She was singing, now. Zee could hear her tiny, shrill voice as she struggled to hit the right key. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t as if Zee was going to stand up and complain. “No, that’s not how it goes. You’re in C when you should be in G#. Go home, put some clothes on, and come see me when you’ve figured it out.”
The song, if you could call it that, was about rice pudding, and as the woman sang, it became increasingly clear that she was not of sound mind (though the lack of suitable clothing had been a good indication).
Still frozen, Zee allowed her head to move across the mouth of the cave, to follow the warbling old biddy as she pranced and danced and swung her bountiful hips, all the time singing about rice pudding and how it was the bee’s knees, etc. etc.
Just when Zee thought the song was over, off she went again with another verse. On several occasions, the old woman peered into the darkness of the cave, as if she could sense there was somebody watching her but didn’t quite have the balls to go looking. Her eyes mustn’t have adjusted to the darkness the way Zee’s had, otherwise she would have seen the girl sitting atop the smooth rock, staring out incredulously, and that, Zee thought, would have been the end of that…
“Yes, yes, rice pudding,” the old woman said. “Delicious it was. Thick and creamy, and hardly any lumps.”
Zee had no idea what the woman was rambling on about, or why she was doing so in the buff. Surely someone had seen her walking through town like that? Surely someone would have tried to intervene, throw a blanket over her, do something!
Apparently not.
“All thick and drippy, it was, not watery, no, no, no!”
Zee felt sorry for the old dear, who was clearly out of her superannuated mind. If I ever get like that, she thought, I want someone to put a steel bolt through my brain.
Just then, the book – Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – slipped from Zee’s lap and landed on the cave floor with a thump. Dust and sand flew up into the air, and Zee, panicking, reached down for the book, forgetting for a moment about the old lady and her confused ramblings.
“I knew there was someone there,” said the old lady as she stepped into the gloom. “Oh, I see you now. I see you very well, indeed.”
Zee didn’t know what to do, but standing seemed to be a good idea. After managing that without too much trouble, she said, “Are you okay? Do you need me to escort you home?”
The old lady cackled. “Home? Why would I want to go home?”
“I’m assuming that’s where your clothes are,” Zee said. “And, no offence intended, I’m almost positive that you look better with them on.”
“Have you tasted the milk?” said the old lady, prodding at Zee with her umbrella.
It’s worse than I thought, Zee thought. “There is no milk,” she said. “Hasn’t been for a very long time. Do you have any family in Oilhaven? Someone that will take you off my hands for free?”
“But there is milk, dear. There is lots of it, and it rescued my rice puddin’.” She allowed the umbrella to fall to the floor of the cave before cupping her hands together. Then, leaning forward, she belched, vomiting something thick and uneven into them. It was all Zee could do not to scream. “Go on, love,” the old lady said. “’elp yourself.”
Zee gagged but managed to compose herself. Was it this poor old lady’s fault that she was lost, that she was confused, that she had just upchucked into her own cupped hands? It would have taken a right old meanie to simply walk away and leave the befuddled biddy to her own devices.
Zee picked up the heavy tome she had been reading and dropped it into her rucksack. She was meant to be avoiding town like the plague, but things had changed. This old lady needed her help, and…
“The milk,” said the old lady, grinning wildly. “You have to try the milk. It’s sooooo creaaaaaaaamy!”
And then something bizarre happened, something that could only be described as a waking nightmare, one that Zee would not recover from for quite some time.
The old lady’s expression changed from one of joy to one of utter horror. Something white and gloopy spilled from her wide open maw as her face contorted, stretching first one way, and then the other. Violent tremors wracked through her entire body as she dropped to her knees, coughing up more of that terrible white stuff.
“Oh my god!” Zee said. “What can I do? What do I do to help?” As far as she was concerned, this was something the old lady suffered from regularly, something for which she took pills, or rubbed lotion on, or got used to with minimal fuss. And then she remembered her little brother and his exploits from the previous day, how he had fallen ill and had spent the majority of the day with his head buried in a bucket. Maybe that was what this was.
But no. Clint’s face hadn’t contorted like that, as if a thousand restless worms squirmed beneath its surface. That was like nothing Zee had ever seen before.
“The miiiiiiilllllk!” the old lady said, but it was no longer her own voice. To Zee, it sounded like three or four people talking at once.
“I don’t know…what to do!” Zee said, hooking her arms beneath the elderly lady’s and hoisting her to her feet. The feel of her clammy, wrinkled flesh made Zee gag again. “Tell me what I can do!”
The old lady stopped wriggling for a moment; long enough to regain her footing. Zee couldn’t see the woman’s face, since she was holding her up from behind, but she could hear the long, languorous breaths emanating from her goo-drenched face, and she knew that something very bad was about to happen.
And it did.
The old lady (though nothing of the sort anymore) snapped her head around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, like an owl only evil and wrinkly. Her tongue darted in and out of her puckered old mouth, but it was black, long and bovine. White slime dripped from it, stretched down onto Zee’s arm, causing her to let go.
