Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters

by Barker, Clive; Golden, Christopher; Lansdale, Joe R. ; McCammon, Robert; Mieville, China; Priest, Cherie; Sarrantonio, Al; Schow, David; Langan, John; Tremblay, Paul

  “Do you even know where the hell they are?” Hart said. Hart was sour about the battle royale at the wharf. He figured it would give the bean counters an excuse to waffle about the payout for Piers’ capture. I suspected he was correct.

  “The Mima Mounds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nope.” Cruz rolled down the window, squirted beechnut over his shoulder, contributing another racing streak to the paint job. He twisted the radio dial and conjured Johnny Cash confessing that he’d “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

  “Real man’d swallow,” Hart said. “Like Josey Wales.”

  My cell beeped and I didn’t catch Cruz’s rejoinder. It was Carly. She’d seen the bust on the news and was worried, had been trying to reach me. The report mentioned shots-fired and a wounded person, and I said yeah, one of our guys got clipped in the ankle, but he was okay, I was okay and the whole thing was over. We’d bagged the bad guy and all was right with the world. I promised to be home in a couple of days and told her to say hi to her mom. A wave of static drowned the connection.

  I hadn’t mentioned that the Canadians contemplated jailing us for various legal infractions and inciting mayhem. Her mother’s blood pressure was already sky-high over what Sylvia called my, “midlife adventure.” Hard to blame her—it was my youthful “adventures” that set the torch to our unhappy marriage.

  What Sylvia didn’t know, couldn’t know, because I lacked the grit to bare my soul at this late stage of our separation, was during the fifteen-martini lunch meeting with Hart, he’d showed me a few pictures to seal the deal. A roster of smiling teenage girls that could’ve been Carly’s schoolmates. Hart explained in graphic detail what the bad man liked to do to these kids. Right there it became less of an adventure and more of a mini-crusade. I’d been an absentee father for fifteen years. Here was my chance to play Lancelot.

  Cruz said he was hungry enough to eat the ass-end of a rhino and Hart said stop and buy breakfast at the greasy spoon coming up on the left, materializing as if by sorcery, so they pulled in and parked alongside a rusted-out Pontiac on blocks. Hart remembered to open the door for me that time. One glimpse of the diner’s filthy windows and the coils of dogshit sprinkled across the unpaved lot convinced me I wasn’t exactly keen on going in for the special.

  But I did.

  The place was stamped 1950s from the long counter with a row of shiny black swivel stools and the too-small window booths, dingy Formica peeling at the edges of the tables, to the bubble-screen TV wedged high up in a corner alcove. The TV was flickering with grainy black and white images of a talk show I didn’t recognize and couldn’t hear because the volume was turned way down. Mercifully I didn’t see myself during the commercials.

  I slouched at the counter and waited for the waitress to notice me. Took a while—she was busy flirting with Hart and Cruz, who’d squeezed themselves into a booth, and of course they wasted no time in regaling her with their latest exploits as hardcase bounty hunters. By now it was purely mechanical; rote bravado. They were pale as sheets and running on fumes of adrenaline and junk. Oh, how I dreaded the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

  Their story was edited for heroic effect. My private version played a little differently.

  We finally caught the desperado and his best girl in the Maple Leaf Country. After a bit of “slap and tickle,” as Hart put it, we handed the miscreants over to the Canadians, more or less intact. Well, the Canadians more or less took possession of the pair.

  The bad man was named Russell Piers, a convicted rapist and kidnaper who’d cut a nasty swath across the great Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. The girl was Penny Aldon, a runaway, an orphan, the details varied, but she wasn’t important, didn’t even drive; was along for the thrill, according to the reports. They fled to a river town, were loitering wharf-side, munching on a fish basket from one of six jillion Vietnamese vendors when the team descended.

  Piers proved something of a Boy Scout—always prepared. He yanked a pistol from his waistband and started blazing, but one of him versus six of us only works in the movies and he went down under a swarm of blackjacks, tasers and fists. I ran the hand-cam, got the whole jittering mess on film.

  The film.

