by Aimee Bender
He brought the battle axe down on another demon, splitting it in half.
He looked over at the girls. They were surrounded. The Impregnator was now forcing the pregnant women to the ground as they exited the barn, ripping the demons from between their legs. The night was alive with the screams of laboring women and the scent of their blood. Zeke didn’t see any way out of this.
He started to feel weird.
Dizzy.
He dropped to his knees.
He kind of felt like vomiting but he fought to keep his gorge down.
It felt like he was spinning, but he also felt… stronger.
A demon baby crouched at his ankle, sprang toward him, and latched on.
Zeke didn’t feel a thing.
He picked the demon baby up and ripped it in half, saving a chunk to shove down his throat.
He turned to the girls.
“Emma! Carrie!” Even his voice was more powerful.
Emma finished sawing two of the demons’ heads off at once. Carrie finished dragging the garrote through a neck. Then the girls turned toward him.
“You have to eat the babies! It’ll make you stronger!”
Carrie garroted another one and drank from the geyser of blood spurting from its neck. Emma took off a tiny hand and popped it into her mouth.
In only a few seconds, they felt indestructible.
Now the Grassville Gang had the distinct feeling that the tide had turned. They fought their way toward where The Impregnator crouched. They also ripped fetuses from wombs and gobbled them down like Guzzler Fried Chicken.
And just when they closed in on The Impregnator…
…he was nowhere to be seen.
In the distance, they heard his laughter. Around them, the demons’ mothers were screaming and dying. The demon babies were all dismembered and either twitched in puddles of their own blood or attempted to make a wounded retreat.
“What do we do?” Emma asked.
“We have to get The Impregnator,” Carrie said.
Zeke nodded his affirmation.
The Grassville Gang loaded up in the dune buggy and shot back toward town.
Toward the Sheriff’s office.
They reached the Sheriff’s office to find Rogers’ car haphazardly parked across the sidewalk. The front door was broken from its hinges. The window was shattered.
From inside the office, The Impregnator shouted, “You’ll never stop me! You can never come between me and my life’s work!”
Zeke approached the door and cautioned the girls. “Careful. It’s slippery.”
Once in the office, he flipped on the lights to reveal The Impregnator ensnared in a finely constructed prison of bondage cord, novelty handcuffs, dildoes, and fake vaginas.
Zeke approached with caution.
“Who did this?” Carrie asked.
“You see,” Zeke began, “when I found your clothes lying on the sidewalk, I naturally assumed The Impregnator had taken you prisoner. I quickly acted on our suspicions and assumed it had to be Sheriff Rogers. I knew he would have to come back to his office sooner or later, so I broke into the Hotel Labrador and used whatever supplies I could find to construct this trap. He walks in the door, slides on the lubricant, and falls victim to the tensile strength of bondage rope and various latex products.”
Zeke sauntered over to The Impregnator, placed his hand on the top of the villain’s head, clutched his mask and, yanking it away, proclaimed, “Girls, I give you Sheriff Rogers.”
The face of Rogers was before all of them.
“I’m afraid you’re not correct, Zeke,” Emma said.
“What do you mean? That’s Rogers.”
“Yes. It is a Rogers. But this is the Sheriff’s evil Siamese twin.”
Zeke shook his head. “You must be joking.”
“I’m afraid not.” She approached The Impregnator and ripped away the sleeve of his left arm. “While The Impregnator was raping me, I noticed this unique deformity.”
She pointed midway down his arm.
“A missing elbow!” they all shouted.
“That’s right,” Emma said. “Just like Sheriff Rogers. Only his was on the other arm.”
“Where they were separated at birth!” Carrie said.
“Exactly. Sheriff Rogers had no reason to do these things, but he did have a reason to wait so long to report them. He didn’t want to imprison his only brother. Unfortunately, his brother was almost able to turn the complete island into his secret demon training ground and prepare for world domination!”
“And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you filthy pornographers.”
