Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  Pill turned the truck around and began to drive back into Cavus, through the empty streets.

  “What are they doing?” John asked, turning to watch the figures behind them, who had stopped in the middle of the road, arms crossed.

  “They’re waiting,” said Pill. “They aim to kill everyone in Cavus. Kill them or turn them. They haven’t ever been able to do it before now…the Keepers stopped them.”

  “Who are the Keepers?” asked Erma.

  Pill turned onto a new street, taking a deep breath. “Why, I guess they’re us now, sweetheart. Us or nobody.”

  2

  Star opened her eyes. Thirty minutes had passed.

  She’d crouched there, listening to the loud banging on the bathroom door, remained still even as the banging was followed by a shriek and then, worse, silence.

  Now the screams outside continued, but they seemed to have moved farther away.

  She felt calmer, though no less afraid.

  Carefully, Star let herself out of the stall, inching toward the bathroom door. She slid the trashcan she’d shoved in front of it away. Star reached up and placed her hand on the large metal lock. And hesitated. They could still be out there. They could be hiding. Waiting on the other side of the door.

  It didn’t matter. To stay in here was death. Eventually they’d find her, whatever they were. They would find her here and kill her. Or worse. She thought of Mabel. They’d gotten to her somehow. Ruined her.

  Star flipped the lock and cracked the door open. In the distance, a popping sounded. Someone firing a pistol. There was another shot and then a scream.

  Star opened the door a little farther. The hallway in front of her was empty, the beige and white tiles gleaming, freshly scrubbed for the party. Thirty feet ahead of her, in front of the Event Hall door, she saw a figure running past, crouched on all fours. But it continued, not turning her way.

  Star stepped through the doorway and looked around. Behind her was the hallway leading to the worship part of the church. In front of her was the Event Hall, where the Feast was supposed to occur. If she could make it there, she’d go out the back doors, which opened onto the rear parking lot.

  As Star stepped forward, her foot encountered something soft. On the floor was a small, limp body, its head twisted at a broken angle.

  The doll looked familiar, and it took a second for Star to understand why. She’d seen it only an hour earlier, clasped in the hands of a little girl. The girl had been running, running from a pack of boys, all of them wearing squirrel masks. Star turned her head away and stepped over it, pointing herself toward the back hall. Behind her, from the direction of the Event Hall, came the sound of laughter.

  Star planted her other foot over the doll and measured the distance to the Event Hall’s door. Only fifty or so feet. Fifty feet. Please, dear God, don’t let it be locked.

  More laughter drifted at her from the dark, this time deep and guttural.

  Star ran toward the door and did not look back.

  3

  The hag finally emerged from her hiding.

  As soon as Rosie stepped outside, Javier brought the blunt ax down on her head. Once. Twice. A third time. It didn’t come cleanly off, but hung by the threads of torn flesh. Javier bent back down and buried the ax again, sawing with it. He planted his foot on the woman’s torso, watching as her mouth fish-hooked open and closed. Around her mouth was a dried brown stain. Brown, like the color of his sister’s hair. Brown, like his mother’s eyes.

  He sawed harder, applying all the pressure he had in his thin body until, finally, the head popped loose. It rolled a few feet away and stopped with a thud against the post of the clothesline, where two dresses fluttered merrily in the breeze.

  Dropping the ax, Javier went to retrieve his prize, bending to grab it by the hair. He held it high against the orange sun by its gray curls and then spat into its face. From the severed edges of the skin, a black, treacly substance dripped. After another moment of staring at the head, Javier flung it as hard as he could into the field beside the house. He wiped his hands on his jeans and went back to retrieve the ax from where he’d dropped it. If there were more of these people—no, these demons. These mind-fuckers. These pinche cabrones—he’d find them. He had a score to settle. It was all he had left, this score. After that, there’d be nothing for him, and that would be that. But for now…

  He thought he’d start with the redhead. And he had a pretty good idea where to find her. Where to find all of them. Whistling, Javier swung the ax over his shoulder, and walked toward the church.

