Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  Darkening sidewalk raced past Wayne’s silhouette and something like a wrecking ball punched against the roof. A singular blast of water rushed at their faces and fell away. The droplets transformed into beads of light as cement ground against the body, flinging firework sparks with a deafening roar.

  The chaos and noise disappeared abruptly, as if she’d gone deaf. Robin found herself hanging from her seatbelt over Wayne.

  The window under his cheek was nothing but a yawning mouth full of glass teeth. Water welled across dirt and grass. An overwhelming maternal pang came over her at the sight of the unmoving boy, and she reached out and shook him.

  “Hey, Wayne, baby, wake up.”

  At first he didn’t move, and Robin’s heart thudded painfully in her chest. God help me, he’s dead.

  But then he opened his eyes and his head rotated slowly, creakingly, to regard her with stunned eyes, looking up into a shaft of light coming down from Robin’s window, which was now pointed straight up at the steel-wool sky. “What happened?” he asked, and groped at his face for glasses that weren’t there.

  “We got hit.”

  Blood, paint-thick on her fingers. A cut on her forehead was leaking down her cheek. She shimmied around, trying to get away from the seatbelt. The tendril-braid-thing under her shirt squirmed angrily, the tape around her dressing pulling loose.

  “Hit?” He said it like the word had lost all meaning for him.

  Gendreau stirred as if waking from hibernation, his mental gears grinding to life, glass falling out of his china-doll hair and the wrinkles of his jacket. Then they all were, Sara and Kenway and Lucas, coming out of their individual daze, docile turtles from shells.

  “Did we just get hit?” asked Sara, in stunned outrage. No one answered, except for Kenway coughing.

  Then: a strange, rising wail outside the car, distant, a faraway siren. But it was high, too high, nonsensical, small and multiformed like a fleet of tiny police cars. Their tiny tin wheels crackled along the sidewalk as they rushed to her aid from some tiny police station, their rollercoaster howl shrilling into the evening.

  No, she thought, as Wayne found his glasses and put them on. The left lens was knocked out, giving him one goofy Sherlock Holmes magnified eye. I’ve heard that before. Those tin wheels were the faint clatter of shoe soles on asphalt.

  The city of Blackfield was coming for them.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she told them all, panic filling her up. Loose glass rattled, settling like Pachinko pieces through broken gaps as they undid their seatbelts. “We’ve got to get out now.”

  “What is that noise?” asked Kenway. His seatbelt uncinched with a sneezy sz-chik! and he fell against the starboard window, crunching more glass.

  Sara groaned. “Where’s the dog?”

  Robin braced one foot against Lucas’s seat, her forehead against Wayne’s headrest, and undid her own seatbelt. The buckle came loose but the pulley in the doorpost was damaged, so the belt only dangled pointlessly in her hand. She threw it aside and lowered herself, sliding on her face across the vinyl seat, until she was resting beside Wayne on her knees.

  Water soaked into her jeans. “The city is full of cat-people, and they’re comin,” Robin grunted. “They’re on their way here to tear us limb from limb. Cutty’s playing her trump card.”

  Leaning against the passenger door, Lucas upended a tire tool and crunched it into the webbed windshield, turning the sheet into a blue craquelure and ripping a hole in it. As soon as he did so, a shadow passed over the oceanic shimmer and an arm exploded through the hole he’d made, grabbing his wrist.

  Lucas was hauled through with a hoot of surprise, safety-glass crashing down his shoulders.

  Through the ragged gap of glass, Robin could see people shuffling back and forth in a dark parody of a mosh-pit, shadows criscrossing over white. More arms reached in for Gendreau, and he jabbed at them with his cane. “Back! Back!”

  The rear cargo door fell open, scraping on the sidewalk. Kenway tangled his fist in Robin’s T-shirt, trying to scrabble for purchase on her armpits.

  “I’m okay,” she told him. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll follow you.”

  Out in the failing daylight, Robin rested against the Suburban’s rear bumper, a busted tail light throwing hot red across her face. The garbage truck had knocked them through a fire hydrant, and water blasted out of a hole in the sidewalk, raining a torrent of cold water.

