Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  On the other side of Erma, Riley linked his arm beneath her own, and the three of them walked the deserted streets toward the sound of the bells, the small spire of the church marking their destination.

  2

  As the first church bells sounded, John pulled open the garage door, expecting Maxie to barrel down upon him. To his surprise, no one was there. The garage was completely empty.

  “Maxie?” John’s voice rang out in the stillness. Why was the garage empty anyway? Where was Erma’s Honda? Riley’d promised his uncle’s crew was going to drop it off here.

  “Maxie.” He whistled. “Here, girl.” No response.

  The garage walls sported haphazard shelves, looking like they’d been made from scrap pieces of plywood. Neatly organized buckets of odds and ends sat upon the shelves. In one of the buckets, John saw the handle of a baseball bat. From another, a tarp spilled messily over the side.

  “Maxie! Come on. Maaaxie!” Maybe Riley had moved her.

  Something smelled off in there. John couldn’t pinpoint the odor, but it was rank, and seemed to grow stronger by the minute. “Come on, girl!” he tried a final time. Obviously the dog wasn’t there. He turned to leave when, from behind him, he heard a very faint sound that might or might not have been a growl.

  “Maxie?”

  There was nothing. He’d imagined it. Must have. He opened the side door to the garage and was about to shut it behind him when the growl came a little louder this time, followed by a yip.

  “Maxie!” He ran back inside and listened. There it was again! John followed the sound, a stream of barks now, to the back wall. There was nothing there, just a wall, the shelves across it.

  The bark rang out again, and John followed all the way to the end of the back wall. A tool bench was there; the sound came from underneath. John looked down and found a hole. When he got on his knees, he saw that the hole was not just a hole, but a handle, and with a yank he pulled what had been a hidden door—two foot by three—open. He hesitated, testing the open space with his hand, then, feeling nothing, crawled into the dark space. The smell inside was overpowering, a rotten meat stench. John moved his hand to cover his nose and crawled forward.

  After just a few feet, the space opened up, and he stood. He was inside of what must have at one time been an underground bomb shelter, built in the heyday of nuclear panic. The thick walls, concrete, must have been what kept him from hearing his dog’s barking the first few times.

  But she was there all right.

  Maxie stood lit up by the single bare lightbulb that illuminated the space. She’d been barking, but when she saw John, she stopped. She did not, however, move. Her sides trembled in exhaustion and excitement, and John saw that spittle had dried against her mouth.

  “Hey, girl? How’d you get in here? It’s all…” The words died in his throat as he saw what Maxie was looking at. In the shadows and up against the wall was a man. He did not stand like a man, but crouched on all fours. He was naked. A pendulous belly swung boldly beneath him, skimming the floor. When he noticed that John had spotted him, he turned, crawling, hand over hand across the floor. His penis swung freely, a shriveled purple worm.

  “Help me,” the man pleaded. “Dear God, help me.”

  “Maxie!” John cried in horror. The dog winced, but did not give up her point at the figure—increased it, in fact, growling as he tried to come forward.

  “Call off your dog,” the man begged.

  “Maxie, come here!” She didn’t move. He’d never seen her like this. How long had she kept the man penned back here? Had she chased him from the garage into this space, where he’d hoped to hide?

  John’s stomach rolled over as the fresh smell of rot came to him. It was so awful. Where was it coming from? Something wet dripped onto John’s face, and he wiped it away. Another drop. John wiped this, too, and then looked at his finger. It was red. John raised his eyes, and when he saw what dangled above him, he sank to his knees.

  It was this, finally, that brought Maxie running to his side to look after her collapsed owner. The minute Maxie moved away, the crouching man took his chance. He sprang forward and scuttled, his bare hands and feet slap, slap, slapping at the concrete as he went. As he passed John, the man turned his face briefly toward him.

  “Get your own,” the face spat. “I don’t share.”

  The man’s eyes were completely black. No iris at all. And then he scuttled on, disappearing through the hole like a bug into the wall.

