A wall of water tumbles past my periphery. I breathe it into my lungs, flailing, gasping. I am tossed and floating. Bodies spasm beneath and above me. Through the turmoil I swear I can see his eyes, pale and yellow like twin sunsets on the horizon. I catch a final glimpse of the dead creature that he used for bait, reclaimed now into the undertow by some stray flesh of the overlord. And then I go under. The girl, whose hand still clings to mine, follows me down. I writhe past the bodies that surround me and pull her toward my chest, clutching her as I had on the beach. Her eyes are wide, lost. She is trying to scream and breathe at the same time, not quite drowned yet. Then her fingers go slack and she is torn away from me on the tide of a hundred more bodies washing out to sea.
I grope for the surface. My head rises into the air, and though I am a speck to his mountain, I seem to mirror the god before me. Lapping crests splash into my mouth, while he swallows entire lakefulls of brine broth dripping with human flesh; some already ripped to pieces, others shrieking as their wits fail them. Pale corpses wedge between his teeth. Orange ooze drips like waterfalls from seven gaping nostrils. He clenches his jaws and the sky blackens with geysers of meat and streamers of viscera.
Hundreds at a time drench the chasm of his throat. We are nothing to him, seasoning for his soup.
The sea grips me again, but I refuse to drown. The hunter must have its prey.
I swim, but not for shore.
-
-
Josh Wagner‘s career as a writer began with his first published work of fiction titled “The Finger”. This short story saw print in Lost Worlds Magazine in 1992, a year before Wagner graduated high school. Since 1999 Wagner has been writing a steady stream of novels and short prose. His first novel, “The Adventures of the Imagination of Periphery Stowe” published in 2004 by BAM Publications, led directly to the development of Fiction Clemens. He has since published several short stories and poems, and plans to release three new novels sequentially between 2010-2012. The first of these novels, “Deadwind Sea”, was released in January, 2010 by Impossible Clock Productions.
Visit Josh Wagner’s page at Amazon.com to buy his books and comics!
Story art by mimulux.
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NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.
Cockroaches
by Amanda Underwood
“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.”
-T.S. Eliot
1.
Sixteen days ago we stepped out of our first AA meeting with the absolute assurance that it was a complete waste of time. The three of us, misfits in every sense, gathered on the grass to fight with the flickering flame of a lighter. I’d been on edge for a while and the thick dusk drew down on us with physical intent. Even the tiny flashes of combustion didn’t ease the strain on my eyes. It was that moment when the trees stand like looming sentries against the night. I shivered as darkness crept predator quiet between the bark, watching us, waiting for us.
“Pussy.” Violence snorted at me, her nostrils flared wide in disgust at my weakness.
“Shit-shit-shit.” Gizzy hissed as the flames burnt his fingers and he spat on them to ease the pain. Nicotine-stained flesh barely discolored as he bent back to try again.
“You’re doing it wrong.” She snatched the lighter away from him and turned her back to the wind. She only wore a black anarchy t-shirt against the cold, either to tough it out or to show off the scars that lined her skin like pale tattoos. Each one had a story, I’m sure, but asking Violence about her past got you a strangely blank glower that pulled at the fresh wound on her lower jaw. I was positive that she was freezing no matter how much bravado she liked to wear like body armor. November nights in Portland weren’t known for balmy temperatures even when there was no rain. I glanced up at the sky as though the thought might draw the weather down on us.
Smoking had the same pull on me – and the two sad fucks to my sides – that alcohol did. We’re the huddled clutches that you saw in sleet and hail drawn together with smoke and wavering flames. I wouldn’t have known these two if it wasn’t for AA, and it was just serendipity that we prayed to the same god of nicotine. The need to smoke rode me through the meeting. The need to do something, anything, other than sitting there and talking about alcohol as though that was the solution to not drinking it.
I’d been the last one to speak before the break. The rote bullshit, “Hello, my name is John and I’m an alcoholic.” After all the sad stories I felt almost ashamed that I didn’t have one. I went to work, I came home, I drank. At some point the three converged. AA was the only thing holding me back from prison time and I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. The DUIs were an inconvenience. Losing the job hadn’t really mattered. I was partially skilled labor, somebody would hire me, they always did.
All I knew was that if the law had its way, smoking would be the last sin allowed me.
“Twelve steps,” Gizzy muttered to me. “Fuck me, but I won’t walk the twelve steps to my fridge if I have to.” He was the kind of guy who was a fixture at the local dive, carved out of the same material as the bar, and just as motionless. The kind whose drink always needed refilling even when the motion between hand and lips got kind of blurry.
The three of us were a mismatch, tossed into a strange collaboration by a parole officer with a twisted sense of humor. Actually Dick was just a jack-ass. Sending the three of us off with the goal of reformation when he knew we’d all choose prison in a heartbeat. He’d made us into each other’s keepers, as though there was some kind of honor among alcoholics. I thought it was his way of getting out of responsibility for us, dumping the three of us on the steps of this ‘new’ stone church that was identical to every other congregation for six miles. So many buildings that housed nothing but weddings and Sunday masses, I guess this one made extra money by catering to the Anonymous losers of the world.