  That was on my mind, sneaking around my subconscious like a night prowler. There was a moment during the scrum when a shiver of light distorted the scene, or I had a near-fainting spell, or who knows. The men on the sidewalk snapped and snarled, hyenas bringing down a wounded lion. Foam spattered the lens. I swayed, almost tumbled amid the violence. And Piers looked directly at me. Grinned at me. A big dude, even bigger than the troglodytes clinging to him, he had Cruz in a headlock, was ready to crush bones, to ravage flesh, to feast. A beast all right, with long, greasy hair, powerful hands scarred by prison tattoos, gold in his teeth. Inhuman, definitely. He wasn’t a lion, though. I didn’t know what kingdom he belonged to.

  Somebody cold-cocked Piers behind the ear and he switched off, slumped like a manikin that’d been bowled over by the holiday stampede.

  Flutter, flutter and all was right with the world, relatively speaking. Except my bones ached and I was experiencing a not-so-mild wave of paranoia that hung on for hours. Never completely dissipated, even here in the sticks at a godforsaken hole in the wall while my associates preened for an audience of one.

  Cruz and Hart had starred on Cops and America’s Most Wanted; they were celebrity experts. Too loud, the three of them honking and squawking, especially my ex brother-in-law. Hart resembled a hog that decided to put on a dirty shirt and steel toe boots and go on its hind legs. Him being high as a kite wasn’t helping. Sylvia tried to warn me, she’d known what her brother was about since they were kids knocking around on the wrong side of Des Moines.

  I didn’t listen. ‘C’mon, Sylvie, there’s a book in this. Hell, a Movie of the Week!’ Hart was on the inside of a rather seamy yet wholly marketable industry. He had a friend who had a friend who had a general idea where Mad Dog Piers was running. Money in the bank. See you in a few weeks, hold my calls.

  “Watcha want, hon?” The waitress, a strapping lady with a tag spelling Victoria, poured translucent coffee into a cup that suggested the dishwasher wasn’t quite up to snuff. Like all pro waitresses she pulled off this trick without looking away from my face. “I know you?” And when I politely smiled and reached for the sugar, she kept coming, frowning now as her brain began to labor. “You somebody? An actor or somethin’?”

  I shrugged in defeat. “Uh, yeah. I was in a couple TV movies. Small roles. Long time ago.”

  Her face animated, a craggy talking tree. “Hey! You were on that comedy, one with the blind guy and his seein’ eye dog. Only the guy was a con man or somethin’, wasn’t really blind and his dog was an alien or somethin’, a robot, don’t recall. Yeah, I remember you. What happened to that show?”

  “Cancelled.” I glanced longingly through the screen door to our ugly Chevy.

  “Ray does shampoo ads,” Hart said. He said something to Cruz and they cracked up.

  “Milk of magnesia!” Cruz said. “And ‘If you suffer from erectile dysfunction, now there’s an answer!’ ” He delivered the last in a passable radio announcer’s voice, although I’d heard him do better. He was hoarse.

  The sun went behind a cloud, but Victoria still wanted my autograph, just in case I made a comeback, or got killed in a sensational fashion and then my signature would be worth something. She even dragged Sven the cook out to shake my hand and he did it with the dedication of a zombie following its mistress’s instructions before shambling back to whip up eggs and hash for my comrades.

  The coffee tasted like bleach.

  The talk show ended and the next program opened with a still shot of a field covered by mossy hummocks and blackberry thickets. The black and white imagery threw me. For a moment I didn’t register the car parked between mounds was familiar. Our boxy Chevy with the driver-side door hanging ajar, mud-encrusted plates, taillights blinking SO
S.

  A grey hand reached from inside, slammed the door. A hand? Or something like a hand? A B-movie prosthesis? Too blurry, too fast to be certain.

  Victoria changed the channel to All My Children.

  3.

  Hart drove.

  Cruz navigated. He tilted a road map, trying to follow the dots and dashes. Victoria had drawled a convoluted set of directions to the Mima Mounds, a one-star tourist attraction about thirty miles over. Cruise on through Poger Rock and head west. Real easy drive if you took the local shortcuts and suchlike.

  Not an unreasonable detour; I-5 wasn’t far from the site—we could do the tourist bit and still make the Portland night scene. That was Cruz’s sales pitch. Kind of funny, really. I wondered at the man’s sudden fixation on geological phenomena. He was a NASCAR and Soldier of Fortune Magazine type personality. Hart fit the profile too, for that matter. Damned world was turning upside down.

  It was getting hot. Cracks in the windshield dazzled and danced.