  John could feel Maxie hesitate under his hand, her body trembling, preparing to spring after him, but then she looked at her master, and stayed.

  John grabbed the dog and pulled her to him. Forcing himself, he turned his eyes back toward the ceiling. From the rafters hung three bodies. The last one was the woman in the tube top he’d seen at the Festival. Her right side was torn completely away, leaving exposed bone and a few dangling strips of flesh. There were tooth marks in the flesh.

  The body swung in a lazy circle, and the left side came into the glare of the light. It was perfect, completely untouched. Fresh. John looked at the closed eyelids of the woman, her skin white against the light, and she might have been sleeping. Until the red swung back into view, and then John could contain himself no longer. What started as sobs became screams, and through it all he pulled Maxie closer, and the dog, usually so unwilling to be held, allowed herself to bend toward him, allowed her fur to be matted with his spit and tears.

  The woman’s good side swung back into view, and this time, John could swear it, she was smiling.

  3

  Javier Martinez crouched, hidden, behind the bushes in Rosie Yubanks’s front yard. A fly buzzed close to his ear, its sound growing loud, louder, maddening. Javier did not hear it, did not move. He did not hear anything, only saw. All around him was red.

  So much red. In his hand, he fingered the wood of the ax and looked up at the door, waiting.

  He closed his eyes, remembering.

  “Mama? Gabby? I’m home.”

  Even from the doorstep he had been able to smell the fresh laundry, the soapish-flowery scent wafting outside. His mom must have just done a load, maybe even washed her good dress, the one she wore to church, so she could wear it to the Festival. The thought of his mom looking pretty in her blue dress and Gabby in her pink Easter one, the three of them walking hand in hand to the Festival, did as much to erase what had happened at Mabel’s as anything could. Javier felt the weight of something very heavy lifting from his chest. He inhaled and smiled, turning the knob of the door and stepping inside. “You ready for the…”

  The first thing he saw when he opened the door was his sister. Her face smiled up at him from the far corner of the room, her dark hair curled in ringlets and her chubby cheeks dimpled from her grin.

  The second thing was her body. It lay roughly twenty feet away, resting against the stove in the kitchen, its tiny feet propped at an odd angle against the lower window.

  “Gabby?” His mind, what was left of it, refused to process the scene. “Gabby?” He knelt beside the head. Was it some kind of joke? A bad joke, maybe, yes. It was just a toy. A doll’s head. Not Gabby—no, surely not Gabby.

  Choking back a scream, he reached out a hand and touched the doll’s hair. It felt crisp, like straw. Yes. Much too harsh to be Gabby’s hair. Gabby’s was soft. Javier turned to where he’d seen the rest of Gabby (The doll! his mind asserted. The rest of the doll) and saw a shape lying underneath a blanket on the couch. His heart leapt as relief flooded through him. His mom! There she was, just taking a nap on the couch, like usual. She’d probably been the one to play the joke, a stupid joke, and, boy, would he tell her that, but there she was.

  Javier approached the couch, the lump under the blanket clearly taking on the form of a woman.

  “Mom?”

  No answer. His steps slowed. It was her, though, he could see that well enough. A single hand poked from beneath the gray blanket, and there were her nails, clean and clipped
short, just as she always kept them. Javier knelt beside the couch and took one of the hands. It was cold and rubbery. He dropped it. His mom’s body was completely covered on the couch, even her face. Reaching up a surprisingly steady hand, Javier uncovered it.

  She had no face. Only a single, terrifyingly clear eye, which shone up at him from a mess of blood, flesh, and teeth marks.

  Something had eaten her face.

  Ttthheee…

  Javier spun, the noise coming from behind him. There, in the doorway between the Martinezes’ apartment and the shared kitchen, stood Rosie Yubanks. She was giggling.

  “Oh, my, what a mess I made,” she said, and then put a prim little hand up to her face to hide the giggle. Her mouth was covered in red.

  His mind tried to catch up to what was happening. A crazy old woman, a crazy puta who did, what, prey on immigrant families, lure them here? And why him? Why his family, his beautiful sister whom he was going to make sure went to school, to college; his mother, for whom he was going to someday build a house of her own, was going to take care of in her old age; and now none of it, none of it, and how could this be possible?

