by Brian Hodge
"Nice setup." It was the best Mikey could muster. "Eh–you're Edict, am I right?"
"I am Edict, the Keeper, at your service."
"Well, Edict … could you … um, remind me of what's supposed to happen, now that I'm here?"
"Prophecy dictates that we shall feast at the arrival of the Comer. You have brought the feast because we have kept the faith. Next, you are to lie with Egg and deposit your godly fundament. Following the benediction of the Big Moby Eater, you will then lead us to the Upworld of 490 burgers and all one may drink, during–"
"Stop. That's where I came in." Swell. Maybe Mikey would make it into a bed, back on his home planet, Earth, by the turn of the century.
"Feast!" hollered Tapshoes. He hollered this a lot. Before Mikey could editorialize, a steaming swatch of gray meat was unlimbered from the spit and thrust at him.
Mikey hopped the offering from hand to hand. Hot. At least it warmed up his numb fingers, by burning them.
"Let me guess. I have to eat this, right?"
"You before any," said Edict gravely. He was rock-solid in his avowals and had done his religious homework. This was not substantially nuttier than other belief systems Mikey had suffered, so Mikey kept his smartass opinions and questions bottled. At least they weren't Scientologists. "You before all," Edict clarified.
"Somehow I knew you were going to say that." Rather than offend his host, Mikey decided to go ahead and bite his chunk of the Cherub. The mind bees had checked out, wanting zip to do with this deal.
Just do it. His guts rolling and percolating, Mikey tweezed off stringy sliver of meat with his front teeth.
It tasted kind of like a rat tail.
Mikey belched. He couldn't help it. He tried to swallow while the meat tried to execute a sliding U-turn in his gullet He said, "It is good." Then he vomited all over Edict.
Edict beamed as though baptized. One more rowdy hooo-baah was all it took to cue a general feeding frenzy. Mikey was off the hook. They all made ahh noises and tore into their barbecue as Mikey passed out, stone cold on the damp concrete.
Mikey's awakening was rude indeed. He was flat on his back and Egg was riding him like a horsey at the supermarket. His nostrils were clogged with thick, pheromonal musk, the stench of boy cats marking their turf by spraying.
Egg got down, cresting on her own alien rhythm and the firm conviction that she was at last performing the one physical function her dogma demanded of her, But for her hiked skirt she was fully swaddled in rags awash in the smell of every bodily function mammals could manage. A metronomic bobbing at her waistline told Mikey that her tits were swaying beneath the rotten clothing there, almost level with his own stomach even though Egg was bolt upright, impaled, her spine arched.
Mikey had no way of knowing Egg only had one breast anyway.
Mikey made a horror movie noise.
The multitude assembled around them began chanting, their fervent saliva speckling Mikey's face with each lusty cheer. It wasn't much of an inducement to perform; at best, Mikey had mustered that which, in coarse parlance, is referred to as a "Hollywood loaf."
Mikey tried to astral-project. It didn't work.
Then he began thudding his head against the cement with each of Egg's lubricious squats. Maybe he could knock himself unconscious until this was all over.
Bonk. Bonk. Their audience waxed enthusiastic, and timed their chants to each impact of Mikey's occipital. Mikey's upward vantage of Egg began to swim and de-rezz in a dopey wash of colors and shapeless points of light. Her chafed and greedy labia gripped him like the suckers on an octopus tentacle, hand-wringing his uncooperative meat to semi-stiffness.
A rat was trying to crawl up Mikey's butt. The flatulent sound of Egg's vulva engulfing and pumping him finally scared it away.
Until tonight, Mikey had never experienced the stroke-book ideal of swooning on orgasm. Or maybe it was just the smell.
Right before the casket-sized maw groaned open to masticate him, Mikey noticed the two baseball-sized eyes.
The eyes were viridescent, pupiled in triangular slits. Off-center in each lay a smoldering spot of quartz pink, mineral-cool, reptile-cold. They hated Mikey, with the species equivalent of racism; they liked Mikey, but only as a potential entree.
The mouth was another bad dream altogether. Slime-caked and ridged with crude tusks, chipped and grooved in brown, they meant to clamp Mikey. To trap him, crush him, and rend him into hunks small enough to swallow.
