by Aaron Polson
Barry pushed his package onto the counter. “I-is it enough?” His eyes wouldn’t leave the box.
The clerk dropped the small, brown wrapped box onto the scales. “Yes. Actually you’ve put a little extra…sir?”
Barry couldn’t stifle the giggle. “I did good?”
“No additional postage needed. Thank you.” The clerk’s eyes moved toward the end of the line. “Next.”
Barry felt the rush. He’d done well. More than enough postage. As he walked toward the post office door, he imagined the look of surprise on Cheryl’s face. Would it be enough? Maybe. Another spasm shot through his back. He remembered the pain—it wasn’t much. Not as much as he’d expected when he slipped his left pinkie finger into the kitchen shears and closed the blades until the bone snapped. Plenty of blood, red like ink. Cheryl would have a really nice surprise indeed.
Chapter 6: Faith
She doesn’t flinch as the counterfeits in white aprons—her co-conspirators—arrange the raw seafood on her skin. Pink and white, tuna and squid, their hands drop the squares in circles, sweeping the meat in spirals over her stomach, her breasts, extending down her legs. The men’s hands shake slightly, but they continue the work. She doesn’t squirm even though the meat is icy on her skin.
Nyotaimori is an art, but the counterfeits have been trained. Like other expensive dishes, this one is best served cold. Five years she has waited.
Her eyes lock on the ceiling as they wheel her across a tiled hallway and through the aluminum doors. In the club room, the voices are brash, too loud, already drunk. When the cart comes to a stop, one of the men mutters something and laugher crawls up the walls. She doesn’t close her eyes, but waits for the probing violation, the jabs and explorations with chopsticks as they begin to eat. Layers peel away, and her skin chills.
She becomes a puzzle broken into pieces with nothing beneath. Naked, but motionless. Hiding. These men cannot know. Her faith keeps her still.
Blood pounds inside her head, and after a few minutes she can no longer hear their voices. She remembers though—she remembers the cold eyes of these men, puppets of the regime wearing the masks of the national guard. She remembers when they took her mother—their voices locked behind stupid, empty grins. Her jaw locks as chopsticks poke and prod bare patches of flesh. Her fingers curl when one set of utensils snap tight on an uncovered nipple. There is laughter, but she doesn’t hear. The men are just shapes moving in the periphery. Shadows. Memories.
Her breath comes in small, measured amounts. In and out. Calm. Even naked, lying on the stainless tray beneath the banquet lights, she will not break. She broke before, five years ago, after they found her mother and the others face down in the sewer ditch near the woods.
She thinks of the chefs bound with tight knots and hidden in the scullery. She knows her co-conspirators have shed their aprons and wait behind the hotel. She knows the poison cannot be adsorbed through her skin, only the stomach lining of those giggling pigs, and it will work quickly and quietly. She has faith that her mother’s ghost will be sated and her thirst for revenge, quenched.
Chapter 7: Manning Up
Evan started coming apart because of the dare. Because of Ben, the kid with a weasel nose and surly eyes. Because he said he could do real magic, and Ben said it was bullshit. Caleb told him it was a bad idea—a stupid idea, but Ben stoked the fire.
“Dare you,” Ben said.
“Maybe it will hurt,” Caleb said.
“Who says you can come back together?” Ben asked. “Who says you can even come apart in the first place? I double-dare you.”
Evan was Evan. Big E. The kid who took every challenge and peeked around every corner without thought to what might be snarling on the other side. He started small: a fingernail. Eyes closed. A grunt.
“See, not even a hint of blood.” Evan flicked his nail to the floor of Ben’s tree fort.
Caleb flinched.
Ben crossed his arms and scowled. “Big effing deal. My cousin Tim lost his nail when he slammed his hand in a car door two years ago. Anybody can lose a freaking nail. Just some magic trick, that’s all.”
Big E never shied from an affront to his twelve-year-old manhood. Big E showed them. He showed them how he could wiggle the pinkie finger back and forth until it popped off with a slick snap.
“Not even a drop of blood,” Evan said again, wagging the three remaining fingers and thumb in the air. “Not even a drop.”
Ben’s scowl flickered. “I saw that one at the carnival. In the sideshow.”
Caleb swallowed hard and used his mother for an excuse then—the excuse he was looking for to get out of the tree house and descend to the rest of the world. Ben had his layer of “bullshit” armor, but Caleb was twelve. A believer. He’d seen what he’d seen and wanted a piece of the real world, the world which still made sense and boys’ fingers stayed on their hands.
“She’s expecting me. Dinner. I gotta go.” He stumbled toward the stairs, backpedaling away from Big E’s big ego and Ben’s crosshairs, fearing the dare would drift toward him. What can you do to top that, Caleb? Top nothing—even for Big E, pulling off a finger was weird.
“See you later, wuss,” Evan called. His four fingered hand opened and shut in a wave.
