Atom Town Book 2: Hands of the Swamp!

by Jason Scott Nebel

  Eve opened the door and started to get out.

  Pete quickly sized her arm and pulled her back inside.

  "Hey!" shouted Eve, yanking her arm away.

  "Promise ol' Pete you'll be careful," whispered the cabbie.

  "You're not coming in?" asked Eve.

  "Pete don't leave the map, Miss Adams. S'pose I shouldn't'a come this far," he continued to whisper.

  "The whispering is a little creepy," said Eve, looking off into the darkened tree line along the water.

  “Fits the scene,” said Pete as he scanned the shadowy horizon. "Remember what happened the last time you left the road? Back in the Desert?" Pete asked her.

  "Of course," said Eve, remembering how she'd been poisoned, trapped, burned, and inches from death the entire time. But there was one undeniable fact. "I survived," said Eve.

  "Luck, Miss Adams," said Pete. "You tempt her, sooner or later, lady fate, she'll get cha'!"

  "Good thing I don't believe in any of that," said Eve, popping open the door and stepping out again.

  "Maybe so," continued Pete. "But that don't mean she don't believe in the likes of you."

  As Eve slammed the door to the cab, an unseen charred shadow dropped from the underbody of the car to the gravel below. It was Lefty, apparently having hitched a ride on the taxi's undercarriage, his fingers still sizzling from clutching to the hot exhaust pipe.

  He rolled to his palm and reached for Eve's ankle, but she was already halfway down the walkway towards the pier.

  Eve looked over her shoulder to check on the cab. Pete seemed content, reading a book in the driver's seat.

  She looked up at the painted wooden sign on the storefront lit by a lone a pair of buzzing spotlights. ‘Spooky's Wonders and Marina’ read the sign.

  A neon ‘Open’ sign came to life, glowing through thick cobwebs inside the window.

  Eve looked over at Pete, still focused on his book. She opened the door and entered the store.

  Pete looked up to watch her walk inside. He clicked the lock on his car door and returned to his reading.

  What he didn't see was a strange visitor reaching in through the card boarded window in the back. It was Lefty, slowly making his way up the back of the seat towards Pete's neck.

  The charred fingers wrapped violently around Pete's throat!

  The cabbie grabbed at the fingers, then pulled on the dismembered arm, but he couldn't shake it loose! He began to feel the effects of the blood rush and restricted oxygen. Dark circles began to form around his eyes.

  "Not now," he gasped. "Not like this!"

  He dove for the glove box and managed to hit the knob, popping the door open.

  His map fell out on the floor and both of them paused as a black pistol shimmered in the glovebox light.

  Outside, the cab shimmied as Pete struggled for the gun and Lefty struggled to keep him from it.

  The cab shook violently, then slowed.

  No gunshot. No Pete. The cab was silent.

  13

  Exhibiting Fear

  Shadows eerily danced across mounted heads, stuffed critters and other assorted wildlife taxidermy displays filling the room, but nothing living. No signs of life in the dimly lit marina, and no shopkeeper to greet her.

  She stepped through a doorway into painted walls lined with tackle and boating accessories. The paint itself was peeling, giving way to older paint underneath.

  A pair of eyes was watching her. Eve grabbed a pen off of the counter then threw it across the room right at the eye hole!

  It wedged into the wood. The eyes were painted on but she knew the feeling of being watched. Someone was definitely in the shop.

  The next room had older fixtures with knives and hooks without packaging, looking rather primitive, as if they'd been there since the turn of the century.

  The deeper into the marina that she went, the more it felt as if she was stepping backwards in time. The rough cut wood of the next room looked like it had been built by hand, slowly warping with the moisture of a thousand seasons.

  "Hello?" Eve called out.

  A hook suddenly slapped into the wood siding only inches from her nose!

  She followed the hook to an arm and eventually to a strange looking little man. His hair was disheveled, he had a patch over one eye, several days of growth on his face and a hand on his throat. Eve's hand in fact. Sneaking up on an agent in the dark was a poor choice. Frankly, he was lucky to be alive!

  "Help you find anything, Miss?" he rasped as his windpipe was squeezed.

  "You usually greet customers like this?" asked Eve, removing her nails from his neck.

  "No ma'am. Usually they scream," he explained, scratching his head with his hook.

  "I'm looking for-"

  "Wonder?" he interrupted, running his hook along some wind chimes made from tiny, hollow bones.

  "No, he's-"

  "The supernatural?" he interrupted again, this time holding up the carcass of a petrified, two-headed snake, caressing each head in turn.

  "Stop that," said Eve, knocking the snake out of his hands. "I'm looking for -"

  "The mysteries of the unexplained?!" Said a taxidermy alligator head puppet on his hand.

  Eve ripped the puppet off of his hook hand and stopped.

  "Wait, where's the hook?" she asked, then immediately regretted as he thrust his other hand into her face, now bearing the hook.

  "Looking for this?" he smiled.

