by P. T. Phronk
“Let’s go, then,” Mike said.
Florence nodded.
Bloody looked at Dean and cocked her head to the side. An old habit from when she was a dog and wanted a human to answer a question.
His eyes were still puffy and red from being on the verge of tears. “Do you want me to come with you?”
She wasn’t sure she did. “Either the dudes outside or your buddy Wilcox will end up killing you if you don’t. But hey, up to you.”
“Okay,” he squeaked.
“Any weapons? Wooden stakes are best, but if you don’t have those lying around, guns will do. Oh! And that UV light there; any way to make it glow without plugging it in?”
Dean said he could throw something together. Bloody followed him upstairs, while Mike broke legs off chairs, and Florence uselessly stared at the bulging eyes peering in through the parts of windows they hadn’t blocked.
Dean lived above the bar. Of course he did. His smell was strong up here, and when Bloody saw the single indentation in the middle of his twin bed, she still—still—had the urge to grab him and roll around in his dirty sheets while they did nasty things to each other.
He rummaged through a cluttered closet and came out with a boombox-looking thing with a turny handle on the side. “A portable generator. Turning the handle charges it, so you can use the power outlet and the radio. This thing is my best buddy whenever the town is snowed in without power.”
The way his smile went crooked as he triumphantly held the generator was too much. She pushed him onto the bed. His eyes bulged with shock, but his worry subsided when she straddled him, then lowered her face near his. She could feel the blood rushing to his cock immediately. He was down with this. Even with her claws and her fangs clacking all over him, he wanted her.
And she wanted him. She hated him and she wanted him. One of his hands tentatively lowered toward her ass, and she wanted him inside of her, one way or another. She finally allowed herself to kiss his neck and take in his smoky smell up close.
Her claw caressed his beautiful face just a little too hard, drawing pinpricks of blood. He cried out, but not in pain. He squeezed her ass harder.
Thumping and crashing came from downstairs. “Is now a good time?” he asked as she reached to take her top off.
It was a good question, but she didn’t want to hear questions right now, so she clamped her oversized paw over his mouth, tilting his head, exposing his helpless neck. She smelled his blood as his heart pumped it faster. She wanted his blood. She wanted it to be hers and hers alone. Opening her jaw, she let her lips pull back and her teeth be free, and she aimed them at his jugular.
“They’re almost inside,” Florence said, criss-crossing her fingers in front of her, a rare smile on her face. The front door had been hacked at with an axe and was bulging inward. Pale faces looked in through the windows. Mike held a jagged chair leg in front of him with shaking hands.
Bloody found the source of the purple UV light—a neon sign that spelled LIVE. It’d do, even though it had probably once been paired with a matching NUDES sign. She unhooked it from the wall and plugged it into the generator, then cranked the handle. It made a whirring sound; the light flickered to life whenever she turned, but there wasn’t enough charge to keep it glowing when she stopped.
“You’ve got blood on you,” Mike said. She looked down. The splatter on her chest looked even blacker than her blouse in the purple light.
“Dean and I made a mutual decision to be apart.”
Mike’s jaw tightened. Florence gave Bloody the same judgmental sneer as when Paul first brought her to stay at their place. “How mutual?”
“I just can’t be around him, okay? We can’t be around each other. He said it himself, he’s weak. Turns out I am too. Now let’s drop it, because there’s a monster crawling through the door.”
A skinny shagg squeezed through a hole in the door. Mike galloped toward him, raised his leg, and gave him a sharp kick. The shagg squealed and recoiled, but another immediately took his place.
“To the back,” Bloody said. They made their way through the kitchen, where Bloody picked up some steak knives, wrapped them in a dish cloth, and stuffed them in her shoulder bag. They probably weren’t silver, but they were sharp.
Shouting and chopping sounds filled the air outside, as did the smells of burning plastic and angry sea creatures. Bloody peeked around the corner of Ducks to get a look at Sandford Avenue. They were everywhere.
