky to see clearly, especially with my substandard human eyes.