The entire beast was a decayed, dirty color which, on a refrigerator, Mikey would have called off-white. Terminally off. He remembered a Nile crocodile he had once seen in the Bronx Zoo. That critter had been sluggish, logy, and twenty-two feet long from snout to tail–longer than Mikey's apartment. The monster presently intent on eating him was bigger, agitated, and deeply fixed on Mikey, a dinosaur with a big chip on its shoulder, newly emerged from the urban primordial ooze to exact revenge on Mikey, personally, for the crimes of evolution.
Everybody was watching, even Egg.
"Hey! Whoa! What's all this happy crappy?!" It was the most pungent line Mikey could fish up.
"It is the Big Moby Eater." Tapshoes' voice boomed from the gathering of indistinct silhouettes, a Keystone Kops gaggle of watchers in the darkness.
"The time has come for His benediction." That would be Edict, holding forth. "Be joyous. You are the Comer.'
Soon to be the Goer, Mikey thought as the jaws stretched wide, with a haunted house creak, tendons juicing up for the big shred-fest.
It was clear that none of them would be so bold as to actually help him. They would watch. Mikey thrashed for balance in the water as the giant mouth crunched shut on his right arm.
It was the shitty ghost color of the monster that j ump-started Mikey from awe and resignation to anger and instinctive defense. The glowing albino behemoth reminded Mikey of the Cherub, back again to gobble up his life.
Only this thing was more aesthetic.
Rather than getting used to the idea of wiping his ass with a stump, Mikey inverted the jawbone-club in his grasp as the teeth of the living, big-daddy version of the same sort of jaws tried to mesh.
The pointed end of the jawbone chocked solid and deep into the thick folds beneath the monster's tongue. It slithered in unexpected pain but made absolutely no sound. No growl, no roar, just the fetidness of blast-furnace breath in Mikey's face.
"It is good," Edict said. "So far."
Mikey tried to backpedal as the creature chomped vigorously, its teeth blocked a foot apart each time. Blackish blood began to pump from the concave ditches of its upper and lower jaws as Mikey's own lifesaving jawbone imbedded ever-deeper. Mikey had accidentally done the same thing to himself, once, when a toothpick misbehaved inside his mouth.
It would punch the spear through the top of its own nose, if that was what it took to savor the taste of Mikey-steak.
Unchewed, Mikey was nonetheless trapped. By the phosphorescence in the tunnel, he could see that his jacket sleeve had been punctured and pinned by one of the large upfront incisors. Mutant 'gator blood soaked down his arm, seeking to corrupt him, or perhaps pre-tenderize him.
Using the snagged sleeve as leverage, Mikey rolled out of his coat with a clumsy slosh just as his impromptu mouth-block splintered apart.
Mikey backed away. Not far enough. His backbone met unyielding concrete and he was the only thing in the monster's sightline. With a weighty swish of its tail, it propelled itself closer for the kill, its otherworldly eyes glowering with something akin to fulfillment. All Mikey could see was those jaws, working, crunching up the broken bone like so many cubes of ice. Then the mouth opened again. For the last time.
"Not so good," Tapshoes muttered.
My people, Mikey thought. My ass. They were about to discover just how gooshy their mistaken messiah was.
Having no other course and no backstop, Mikey reached out, grabbed the monster's tongue, yanked, and shoved his other arm straight down the gagging, grasping
gullet awaiting him.
The result was unusual. Mikey watched his own swallowed coat briefly resurface as the albino gator's own esophagus tried mightily to vomit. Mikey braced himself for a spray of ribboned tweed and hydrochloric stomach goo…
…which never came.
Then something genuinely astonishing happened.
The coat slid back down into digestion. The mouth reopened. The throng emitted assorted oohs and aahs. Mikey's own mouth unhinged, dropping open at the unique thing he saw.
The bright spots of pink sunk in the pupils of the eyes that had filled Mikey's existence flared, then ebbed, the way a light bulb burns brighter before it burns out. The pink snuffed out and the eyes clouded with smoky red as the delicate capillaries there began to overload and burst.
The monster with Mikey's arm down its throat was in definite distress.
