Write On Press Presents: The Ultimate Collection of Original Short Fiction, Volume II

by Write On Press

  ~*~

  I went to work at Ray’s shop the next day. I’m not bad at manual labor, but my innate mechanical skills tend to land somewhere between slim and none, which Ray figured out almost instantaneously. I was constantly dropping tools at exactly the wrong moment, and midway through my first demo on how to take an engine apart I stripped the thread on one of the screws.

  It obviously took all the restraint Ray could muster to keep from tearing me a new one, and I knew that if I wasn’t screwing his daughter I probably would have been fired on the spot. The rest of the day didn’t get much better, and by the time I punched out I had serious doubts about my future fixing cars.

  Loretta’s gig went better. She was naturally friendly, which explained how she’d gone from stripping in front of me, which was how I met her back in Raleigh, to ending up in my bed, and that same talent made her a natural as a waitress as well. She was holding up pretty well considering that she was working with her mom, and she was all smiles when she got home, which annoyed me slightly after all the tension of my day with Ray.

  In spite of our issues, we fell into a rhythm for the next couple of weeks. Loretta’s shifts were staggered so that she could be home to feed Gizmo during the day, and thankfully he stopped growing after his last little spurt.

  The only remaining issue was cleaning the cage, but the enclosure had a slot for a partition that could be inserted from the outside, so as long as I was able to surprise Gizmo and keep him on the opposite side of the one I wanted to clean, that part of it went fine.

  Still, the psychological aspect continued to go unaddressed. Loretta was clearly still afraid of Gizmo, and while we started getting it on again a couple of days later, she never talked about the marks on her legs during the trip, which I became more and more certain were bites.

  Given what little I knew about monitor lizards and lizard saliva in general, I was amazed that her wounds never became infected. But Loretta’s knowledge level was much higher than mine, so she probably knew of a way to treat them to prevent that from happening.

  My own feelings about Gizmo landed somewhere in between. I wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but I was very uneasy, especially after the last incident during the cage switch when he basically destroyed his home and almost got to me in the process. I continued to be wary around him, but if necessity demanded it I would have entered the enclosure with him, albeit with great trepidation.

  Little did I know that I would soon have to do much, much more than that.

  Once things settled down a bit, Loretta and I had a couple of tentative, nervous conversations about what to do about Gizmo. She mentioned having him assessed and evaluated by a museum curator or a naturalist who specialized in reptiles, but we both knew that was absurd; the minute word got out we’d have bloggers and thrill seekers swarming all over us to exploit the situation.

  We also discussed reptile dealers. Loretta had a couple of leads on people she could possibly contact, so we went back and forth on that one for a while. I was for it, just to break the stalemate and try to get some idea if Gizmo really was what he appeared to be and how much he might be worth if we wanted to go that route. But in the end Loretta talked me out of it, saying we’d just be doing to Gizmo what Sneaky Pete had done to us, a point on which I had to agree, albeit with some hesitation.

  And then the first real incident happened. Fortunately, I was the one to discover it when I spiked a fever at work and decided to come home early. Somehow, Gizmo had gotten out of the enclosure by separating the two sections where the partition could be inserted, which had then somehow popped the door. Basically, it looked like he’d somehow found a way to muscle some part of his body into that tiny space, and then pushed until it gave.

  I quickly searched the apartment. No Gizmo. But I did find his exit route. Somehow he’d managed to get up onto our bed, which was low to the floor because that was Loretta’s preference; she said it made for hotter, earthier sex. The bed was tall enough for him to get up to the window, and the broken glass explained what had happened after that.

  At that point I completely panicked, running around the outside of the tiny apartment complex frantically, checking all the obvious places he might have gone. Nothing. Then I started thinking like a reptile. Gizmo would want a spot that was shaded with sun access, so that he could hide most of the time and come out to sun and keep his body temperature up. There was a spot behind the complex where people could barbecue, a tiny little patio with a couple of trees and a bench, so that was where I decided to look next.