I changed my mind in an instant. I didn’t want to be outside anymore. Residential Portland was a thinly lit mass of houses. There were a few homes internally lit with a golden glow completely unlike the shoebox apartment I called home, but there were long spaces where the houses were dark. With overhanging trees and a cloudy sky, they disappeared into deep black abscesses that made it seem like the only buildings on the block were the church and the distant fluorescence of a gas station.
Unease wormed through my gut, desperation for something to lean my soul on. Violence finally lit the cigarette and passed it to me. I was careful not to touch her, and conversely, almost broke the cigarette as I avoided her fingertips. Every drag burned. It was probably the only time where I understood how she could be so addicted to pain. All three of us hated life, especially when we’d found ourselves gutter-bottom and barely hanging on, but there was always this sense that you had to keep going even when Jack Daniels and Jim Beam were the only bedmates who mattered.
“I want…” Gizzy started.
“Shhh,” Violence snapped at him. Her head canted sideways as though she heard something.
The jerky movement gave her buzz cut scalp the appearance of a vulture, bobbing its neck at potential prey. A week ago I’d told her that she should let her hair grow out and it had taken Dick and the P.O. next door to keep the damage at one black eye instead of two. That eye was still tender and the more jittery I got, the more I wanted to rub at it.
“Shhh-you.” Gizzy snatched the cigarette from me and pointed towards the far end of the block. The gas station looked empty, no cars at
the pumps, and at this distance we couldn’t even see the shadow of the attendant inside. “I need a drink myself.”
“Shut the fuck up, old man.”
“I’m going in.” I couldn’t do it any longer. I just wanted –
Something groaned from behind us. A deep heavy sound, as though the building suddenly shifted its weight with a ponderous attempt to get up.
It’s an earthquake, was the first thing that ran through my head. We were close enough to California and the fault lines. But this wasn’t the ground. Even as my head wrapped around that thought I heard the noise again. And this time it sounded like a low throbbing growl running like bristles up the back of my neck. Wind tore through every gap in my clothes. The sweat that sprang from my pores as the noise deepened, dripped ice cold along the hollow of my back.
“The building moved.” The words fell out of Gizzy’s mouth along with our precious cigarette.
“No it didn’t.” Violence snapped.
So I was the voice of reason. Or fear. “Yes. It did. It moved.”
“Buildings don’t move.”
The church heaved from the interior. Any satisfaction that I was right was blown away. I couldn’t move. Violence made a gesture that I couldn’t decipher. All I could do was stare and hope, pretend really, that whatever was going on was too big to notice me. My brain iced up. I was frozen, watching as the building heaved again from inside. The bricks seemed to draw on weight and heft and their new mass let the building swell as though a deep breath filled it.
The building arched up like a huge predator and leered into the sky with the sound of sheering metal. It was an impossible motion. And even more strangely I remembered looking at it and thinking that it was the first step of a stop-time explosion. It was a frame-by-frame demonstration of how to blow up old buildings. I wanted that to explain it, a gas leak, a bomb, anything but what my hindbrain screamed it was. There weren’t any words in the reptilian piece of meat that followed us throughout evolution, just a terrified sense that flight was the only option.
Glass burst from window stretch and blossomed into a thousand falling shards of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
All three of us flinched backwards.
The foundation gave off this sound. I don’t remember it clearly, but there was this sound: a train whistle, a shooting star, stones cracking as they were torn asunder. And yet there was something else. An eerie whine beneath it all. As though wind was sucked from inside the building – positive to negative – and then that noise stopped as though the doorway closed.
Or something else came through.
Voices called out from inside the building. There’d been a lot of us at the meeting, but I couldn’t think of how many. Forty? Sixty? All their faces blurred together as their screams rose up, slow and tremulous to start. Unnerved Violence cursed next to me, a more aggressive sound than the whimpers that Gizzy and I managed. Voices were added until there was an entire choir. Hell’s version of a chorus. And then, one by one they were cut off. They were dying inside, somehow we knew it, but none of us moved. Fear or self-protection kept us motionless, but it didn’t to matter to those just a few feet away, no help was coming.
At its apex I would have sworn that the building was a thousand feet high. But memories cloud what exhaustion does not.
Electricity snapped, popped and died. Every flash illuminated a coiling motion. I saw some thing whip off the ceiling as though it was laying in wait like a gigantic octopus. Silvery tentacles reminded me of how the big soapy fronds spin your car through the automated wash. Except that these sucked people off the floor as the lights gave out and there was nothing but slurping darkness.
It – I was too fucking scared to understand it – collapsed back down and hunched over its kill. Lightless. Now soundless inside. But the building was far from quiet or still, foundation and roof crackling and chomping like jaws over fresh meat. What constituted the marrow was a thought that shut down my bladder. Instead of wanting to piss, it was the furthest thing from my mind, it would take energy and my body wanted to conserve that for running.
Gizzy made this weird choking hiccup that caught my attention. He was trying to point down the street but he shook with a palsy that hadn’t been there five minutes ago, the same fierce tremble that invaded all of our bodies.
“Is it over?” He asked me, as though I was supposed to have some kind of answer.