  And then Javier allowed whatever rational thought made him human to peel away, fall like a dead shrimp’s carcass to the floor. The thick black ichor of emotions that he’d been trying to swallow boiled up inside him and spilled over so that it was the only thing left, and Javier embraced it. He ran at the bitch with a fury he hadn’t known he could possess, ran and was almost at her, Rosie in the door frame, calmly waiting, waiting, waiting for him, until, at the last minute, she slammed the kitchen door closed.

  Quickly, he reached down for the handle, but not quickly enough. He heard a click on the other side, followed by another giggle.

  “Let me in, you BITCH!” Javier banged his hands against the door. “LET ME IN!”

  There was no answer from the other side. Only breathing—a thick, heavy breath, followed by a hiccup, and then a cough.

  “Sorry,” the thing on the other side of the door breathed. “I think I have a little indigestion.”

  “YOU BITCH!” Javier sank to the floor, and he found that he was crying. Crying and screaming all at once. “YOU BITCH COME OUT HERE AND I’LL KILL YOU!”

  —

  The sun was still bright but had begun its descent, bathing him in its light as he crouched outside the house. Javier’s muscles had moved beyond pain, locked into stiff numbness from crouching outside, hidden for hours.

  Rosie knew that he was there. It was why she wasn’t coming out. He didn’t care. He could wait forever. Would wait forever, if that’s what it came to. He’d kill them all. First the puta who’d done this to them, that stinking lump of an old woman whom he’d left behind to do this to his family. First Rosie, but then Mabel. Yes. Her too. It had been her he’d gone to, her temptations he’d let himself be distracted by when the monster was at her work here.

  In his hand, he fingered the ax, a heavy piece of equipment, but all that he could find. It had been dull when he lifted it from the wheelbarrow where it was buried beneath other rusty tools out back in the shed.

  Red. So much red. The hair of the girl.

  From the bush in which he crouched, a scratchy pine-like scrub, a small sparrow detangled itself from the branches and worked its way free.

  The church bells rang, and he waited. The monster would have to come out soon. When she did, he’d let her listen. Just for a moment. He wanted to let her register the sound of the bells. A sound of beauty, like his sister’s name, or his mother’s laugh. He wanted her to hear it right before he buried the ax in her face. He wanted it to be the last thing she ever heard.

  4

  Fifteen miles from Cavus, Pill Verrity closed his wife’s journal for the last time.

  “I’m sorry, Jessi,” he mumbled, thinking of how he’d acted toward her at her death. How he’d thought her crazy. How he had, on his worst days, wished she’d hurry up and die from the slow cancer so he didn’t have to listen to her insane rantings anymore.

  “No!” he answered himself. “I never did that. Never!”

  But didn’t he? Didn’t he, especially at the end, wish that his wife would stop going on about her damn journal, would stop telling her stupid stories and informing him that he was The Keeper? The Keeper, The Keeper, always on about him having to be The Keeper.

  “I dreamed it, Pill. You and the girl. And white. A woman in white.”

  Which was bullshit. Didn’t matter at all even if she had dreamed it.

  Except that he’d dreamed it, too. Last night, he’d dreamed it again, but he’d started dreaming it months ago. And since then, he’d set out to prove himself wrong. To prove himself and Jessi and all the craziness wrong. He could at least give his dead wife that.

  It’d seemed an easy task at first. Keep an eye on Cavus. Watch for any changes. Changes like what Jessi talked about. Little changes. Changes that most folks wouldn’t recognize.

  The retirement of the young police officer had been the first sign for him that all was not as it should be. He’d followed the man home from work. Watched him. He hadn’t seen anything definite, only the man going out at odd hours, bringing unusual people home. Once, he thought he’d seen the man bend over, pick a clump of dirt off the ground, and put it in his mouth. But that might have been his imagination.