  Sure enough, there was Gizmo, under the bench right next to the most prominent tree. He appeared happy enough, and he recognized me as I approached and was considerably more friendly than usual. I walked up to him slowly to see what was going on, and I noticed familiar signs of a recent meal. He was even more sluggish than usual, which made me wonder what he might have eaten.

  I sat down on the other end of the bench to see what he’d do, placing my legs carefully at an odd diagonal so I could move them quickly if he got too curious. But nothing happened. In fact, what took place was just the opposite – within minutes, Gizmo was asleep under the bench, as if he’d suddenly morphed into a dog.

  This left me with the issue of how to get him home. As groggy as he was, I knew rousing him would probably be a bad idea, so I opted for a different approach. Sliding carefully down the bench, I lowered myself slowly, so that I was sitting next to him on the brick pavement in front of the bench.

  Then I took the big risk. Trying to make my movements as smooth and slow as possible, I reached back toward Gizmo, watching carefully to see how he tracked my hand. His eye opened, but he was obviously lazy and satisfied, so I started scratching the top of his head very carefully. Gizmo moaned, arching his neck, and somehow I managed to remain calm when he did that.

  Other than that, though, he accepted what I was doing with obvious equanimity. I continued scratching until I found a rhythm, and Gizmo went back out like a light within a few minutes. It was almost as if he was hypnotized, his sleep deeper than any I’d ever seen from him in either the enclosure or the cage.

  That got me to the point where I knew I’d have to pick him up, eventually. The risk with that was that I’d need to slide Gizmo forward a bit to get him out from under the bench, which might startle and possibly even provoke him. I considered that option for a few minutes, until finally I noticed that the bench wasn’t anchored and could easily be tipped over backwards, possibly with far less fuss.

  So I decided to try it. Removing my hand was the hardest part, but Gizmo was obviously comatose at this point, and he barely reacted at all when I took my hand away, emitting another small moan. I waited until he settled back down, and then slid away from him a little so I could push the bench back from the center.

  The whole exercise went pretty smoothly. The key was moving the bench slowly enough so that it didn’t change the mix of sunlight and shade on Gizmo too quickly, which I’m pretty sure would have initiated some kind of reflex reaction. Once the bench was on the ground I waited to make sure he was still out, and finally I came up on my knees and slid my hands underneath him, lifting Gizmo gently off the ground.

  Shockingly, he barely reacted at all. His eyes blinked open, slowly, and he stared at me for a brief instant that almost threw me back into a panic state. But once he recognized me he closed his eyes and let me pick him up and carry him with almost no fuss at all. It was a startling moment, and for an instant I almost understood the combination of emotions that had affected Loretta so deeply when she referred to him as her baby.

  Then I noticed the blood. Splotches of it dotted his back, and there were little splashes on the dirt path I used to get back to the apartment complex. The evidence of what must have happened was undeniable, and yet I remained in temporary denial, wanting only to get him back into the apartment and back into his enclosure.

  There was one small problem with this, though – I’d locked myself out.

  I knew ex
actly where my keys were, on top of the nightstand in the bedroom. Once I remembered that, I realized that my only way back in was through the window, the one where Gizmo had made his escape.

  This was easier said than done. The window wasn’t that high, but I had to find a way to get back in without waking Gizmo, who was still placid in my arms.

  Without my precious little bundle in my arms climbing would have been easy, but with Gizmo I had to find a way to back up and into the window, scooting my butt up until I could get high enough to sit on the bottom of it and swing my legs in.

  That pretty much did it for Gizmo’s calm, peaceful moment. Maybe it was the way I moved that disturbed his equilibrium, but he started scrambling in my arms as soon as my ass hit the bed, and suddenly I was trying to contain a scaly little ball of dinosaur hate, 30 or 40 pounds of reptile with razor sharp teeth.

  Somehow I managed to do it. I rolled off the bed as quick as I could, and turning him upside down seemed to disorient him enough to allow me to come up with him still in my arms, more or less. I felt my shirt tear as I did, though, and suddenly I realized how close those teeth had come to breaking skin.

  My skin.