“Florence, did you manage to find any guns?”
She just shrugged while she gawked at the overrun town. Bloody didn’t want to be mad at her, since things would probably get a lot worse when she found out her husband was dead, but damn, her uselessness was still really fucking annoying.
“Jesus Christ,” Bloody muttered.
“Do you see Jesus?” Florence asked, suddenly alert again. “It’s just the shaggs here now.”
A group of women approached Sandford from one of the side streets on the nice side of town, across the tracks. A gang of shaggs moved deeper into town, approaching the women with caution. Each of the Tupperware-selling, smoothie-drinking ladies had smiles on their faces. They raised their arms as they jogged toward the shaggs, as if they were greeting a group of old friends at the airport.
It was hard to tell what the shaggs were thinking, with the masks covering their faces. They walked calmly, with an exaggerated swagger. These outcasts were finally getting their run of the town. Bloody could almost relate.
Another gang of them scampered along the train tracks, toward the crossing beside Ducks. When they spotted Bloody, Mike, and Florence, they veered off the tracks and headed toward them.
Bloody got Mike to hold the LIVE sign while she cranked the handle of the generator. The sign flickered to life, the glass making tinkling sounds like it was about to die. But with faster cranking, it was bright enough to form a halo of purple light around them.
“Are you sure that’s even UV light?” Florence whispered.
Bloody cranked, even though her arm was already hurting. “They believe it is.”
The shaggs skidded to a halt in front of the light, shielding their eyes and spreading out around Bloody and her friends in a semi-circle. Their water tanks sloshed, and they shot glances at each other, waiting for somebody to decide what to do.
“Are you here to take me?” Florence asked.
None of them spoke up.
Another group of them approached from behind but they, too, stopped short of letting the glow hit them directly. Mike held up a stake. His big nostrils flexed with unsteady breath.
With Ducks on one side and a rail-side fence on the other, they were surrounded.
Bloody’s arm felt like spaghetti from cranking the generator.
On the street, the Tupperware Cult was about to reach the shaggs. More people emerged from side streets and the safety of the apartments above the shops lining Sandford Avenue—those church ladies, the Makin’ Bacon guy, a smattering of other frail people—their arms open, their faces lit up by smiles and firelight, like it was the fucking rapture.
“Florence,” Bloody hissed. “You realize they’re not here to ‘take’ you, right?”
Screams from the street.
The lines in Florence’s face seemed deeper in the purple light. “I know. I probably always knew. I volunteered to go next, because my time is up. I know what happens when cancer takes me. I’d prefer to try something different. You only die once, right?”
She bolted, wincing in pain at the sudden movement; she probably hadn’t broken into a run in years. She headed along the tracks, toward the woods, and toward the group of shaggs waiting there. One of them shouted, “Don’t let her escape,” and all of them sprinted after her as Bloody and Mike backed away.
That left an opening. Bloody stopped cranking and let the light die, then she and Mike ran for the street, trying to remain inconspicuous by sticking to the shadows between buildings, moving toward Stan’s scent. Bloody allowe
d herself one look back. Florence was calm as she stopped and let the shaggs surround her. She didn’t cry out when their claws started to tear, taking her blood, but giving none in return.
On the street, the Tupperware Cult collided with the shaggs. Confused husbands watched from windows as their wives were ripped into consumable portions. The creatures picked up fleshy pieces of the women while they still spurted blood and wrung them out into each other’s water tanks. As they took deep breaths of artisan homemade blood-infused water, they perked up like coke fiends in an 80s movie. They spread themselves out, making each of them look larger.
The guy from the record store sobbed in the street, between his burning business and the dying women, one of whom was presumably his wife.
The creatures let out muffled, wet grunts of pleasure. Of anger. Some of them ran into the unlocked doors that the women had come from, finding weapons and more unclaimed blood. Others headed straight for Mike and Bloody.