  The boys debated cattle mutilations and the inarguable complicity of the Federal government regarding the Grey Question and how the moon landing was fake and remember that flick from the 1970s, Capricorn One, goddamned if O.J wasn’t one of the astronauts. Freakin’ hilarious.

  I unpacked the camera, thumbed the playback button, and relived the Donkey Creek fracas. Penny said to me, “Reduviidea—any of a species of large insects that feed on the blood of prey insects and some mammals. They are considered extremely beneficial by agricultural professionals.” Her voice was made of tin and lagged behind her lip movements, like a badly dubbed foreign film. She stood on the periphery of the action, scrawny fingers pleating the wispy fabric of a blue sundress. She was smiling. “The indices of primate emotional thresholds indicate the [click-click] process is traumatic. However, point oh-two percent vertebrae harvest corresponds to non-[click-click] purposes. As an X haplotype you are a primary source of [click-click]. Lucky you!”

  “Jesus!” I muttered and dropped the camera on the seat. Are you talkin’ to me? I stared at too many trees while Robert DeNiro did his mirror schtick as a low frequency monologue in the corner of my mind. Unlike DeNiro, I’d never carried a gun. The guys wouldn’t even loan me a taser.

  “What?” Cruz said in a tone that suggested he’d almost jumped out of his skin. He glared through the partition, olive features drained to ash. Giant drops of sweat sparkled and dripped from his broad cheeks. The light wrapped his skull, halo of an angry saint. Withdrawals something fierce, I decided.

  I shook my head, waited for the magnifying glass of his displeasure to swing back to the road map. When it was safe I hit the playback button. Same scene on the view panel. This time when Penny entered the frame she pointed at me and intoned in a robust, Slavic accent, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is Latin for a death god of a primitive Mediterranean culture. Their civilization was buried in mudslides caused by unusual seismic activity. If you say it loud enough—” I hit the kill button. My stomach roiled with rancid coffee and incipient motion-sickness.

  Third time’s a charm, right? I played it back again. The entire sequence was erased. Nothing but deep-space black with jags of silvery light at the edges. In the middle, skimming by so swiftly I had to freeze things to get a clear image, was Piers with his lips nuzzling Cruz’s ear, and Cruz’s face was corpse-slack. And for an instant, a microsecond, the face was Hart’s too; one of those three-dee poster illusions where the object changes depending on the angle. Then, more nothingness, and an odd feedback noise that faded in and out, like Gregorian monks chanting a litany in reverse.

  Okay. ABC time.

  I’d reviewed the footage shortly after the initial capture in Canada. There was nothing unusual about it. We spent a few hours at the police station answering a series of polite yet penetrating questions. I assumed our cameras would be confiscated, but the inspector simply examined our equipment in the presence of a couple suits from a legal office. Eventually the inspector handed everything back with a stern admonishment to leave dangerous criminals to the authorities. Amen to that.

  Had a cop tampered with the camera, doctored it in some way? I wasn’t a film-maker, didn’t know much more than point and shoot and change the batteries when the little red light started blinking. So, yeah, Horatio, it was possible someone had screwed with the recording. Was that likely? The answer was no—not unless they’d also managed to monkey with the television at the diner. More probable one of my associates had spiked the coffee with a miracle agent and I was hallucinating. Seemed out of character for those greedy bastards, even for the sake of a practical joke on their third wheel—dope was expensive and it wasn’t like we were expecting a big payday.

  The remaining options weren’t very appealing.

  My cell whined, a dentist’s drill in my shirt pocket. It was Rob Fries from his patio office in Gardena. Rob was tall, bulky, pink on top and garbed according to his impression of what Miami vice cops might’ve worn in a bygone era, such as the ’80s. Rob also had the notion he was my agent despite the fact I’d fired him ten years ago after he handed me one too-many scripts for laxative testimonials. I almost broke into tears when I heard his voice on the buzzing line. “Man, am I glad you called!” I said loudly enough to elicit another scowl from Cruz.

  “Hola, compadre. What a splash y’all made on page 16. ‘American Yahoos Run Amok!’ goes the headline, which is a quote of the Calgary rag. Too bad the stupid bastards let our birds fly the coop. Woulda been better press if they fried ’em. Well, they don’t have the death penalty, but you get the point. Even so, I see a major motion picture deal in the works. Mucho dinero, Ray, buddy!”

