Something had caught her eye. Something far more important than brutally assaulting her son.
“Miiiiiillllk!” she snarled, moving slowly toward the half-filled vat. Her saggy breasts spilled up over her blouse and began to stretch upwards, as if reaching for the basement ceiling. Little nubs pushed outwards next to her gigantic areola, and it wasn’t long before Lou realised what he was looking at.
Fingers.
Her droopy breasts had grown hands.
Why of course they have, Lou thought, making himself as small as possible. He was on the verge of insanity; it was like staring into some stygian abyss. It would be much easier allowing the madness to consume him than fighting back. But fight back he did; he wasn’t ready to die just yet, and especially not at the hands of this atrocity.
The mother-beast loomed over the vat as its breast-hands scooped up the milk from within. It slurped and growled and made generally uncouth sounds as the milk was fed into the unnaturally wide hole in its face.
There was, Lou realised, nothing of his mother left in the creature standing before him. No sign that she had ever been there.
He had to act fast.
Unfortunately, he was paralysed with fear, and it took a helluva lot just to make his feet comply. Eventually – though not as quietly as he’d intended – his legs were moving, and he raced up the basement stairs, tripping only seven or eight times as he went. His nipples screamed out in agony, and Lou knew he needed to calm down, lest he start producing again.
He reached the top of the stairs and paused for just a moment to listen to the mother-beast’s insatiable groans. Part of him wanted to run away, to put as much distance between himself and the store as possible; another part wanted to slam the trapdoor, confining the thing that used to be his mother to the basement, at least until he had a chance to figure out what to do.
Neither of those options were the right ones.
Lunging across the room, Lou had only one thing in mind. He grabbed the duel pistols from beneath the counter, said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” and made his way back down to the basement, to where the mother-beast lurked.
*
Descending, down, down, steps, mind that one (it’s a bit creaky). Lou tried to regulate his breathing, keep the noise to an absolute minimum, but as a fifty-year-old man who seldom exercised, it was easier said than done.
The basement was quiet. Not ‘you could hear a pin drop’ quiet, but creaky old basements rarely are. The mother-beast – whatever the hell it was – was nowhere to be seen. But it was down there somewhere, hiding in the shadows, waiting for Lou to return.
Did it know about the pistols? Was it hiding, anticipating the right time to attack, thusly snatching the antique guns from the petrified man nervously wielding them? Lou had hoped the thing wasn’t that smart – his mother hadn’t exactly been the sharpest tool in the drawer – but if it was hiding, it had at least a soupcon of intelligence about it, which put them on pretty much a level playing field.
Three steps from the bottom…two…
One…
Lou slowly, carefully, made his way through the basement, listening out for any noises that weren’t his own – wheezing, rattling, occasionally trouser-coughing. Other than his own noises, he couldn’t discern a thing.
The vat, previously half-filled with his milk, was now empty but for a centimetre of lumpy bile and coarse hair at the very bottom. The mother-beast had devoured the lot, and in such a short space of time. That giant, inhuman hole in the centre of its face sure did have its advantages.
The basement stank of piss and milk and shit and vomit, as if the creature hadn’t been able to control its bodily functions. Lou fought back the urge to vomit, knowing that if he did, the mother-beast would attack. It is a known fact that vomiting with one’s eyes open is a scientific impossibility, like pissing in a busy urinal, or eating Oreos without becoming hopelessly addicted. If Lou’s eyes should close for just a moment, no matter how brief, the beast would lunge from the darkness and despatch him.
He was the fly; his mother was the spider, and this was her web. And it was thoughts like that which made Lou realise he should have run for the hills while he had had the chance.
A noise, somewhere behind, made Lou turn. He was about to level the pistols into the darkness when something slammed into him from the right, knocking him from his feet.
“Miiiiiiiiillllllllk!” the thing hissed, its rancid breath slamming into the side of Lou’s face like a freight train. The mother-beast was bearing down on him, grabbing at him with four hands (Lou tried not to think about the new growths), flipping him over, and yet not killing him.