The taste buds on the tongue ruptured, voiding clear fluid. Blood began to drip down the tree-trunk teeth, which rocked in gums that could no longer bear their weight, and one by one disengaged and dropped out.
Sewer rats took it on the lam double-quick as the creature tried valiantly for a final roll, a death jolt, but only managed to tread water, feebly. The encrusted off-white armor plating of its hide was issuing blood from every root of every scale, every join and juncture of its bulletproof dermis sundering loose, and leaking. Blood candy-striped it as it fought the cataclysm inside its own body.
Its shotgun nostrils liberated a spray of blood before Mikey could get his disbelieving mouth shut. Mikey screamed and slam-dunked himself below the surface, feeling the oily discharge cling to his face.
Wasn't this where he'd started? Underwater, with no room to breathe?
Logic is a curious process, especially within the exploded timeframe of imminent death. Mikey saw his trip to the Cherub's headquarters replay. Lived again through Cobbler's glass head blowing apart. And remembered, at last the capsule given to him by the weird old geezer running the Cherub's elevator.
So, them there is what we in our trade call as 'terminators…'
Mikey had put the capsule in his pocket. And Gator-Zilla had eaten his jacket. Somehow the gel cap had not dissolved in the sewer, and Mikey recalled the weird feel of it when the old man had first handed it to him. He had been too busy pondering its terminative function to notice that it was not a gel cap at all, but glass. It was designed not to dissolve. You were supposed to bite it.
As in "biting the big one."
Mikey resurfaced, his arm still sunk to the elbow inside the Big Moby Eater, now spasming and sinking and freeing itself of the last of its blood. And the natives were sore perturbed.
Edict, Tapshoes and the others stood there like wax statues, unable to encompass what they had just witnessed. Egg took one forlorn glance at Mikey, then went on one knee to throw up, in the manner of one observing the proper courtly decorum. Then she frantically began to wail and paw between her legs, as though fearful the same miracle would befall her.
The orts and nuggets of the Cherub that had just come out of her stomach steamed, then sank. Even the rats wouldn't bother with them.
The mind bees awoke, suggesting to Mikey that it might be a very good idea to leave with utmost haste as soon as he could get his arm unmired from the lips of the Big Moby Eater. The late.
Enough of the old Mikey still existed for him to make a game try of the weasel routine: "Er guys? I have no idea how this happened, really, I, uhh–"
"We dared the despair of hope!" declared Edict, so loudly that Mikey mistook it for Tapshoes' basso. "It is written that the Big Moby Eater partake of the Comer." He pointed grimly to the blown-out corpse of the albino gator, forming tiny clusters of bubbles as it displaced water, going down for the last time. "The Comer must now become feast."
"What kind of stupid rule is that?!" Mikey extracted his arm. Big Moby's nose disappeared beneath the black water. "You guys have already eaten enough for a regiment!" He mocked Edict: "It is written…so, where is it written, huh? Show me!"
"Kill him," said Edict. "And eat him."
Tapshoes hesitated. "No 490 burgers, no–?"
"Do it, you moron, or you've got the wrath of God right up your hineyhole."
There was nothing quite so pure as religious understanding. Tapshoes handed Edict a lit torch. Petroleum smoke plumed forth as the torch was used to ignite others. Within seconds the tunnel was a low-budget, glowing Hades–Joe Dante, rather than Durante Alighieri.
Mikey mourned all the hardware that had been just strewn around at the Cherub's. All those pretty unfired guns.
Back to the mulch, the mind bees suggested gently. Mikey appropriated a deep breath and crash-dived just as his turncoat disciples ganged into the water to claim him. He collided immediately with the semi-buoyant, twitchless carcass of the Big Moby Eater. It was easy to feel his way around to the underbelly, which was completely sundered–split from the knave to the chaps, as some poet might opine.
Become god, whispered the mind bees. Assume his pleasing shape. Whatever the black capsule had contained was as efficient as a nitroglycerin enema. It had left Mikey plenty of room to venture the one place he had just battled to avoid–inside the albino gator, where its stomach used to be. It was like donning a chainmail overcoat, skinning in through organic jelly. Mikey forced his upper body into the cavity, and round he could see (dimly) and breathe (sort of) through the monster's mouth, still partially doorstopped open by a lingering fragment of the embedded jawbone club.