  All three of them were bleeding from cuts on their faces; Kenway’s shirt had a ragged rock-punk slash over one shoulder and glass glittered in Sara’s cardinal-red hair. She was on her hands and knees, blood streaming down her face, looking around in a daze.

  “Get off me!” Lucas shouted on the other side.

  Robin staggered around the car to help him and someone tackled her against the roof-rack, a fat woman in a brown spring parka, a shopping bag from The Gap still looped around one elbow.

  The woman hissed madly, trying to claw her throat open, and Kenway wrenched her away, throwing her to the asphalt.

  Robin’s demon tendril was going crazy, writhing, pushing out her shirt at an angle. She jerked her bloody shirt-tail up to her shoulder to uncover it and discovered a grotesque braid of fibers in the rough shape of an arm, bent at the middle in a macabre imitation of a human elbow. Fine red peach-fuzz grew from the backhand side of this new appendage.

  Bristling from the end were five dark roots as smooth and steely as meathooks. She willed them to flex like fingers and they did, crimping and creasing in all the right places.

  This was her inheritance from the shaggy, monstrous stranger that had attacked her mother, she understood now, suddenly faced with the new normal, this inner darkness, this insidious evidence of her mother’s violation made physical.

  Forced to confront it, Robin couldn’t look away; she hated it but was fascinated by it at the same time.

  She made a fist. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  A clamorous gang of familiared people had gathered around them. Dozens and dozens of brainwashed people inched closer, green and yellow cat-eyes shining at her, their fingers bent into rigid claws, their stupid, blunt human teeth bared in distorted grins.

  The intersection seemed to have frozen in time, idling cars littered all over the road, their doors thrown open, exhaust guttering from their tailpipes. The traffic light turned red for cars that weren’t going anywhere anyway. “Come on!” Robin told them, slamming her new fist against the Suburban’s roof. “Come get me.”

  One of them peeled off and ran at her with a choked snarl, and her sinuous new arm lifted him by the throat and flung him back. Another one, a tall woman with a stupid expression and a Carhartt jacket, ran at her and Robin rounded on the woman, slapping her across the face hard enough to cartwheel her against the Suburban.

  Incensed, they ran at her as one, a surging mass of people. Stepping from between Robin’s feet, Eduardo barked and the water gushing out of the broken fire hydrant turned downward at a right angle, becoming a high-pressure crowd-control blast. The first rank of people gusted backward in a stumbling, screaming phalanx, revealing more familiars, who clambered over them into the gush like sewer rats.

  The little dog barked again and the water swept from side to side, breaking against the bulk of humanity teeming in front of them, sea crashing on a headland of human beings.

  Behind the teeming crowd, the dark shape of the garbage truck loomed, a glass-eyed green monolith.

  The driver door opened and a man leaned out, or at least she thought it was a man; he was as bald as Mr. Clean and his skin was an angry, welted red. His ears were black holes and deranged eyes stared from deep in his knothole eye sockets. Teeth glistened in the pit of his withered mouth.

  To Robin he was the angel of Pestilence.

  The disfigured man shouted something—screamed, actually, the shrill, mad whoop of a baboon—but she couldn’t understand him over the noise of the crowd. Then he drew a rifle out of the cab of t
he garbage truck and settled it into the valley between the open door and the doorpost, hunkering down, staring through the ironsights at her. Robin ducked and made for the back of the van, intending to hide behind it.

  Thunder cracked down the valley of the street and a hole appeared in the Suburban’s roof, ptunk!

  Kenway was wrestling with two people now, both of them trying to bite his face. The pestilence-man fired the rifle again and one of the familiars, a tall thick redneck in Wranglers, jerked as if he’d been goosed. A hole blew open in his neck and sprayed Kenway with red gristle.

  The veteran shouted and threw the man aside, shoved the Gap woman away. Robin grabbed Sara’s shirt, popping stitches. “We gotta go!” she shouted over the roar of the fire hydrant. “Man with a gun!”

  One of the familiars shoved his way through the crowd and at first Robin couldn’t believe what she was seeing—Joel Ellis? How could he be a pod-person if he had an algiz tattooed on his ass?—but then Joel shouted, “Y’all follow me! Come on!” and took off running east up Broad.