The old lady stumbled forwards a few steps before composing herself. Her distended belly rolled, as if she was about to give birth to not one, but many, aberrations. Her head snapped back into its rightful position just as that terrible tongue leapt from her mouth and snatched the umbrella up from the cave floor.
Zee, no longer paralysed, lunged for her machete, and would have made it had an umbrella not smacked into the back of her head, sending her sprawling.
The old lady/evil creature roared triumphantly, but Zee wasn’t beating around the bush. She dragged herself forwards and, in one swoop, gathered the machete up. The monster groaned, clearly not pleased with the sudden shift in impetus.
“What the fuck are you?” Zee said, turning to face the beast, which now had an extra set of arms hanging from its anus. They propelled it forwards, pushing up from the ground with giant, hairy knuckles. One swing of the machete, though, and the monster backed off.
“Miiiiiiiiiiillllllk!” the thing hissed, circling Zee, prowling like a lion – an extremely wrinkly and bloated lion that had been shaved haphazardly and left to fend for its self. Every time its mouth opened, thick white liquid leached out. Zee could smell it – an odd combination of death and honey and brimstone and earth – as it splattered onto the cave floor. Whatever the liquid was, it had no right pouring from a previously-normal old lady’s disfigured face.
It lunged again, this time managing to penetrate what Zee liked to think of as her ‘safe zone’. Acting fast, Zee brought the machete up, whipped it through the air so quick that it was invisible to the naked human eye.
The beast drew back, shrieking like a cornered fox, and then a thin line appeared along her chest, running up through the gelatinous mountains that were her mutilated breasts. At first it was a red line, no thicker than a pubic hair, but then it opened up more, and the woman-thing screeched as she realised she was, in fact, coming apart.
“Oh!” Zee said, for she hadn’t meant to split the thing in half. “Oh, fuck!”
But it was no use; the damage had been done. Zee’s blade had sliced through the beast as if it were made of butter, or mallow, and now all she
could do was stand and watch as the thing’s left side and its right side parted company for the foreseeable future.
The haggard old face of the thing twisted into something even more unsettling, something so far from human that Zee dared not look at it for too long, lest she go completely bonkers. And then its body snapped apart; blood and white liquid sprayed out, coating the walls of the cave, combining to make an almost rosy pink. It was a colour that didn’t suit the environment. Maybe someday, Zee though, a camp drifter would stumble upon the cave and make it his own, but until then…
Zee took a step back as the thing teetered forwards on fleshy, perpetually-warping legs. It was hard to believe that, just a moment ago, a naked old lady had stood there, singing about rice pudding and swinging an umbrella. It was so hard, in fact, that Zee refused to believe it. She couldn’t live with herself, knowing that she had ended the life of some insane old biddy. It was much easier pretending this thing, this monster, had been a monster all along, masquerading as an old lady with an umbrella and a terrible singing voice.
“I’m so sorry!” Zee whined as the thing toppled backwards, its innards flying up into the air before slapping back down again with a meaty thud. It gargled, it choked, it farted, and it hissed, and Zee heaved as the stench of the thing filled her nostrils. There was nothing sweet or honeyed about it now. It was like licking shit off the back of a decaying dormouse.
Three minutes later – though it could have been a lot less – the geriatric ladybeast stopped twitching and gargling and fell still.
Zee exhaled and lowered the machete, watching as the thick, pink slime pouring from the creature’s wounds blossomed outwards, surrounding the dead thing like a fancy aura.
Another minute passed, and it was then that Zee decided to end her voluntary exile.
She ran as quickly as her legs could carry her, leaving her rucksack, along with Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, precisely where it had fallen.
Who needed to know how to darn socks, anyway?
18
An old boiler, rusty but not cracked, lying in the store’s basement, was the perfect receptacle in which to shoot one’s surplus bodily fluid. It was half-filled with Lou’s Milk when both nipples decided to take a little break. And not before time, Lou thought, breathless and tender. He drained off what remained in his ducts before pulling his shirt back on, being careful not to set the little buggers off again.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said his mother. She was sitting in the corner of the room on a dusty, old rocking-chair that would have buckled under a normal person’s weight.
“What?” Lou said, leaning, for a moment, against the vast vat he was in the process of filling. “The fact that I’m pissing enough milk to nourish the whole town, or the fact that I haven’t gone crazy yet?
“No,” Freda said, smiling thinly. “I was just thinking about how many years we’ve been here. How long this store has been running. All those years you’ve been in charge…and only now have we started stocking something really profitable.”
Lou shrugged. What was she saying? That she resented him for not going through this ridiculous metamorphosis before now? Any other time he would have argued with her, but he simply wasn’t in the mood. Too much craziness rolled around in his head; too many questions that, if he was really lucky, would remain unanswered, for did he really want to know what was happening to him? Why he had suddenly started to spout milk? Of course he didn’t, because the answer could not be a good one. He was either dying, or malfunctioning, and neither of those would help him sleep better at night. No, it was best to remain aloof, unknowing, and just hope that his titties weren’t going to be the death of him.
“I remember when you were a little boy,” said his mother. Her beatific expression suggested this was going to be a long story, one filled with tales of yappy dogs and weekends on the beach. It came as quite a shock to Lou, then, when she said, “You were a right little shithead.”