21. Homecoming
THE SCREAMS SNAPPED SOME FINAL straw within Stan. The dread won out over the adrenaline. He suddenly realized how much his mangled hand hurt. He suddenly realized how much he would miss Paul. Was that Annie’s voice among the screams? They were not even cries for help, but involuntary exhalations of pure, final terror. Just dying nerves linked directly to vocal cords.
He stopped running and collapsed on the steps of Town Hall, which had shouting inside too, but of a more intentional nature. He closed his eyes and his crumbling mind presented him with a memory: 1993, his first year of high school. He’d been riding his bike out to the school, which, back then, was on the edge of town, at a crossroad that had been located conveniently for kids from nearby farms and tiny settlements.
Stan had been late for school, going a little too fast, and hit a sandy patch in the woods at the wrong angle. His leg hit some woody protrusion as he tumbled off his bike. It ripped right through his jeans and most of the way through his leg. He swore he could see bone. And that’s when he let out that involuntary cry of anguish, without even trying, as if it was the last sound he’d ever make.
The next thing he remembered, Paul and his mom were there. Paul had been biking to school with Stan, as always, and gone to get Linda from her job at Town Hall.
“Oh, Stanley,” his mother had said. She’d brought Band-Aids, but stuffed them back in her purse when she saw the extent of the damage. “It’s bad right now, but nothing a few days at home won’t fix.”
“What should I do, Miss Lightfoot?” Paul had asked.
“You go on to school. I’ve got this. You go get educated.”
“I had a good time educating her,” Wilcox said.
Stan mumbled the words out loud. The memories were getting all mixed up in his head. He couldn’t tell if the cries of pain were down the road or within his own memories, back with that gash in his leg.
His mother had put all one hundred and fifteen pounds of Stan on her skinny back, and even dragged his bike along. “We need to hurry,” she’d said. “It’s not a good idea to have an open wound in these woods.” So he’d stopped crying, and watched the blood soak into his jeans while his mother carried him all the way home.
And by the time he was set up in front of the TV, the pain was replaced with relief over getting out of school for a few days. Because he hated that teacher, with his wrinkled face, that always had chalk on it. What was his name? Mister … Wilcox?
No, no, Stan’s memories were getting all mixed up.
I had a good time educating her. His face chalky. Stan had thought Wilcox needed moisturizer, but it was too white to be dry skin, wasn’t it? An education. Relevant detail: that school was abandoned now.
His mother was at the old school.
It was off the main road, away from whatever mayhem was happening there.
It’s bad right now, but nothing a few days at home won’t fix.
He’d come home, all the way from New York. But it wasn’t really home until he knew where his mother was. So after reviewing a thousand excuses about Annie being able to take care of herself, and having Mike with her, and being a fucking wolfman, Stan stole a bike and rode out to the edge of town.
The school was smaller. It was another supernatural trick; the place was halfway to being compressed into nothing, like Dalla’s mansion. Stan gave his head a shake, telling himself that it only seemed that way because he was bigger now. Not only physically bigger, but coming in with a bigger world in his head—a world that included distances longer than the bike ride from his mom’s house to the school.
Mist filled the school, as if he were in a hazy flashback. Lockers still lined the hallways. They were rusted, but not much more than when Stan had graduated. He got lost in trying to remember which locker was his, and what his locker combination was, before being slammed back into reality by a footprint made of blood on the linoleum floor.
He followed the footprints, made by heavy boots, backwards from the door he’d come in. He passed trophy cabinets. He passed pins in the walls holding scraps of paper that had once been election posters that Stan did the photos for.
The footprints got darker as he went, until he found a larger splash of blood where multiple footprints criss-crossed. The blood smeared, and that streak continued down the other hallway, toward the music room. There were different footprints around this one. Wolf prints. And tufts of fur—or was it hair?—encased in the dried blood.