It knows, Lou thought. It knows I’m the milk-maker.
As the creature unceremoniously rolled him around the basement floor like a Vileda supermop, Lou fumbled with the one pistol he’d managed to keep a hold of. There was a good chance it wouldn’t work, but he had to try, he had to do something…
“Suck on this, you milky bastard!” he said, rolling onto his back. The mother-beast’s gigantic forehead crumpled up, folded over like an accordion as it frowned. For just a second, Lou thought he saw something in its eyes, something human in those cloudy cataracts that suggested his mother might not be lost forever.
He wasn’t taking any chances.
He pulled the trigger.
The mother-beast’s head snapped back as the ancient bullet tore through its skull. A shower of milk and blood rained down on Lou, who closed his mouth tightly, lest he ingest the disgusting drizzle. The thing that had birthed him, that had brought him up and forged him into the man he was today, slumped to the side, spilling grey matter and cream across the basement floor. Its breast-hands shrivelled up and turned black, like those antediluvian mummies people used to dig up.
The thing was heavy – much heavier than it had been as a dying old lady – but Lou managed to ease it off after a few minutes of struggling.
He stared down at the body, the thing that should not be, and a tear crept from the corner of his eye.
A milk tear.
“Well, that was a fucking nightmare,” he said, stowing the antique pistol in the waistband of his slacks. She had been possessed, infected by a demon; that was the only explanation he had.
But then he saw the vat, all rusty and barren in the middle of the basement, and something terrible occurred to him.
“Shit,” he said as milk began to, once again, seep from his nipples. “Shit, shit, fucking shit!”
19
El Oscuro parked the horse and tethered it to a sign that said OILHAVEN – WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE…OCCASIONALLY. He climbed down, joining the rest of Los Pendejos on the sandy road.
“You sure this is the place?” Red said, surveying the two storey building they found themselves standing before. It didn’t look like much, but it was fancier than the rest of the edifices in town, inasmuch as it had glass windows (none of which had been put through by rocks or planks of wood) and a steel door that suggested the person who lived there did not like to be interrupted. Someone – some brave soul – had graffitied the word cockbasher on the door, which was, El Oscuro opined, the usual attitude shown toward small-town authority.
“This is the place,” El Oscuro said. “This mayor, Kellerman, is probably up there right now, fiddling taxes and counting whatever passes for currency in this shit-forsaken town.”
Blink stepped forwards, examining the steel door carefully. He could see a lot better now that the grit and filth had been removed from his eyes, which were stinging a little, but it had mentioned possible side-effects on the side of the can, and unbearable agony had been one of them. “So what?” he said. “We’re just going to go up there and rob the man?”
El Oscuro laughed. Thumbs, Samuel, and Red joined in, but if you were to ask them why, they would have told you they hadn’t got the foggiest. “Is that how we operate, Blink?” he said. “Heavy-handed, shoot first ask questions later?”
Blink shrugged. That was u
sually how it went down.
“No, we’re going to play this one cool,” El Oscuro said, giving the steel door a gentle nudge. It was locked, which made perfect sense. What was the point of having a steel door if you were just going to leave it hanging on its hinges all day long? You could do that with a wooden door. In fact, you might as well not have a door at all…
“By cool,” Thumbs said, “you mean we’re going to stand out here and talk about what we would do if we had half a chance?”
There were times when El Oscuro wished he was a one-man operation, and this was one of them. “My dear idiot,” he said, shaking his head, “we are going to make this man, this Kellerman, believe that we are here to offer him a service. In doing so, we will gain his trust, and therefore, access to his assets.” He smiled. Not bad for a plan he’d just fabricated on the spot. It sounded almost…feasible.
“I don’t mean to burst your bubble,” Red said, “but what services could we possibly have to offer a man who clearly has his shit together? I mean, people don’t just become mayor of a town willy-nilly. He’s obviously got folks doing his dirty work for him already.”