  Chapter 18

  1

  Pill parked his truck in Bunny’s driveway, just like he was doing nothing more than dropping some friends off after a movie. When he got out, he took his gun with him. John watched as the old man walked around the truck to the bed, where Riley, his daughter, and Bunny sat.

  “Might should have listened to me, shouldn’t you, Sheriff?” Pill said, leaning into the back of the pickup and looking at Riley.

  “What the fuck were you trying to pull back there, Pill!” Riley looked furious, his face red with rage and trembling.

  “You know him?” asked John.

  “I know him all right. Crazy old man. You crazy fucking old man, you could have killed us!”

  “Calm down. Calm down. I just needed to prove a point. Let you all see how serious this situation is.”

  Riley lunged at Pill, placing his hands around the man’s neck.

  “Riley!” Erma screamed. She’d scooted all the way over to the driver’s side and was kicking the door open. “Stop him, John!”

  “Don’t stop him,” said Bunny, watching from the truck bed, her expression blank. “That man drove us right into those monsters!”

  “You going to kill ’im, Daddy?” Izzy looked up at her father, her face bright with interest. Riley looked down at her and back at Pill, who did nothing to fight him. Finally, Riley dropped his hands.

  “I aim to keep me and my little girl alive,” he said. Izzy stuck her hand into her mouth and began to suck on it, as if enjoying the show of her father’s speech. “Whatever it takes,” Riley said, leaning into Pill’s face. “Don’t you pull that shit again.”

  “You’ll understand, later,” said Pill, who looked completely calm. But when Pill thought no one was watching him, John saw, the old man pushed both of his hands into his pockets to hide them. John could see them shaking, even beneath the denim.

  “Now,” said Pill, keeping his voice steady, “I said maybe you should have listened to me before. You ready to listen to me now?”

  He gave away nothing, John thought. Not a sign of his nerves or fear.

  “I’ve got my little girl here, and my aunt…. ”

  “You have to save us!” Bunny lunged forward, past Riley and Izzy, and grabbed hold of the front of Pill’s overalls. “You’ve got to save us! Do you know what’s going on here? Do you?” Bunny’s eyes rolled wildly in her head, and John, who’d stepped out of the truck behind Pill, thought the woman had never looked more like her namesake than now, her large front teeth showing from between her lips, too dry with nerves to cover them.

  “Ma’am, what I need you to do right now is just calm down.”

  “I need you to tell me what the fuck is going on!” Bunny spat the words.

  Riley gently pushed his daughter off his lap and took his aunt’s shoulders, turning her to face him. He had pulled himself together, and John could see a hardness in the man that must make him a good cop. “Come on, Aunt Bunny,” Riley said. “We’re all confused here, let’s just calm down.”

  Behind him, Izzy began to cry. “Daddy!” she screamed, holding out her arms. “I want up. Up!” Riley grabbed the girl up out of the truck’s rusted white bed and folded her to him. Watching them, John’s heart flipped over as he realized that the little girl would be forever changed by what she witnessed today.

  On the horizon the human screaming, unified now, the sound of a pack, drew closer.
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  “Sheriff,” said Pill, “I’m afraid we don’t have time for any of this drama. You still got your gun on you?”

  “I do,” said Riley, reaching down and pulling a small pistol out of his sock. “Thankfully. I’d be dead by now if I didn’t.”

  “That’ll be fine for a start,” said Pill, ignoring the jab. “What I want you to do is get these women and your little girl into the house. And be careful. John said he saw one of them in the garage.”

  “One of them,” said Riley, rolling the last word around in his mouth as if tasting it, testing it out. “What are they, exactly?”

  “They’re Feeders,” said Pill. “And they’re coming for us.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Riley asked. “And how do you—”

  The howling on the horizon rose to an earsplitting roar, and Pill cut Riley off, whistling for Maxie. She leapt down the high truck over Erma’s lap and went directly to Pill’s side. “You really want to stand out here and discuss it, son?”

