It was ultimately my fault, anyway. I was the one who slept with Stasia. That was really when it all began. I was not an attractive guy. I was not the guy who had the ability to meet strange girls in bars and sleep with them in the same night. I should have known something was up.
There was a reason I hadn’t remembered sending the pictures to Travis.
Because I hadn’t.
Stasia had.
She may have even taken them in the first place.
And that’s what had gotten me here.
Stasia’s vagina was the proverbial rabbit hole.
For all I knew, White Power Larry only existed as a threatening tool to blackmail people like me. It was entirely possible his rallies really were nothing more than redneck keggers. Stasia was the bait and Larry was the steel in Dawn’s trap.
* * *
I woke up one morning toward the end of July to see Dr. Weishaupt’s smiling lizard face staring down at me.
“Didn’t mean to wake you there, guy,” he said. “Just need to check a few things.”
I tried to protest but my mouth felt dry and cottony and I was nearly certain he’d injected me with some type of sedative.
He tugged the covers down to my waist and examined my growing buds. He made sounds of satisfaction as he squeezed and prodded them.
He rolled me over to examine the three on my back.
That wasn’t all.
He made grunts of satisfaction as he entered me.
I wondered who else was watching this.
It was mercifully short and, thankfully, he used lube. When finished, he felched himself from my asshole and smacked his thin lips.
* * *
The greatest mistake one can make in life is to assume he has been chosen for something. I’m not sure if this would properly be called pride or hubris or just a good old-fashioned delusion of grandeur. Yet, it completely explains why each of us stood outside Dawn’s house under a late July sky full of stars for something called the End of Humanity Ball. We had all been seduced by her in one way or the other. Each of us had thought, at one point, that we were the one. Some people, the ones who were actively seeking some type of guidance, responded to her flyers for the Healing League. They were fragile people who would probably always seek some kind of healing. Others were seduced by White Power Larry’s message of hate and anger. They were probably always hateful and angry people. Some people had been passively seduced. I thought about my role in this, working for Billups. The plants we’d put in people’s homes. Maybe there was some brainwashing recording buried in the soil. Maybe they were coated in some sort of narcotic substance. Maybe it was something with the soil itself. Maybe it hadn’t affected me too much because I wasn’t around them all the time and had never put one in my home because I was too lazy to take care of things. Maybe it had affected me and I was too delusional to realize it. Others, like me, were actively seduced.
We were all guilty of thinking we were somehow more important than the next person.
And that’s why we were all here, nude, neon green buds bulging from our skin, throbbing with the terrible energy of the evening amidst deafening electronic music and constant fireworks and a catapult periodically launching dead dogs into the lake behind Dawn’s house.
Nearly everyone from my route was there. Even the Gundersons, stretched out on their mobile hospital beds like quivering puddles of vanilla pudding. White Power Larry and Stasia and their skinhead group, which now included Donnie and Kren.
All naked.
All budding.
I wondered how long this ritual had been going on.
How had I ignored it for so long?
* * *
In the end, it turns out we may have had the right to feel like we were somehow chosen.
The music cut off and the last firework exploded in the sky. The final dog made its sad splash in the lake.
And I felt it.
I think we all did.
Some type of collective anticipation.
We turned toward the house.
The outdoor lights cut off, leaving us with the glow of the half-moon and the stars.
Until an image flickered to life on the massive screen spread across the back of the house.
The image divided repeatedly until the massive screen was covered in smaller squares.
We all moved closer.
In each of the images was someone’s front door, all different, but still similar.
We all knew what we were watching. Dawn’s army of girls had cameras for eyes. Maybe not actual cameras. Maybe we were just somehow linked to them through biology, through Dawn, through that cosmic thing living inside her. We were seeing what they saw.
We watched as they easily opened doors and calmly strolled through houses, some large, some small, some messy, some spotless.
We watched each of them lean over a sleeping person.
Our buds twitched and stretched, all part of the same flesh, all waiting to be born, all needing what only these sleeping victims’ pain could supply.
We watched the sacrifices.
Maybe if there was someone in the bed with the sacrificed, they would feel a few moments of confusion upon waking, but it wouldn’t take them long to understand. It wouldn’t take them long to accept their new reality.
Just like we’d all accepted our new reality.
And when the screen was nothing but a sea of red, we all made our way to the lake, filled with the pain of who knew how many dead dogs, because that’s where the buds wanted us to go. That’s where Dawn wanted us to go. And we lived to serve Dawn.
The buds began dropping from our flesh, plopping onto the ground and wriggling toward the lake like glowing, bloated slugs.
Eventually the lake glowed a dull neon green.
We knew it would gain in intensity each successive night and, when it no longer glowed, a new Dawn army would emerge from the pond.
And this would be the future.
The lights came back on.
The music started back up.
We felt free.
What we entered into was not a living death.
It was freedom.
Free to repeat these actions year after year.
Free to lose ourselves completely.
Free to serve Dawn and only Dawn.
Free from poverty and boredom and judgment and the struggle to make our own choices.
I felt good for the first time in years.
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This Town Needs a Monster Page 26