“Ah,” El Oscuro said, wishing, all of a sudden, that he’d thought that far ahead. “Yes, but…but what we are going to offer him is something he can’t get in this town. Something that only we can provide.”
“I think I’ve got herpes,” Samuel said, scratching at his balls. “But he can get that in this town. All he needs is an appointment with Madam Sneve.”
“Keep your herpes to yourself, Samuel,” El Oscuro said. “We’re going to make this Kellerman geezer an offer he can’t refuse.”
The bandits did scratchings of the head, and glancings at one another, hoping that someone could explain what the hell their leader was babbling on about. When no-one did, El Oscuro sighed as hard as he could – he almost ruptured his spleen – and said:
“We’re going to tell him we know where to get e-lec-tricity from.”
There was a pause as four bandits tried to get their head around El Oscuro’s plan, and the myriad flaws that came with it.
“Electricity?” Red said, incredulously. “That’s your plan, is it?”
“She’s right,” Thumbs said, wiping grease from the side of his head with the stump of his right hand. “There hasn’t been a sighting of electricity for over two decades.”
El Oscuro shrugged. He would have left it at that had he been in the company of geniuses. Unfortunately he wasn’t. “He doesn’t know that,” he finally said. “If we tell him we know there’s a place not far from here that’s got light and power, all rigged up to the mains, that’s going to set his little noggin to thinking.”
“But what’s to stop him from sending out his scouts?” Samuel said. “Surely he’ll just dispatch a reccy, and what happens when they come back empty-handed? They ain’t gonna be too happy being sent on a wild goose chase to some fictional electric town in the middle of the desert.”
“Ahhh,” El Oscuro said, tapping the side of his nose with a grimy digit. “That’s why we’re not going to tell him where this fictional town is. We’ll have the upper hand, no offense, Thumbs.”
“None taken,” Thumbs said.
“We’ll offer to rig this place up, just like the fictional town we’ve just come from. We’ve got the know-how, you see. We’ve got detailed drawings of how they did it, and since Samuel and Blink here used to be trained electricians, it’ll be a walk in the park, so long as the funds are in place for us to do the work.”
“That’s all well and good,” Samuel said, “but we’re not trained electricians. In fact, I’ve never even seen a light bulb in action.”
“Yeah, what is e-lec-tric?” said Blink.
“Look, it’s not as if you’re going to have to pass a test,” El Oscuro said. “You don’t even need to know what electric is, Blink. All you need to do is pretend you know how to get it, and Robert’s your auntie’s husband…”
There was another pause, in which cogs could be heard turning, albeit very slowly. El Oscuro needed them all to understand what was about to happen before they made contact with Kellerman, but standing out there in the scorching heat, pissing sweat by the bucketload, was starting to take its toll.
“Dave,” Thumbs said. So unexpected was his ‘Dave’ that El Oscuro started.
“What?”
“Dave,” Thumbs reiterated. “That was my auntie’s husband’s name. He was a right bastard, used to knock her about something silly, but he did buy me a fish-tank once…so, swings and roundabouts, really.”
El Oscuro stood, slack-jawed, for a relatively long time, before saying, “Look. Can we just act like professionals for one minute?” Nobody spoke, which was as good as a yes as he was going to get. “Right. Now, just let me do the talking, and everything’ll be fine. Like the contractors of yesteryear, we’re about to become very rich, so let’s not fuck it up.”
“You might want to cover up your weapon,” Red said, pointing to the samurai sword hanging from his waist. “If this guy’s in charge around here, he might take offense to us waltzing into his office tooled up.”
“Ah, good thinking,” El Oscuro said, draping a pair of dirty, well-worn pants over the end of the sword. As disguises went, it wasn’t the best. In fact, it looked like a samurai sword with a pair of paints hanging off it, but you worked with what you had.