  "Wasn't that on your other hand?" she asked, fairly certain she wasn't crazy.

  "Ah! Just another mystery of the unexplained!"

  She looked around and realized all of the curios in the room were made from dead alligator parts. Alligator boot scrapers, an uncomfortable looking alligator tail bench, even pens from little alligator arms that read "Spooky's Marina and Mysteries".

  "You have quite a thing for alligators," she said with more concern than amazement.

  "Gators?!" he nearly spat in her face. "Filthy gators, can't stand 'em! This is all they're good for!" he shouted, waving his good hand to the wall of gator merch. "After all, you've seen what they did to my hand!" he thrust his other hand into her face, but suddenly it was completely normal. No hook.

  "Sorry wrong hand. Try this again… look what they did to my hand! "

  He threw up his other hand but it was normal as well. He held up both of them… still no hook.

  "You looking for this?" said Eve with a grin as she presented her own hand, now bearing the hook that was clearly a prop.

  Spooky lifted his eye patch and studied the hook then his two bare hands with his two perfectly functional eyes.

  "Hey, give me that!" he whimpered, snatching the hook away from her and readjusting his eye patch.

  "A man came through here," Eve said, returning to her original line of questioning and turning away from the little man. "He was a doctor, with a real problem with his hand," she stopped. "Alligator hand…"

  On one of a series of gator hand coat hooks jutting from the wall was Adam's lab coat.

  She turned to scan for Adam then came face to face with a turban sprouting from a crown of baby alligator faces, now firmly atop Spooky's head.

  The deranged shopkeeper smiled, relishing in the fact that he'd finally captured her interest. He returned to his theatrics.

  "I know what you seek!" He said waving a velvet cape behind him and rushing into the next room.

  Eve paused at the sign ‘Museum of Oddities’. She nodded at the sign. Clearly this is where Adam would belong.

  As she stepped inside, a spotlight ignited a wall of several velvet drapes. Spooky stepped into the center.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," began Spooky in a melodramatic tone as if speaking to an audience beyond just Eve. She looked at the back of the room, but clearly it was just the two of them.

  "What you are about to witness will defy human comprehension!" He continued. "Hideous deformity, unexplained myste
ries, oddities from beyond!"

  Eve was growing impatient and tried to peek behind one of the curtains. The tip of a cane smacked the curtain back against the wall.

  "All in good time!" he whispered as if not to be heard by the rest of the nonexistent audience.

  "And now, my good people, I give you a creature neither man, nor beast! A monster from a bygone age! Ladies, you may want to shield your children's eyes…"

  He grabbed a golden tasseled rope by the middle curtain.

  "I give you… The Gator Man!" He shouted.

  Eve already knew who it was, she'd been waiting for it during the entire ridiculous presentation, but nothing could have prepared her for what she saw as the curtains retreated to one side.

  Under a plaque marked "The Alligator Man" was Doctor Adam Townsend's head and hands, stuffed and mounted on the wall. The Doctor was gone, and all that remained had become a permanent member of the Museum of Mysteries.

  14

  Mounting an Attack

  Human Taxidermy. It gave Eve chills just to think about the details of the process. Her mission was lost, but worst yet, he was gone. Had Adam not survived the CX serum in his veins? Or had Spooky hunted him down for the monster he'd become?

  Eve studied the face for as long as she could handle. His flesh had become more scales than skin and his brow had grown, nearly overcoming his eyes. The nails on both hands were now more claws than cuticles.

  She couldn't look any more. Her eyes welled with fire and tears.

  "I did warn you…" started Spooky.

  "Enough!" screamed Eve, her hand finding the familiar spot on Spooky's neck, cutting off his words and pinning him up against the wall of curtains.

  "This wasn't a freak for you to put on display, it was a man! A crazy, infuriating one, but a man nonetheless!" she seethed.

  "The Gator Man-," gasped Spooky. Eve just squeezed harder.

  "His name was Adam Townsend, he-"

  "Doctor," interrupted a voice.

  "Fine, 'Doctor' Adam Townsend was…" Eve stopped and turned back to face Adam's dismembered head and hands on the wall.

  She studied the Alligator Man for a moment, then took her fingers and flicked him in the eye.

  "Ow!" cried Adam.

  "You're alive?"

  "If you call this living," said Adam.

  Spooky seized the moment to slip away and rushed out of the room.

  "How…?" asked Eve, but as Adam's hands slipped backwards into the wall she began to understand.

  The top of the wooden plaque slid up and Adam's head slipped back into the wall as well. The wooden paneling then creaked as the wall sunk backwards, revealing a hidden door.

  Adam stepped out in nothing but his slacks belted sensibly at the waist. His upper torso was now green and scaly, matching his face, hands and feet.

  "May I interest you in a T-shirt?" asked Spooky having returned with a pile of ‘I Saw the Alligator Man and Survived!’ T-shirts.

  "How do you already make… No. Never mind. We'll pass" said Eve.