  “Fly the coop? What are you talking about?”

  “Uh, you haven’t heard? Piers and the broad walked. Hell, they probably beat you outta town.”

  “You better fill me in.” Indigestion was eating the lining of my esophagus.

  “Real weird story. Some schmuck from Central Casting accidentally turned ’em loose. The paperwork got misfiled or some such bullshit. The muckety-mucks are po’d. Blows your mind, don’t it?”

  “Right,” I said in my actor’s tone. I fell back on this when my mind was in neutral but etiquette dictated a polite response. Up front, Cruz and Hart were bickering, hadn’t caught my exclamation. No way was I going to illuminate them regarding this development—Christ, they’d almost certainly consider pulling a u-turn and speeding back to Canada. The home office would be calling any second now to relay the news; probably had been trying to get through for hours—Hart hated phones, usually kept his stashed in the glovebox.

  There was a burst of chittery static. “—returning your call. Keep getting the answering service. You won’t believe it—I was having lunch with this chick used to be one of Johnny Carson’s secretaries, yeah? And she said her best friend is shacking with an exec who just frickin’ adored you in Clancy & Spot. Frickin’ adored you! I told my gal pal to pass the word you were riding along on this bounty hunter gig, see what shakes loose.”

  “Oh, thanks, Rob. Which exec?”

  “Lemmesee—uh, Harry Buford. Remember him? He floated deals for the Alpha Team, some other stuff. Nice as hell. Frickin’ adores you, buddy.”

  “Harry Buford? Looks like the Elephant Man’s older, fatter brother, loves pastels and lives in Mexico half the year because he’s fond of underage Chicano girls? Did an expose piece on the evils of Hollywood, got himself blackballed? That the guy?”

  “Well, yeah. But he’s still got an ear to the ground. And he frickin’—”

  “Adores me. Got it. Tell your girlfriend we’ll all do lunch, or whatever.”

  “Anywhoo, how you faring with the gorillas?”

  “Um, great. We’re on our way to see the Mima Mounds.”

  “What? You on a nature study?”

  “Cruz’s idea.”

  “The Mima Mounds. Wow. Never heard of them. Burial grounds, huh?”

  “Earth heaves, I guess. They’ve got them all over t
he world—Norway, South America, Eastern Washington—I don’t know where all. I lost the brochure.”

  “Cool.” The silence hung for a long moment. “Your buddies wanna see some, whatchyacallem—?”

  “Glacial deposits.”

  “They wanna look at some rocks instead of hitting a strip club? No bullshit?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  It was easy to imagine Rob frowning at his flip-flops propped on the patio table while he stirred the ice in his rum and coke and tried to do the math. “Have a swell time, then.”

  “You do me a favor?”

  “Yo, bro’. Hit me.”

  “Go on the Net and look up X haplotype. Do it right now, if you’ve got a minute.”

  “X-whatsis?”

  I spelled it and said, “Call me back, okay? If I’m out of area, leave a message with the details.”

  “Be happy to.” There was a pause as he scratched pen to pad. “Some kinda new meds, or what?”

  “Or what, I think.”

  “Uh, huh. Well, I’m just happy the Canucks didn’t make you an honorary citizen, eh. I’m dying to hear the scoop.”

  “I’m dying to dish it. I’m losing my signal, gotta sign off.”

  He said not to worry, bro’, and we disconnected. I worried anyway.

  4.

  Sure enough, Hart’s phone rang a bit later and he exploded in a stream of repetitious profanity and dented the dash with his ham hock of a fist. He was still bubbling when we pulled into Poger Rock for gas and fresh directions. Cruz, on the other hand, accepted the news of Russell Piers’ “early parole” with a Zen detachment demonstrably contrary to his nature.

  “Screw it. Let’s drink,” was his official comment.

  Poger Rock was sunk in a hollow about fifteen miles south of the state capitol in Olympia. It wasn’t impressive—a dozen or so antiquated buildings moldering along the banks of a shallow creek posted with NO SHOOTING signs. Everything was peeling, rusting or collapsing toward the center of the earth. Only the elementary school loomed incongruously—a utopian brick and tile structure set back and slightly elevated, fresh paint glowing through the alders and dogwoods. Aliens might have landed and dedicated a monument.