“Thanks, mother,” Lou replied, ignoring the urge to pace across the room and kick the ancient rocking-chair from beneath her.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, before swallowing down the remnants of her mug. She had been drinking the milk nonstop, or thereabouts. Lou just hoped it didn’t extend her life-cycle too much. “What I meant was, you were always fighting, never one to be controlled or dictated to. Me and your ol’ father used to call you Tonka. It was the way you were built, see. Like a Tonka truck. Course, you never had much luck with the girls, but that didn’t mean you were without your admirers.”
“Who?” Lou said, genuinely intrigued. If there had been an admirer – a single one – surely he would have known about her. He’d gone through his entire life feeling utterly repellent, and this new ability wasn’t doing much to change that, but it would have been nice to settle down…wife, two kids, dog, cockatiel…maybe a bungalow somewhere – less rooms to clean, and much easier to shift the TV aerial…
“That ginger boy at the end of our street,” his mother said. “What was his name again? Barry? Bobby?”
“Bandy,” Lou said. “Bandy Borkenstein was my secret admirer?”
His mother visibly recoiled, as if she’d been slapped across the face by an invisible man wielding an invisible kipper. “Lou Decker! You could have done a lot worse than Bandy Borkenstein. Besides, he looked lovely in that spotty dress he used to wear.”
“Why are you doing this?” Lou said. He didn’t have many memories from before The Event, and there was a perfectly good reason why that was: they were all shit.
“Just trying to make conversation,” she said. “Thought it might help with your lactating; something to take your mind off how gross it actually is.” She held up her empty mug. “One for the road?”
Reluctantly, Lou took the mug and filled it from the vat. He was halfway across the room when his mother groaned and clutched at her stomach.
“Oooooooh,” she said, sucking air in through her toothless gums. “Ooooooh, second thoughts, I might give that one a miss.”
Lou shook his head. “I told you to slow down. We don’t know how safe this stuff is, and you’ve been knocking it back like Keith Richards at his own wake.”
Freda Decker stopped rocking and eased herself up from the chair. “Nothing a good shit won’t heal,” she said, staggering forwards a few steps. “But maybe we need to put something on the bottle. A little disclaimer…”
“Don’t drink more than one gallon in every hour?” Lou said. “Unlike you, the ‘haveners don’t have unlimited access to Lou’s…to my milk. From now on, you’re on strict rations. Can’t have you dying on us, can we, not before this new venture gets off the ground?”
She moaned again; Lou didn’t think this one was ever going to end. It was more like a plaintive keen than a human complaint, the kind one might hear out in the desert late at night, the kind that usually meant you were about to be chased, or eaten, or both. Whatever was wrong with her, it would take a lot more than a forced shit to put it right.
“I don’t feel too good, Lou,” she said, stumbling across the room as if someone had tied her shoelaces together when she wasn’t looking. “I feel…something’s not right…my innards are giving me some right gyp…”
Lou had spent the last thirty years listening to her various complaints, the myriad afflictions affecting her, keeping her bedridden and bedraggled and, frankly, he wasn’t going to honour this one with anything more than a ‘told you so’ and a ‘don’t forget to flush’.
Just then, a foul smell filled the room. It was the kind of smell that, even if you had been out on the street when you passed it, would have followed you to the end of your journey.
Freda Decker regarded her son with something akin to fear. He had never seen an expression like that painted upon his ailing mother’s face, and he didn’t like it one bit. Perhaps…just perhaps…
“Mother?” he said, trying not to inhale one ounce of the malodorous stench permeating the basement.
<
br /> She looked back at him in silence, her eyes wide and watery, her bottom lip quivering in much the same way a young girl’s might if you were to sequester her favourite doll.
“Mom?”
“ – “
Lou didn’t know what was happening before it had already happened, by which time he’d lost the ability to react.
His mother came at him like a bull in a china shop, only now it wasn’t his mother. It was a shifting, transmutating mass of flesh, held together only by snapping bones and sinew. White fluid geysered from her gummy maw, coating Lou from head to toe in less than a second. Its vile warmth reminded him of the time he’d slept out under the stars for the very first time.
Had Bandy Borkenstein been with him that night? Masturbating in his sleeping bag whilst Lou peacefully slept, unaware that he was being simultaneously watched and violated?
“Miiiiiillllllk!” Freda screeched in a hundred different voices, none of them her own. She caught Lou by the throat and picked him up, as if he was no more cumbersome than a broomstick. It was then that Lou saw his mother’s eyes – two milky-white pits devoid of any life, any sign that she was in control.
“Grghhhgergh!” Lou said, which was about all he could manage with his crazed mother’s desiccated hand wrapped around his throat, squeezing the life from him ever-so-slowly.
She drew back her hand and tossed Lou to the side. He crashed into the wall and was followed on his way to ground by a selection of useless power-tools that had been hanging there since the world had ended all those years ago.
Lou wasted no time – the floor was nice, spacious, and relatively clean, but you wouldn’t want to live there – and quickly scrambled to his feet. He turned to face his mother, half-expecting her to be rushing him again, only now she wasn’t.
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