  The deluge of hydrant water eased upward, relinquishing its force on the crowd, and Eduardo blasted the garbage truck. The gunman hid behind the door and let it wash over the windows, forcing the door shut.

  Robin shoved Sara and Kenway after Joel, “Follow him!” and turned back to the crowd to catch an elbow to the face.

  A man in a puffy jacket lifted her and slammed her against the inside of the SUV’s back door, breaking the hinge, and lunged at her throat with his teeth. She shrugged, scrunching her shoulders, and his bristly mustachioed face wedged against her cheek.

  “No!” shouted Kenway, pausing in his escape.

  The man in the marshmallow jacket floated away bodily as if repelled by a broad force.

  Lucas Tiedeman had snatched him up by his neck and the waist of his jeans. He flung the snarling man into the crowd as if he were nothing but a suitcase and turned back to Robin, pointing after the others. “Run, we got this.” His spook suit was sopping wet and he was deathly pale—milk-white, even, his skin almost translucent like marble. He had channeled the man’s mass into himself, making his body heavier, his skin more resistant, and his blood was having trouble pumping through it.

  Lucas was a Greek statue, clothed in black.

  Regret burned inside her chest. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to—”

  “We knew the risks.” A legion of cat-eyed people burst through Eduardo’s fusillade of water. “Go!” Lucas lumbered into the fray, fists and feet bouncing off of his stony body, familiars hanging from his arms. “DISTRACTION!”

  A hand snatched at her T-shirt, at her arm. “Let him work.” Gendreau, his eyes severe, his hair a nest of milkweed fluff. Deep gouges ran across one cheek, blood dripping into his white button-down. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Reluctantly leaving Lucas to the fight, she fled with Gendreau down a Broad Avenue choked with running people.

  If she’d seen photographs of it, Robin would have been hard-pressed to tell if the photos were of a European football riot or the final mile of the Boston Marathon: wild-eyed civilians poured from the restaurants and shops lining the historical district, funneling out of doorways and storming into the road. Some of them galloped sideways in a simian fashion, pawing across the pavement on their hands; most of them ran like velociraptors, their shoulders bunched up by their ears and their hands bent under into obsequious pianists’ hands, banging imaginary Steinways.

  Kenway led the escape with his fists, forging through the seething crowd toward some point. Robin fought the men and women off with the little martial arts Heinrich had been able to teach her. Augmented by the demon arm, she was a force of nature, throwing leaping haymakers and hammering knees and elbows into chests and faces.

  A blood-tingling Godzilla roar echoed off the buildings around them. The throng of familiars parted and a bear, an honest-to-God grizzly bear, eight feet of primordial tooth and claw, came loping out of nowhere.

  Familiars scattered in every direction, braying and hollering. Even Robin stopped short, but when she caught a glimpse of Sara Amundson with her temples in her hands and her fingers sunk into her red hair, the spitting image of an actor in an Excedrin commercial feigning a migraine, she knew that the grizzly belonged to the magician.

  “I thought you could make monsters,” Robin told her, the bear following them, driving a wedge through the crowd.

  “So sue me, it was the best I could do on short notice.”

  Joel stared at the bear, stumbling over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The trip seemed to bring him back into the moment and surrender flashed across his face as if he were thinking, hell, that ain’t the craziest thing I’ve seen, and it’s only gonna get worse.

  “We’ll hide in the comic shop,” Joel told them, his arms up. He pointed to something colorful in his other hand. “I got the key!”

  The grizzly bear shambled along behind them, roaring and challenging the familiars as they got close. Spider-Man and Batman appeared ahead of them, Fisher’s window mural flickering into view through the mob. Joel ran for the front door and jammed the key home, his hands shaking.

  Skittering out of the chaos, Eduardo leapt into Sara’s arms. “Oh thank God,” she muttered, clutching the dog.

  The front door of Fisher’s comic shop stood in a shallow alcove on a short ramp. There were two locks—one was a latch in the center of the door, and the one above it, a larger deadbolt, commanded a pair of sliding bars that secured the top and bottom of the door. “What have y’all crazy-ass white people done got me into now?” demanded Joel, the lock disengaging with a double-barreled clank. “I got people actin like cats, car accidents, people shootin at me, and now we got freakin bears in the middle of town?”