Stepping up to the steel door, El Oscuro took a deep breath, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Once he’d finished coughing and spluttering, he banged three times with the ball of his fist. The door rattled, like an epileptic rat in a discarded tin-can, and then the noise tapered off altogether.
“We’ll just give him a few minutes,” El Oscuro said. “He’s probably a very busy man.”
*
Kellerman’s feet weren’t even touching the ground anymore; the sign of a very arduous and violent shit. Every now and then he would allow himself to relax, if only to catch his breath, but it wasn’t long before the next wave hit him, and up went his feet again, and that strange eggplant hue returned to his face with a vengeance.
When will it end? he asked himself, or God, or anyone with access to his thoughts that might have been listening in. He had been laboriously defecating ever since Smalling and Harkness left, and yet whenever he checked, there was nothing in the bowl beneath him but a strange, white liquid. He’d considered the idea that he was laying phantom turds – the ghosts of poos that had somehow died inside him – but it seemed a little far-fetched, even by Oilhaven standards.
“Owowowowow!” he said, but again there was nothing solid emerging; the sound of a liquid hitting the bowl was slightly disconcerting. The whole experience brought back memories of a time before The Event, when something called Vinda-loo was readily available. At least with a vindaloo, you knew you were in for trouble the following morning. This anal assault had caught him completely off guard, and he had a damn good idea who and what was responsible.
The milk. It had to be, for that was the only thing he’d had that deviated from his normal diet of bread and squirrel. And if it was the milk – and it looked that way – then Lou Decker was in for a nasty surprise when Kellerman caught up with him.
Just then, someone banged on the door – three times, because once is never enough and five is taking the piss. Kellerman eased his feet to the ground and tried to breathe, but the smell – a sickly-sweet stench that seemed intent on rendering him unconscious – made breathing an impossibility. Still, the colour returned to his cheeks, and after a few moments he felt a little better.
He wiped, using the three envelopes he’d lined up beforehand, and slowly stood, holding onto the wall for support. He had been there for quite a while, and his legs were buzzing with pins and needles; the last thing he needed was to fall, hit his head off the side of the lavatory, or worse, the inside. Once the feeling returned to his lower half, he yanked up his suit trousers and pulled the chain hanging from the ceiling next to him.
The milky faeces dis
appeared, and Kellerman felt a lot better for it. Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t Lou’s Milk that had caused his sudden discomfort. Maybe he just wasn’t used to such richness, such pure dairy. It had been so long since he’d had anything remotely milky or cheesy; perhaps he needed to simply become accustomed to it again.
Whatever it was, it seemed to have passed for the time being. Kellerman, whistling like a tin-kettle, made his way to the front door, but not before picking up a shotgun that had been leaning against the toilet door. His favourite Remington – a 10 gauge semi-automatic in camouflage finish. Anyone foolish enough to argue with it deserved the huge hole it left in their face; although he had not yet fired it at anything other than coyotes and hares, and on those occasions he’d missed by quite a margin. In truth, he wasn’t the greatest shot, but more often than not, just holding a gun was enough to deter the wrong kind of people. Statistically speaking, you were more likely to get shot by a passing meteor than you were a bullet, but that was only because there were far more meteors out there than there were bullets. Not to mention that the number of people with the weapons to fire said bullets had depleted, meaning you were far better off buying a good telescope than a Kevlar vest.
Kellerman reached the door and glanced out through the peephole, where five fisheye-lensed faces gawped back at him, their grins seemingly wider than their faces. One of them was an extremely pretty woman, not that such things bothered the mayor any longer. Besides, out of all of them, it was she that looked the most menacing, despite the smile.
“Yes?” Kellerman said. It was strange answering his own door. Perhaps things would be different once the Fox girl was under his employ. Yes, she looked the type that could answer a door at the drop of a hat…
“We’re here on behalf of…of…Oscuro Contracting,” the one at the front said, tilting his head. “We need to speak with the mayor urgently.”
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