“I don’t …” but the words escaped me. Every building around us, every one, had the sense, the absolute surety that I could not understand, that it was the same. The utter silence that blanketed the street did not speak of life and human beings but of rape and violation. Every place that we considered sanctuary was stolen. I stared at the church and noticed that the rubble around the steps wasn’t as bad as I had thought. Maybe it was all some weird delusion and I’d go back inside and have to emote to the group some more, make them believe that I wanted to change my life. I had to be wrong.
“I’ll go check.” Violence dragged me back to the moment. There wasn’t any fear in her voice, but I guessed that she’d lost the meaning of self-preservation somewhere between the first scar and the head shaving. She started for those steps, a lone supplicant heading towards some kind of terrible knowledge.
Words lost their meaning. I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to tell her that I would go. I wanted a drink to drown my inabilities and build my false shield around me. I couldn’t tell her any of that, I was too afraid.
The tingle started somewhere below my navel. It was certainty.
There was something in that building.
Gizzy screamed “No!” in a voice reserved for six year old girls.
She turned back to us, her shoulder bones rigid and easily visible under her threadbare t-shirt. At the heart of all of us, even her, we were still animal and there was only one answer when you felt this way. You wanted to run, find safety, and hide. Pull the door shut and lock it behind you to keep out the boogeyman. But the boogeyman ate the windows and the doors. He grew so big that he knocked the roof skyward and became the house itself. What the fuck do you do against that? What do you do when all the boogeyman wants is for you to come home?
“Its…is it in the building? Or is it the building? What were those – what were those fringe things? What the fuck is going on?!” Gizzy was on the verge of tears.
“I don’t know.” A voice that sounded like mine answered calmly. “We could walk towards downtown, find someplace to spend the night. Something not like – somewhere not here.”
“Safety.” He affirmed and I was shocked how much I wanted to believe in it too.
Violence just stood there, apart from us in her defiance. A barrier that I would have wrapped around me if I’d ever had the strength to hold it in place. Liquor sometimes sufficed and goddamn me if I didn’t want a cigarette.
Our motley caravan didn’t find sanctuary. Every building was the same.
We crossed into a public park. Usually there were old men playing chess on tables long after the sun had gone down. Their soft patois of familiarity and trash talking would echo back and forth under low hung trees that protected the tables from the incessant rain. Chess pieces that marched through the debris from the branches as it fell fragrant and heavy, the trees shedding pieces of itself with as little thought as we lived and breathed. Now there was no one. Just a few games frozen between one move and the next as they’d been abandoned. Cheap plastic pieces left side-by-side with more valuable personal sets. Knights and queens and pawns tipped onto their faces and forgotten.
Gizzy collapsed looking like a survivor of fifteen years hard labor. His breath was harsh, probably emphysema added to the cold night air. Watching him, I was suddenly, sharply, glad not to be an old man.
The question of what next hung between us. Where do the cockroaches run when all the rugs have been picked up?
“I might know a place,” Violence offered.
“What kind of place?”
“My kind of place
. What does it matter, Doe? Someplace to put our backs against a wall until tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t want a wall anywhere near me,” Gizzy said.
“Then you’ll freeze to death in this fucking park, old man.”
She was right. The temperature was dropping and pretty soon we’d have nothing but our body heat to hold back the night. I might do okay in my coat, but Violence wouldn’t, and while Gizzy was half-preserved with alcohol it wouldn’t help in the end. Booze might cut the chill, but we didn’t have any, not even any of the nasty AA brew they called coffee.
I helped Gizzy back to his feet and we followed Violence to an underpass filled with a hundred young, urban homeless and their ramshackle town. They made room for us even as whispered discussions populated the night. I didn’t have anything to offer. Without a proof running through my blood, I didn’t have any emotions to draw on, I was empty. Long past midnight I fell asleep to their murmurs and found a sense of comfort in the sound.
2.
We wasted our lighters on wood that wouldn’t light. The drizzle of rain soaked everything and even baking the kindling in the inch-high flame only got us wispy black smoke. I tried to remember what the Boy Scouts would do: flint, wood sticks to rub together, waterproof matches, but I wanted a fucking flame thrower. Anything that would catch the wood on fire instead of failure after failure.
Gizzy finally took it away from me. We had enough cigarettes left that it made more sense to prioritize. Smokers and drinkers are good at tricking themselves into thinking that their vices make them warmer and I was good at believing the lie.
But four days under the bridge taught me another life lesson. When people get hungry we’re all murderers inside. First we tried to steal groceries from parked cars. Then, when anti-theft systems and the lack of tools stalled us, some of the younger crew got the thought to go fishing. A couple of men took long sticks and a long coil of laundry line to snag food from inside the storefronts. Gizzy and I were sharing a bottle of Night Train and some bum’s hideous shelter when the group went out. Only four came back, Violence among them, and they didn’t have any food. I was feeling so numb I never asked her what happened, Night Train tastes like puckered olives but it works when you drink it fast enough. I tried to blame my inaction on the drink when I saw two men start to fight over a couple of candy bars. I wasn’t hungry enough to lay down my life for two sticks of chocolate nougat, they were.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 11