When he finishes the beans, he neatly and quietly stacks the empty can in another corner of the cave. He sits back on the mattress, facing her, and sips his water. She stirs when he sits, knuckles her eyes, turns and grins sleepily at him.
“What’s for breakfast?” she asks.
He smiles briefly, but it quickly slips. “There’re only five cans left.”
She yawns, sits up, says, “I know. You don’t have to tell me. I know.”
They are both so thin that their cheeks are sunken and their vertebrae poke through their thin black shirts.
“Do you want to talk about the kiss?” he asks. Despite their situation, he still, absurdly, blushes.
“What is there to talk about?” she says. “It was nice. Isn’t that enough?”
His eyes fall to the floor. “Well, what I mean is—”
She suddenly brushes past him, picks up a can of beans, holds it at arm’s length in his direction. “Can you please open this?”
He has had control of the utility knife the entire time they’ve been here. Now he pulls it from his belt, extends his arm toward her, palm open, upturned. She looks at him strangely for a moment, then gently takes the knife from his hand.
Later, they are lying on the mattress, trying to sleep, but both wide awake. The machines pound and they pound and they pound. Sometimes small bits of rock fall from the ceiling, sprinkling them, their mattress, the floor. It is one of the only things that makes this experience seem real to her. She says, “If that vent just goes straight up and out, why can’t we ever see daylight when we look up it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand.”
He waits a moment before he responds, fiddles with his watch—the watch that tells the time and date. The number “22” sits in the little window, on its way to “23.” Glancing at the remaining supplies, he knows they probably won’t live to see much of next month.
“We don’t ever see daylight when we look up the shaft because the daylight is gone,” he says. “It’s gone.”
They sleep again, but this time their backs do not touch.
A couple of days later, eating and drinking, trying to ration what little they have left. They sit on the bed, cross-legged, facing each other. The man thinks of it as their attempt at creating a civilized dinner-table situation. The woman simply thinks of it as heartbreaking and squalid.
“What did you mean when you said the daylight is gone?” the woman asks, licking beans from her fingertips.
“I mean that the daylight is gone; it no longer exists,” the man answers. He does not look at her when he speaks.
“So what happened? Does it have something to do with the machines outside? Or maybe something to do with what they’re digging for?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He wipes bean sauce off the inside of the can with his index finger, angling it so he doesn’t cut himself on the sharp edges.
“Sometimes I feel like you’re not telling me something.”
The man finally looks up from his can. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.” She reaches a hand out, touches his knee lightly. “You wouldn’t hide anything from me, would you? We’re in this together, aren’t we? I want to think that I can trust you.”
The man grins a little, touches the woman’s hand with his own. He plays with her fingers like they’ve known each other for years, gently stroking the tops, curling down to slide under her palm. His familiarity simultaneously excites and disturbs the woman.
“Yes. Yes, we’re in this together. I’m glad you think so. I really am. I know I haven’t said it before, but I’m very happy you’re here with me.”
Something about the phrasing of this statement makes the woman pull her hand away from the man. Happy you’re here with me, she thinks. What does that mean?
Something like suspicion crawls across her scalp, settles deep at the base of her skull.
When they fall asleep that night, one of her hands is curled into a tight fist, nestled next to her heart; the other hand wraps around the fist, pulsating in time with the grind of the machines.
He is awakened by more pounding, but this time it’s much closer and not nearly as deep. Not the bone-rattling pounding of the machines outside, but a machine inside—or at least very nearly inside.
He springs from the bed—a movement he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of anymore—and reaches down to his belt for his utility knife. Fuck, he thinks. I knew I shouldn’t have—
“Here,” she says. “Calm down, it’s right here.” Awake now, too, she hands him the knife. He snatches it from her hand, flicks open the longest blade with his thumbnail.
The noise comes from beneath them. A drill. Louder with every passing moment. The floor shakes. He is very aware of the knife in his hand, his thumping heart, blood pounding through his system. She yells something at him from where she sits on the bed.