The boot prints went the other way, toward the pool. Stan went that way first. He passed speakers for the intercom system, from which Paul had read off the morning announcements in a monotone drawl that all the kids talked over, until the teachers begged for him to be replaced with Joey Bussichio, who did a spot-on impression of the DJ from that country radio station they could pick up from Sault Ste. Marie.
Stan raised his sword and swung open the door to the swimming pool. Somehow, the light switch still worked. The pool he’d learned to swim in was still there, surrounded by bleachers, and nearly drained of water. Except there was something in the middle of it; a poky structure, like a tree had grown right through the patterned tiles.
This tree was familiar. It looked different than in his dream, but similar to the real one Bob constructed to track down Bloody. It was not a tree, but an array, with panels sticking at odd angles from a central stalk, like one of those cell phone towers on top of every tall building in New York.
A laptop sat beside the array, outputting a string of inscrutable readouts—letters and numbers flying across the screen, and gauges that ticked up and down more slowly. The array was being used to track the movements of … something. A notebook beside it was open to a drawing of a cartoon animal, with bulging eyes, a fuzzy face, and a pair of stubby horns. Maybe Wilcox just liked to doodle.
Chalk drawings covered the blue tile around the structure. At first they looked like more ancient symbols, but upon closer inspection, they were simply circles with writing that was refreshingly Roman. The circles varied in size, surrounding each other in nesting patterns, like molecules—or planetary bodies. There was one large circle labeled JHW. Jeffery Humber-Wilcox. An M off to the side, a D crossed out, P, JB, L, and an S. Was that Stan?
Most concerning was the large circle in the middle, its lines drawn jaggedly with a shaking hand, the only one labeled with a full word, underlined twice: DEMON.
Stan attempted to memorize the layout, itching for a camera to capture it with. But he noted with a jolt of fear and hope that the circle labeled with an L—Linda?—had a double line around it, and was nearly overlapping with the JHW circle. It was not crossed out like some of the others.
A mini cheesecake sat in a pool of fetid water in the pool’s deep end, with a light mist wafting off of it and filling the school. Stan scooped it out of the water with his sword and hurled it into the bleachers.
He followed the blood trail back the other way, toward the smear that led under the door of the music room. The door was locked from the outside. The music room would be t
he place to hold someone, with its sound-proof walls and lack of windows.
Stan was sweaty despite being able to see his breath in there. When he breathed in, he could smell gasoline. When he stopped breathing to listen, he could hear tinkling. Like the ghost of the least talented kid in school was still playing the triangle in there.
There were more footprints here: barefoot ones, with the dots of some of the toes connected with feathery lines. Shaggs. They must have left for town when they heard Wilcox’s howl. The big boots had been here too. But no small, sensible shoes had stomped here. None of the perfectly-timed footsteps he listened carefully for when he was up to no good in his room as a kid. If his mother was on the other side of the door, wouldn’t he see some detail, or feel some feeling, that let him know for sure?
But he thought of those chalk circles, like planets drawn to each other by gravity, the double-circled L ensnared by JHW’s pull. Sometimes gravity needed to fuck off while people launched themselves at the moon.
He hacked at the lock with the sword, once, then listened. Just that tinkling. He hacked again, and again, until the lock popped, and he opened the door, and finally, there in his high school music room, he found what he was looking for.
“Mom?” Somehow he knew it was her.
The tinkling came from chains looped around pulleys attached to hooks that had once held up microphones. The chains looped through a machine attached to a generator. It rumbled, turning something in its guts, pulling the chains away from the center of the room, where they ended in … something.
His mother. But not.
Her gray hair had been replaced with patchy, mottled fur. Her head was elongated, stretched, like an H.R. Giger painting. Above each ear, red-rimmed holes oozed, as if someone—Wilcox—had taken a drill to her skull. Her teeth were needly stalactites, poking out of her mouth at odd angles as she opened and closed her mouth, unconsciously smacking her cracked lips around her swollen tongue.