  "Yeah, I'll take three," said Adam.

  Eve scowled at him. "You're encouraging this freak show?"

  "As I was the pinnacle of man, I too shall be the pinnacle of gators. It's only fair to the world to put my unique, beastly beauty on display."

  "This infection is only skin deep," argued Eve. "You don't belong here in this freak show, there are hospitals with real doctors!"

  Adam looked up. Is it possible she finally got through to him?

  "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

  "What I mean is, so what if you're a little scaly, and crazy, with a monster-sized ego?"

  Adam was ignoring her again, looking at his reflection in his brass nameplate and straightening his hair.

  "And my hair still looks fantastic!" he smiled.

  "You know, I'm not really sure why I'm trying to talk you out of this," she muttered.

  "No need," explained Adam. "I've come to embrace my fate. I must live as the gators do, eat as the gators do, sleep, breathe, jog, play rummy, and dance the cha-cha as the gators do."

  "Wait, Cha-cha?" questioned Eve having never seen a gator dance.

  "Well, they don't have the ankles for the foxtrot, but I'll find a way to live with that," continued Adam solemnly.

  "But you're going to need to get over me, Eve," he continued.

  "But Adam-" Her words were quickly cut off as a Gator finger was held up to her lips.

  "Sh! I know, you're obsessed with me. Well, who could blame you? But you have to move on! As for me, I'll just be outside enjoying the night air…”

  A hand reached through the velvet curtains with a mug of coffee.

  “And this last cup of coffee,” he smiled.

  As Adam sipped the mug, Eve threw back the curtains to see who was handing out coffee, but all she found was a wall and a glass case containing a pair of hands under a sign that read ’Hand of the Swamp Man’.

  Adam shoved the empty mug into Eve’s hands and headed out the open doorway.

  Her eyes fell back to the glass case. It had clearly said ‘Hand of the Swamp Man’, not ‘Hands’. Inside the case was a single, petrified hand, clearly propped up on a metal stand. Had she imagined the second hand?

  "Don't forget your T-shirts!" interrupted Spooky, returning with Adam’s order.

  Eve stepped outside and closed the door on Spooky, ignoring his continued sales pitch.

  She nearly lost her footing, having stepped out onto a floating pier inside a covered boat dock.

  Adam had stopped and was staring out at the mouth of Black Swamp.

  "She's calling to me, Eve!" said Adam. "You were right. I don't belong in a museum, I belong out there, with my brothers… where all gator-kind can envy me in the flesh! Or in the scales, or whatever. The point is, I'm pretty."

  "Yeah I got that," said Eve shaking her head.

  Adam knelt down and began staring into the water.

  "The final transformation is coming, Eve," he said with an exhale. "I want you to have this."

  He handed her a scrap of paper. As she unfolded it she could tell it resembled the equation from the chalk board.

  "Is this…?”

  "CX-18," interrupted Adam. "I only pray no one else must suffer this same fate.”

  He turned away and grabbed his head, doubling over in pain and sorrow.

  "Adam?"

  As Adam stood back up, his face was replaced by an inhuman gator head complete with snout and teeth!

  Eve backed away. It sounded as if he was trying to say something but it was coming out in a garbled growl.

  He stopped and backed away from her, then jumped into the water. She walked along the pier but couldn't find him in the dark.

  She could hear the water splash in the distance. Adam was standing in the middle of the water, looking back at her. He dove back into the water and disappeared into the night.

  Spooky tapped her on the shoulder.

  "Are you sure I can't interest you in a t-shirt or maybe a keychain?" He asked, holding up his wares.

  "No thanks," said Eve. "I don't need any of your fake monsters."

  "How about a real one?" whispered a deep voice behind her.

  Eve's mind raced in seven directions at once. There was no one else in the marina. It was just her, Spooky, Adam, and…

  She looked up the hill at the cab. No driver. No Pete.

  She whipped her head around and came face to face with an oar!

  Eve dropped to the ground. She couldn't remember being hit that hard before. As her eyes flittered she could barely make out her assailant, but she instantly recognized the coveralls.

  One last thought registered. Pete.

  Eve's world, sights and thoughts went dark.

  15

  Dock, Doc, Goose

  Eve could feel the cold water on her fingertips. As she opened her eyes she could see Spooky lying unconscious in the doorway
as Pete was backing away from him.

  Her head level with the boards of the pier, she could see exactly why Pete was doing this. The same reason the guard had tried to attack Adam earlier… Lefty!

  The dismembered arm was clutching the back of Pete's ankle. Pete turned. Dark circles where eyes should be suddenly fixed on Eve. His mouth formed into a chilling, sinister grin.

  She had barely beaten the assistant in the lab, a peaceful scientist, and here was a seasoned agent, now under Lefty’s control!

  Pete started down the pier towards her. Eve's head was spinning, but she had to act fast. As she rolled to her feet, the rocking of the pier only increased her nausea.