“What?” he bellows back, the floor now buckling. The faint outline of a manhole-size circle forms.
She takes a deep breath and shouts, “I said, why do you want to kill this person? Maybe he’s here to rescue us. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?”
The tip of the enormous drill finally breaks through, scattering pieces of rock across the floor of the cave. The drill then recedes. Muttering voices as it’s passed from the driller down to someone below him. The driller tentatively pops his head into the cave. He eyes the man and the woman in the room. He raises himself up a little more, bringing a gun into view.
For nearly a full half-minute, no one says anything. Just heavy breathing, wild-eyed stares, and the sounds of the machinery growling outside the cave walls.
Then: “Nearly out of water, I see,” the driller says. He’s wearing a heavily scuffed hardhat and dark goggles. “Food, too.”
The man with the knife just stares, still in defensive posture.
The woman speaks: “Are you here to rescue us? We’ve been here for so long.”
The driller does not look at her.
“Sir,” he says. “We have to get you out of here. They’re getting closer, they’ve nearly drilled down to where they think it is. But they’re getting bizarre readings, indications of something no one expected to find this deep and—”
“I’m not leaving,” the man with the knife says.
The woman’s brow furrows. “What are you talking about? And what is he talking about?” She moves her head in the direction of the driller. “What is this ‘sir’ shit? What’s going on here? What—”
“Doctor Farrid, listen,” the driller says, cutting the woman off. He steps up out of the hole in the floor, kicks aside chunks of rock to get a firm foothold. “We don’t have time for this. We need to leave now. They’re getting close, and I know you wanted to see it, but—”
Farrid steps forward quickly, pushes the knife out in front of him, hisses through clenched teeth, “I’m not. Fucking. Leaving. I need to see this. I need to know what it is. And do not say my name again, understood?”
“Sir,” the driller says, clearly intimidated, even though he holds the gun. “No disrespect intended, but these are orders from higher up—higher than both of us. We need to get you to a safe place, somewhere through the service tunnels, maybe to the first check post, where we can—”
Farrid steps forward quickly, slashes the knife across the driller’s throat as hard and as fast as he can, then steps back. Blood bubbles out of the driller’s throat, his eyes wide, throat gurgling. He drops his gun, slumps forward onto the floor. Twitches once and is silent.
Farrid pockets the knife, picks up the driller’s gun, points it at the woman’s face. “Not one sound, do you hear me? Not one sound.”
But the woman isn’t thinking about speaking, screaming, or any other sounds. Only one thought runs through her mind: He kidnapped me. He kidnapped me. He kidnapped me.
Someone calls up from below: “Derek? Everything all right, brother? What’s going on up there?”
Another few mo
ments of silence as the man below waits for an answer that will never come. Then booted feet clanging on metal ladder steps, coming up. Farrid points the gun at the hole, but keeps his eyes trained on the woman.
The man, far from expecting to see his colleague’s dead body, comes up fairly quickly through the hole, glances at the woman and Farrid before casting his eyes down to see his fallen partner. Shocked, his mouth just flaps a couple of times, then his hand instinctively reaches for the gun on his belt.
“Don’t,” is all Farrid says, shakes his head once.
The woman, finally finding her voice, says, “Why did you do this to me? We don’t know each other. I don’t understand.” Her hands flutter like curious butterflies at her sides. “Why did you do it? What sort of sense does it make to—”
Farrid motions with his gun at the woman, speaks to the man: “Take her. Go.”
There is fury in the man’s eyes, a tightness around his lips. He wants to go for his gun. Farrid sees that he desperately wants to try. Farrid shakes his head again. “I will shoot you both before you even get your revolver halfway out of its holster, son. Just take the girl and leave me. I’m sorry about your friend. Really, I am. I did not mean for things to turn out like this.”