  From the corner of his eye, John saw Bunny draw a deep breath and step away from the dog, and he remembered the woman’s earlier reaction to Maxie. Maybe she did have an allergy to dogs, but she was scared of them, too. Badly scared. Maxie ignored her, however, and sat patiently beside Pill, licking the man’s hand.

  “Let’s get inside,” Pill said. “Those walls ain’t much, but they can keep us hidden long enough for me to try to explain some of this to you.”

  “Fine,” said Riley. “But if you don’t make sense and make sense quick once we’re in there, whatever is out here won’t be the only thing coming for you.”

  John opened the door on his own side and helped Erma out, turning to look toward the garage in case the man he’d seen earlier might be sneaking up on them. A Feeder. That was what Pill had called him.

  Feeders.

  “John?” Erma said, holding tightly to her husband’s hand.

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “I’m just glad, that’s all. That if it has to happen…if something happens here, we fixed us first. You and me. That we’re okay.”

  John pulled her to him and held her. “Me too.”

  Feeders. The word replayed itself in his mind as he stepped away from Erma and led her in a jog toward Bunny’s front door, following the sheriff and his small group. Pill stayed with Maxie by the truck, his shotgun held at his shoulder to cover them as they ran.

  Bunny fumbled in her purse for the house key as everyone waited on the porch nervously. Pill limped across the yard, gun out, and joined the rest of them as Bunny clicked open the lock.

  Everyone piled inside, Pill entering last, slamming the door behind him. But even with it shut and locked, they could hear the screaming growing louder, the mass approaching.

  The Feeders were coming.

  2

  Javier Martinez swerved across the street, the ax, now covered in more of the black blood, clutched tightly to his chest. He had not yet made it to the church, but he’d already killed four more of them. The town was quieting down now. They, whatever they were, had gotten most of the people. Either that, or whoever was left was hiding, but after having seen three more sets of the monsters in human skin feeding, Javier didn’t think the latter was very likely.

  He himself couldn’t last much longer. Javier looked behind him to the pile of human bodies, three of them, that he’d left in the street. The two on the bottom had been kids he’d seen with Mabel on several occasions, walking home from school. A blond girl and a boy with dark hair and a pierced lip. He guessed they might have been on the cross-country team with her. When he arrived, the boy was already dead, and the girl was missing her left arm. The creature, a monster wearing what looked to be the flesh of a middle-aged house-mom, was working on the blond girl’s right arm. She hung above her, crouched, balancing herself on just one arm. They were strong, these creatures, that was one thing Javier had noticed. They also had amazingly advanced senses. The woman spun around. As she turned and Javier brought the ax down, he noticed that the woman was probably his mom’s age, and had bright brown eyes and arched, nicely shaped eyebrows. Maybe she’d been pretty at one point in time. It was hard to tell with all the blood smeared on her face.

  He took the house-mom’s head off with a single blow from the ax (he’d sharpened it with a home knife sharpener that he’d found in an open garage just a few houses back—he kept it now in the side pocket of the hunting vest, which he’d also stolen). The blond girl looked up at him with relief and gratitude, and then promptly died.

  Oh, well.

  Oh, well.

  Wasn’t his problem. He didn’t care who lived. Only who died. Only who he could kill. He fingered the splintered handle of the ax with a bare hand, letting a piece of the wood prick his skin and work its way under his flesh.

  Didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered.

  He was headed toward the church, toward the Feast, where, from the sounds of it, all hell had broken loose. Good. Fine by him. Javier knew hell all right. He could get down with that ball of flames, that finger-flopping, body-plopping death dance. Hell was just awesome by him. He’d been living in it since this morning.