  Speculative stuff, all of it, but then the phone lines had started disappearing. Watch for ways of communication to be impeded, Jessi had said. And so he’d watched. Hadn’t been hard. He’d just gone to a pay phone each day at the highway gas station and dialed a random sampling of twenty numbers that he’d written down from the Cavus phone book, and one by one there’d been fewer people picking up the phone and more of that tin-can voice telling him that she was sorry, but the number he was trying was no longer in service or had been disconnected. Pill had started to dream about that voice.

  After that, he’d gotten the CB, bought it at the junk shop in Custer, and then he’d started listening to the truckers as they passed by. Because the truckers saw, and the truckers talked.

  “Man running west across the field in just his skivvies and a raincoat! Crazier than a pet coon!”

  “Anyone seen Tosha or Bonnie around the pit? Red Hog wants to know.”

  “Ain’t seen those girls around in over three weeks. Over.”

  All these and others through the airwaves. Reports of more people than should rightly be off their rockers and running around along the roadside after dark doing just that. Other things, little things that didn’t add up. Like the spoiled milk at the gas station. Or a black and white just sitting on the side of the road and not stopping a fellow who was an easy twenty over the speed limit.

  Now he was here, sitting behind the wheel of his pickup truck with six sticks of illegal dynamite and three cans of gasoline, and his dead wife’s journal in his lap with a shotgun resting like a bookmark between its pages.

  He’d picked up the dynamite weeks ago from a survivalist he’d found online. The man had offered to sell him many other things, had had an entire bunker full of grenades and the makings of dirty bombs, but at the time, Pill hadn’t really believed his own paranoia. The dynamite had seemed less real, especially since it was old and harmless looking, and so he’d taken only that.

  It was finally reading the pages of Jessi’s journal in their entirety that had put the nail in the coffin of whatever choice he’d thought he had. He’d put it off, only reading bits and pieces of it until now, when he’d sat in his truck this last hour and read, hoping that in some way the journal might prove his original theory: that Jessi was just crazy. It hadn’t.

  Jessi’s book consisted of her journaling via pictures and writing the entire story of the town fire of 1937. Not the official story, the real one. The way Jessi told it in her pictures, she’d been a plain-looking little girl when she arrived in Cavus. She’d drawn herself as a spindly, terrified-looking kid with ragtag clothes and ratty hair. Pill knew differently. His wife ha
d been and always was beautiful.

  Not wanting to, Pill had spread Jessi’s pictures out in front of him on the truck’s seat, alongside the shotgun and dynamite. They were in charcoal, an unusual medium for her, and as such, they showed no color. But it wasn’t hard to imagine. Pill’s mind easily filled in the orange of the tiger’s fur, the red of the circus tent, the different color of red that was Jessi’s hair. When he allowed himself to do that, he almost couldn’t go on. Not with thinking about her wearing those scarves wrapped around her bald baby bird’s head at the end. Pill shook the image away. He couldn’t afford to be sentimental. Not now.

  There was a time when a good many newspapers would have paid for Jessi’s “real story.” She was, at least historically, the only survivor of the 1937 mine fires. She’d been sixteen at the time. Publicly, and to all the papers, she told everyone that she’d only been lucky, passing out near the entrance to the mines while everyone below burned, or died from smoke inhalation and lack of oxygen.

  The big mystery that all the papers wanted to know about was why were so many people from town down in the mines. Hundreds, they’d stressed, down in the mines. It just didn’t make sense. Jessi always said that she didn’t know exactly what had happened, only that there’d been a fire and maybe the townspeople went down into the mines for safety.

  But there, in his wife’s unsteady handwriting, was the real story. Not that any of those damn reporters would’ve believed it if she’d told it to them. They had a hard enough time understanding why she’d stayed. Stayed even after everyone else from the circus she came with was dead. Stayed until a new town built up around her from the ashes of the old. But Pill knew.

  Now, the cover of the book firmly closed, Pill turned the key in the ignition and listened to the engine roll over as the truck sprang to life. “Jessi, my love, I hope this is just one crazy old man out on a fool’s errand.”