Mikey had never been a monster before. Now he could see pissed-off villagers, waving their firebrands, lusting to destroy him. Alternate perspectives have their little advantages. They stormed around him, cautious not to jostle the body of their fallen icon. He heard their voices dopplering away as they pursued the most obvious course of flight.
Mikey kicked his feet, modestly, and propelled Big Moby in the opposite direction.
All options weighed, being inside this creature was warmer than being inside Egg. Comfortable, almost. Mikey's eyelids drooped. Easy to go to sleep in here, he thought. Miss out on everything. So tired.
Stay in the gator...
The lifeless body of the Big Moby Eater kept him afloat, and breathing, as Mikey drifted.
"You got the coffee?"
"Yeah. Here."
"This doesn't count. If it's in Styrofoam, it's not coffee."
"Bite me. Then give it back."
"No way. You got that cream stuff?"
"You gonna complain about that, too?"
"I hate this shit. They can't even call it cream, legally. Look–it's got two rows of ingredients all around the rim of the seal, then at the end it says artificial flavoring and coloring added. Know what that means? It means that when they mixed all these chemicals together, it came out the color of diseased dogshit and tasted about the same, so they had to bleach it and pump in some more chemicals to make it taste like fake dairy. 'Coffee whitener.' Jesus. I might as well put paint in here; that's what it is."
"You want this shit or don't you?"
"Gimme two."
At first Mikey thought the two ambient voices were those of Edict and Tapshoes, faking him out of hiding with a bogus real-world conversation. He startled awake, then opened his eyes and looked out through the nose of his biological submarine.
Worklights. Air hoses. Two dudes in orange coveralls. Helmets of yellow plastic. The end product of a chain of caste that had begun with Ed Norton on The Honeymooners. About thirty yards ahead. Mikey could see them but they didn't have a clue. Yet.
Mikey gulped a breath and shucked backward out of the carcass. He had been installed long enough for his upper torso to settle in the ravaged tissue and organs, like glue seating well. After a bit of auto-wrestling, he came free with a moist Velcro noise and Big Moby, un-aerated by this living parasite, took on water and sank in silence. Mikey felt a twinge of regret, like a U-boat captain scuttling his own abandoned ship.
The splashing and splattering of Mikey's climb onto
the service rim of the tunnel succeeded in belaying the history-making conversation of the two guys in orange. One of them said what the fuck? and his partner, not so predictably, said:
"Want me to shoot him?"
The mind bees sizzled to life, full force, going nyaah, nyaah and chiding him that Roach and Ratso had found him, had known where he was all along, it was all just a game with Mikey as the dunce, time to wave bye-bye to the bad old world, you imbecile.
"Don't shoot me," Mikey said boldly. Maybe it would work.
"Hey, it talks."
"You fellows wouldn't happen to know the way out of this sewer, would you?"
The taller one rolled his eyes. "No, stupid, we live here."
The other one said, "Christ, guy, you look like you've been shit on by the whole universe."
"Aw, god, don't start going cosmic on me now, Alex."
"Blow me." Alex jerked a thumb past his shoulder. "Ladder's right over there. Follow the air hose."
"Thanks." Mikey shambled past them. They both made faces at the stench.
Alex's partner said, "Take a shower, huh? We got standards down here."
"Are you lost?" said Alex.
Mikey stopped, turned briefly. "Yeah. I'm better now."
Then, as the two men continued to crack jokes about the sorry state of this interloping son of a bitch, Mikey found the way out, and ascended back into the world of hurt.
Author's Note:
This story is only the second in a series of cataclysms destined to befall poor Mikey, aka Scoop. The first (referenced in the text here) was "Scoop Bites the Dust," which can be thrilled to in another collection, Look Out He's Got A Knife. The creation of Scoop is mostly Joe Lansdale's fault–I wrote the first story for Joe's crime anthology, Dark at Heart, then substituted a serial killer story called "Action." But Scoop isn't done, yet; oh no. I think the next one is called "Scoop Sucks the Troposphere."