  A shape appeared in the path across from him. Javier lifted his ax, but then stopped as the shape unexpectedly solidified into a recognizable form. A man. A man Javier had seen almost every day of his life since he’d arrived in Cavus. Otto. Otto Blomgren, who worked with Javier on the line at the factory and liked to invent stories about Javier’s conquests of women and then tell them to the rest of the line just to watch Javier blush. But it had all been in good fun, and Javier had found in Otto the closest thing to a friend that he had at the factory.

  Otto continued to approach, and for a wonder, the man looked completely sane, completely normal. In fact, he walked toward Javier with a hand raised in greeting. And he spoke.

  “Javier. Good God, man, am I glad to see you.”

  Javier paused, the ax raised. “Otto?”

  “Javier!” Otto took another step forward. “What’s going on?” There was a tremble in the man’s voice that betrayed his fear. Javier dropped his ax completely to his side and hurried to him. He hadn’t thought it would feel so good to see another human! He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t wanted to see anyone at all, only to cut the heads of these monsters free from their bodies.

  When he reached Otto, he held his hand out for his coworker to shake. Instead, Otto pulled Javier forward into a tight embrace. “Javier, man, you look like you’ve been through hell.”

  “I’ve taken down a few of the bastards,” Javier said. “I plan on taking down a few more.”

  “Are you okay?” Otto still held him tightly, and although the embrace was growing uncomfortable, Javier did not pull away.

  “They killed my mother. And my sister. They killed my little sister.” Javier’s voice broke, and he did not try to hold back the tears.

  Otto pulled him tighter. “It’s okay, my man. You can cry. Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it, Javier. You’re pretty upset, aren’t you?”

  “Damn right I’m upset.” He could smell the sweat rising from Otto’s body, and it was beginning to make his stomach knot. It smelled of iron and mud and a little like piss. Had the man been so afraid that he’d wet himself? Otto squeezed him tighter.

  “Of course you are. How old was she?”

  “Four.”

  “Four years old. Probably still had a pretty tight little pussy, then, didn’t she, man?”

  Javier stiffened. “What did you say?”

  “Hey, relax, hombre. I just said she probably had a tight little pussy. Isn’t that right? Don’t all you beaners like to keep it in the family? Mexican pride and all that.”

  Javier struggled to pull away, but Otto held him tight. The man’s strength was unreal. Javier couldn’t even draw a breath. But though his body was pinned, his mind worked on, and in less than a second, the details of the situation clicked into place, the pieces fitting neatly together. O
tto was one of Them.

  And although Javier had been planning on dying today, he couldn’t let himself do it here. Not without avenging the filth that had just fallen from that man’s lips. No, not man. Demon.

  “Let me go.”

  “Relax, hombre. Just chill.” Javier felt Otto shifting above him, although he couldn’t tell what he was doing. The breath leaked out of his lungs, one painful gasp at a time. There again was the piss smell of the man, stronger now. Javier tried to turn his head away, but Otto pulled him closer, pulled him into the red-and-blue plaid of his flannel shirt…soft, really. Soft enough to just fall into and forget. Let it happen. But Otto shifted and then there was the skin of Otto’s arm, its surface covered in coarse black curls of hair, and these curls tickled Javier’s cheek, tickled and poked and worked against his skin like a hundred tiny ant feet, needling, needling, irritating to rage with their maddening lightness. Javier lowered his head and butted it into Otto’s chest, but the blow contained no power. He was too close.

  “I’m going to give you a little something,” Otto said. “It won’t work right away, so I’ll have to knock you out after you eat it, so you’ll calm down a little. Should have had a communion wafer, my man. That shit was instantaneous. Powerful.”

  “Let…me…go! I don’t know…what you’re…talking about.”

  “Don’t fight it. Just admit it. Admit your sins, man. They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful, you humans with your dirt and your filth and your sins. It’s the trying to cover them that’s wrong.”

  “Fuck…you.” The world around him began to go black as the last of the air in Javier’s lungs departed. He had to think. Javier willed himself to focus. Just think of one thing. Think of what was cutting off his air. Javier stilled and let the image of Otto’s face form behind his closed eyes.