Farrid sees wetness on the man’s eyelids. The face hardens further. Farrid squeezes the trigger a little, sensing movement of the man’s hand toward his holster. Then the man’s eyes drop to his friend again; they remain there for a few moments before he lifts them to the woman. Frightened, confused. Her breath comes in hitches. The man holds his hand out to her. The butterflies at the ends of her arms settle a little. One of the woman’s hands comes up slowly, then before her and the man’s fingers touch, she says quietly, “Are you here to rescue me? You’re here to save me, aren’t you?”
The man does not react, only keeps his hand out for her to take.
The woman takes the man’s hand, steps over the blood-soaked body of the driller, focuses her attention on Farrid once more. “Liar. Murderer,” she says.
Farrid nods.
The woman’s lip trembles, but she does not cry.
Outside, the machines seem closer, the earth shaking more than any other time since he’s been here. Concerned voices drift down the airshaft. Farrid cannot make out the words, only the tone. Curiosity. Fear.
The man steps out of the hole, moves aside, helps the woman find the top rung of the ladder several feet down. Once she’s safely on her way, the man lowers himself to the top rung, locks eyes with Farrid, says, “I’m taking the body.”
Farrid nods again.
The man pulls his friend’s legs toward him, maneuvers them so they’re aligned with his back, rests the torso on his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He descends slowly with the body, making sure not to bump the head on anything.
Farrid lowers the gun, stares at the red streak of blood leading to the hole, the congealing pool a few feet away, the flecks spattered across the jumbled rocks.
Liar. Murderer, he thinks, and knows the truth of it, but is unable to dig out of himself anything resembling remorse.
Farrid picks his way through the rocks to the stained mattress, sits down softly. For a brief moment, he imagines the gun in his mouth, the knife sliding along his wrists. He feels this is what he should be thinking about, but he is not. He is thinking only of what the machines have found. What he has waited his whole life to see.
The ground suddenly shakes like a bomb has gone off. The kerosene lamp flickers out. Darkness wraps him in a stifling blanket. He cannot breathe, but he does not want to breathe; he wants only to see it, hear it, feel it near him. If he can just have a taste of its presence, this will all have been worth it.
The machines outside suddenly stop, every one of them powering down. The silence is enormous, as if all life on the planet has suddenly been vacuumed out into space. It fills Farrid’s ears, his heart, his mind. Batters at his skull to get out. Then a massive throbbing sound, of blood pumping through gigantic veins.
They found it. They found it, and it’s alive.
He feels it awaken, senses its life in his mind, through his entire body. It cries out, once—a deep, lonely, mournful sound. It does not want to be here. It does not belong.
Farrid is the only one who hears it.
Proboscis
Laird Barron
1.
After the debacle in British Columbia, we decided to crash the Bluegrass festival. Not we—Cruz. Everybody else just shrugged and said yeah, whatever you say, dude. Like always. Cruz was the alpha-alpha of our motley pack.
We followed the handmade signs onto a dirt road and ended up in a muddy pasture with maybe a thousand other cars and beat-to-hell tourist buses. It was a regular extravaganza—pavilions, a massive stage, floodlights. A bit farther out, they’d built a bonfire, and Dead Heads were writhing with pagan exuberance among the cinder-streaked shadows. The brisk air swirled heavy scents of marijuana and clove, of electricity and sex.
The amplified ukulele music was giving me a migraine. Too many people smashed together, limbs flailing in paroxysms. Too much white light followed by too much darkness. I’d gone a couple beers over my limit because my face was Novocain-numb and I found myself dancing with some sloe-eyed coed who’d fixed her hair in corn rows. Her shirt said MILK.
She was perhaps a bit prettier than the starlet I’d ruined my marriage with way back in the days of yore, but resembled her in a few details. What were the odds? I didn’t even attempt to calculate. A drunken man cheek to cheek with a strange woman under the harvest moon was a tricky proposition.
“Lookin’ for somebody, or just rubberneckin’?” The girl had to shout over the hi-fi jug band. Her breath was peppermint and whiskey.
“I lost my friends,” I shouted back. A sea of bobbing heads beneath a gulf of night sky and none of them belonged to anyone I knew. Six of us had piled out of two cars and now I was alone. Last of the Mohicans.