Caleb scampered home with thoughts of “Humpty-Dumpty” bouncing inside his skull. Sure it was only a finger, and a pinkie finger at that. Magic. No blood. Ben’s scowl and a sour dare. He never liked Evan much, anyway. Always manning up and playing alpha dog and bitching when he’d lose at Madden. The thought of Evan’s pinkie-less paw clasped on to his X-Box controller made his stomach do a few jumping jacks.
“What’s wrong?” his mother asked at dinner.
“Nothing,” he muttered, firing off a lie as big as a brick through the big plate glass china hutch in their living room. Bits of glass tinkled to the floor in his mind, joining pieces of Big E in a disorderly pile. …couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Caleb being Caleb, he didn’t sleep easily that night, nursery rhymes jingling and detached fingers writhing toward him each time he closed his eyes. It was nearly midnight when something hit his window, something heavy enough to rattle him from a light, fitful sleep, but soft enough to bounce off the glass without a crack. Caleb hopped from bed and peered at a figure in the dark yard.
Whoever it was balanced on one leg like a black flamingo. Caleb pushed the window open.
“I need help,” Big E cried. “I can’t stop.”
Caleb swallowed, knowing in his twelve-year-old heart to what, exactly, “can’t stop” was referring. He slipped on his tennis shoes and took the back stairs, sliding out of the kitchen door with only a tiny squeak of the old hinges.
“Jesus, Evan.”
The part-boy in front of him was missing a hand—the aforementioned object which struck the window—one leg, and part of an ear.
“I can’t stop.” Big E was little now. Tiny. Afraid.
Caleb switched from one foot to the other. “Ben. Ben can help,” he said.
The one-legged broken-boy thing which used to be Evan limped along with Caleb’s help, and five minutes later, Ben leaned against the wall of his tree house in his pajamas, rubbing his sleep sullied eyes with a frown tacked on his face.
“You guys pulling my leg?” he muttered.
“Ben.” Caleb’s voice rattled. “Take back the dare. We gotta help put him back together.”
“Stop faking. It’s late. Humpty Dumpty here can put himself back together.” Ben rubbed his eyes. “Stupid bullshit magic trick.”
Tears started in Caleb’s eyes just then, the boy in the twelve-year-old outpacing the desire to be a man. “He’s n-not faking.” He thought of a rubbery hand on the grass outside of his bedroom window.
“Humpty Dumpty and crybaby. Boo h—”
Caleb’s tears turned into a fist, and that fist caught Ben in the side of the head. Ben thumped to the floor.
“Jesus, Caleb.” He rubbed the side of hi
s face. “I’m…gonna—”
But he never finished what he was “gonna.” The Big E broken boy-thing let out a grunt just before its—his—jaw wiggled to one side and plopped to the floor of the tree house with a thunk. Both eyes popped like thumb-fired marbles, and the rest tumbled to the floor. No blood of course, but plenty of parts. Caleb caught the wall to steady himself. Ben melted from sour to terrified and started to cry. It was Caleb who manned up then, took what was left of Evan home, wrapped the parts in old tissue paper his mother saved from Christmas presents and birthdays, and stuffed them under his bed.
Chapter 8: Bad Poetry
A young officer drops a plastic evidence bag on Detective Talbot’s desk. The detective flinches and scoots back.
“Jeezus, Pendergast. What’s that?”
“Vegetable peeler.”
Talbot nods. “I can see that, but the dark stuff—is that blood?”
“Yes.”
“Found this at the Gardner house, didn’t they?”
“Yes. Looks like this sicko used it to scrape the skin off her body.”
“Her name was Rose, wasn’t it?” Talbot pulls at his lip. “Roses are red…” He jumps up from the desk. “Get a phonebook.”
“What?”
“I need to know the location of all the women named Violet in town. Find out which one’s have freezers big enough for to hold a body. I think I know where he's going next...”
Chapter 9: Full Count
Harry holds his id badge in front of him like a shield as he approaches the gate. Two guards—men young enough not to remember day zero—rise to greet him. The wider one, the one with a pudgy face and ring of baby fat, lifts his rifle. He doesn’t point it at Harry, but close enough. Ready.
“At ease,” Harry says. “I’m on the council.” He waves the badge slightly as if to prove it to the men. Boys, really. The fat one can’t be a day over sixteen.
Two pairs of eyes exchange a glance.
Harry takes a deep breath while the boys sweat it out. Being a council member has privileges, special perks like the right to leave the gate when he wanted. Whenever he wanted.
The taller guard nods. “Yes, sir. Just checking. Nobody really goes outside much. Not at night. It’s our—”
“Job.” Harry nods. His hand slides into the pocket of his jacket and finds the grip of his pistol. “I understand soldier. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.” He pulls out the gun and shows them.
The fat guard hasn’t lowered his weapon, but the other unlatches the gate and pulls it forward. The gate squeaks as it swings, the song of rusty metal. The fat guard coughs. Harry holds his breath.
“Good evening, sir. Just signal when you want back in.”
Harry’s boots tap a few paces on the broken asphalt. He stops, turns, and nods. “Of course.”