  “The bear isn’t real,” Gendreau told him as they all ran past into the darkened shop.

  Joel tossed a hand and rolled his eyes. “Of course it ain’t.”

  As soon as they were inside, he pushed the door shut on its hydraulic hinge and locked it again. Robin counted them…Kenway, Gendreau, Sara, Joel, and herself.

  Her heart lunged painfully. “Where’s Wayne?” she shrieked, surprising herself. “Where’s—”

  “I’m back here!” a voice called from the feeble darkness.

  Such intense relief settled over her that she could have collapsed. Robin lurched past her friends and into the depths of the comic shop, where Wayne stepped out of the shadows. He’d found a Batman cowl somewhere and was shrugging into it.

  She snatched it off his head, eliciting an indignant yelp of pain, and squeezed him against her chest.

  “I thought we left you out there, kiddo.”

  “Nope.” He rubbed his ear. “I’m right here.”

  Standing by the window, they watched the imaginary bear distract and fend off the crowd.

  As the familiars tested the giant creature, dancing in to bat at its non-corporeal body and leap back, Sara released her grip on the hallucination and it faded with all the ceremony of turning off a television. The sudden disappearance left the cat-people stupefied and they boggled at the space where it’d been with vacuous screwhead eyes.

  “Get away from the window before they see us,” warned Gendreau.

  Heeding his advice, they retreated deeper into the shop, gathering in the clear space at the back where Fisher had once held Movie Nights. Someone tripped over a chair with a clatter. Kenway’s face was a smear in the darkness, the windowlight sparkling in his eyes. “Where’d that kid in the Blues Brothers suit go?”

  “Lucas?” Gendreau sat in a chair, wheezing. “He’ll be all right, I think.”

  “Why didn’t you magic those people?” Kenway asked. “You look like you could handle yourself more than the other two.” He caught his breath, his face drawn into the grimace of a side stitch. “You look like the third member of Siegfried and Roy went off and started a menswear line.”

  “What witty commentary, coming from the lead vocalist of a Nickelback cover band.�
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  Kenway snorted. “Them’s fightin words, Snagglepuss!”

  The atmosphere in the dark room chilled as everybody paused for a long, pregnant moment. Then Kenway chuckled, shaking his head dismissively, breaking the tension.

  “I didn’t participate in the combat,” said Gendreau, “because I am not, ahh, versed in combative magic.”

  Sara put the dog on the floor and sat down to rest as well. “Anders is a sensitive. He’s our … supernatural GPS. He’s how we found you Sunday night, and he’s how we knew which hospital they took you to.”

  He sat back and tugged at his jacket, straightening it. “I am also a superlative alchemist, and I am quite useful at curative properties—removing poisons and illnesses, knitting small wounds, that sort of thing. I was made an official curandero in Chile six years ago and some call me Don Gendreau, the Healer of Caddo Parish.”

  “Some, as in like, twelve people,” rasped Sara. She had found a roll of paper towels with the party supplies on a table in the corner and was mopping at the now-tacky blood on her forehead.

  Gendreau got up and went to her, his hands gravitating to her face. “Here, love, let me take a look at that for you.” He tsk-tsked, combing through her hair. “You poor dear; banged your head pretty badly, didn’t you, Murdercorn?”

  “Oh, stop petting me and fix it, please.”

  “Sensitive.” Kenway watched Gendreau dress Sara’s head wound. “Hey, does that mean you can see ghosts?”

  The magician glimpsed something in the veteran’s eyes and went back to work. His delicate hands probed a gash at her hairline, his fingers sweeping and flourishing in graceful, encompassing gestures.

  “No,” Gendreau said quietly, “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

  “Okay, enough banter. We need to figure out what we’re going to do now,” said Robin. “We barely made it just now, and I don’t think we’ll survive another round with the Thundercats out there.”

  There were at least a hundred people shambling back and forth in the street now, picking fights with each other and sniffing the air. Many of them had taken off their clothes, their breasts swinging, and three of them rutted madly in the middle of the street. “Man, I’ve never seen this many familiars in one place before. Most I’ve ever seen was at Gail Symes’s casino in Nevada, and the only way I got away from them was by cutting the power and sneaking out.”