The girl grinned and patted my cheek. “You ain’t got no friends, Ray-bo.”
I tried to ask how she came up with that, but she was squirming and pointing over my shoulder.
“My gawd, look at all those stars, will ya?”
Sure enough the stars were on parade; cold, cruel radiation bleeding across improbable distances. I was more interested in the bikers lurking near the stage and the beer garden. Creepy and mean, spoiling for trouble. I guessed Cruz and Hart would be nearby, copping the vibe, as it were.
The girl asked me what I did and I said I was an actor between jobs. Anything she’d seen? No, probably not. Then I asked her and she said something I didn’t quite catch. It was either etymologist or entomologist. There was another thing, impossible to hear. She looked so serious I asked her to repeat it.
“Right through your meninges. Sorta like a siphon.”
“What?” I said.
“I guess it’s a delicacy. They say it don’t hurt much, but I say nuts to that.”
“A delicacy?”
She made a face. “I’m goin’ to the garden. Want a beer?”
“No, thanks.” As it was, my legs were ready to fold. The girl smiled, a wistful imp, and kissed me briefly, chastely. She was swallowed into the masses and I didn’t see her again.
After a while I staggered to the car and collapsed. I tried to call Sylvia, wanted to reassure her and Carly that I was okay, but my cell wouldn’t cooperate. Couldn’t raise my watchdog friend, Rob in LA. He’d be going bonkers too. I might as well have been marooned on a desert island. Modern technology, my ass. I watched the windows shift through a foggy spectrum of pink and yellow. Lulled by the monotone thrum, I slept.
Dreamt of wasp nests and wasps. And rare orchids, coronas tilted towards the awesome bulk of clouds. The flowers were a battery of organic radio telescopes receiving a sibilant communiqué just below my threshold of comprehension.
A mosquito pricked me and when I crushed it, blood ran down my finger, hung from my nail.
2.
Cruz drove.
He said, “I wanna see the Mima Mounds.”
Hart said, “Who’s Mima?” He rubbed the keloid on his beefy neck.
Bulletproof glass let in light from a blob of moon. I slumped in the tricked-out back seat, where our prisoner would’ve been if we’d managed to bring him home. I stared at the grille partition, the leg irons and the doors with no handles. A crusty vein traced black tributaries on the floorboard. Someone had scratched R+G and a fanciful depiction of Ronald Reagan’s penis. This was an old car. It reeked of cigarette smoke, of stale beer, of a million exhalations.
Nobody asked my opinion. I’d melted into the background smear.
The brutes were smacked out of their gourds on junk they’d picked up on the Canadian side at the festival. Hart had tossed the bag of syringes and miscellaneous garbage off a bridge before we crossed the border. That was where we’d parted ways with the other guys—Leon, Rufus and Donnie. Donnie was the one who had gotten nicked by a stray bullet in Donkey Creek, earned himself bragging rights if nothing else. Jersey boys, the lot; they were going to take the high road home, maybe catch the rodeo in Montana.
Sunrise forged a pale seam above the distant mountains. We were rolling through certified boondocks, thumping across rickety wooden bridges that could’ve been thrown down around the Civil War. On either side of busted up two-lane blacktop were overgrown fields and hills dense with maples and poplar. Scotch broom reared on lean stalks, fire-yellow heads lolling hungrily. Scotch broom was Washington’s rebuttal to kudzu. It was quietly everywhere, feeding in the cracks of the earth.
Road signs floated nearly extinct; letters faded, or bullet-raddled, dimmed by pollen and sap. Occasionally, dirt tracks cut through high grass to farmhouses. Cars passed us head-on, but not often, and usually local rigs—camouflage-green flatbeds with winches and trailers, two-tone pickups, decrepit jeeps. Nothing with out-of-state plates. I started thinking we’d missed a turn somewhere along the line. Not that I would’ve broached the subject. By then I’d learned to keep my mouth shut and let nature take its course.
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Page 33