The pistol isn’t loaded, but neither guard knows. A gun is a gun. Harry walks down the snaking ruin of a road, just far enough to turn the corner and leave the glow of the compound behind. A chill breeze, the coming winter, rattles leaves like the breath of the dying. He steps into the thick grass and wades toward the tree line. His boy’s bat waits in the hollow of an ancient oak. It’s an aluminum bat, the logo on the shaft scarred and stained beyond recognition as a logo. The manufacturer wouldn’t exist anymore, anyway. Moonlight burns on the shiny surface. Memories smolder when Harry touches the handle.
He sees his son, Grant, standing at the little league plate. An eighteen-year-old memory.
Harry walks at night because he likes the feeling of night air on his skin. He likes the way the trees look, how the shadows live in the breeze. He knows they are out there, waiting in the cold, dark forest, afraid of the sun. Those still moving after so many years are weak, and the sun burns them, dries out their dead flesh. Harry almost thinks the word “alive” rather than “moving”, but that would be wrong.
They aren’t alive.
He walks to get away from the compound, the village, and his wife. She’s a good woman, but he knows she never forgave him for what happened to Grant—for how Grant died, eyes bulging like the swollen throats of bullfrogs, the near-human terror clamping its teeth on his neck. Harry’s grip tightens on the bat until the knuckles whiten and numb in the chilly air. He spits on the ground and yells—not a word, but a raw, barbaric yawp.
The echo fades.
There are no other sounds.
Harry starts walking again. Each night, he walks further down the stretch of forgotten road. The uneven earth and weeds have reclaimed much of the highway, but he can walk in the open, under the night sky when the moon hangs full and fat like a bloated belly ready to burst. Eventually, a groan—an almost human sound—rises above the thud of his boots.
He freezes.
The thing is pitiful, if Harry still owned pity. Broken, jangling, and staggering like a ruined marionette. It looks black, like a piece of the shadows broken off and blown toward Harry by the wind. Its mouth hole flaps open. It tries to make words.
Harry raises the bat. His heart bumps his ribs. There is fear, but Harry carries something more than fear in his bat.
“Come on, you sorry bastard…”
The thing used to be a woman. It lunges, and Harry sidesteps, swinging the bat at the back of its rotten skull. The sound is dull and almost soft. Harry’s stomach curdles at the smell. Memory holds onto smell as well as anything. He remembers the smell in Grant’s room after they killed the thing and the smell when they had to kill what was left of Grant.
“Pathetic,” Harry says.
The monster turns on its spindle-legs and lurches.
Harry dodges, catches a foot on a bit of asphalt. He fall, scraping away a layer of skin from one elbow. The air is cool on fresh blood. Harry smiles. Pain is good. Feeling anything is good. The thing gnaws on his boot with a rotten, toothless mouth. It must be very old. Harry kicks with his free boot and scrambles to his feet.
There hasn’t been a fresh outbreak in years. All of them are similar: Ancient, toothless, rotten beyond the point of being much threat to the living. The bat finishes the work, and Harry wipes off the black sludge in the grass before walking home.
Home.
Two terrified guards with rifles will greet him, kids younger than Grant would be had he lived. Kids who’ve only known a world filled with monsters—even if the monsters are little more than memories.
Chapter 10: Chaos and the Creative Process
Chaos rumbles into the bar with a hammer in one hand. He roars. He kicks over a chair or two. The patrons tremble and cower.
All except one. The Creative Process sits alone in a corner booth, sipping a Madori Sour.
Chaos turns to a window and hurls his hammer. It tumbles end over end toward the glass, strikes it dead center, and sends spiderweb cracks skittering to the corners. He roars again.
"Always breakin' stuff." The Creative Process leaves her booth and ambles over to Chaos. "Always breakin' stuff and making it look so pretty. Just look at those lines. Such a focal point...such raw energy." She points at the broken glass.
Chaos's lower lip quivers. His eyes droop.
"There, there," The Creative Process pats him on the back, "I'll buy you a drink. You'll feel better."
Chapter 11: Billy Boy
Billy found the keys in his dad’s truck one day, shortly after they shuttered the kitchen store and the place that once sold bargain books. His dad had changed light fixtures, mended walls, and tightened pipes for five years, but without the tenants, the building no longer needed maintenance. Searching for work at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, he didn’t miss the keys. Not until later.
So the mall was abandoned, a playground in which our imaginations touched other places.
We rode our bikes after school and stashed them out back, in the high grass just off the trail near the railroad tracks behind the building. Billy was always eager to go on nights his mom worked late. We first entered the dark spaces while the world shed her summer greens for the br
owns and tans of fall, the dingy grey of winter lurking behind the turn of the calendar.
The game was Billy’s idea.
We built a circular wall of boxes in the storeroom of one of the anchors to the mall, the largest building on the south end. In our circle, our sanctuary, we told stories, we pushed our imaginations to the blackened corners to flirt with spiders and dust. Our stories grew arms and legs, fingers and eyes; they flickered just past our musty cardboard fortress. Our flashlights inspired stacks of empty boxes to cast shadows of strange cities on the walls. Games of chicken hung on who could bear the darkness the longest, who could leave his flashlight off in the dead, empty space.