  After that it was a race back to the enclosure. He got two more shots at me, whipping his head around to nail what was left of my shirt but still leaving me intact. Gizmo scored on the next one, though, sinking those chompers into the flesh in the front of my shoulder, just inside the arm, the nice, soft stuff that was especially vulnerable when exposed.

  I winced in pain and almost threw him against the wall. I managed to stop myself just in time from doing that, enduring the pain for a few seconds so I could throw him into the enclosure instead. Gizmo took a fall of several feet when I tossed him in, but he seemed none the worse for wear as he began pacing around the perimeter of the enclosure, looking for a way out.

  I watched him for a minute or two after I secured the enclosure, just to make sure he didn’t succeed. He looked at me the entire time around as he searched for an escape route, and the look in his eyes was unmistakable – it was pure blood lust.

  Right about then I looked down at what was left of my shirt and my shoulder, and I realized that his lust was in fact based on something tangible. The front of my shoulder was a bloody mess, thick red liquid dripping down my chest and shoulder, and suddenly I felt lightheaded, maybe from the blood loss, but most likely from the shock of it all.

  I tried go get to the bathroom to clean myself up, but I staggered on the way, which made me realize how much jeopardy I was gonna be in if I didn’t get a handle on my wound. I made it to the bathroom sink and started grabbing everything I could to clean off the blood – towels, a washcloth, even toilet paper. Then I poured disinfectant all over the thing, which set me to howling in pain, loud enough so that I hoped no one in the complex would be able to hear me through the thin walls.

  It took ten or fifteen minutes, but I finally managed to get everything under control. The wound was several inches long, and jagged and uneven. It looked like I had tried to carve myself up with a razor, except the impact was a lot nastier. It needed some real needle work, I knew that, but there was no way I was going to be able to go to a doctor or a hospital to get treatment without having some serious explaining to do.

  I found a packet of big gauze bandages in the back of the bathroom cabinet and started tacking them onto the wound. At first I tried to stitch them on with band aids, but they proved to be way too small. I thought about going out into the kitchen to get some duct tape, but finally I found a spool of surgical tape back next to where I’d found the gauze bandages, and I managed to patch together an ugly white mess that more or less covered the wound.

  Then I went and sat on the couch, still woozy from the experience. After about a half hour I’d recovered enough to be pretty sure I wasn’t going to pass out, but the pain from the wound was getting worse by the minute. I found some of Loretta’s pain killers that she used for her occasional migraines, and I grabbed a bottle of her scotch from the liquor cabinet.

  That combo left me feeling high and happy, but just when I was starting to really get into it I realized that I had a lot of cleaning up to do, so I capped the scotch and got after the business of straightening up. It really did look like something from a B horror flick, and cleaning up definitely isn’t my strong suit. But by the time Loretta was due to come home I had the place looking more or less the way it had before Gizmo ran amok on me.

  The one thing I couldn’t take care of at the moment was the broken window. I checked to make sure the shards left in the frame weren’t too big, and once I cleared them out I took a piece of cardboard, cut it to more or less fit the frame, and duct taped it over the opening. There was no way Loretta would buy it, but I planned on trying the time-honored “kids through a ball through the window” excuse.

  By the time all that was done I knew Loretta would be home any minute, so I decided to go for some brownie points by cooking dinner, figuring it probably wouldn’t help much but it couldn’t hurt. Without thinking, though, I fired up a couple of burgers, which got ol’ Gizmo pretty excited, I could hear him banging against the enclosure from the kitchen when the sizzle started for real.

  I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to hide it from her, at least for a few nights. Loretta knew something was up as soon as I winced in pain carrying the plates from the kitchen to the dining room table, but I managed to convince her that I’d been the victim of a mysterious auto jack injury. I knew she didn’t really believe that, just like I knew she wasn’t buying my explanation for the broken window.

  It was the best I could do under the circumstances, though, and I could tell from the way Loretta’s skin paled when I told my stories that she really didn’t want to know what had actually happened. I really couldn’t blame her for that, so I had the window replaced the next day and life went on in more or less the same manner for a short while.