“So Sheriff Rogers is innocent…”
“Well, not entirely,” a voice said from the back of the office. Sheriff Rogers emerged. “This island’s ruin is as much my fault as Lenny’s… my brother’s. I’d invested in everything until I practically owned the entire island. But I’m not good with money. I’m addicted to Guzzle and prostitutes and this is the wrong place for that. Eventually, I just couldn’t make payments on my holdings. Everything fell into disrepair. The fewer tourists were a blessing at first. Things weren’t so embarrassing...”
The Sheriff brought a hand up to his eyes and wiped the tears away.
“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Carrie said. “You’re just stupid.”
The Sheriff nodded.
“So what now?” Emma said.
“Well,” Zeke said. “I think we leave The Impregnator right here, get the hell off this island, and let the Feds sort it out.”
“Only one thing left to do,” Carrie said. She approached The Impregnator and pulled a blade from the waistband of her skirt. While Zeke braced The Impregnator’s head, she carved a “G.G.” into his forehead.
Reaching behind The Impregnator, she pulled a canister from his back.
“Nooo!” The Impregnator howled. “Not my secret alchemical formula!”
“That must be the demon semen,” Emma said.
There was a tube running down to the prosthetic penis outfitted in his costume. Carrie pulled the tube free and spurted the semen on The Impregnator while he wept tears of humiliation.
It was dawn by the time they finished. Stepping outside, the air had cooled considerably.
“Say,” Sheriff Rogers said, “there really isn’t too much here for me. Seeing as how you guys lost one, does that mean you have room for one more? I kind of like to solve crime. And I really like to fuck.”
Carrie said, “Your penis isn’t very large but, I guess if it’s okay with everyone else, we could give you a trial run.”
“You ever take it up the ass before?” Zeke asked.
The Sheriff didn’t answer.
When they reached the van, they remembered it was damaged.
Zeke went around front to reinspect the axle.
“Hey!” he called to the others. “Look at this!”
The wheel was back on the van.
“How did this happen?” Zeke asked.
“I wasn’t just hiding out from trouble,” Rogers said.
“Welcome aboard,” Carrie said. She and Emma slid the side doors open and crawled in.
Zeke was excited about finally being able to fly the van, but when he opened the door, Brock was sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Hope you’re into necrophilia, buddy!” Brock said with a shit-eating grin.
Zeke, realizing he was into anything, climbed into the passenger side of the van.
Rogers climbed on top of him and began giving him a seductively hideous lap dance.
Brock powered the van down the street and bellowed, “It’s a good thing this baby can flyyy!” in his dumb guy zombie voice.
And Zeke, he showed the Sheriff the super special lever.
INHERITANCE
JEDEDIAH BERRY
At first they didn’t talk about it, the beast Greg brought with him to the Saturday night poker game. He tugged it leashed down the basement steps and it sat cross-l
egged in a corner, muzzled but more sad than mean. Greg said, “It’ll stay right there, don’t worry about it.” And they tried not to, but it was a worrisome beast, its snout long and searching, head furry with woolly clumps around the ears, cloven hooves at the ends of its lean legs. Even harder to ignore were the almost human parts—the navel visible through wiry hair, the hairless brown nipples, eyes with something like a soul behind them. The beast perked its ears while Abe shuffled and dealt the cards.
It was Phil who finally said, “You think it wants a drink?”
“Hell, it might,” Greg said, so off came the muzzle, off the cap from another beer, and Phil thrust the bottle into the beast’s big-knuckled hand. It held the bottle up to the light, squinting at the brown glass. Phil showed it what to do—“Here, lift and swallow, partner, lift and swallow”—and it tried with teeth and tongue to get at the liquid inside, to hold the bottle’s mouth with its bullish lips. Most of the beer spilled foaming onto its chest.
Abe, from the card table, said, “Christ, get the thing a mug and ante up.”
So they sat down and played the next hand. But the beast, encouraged by all the attention, maybe, stood and started to explore the basement, its hooves clacking against the slab. It had a dank smell about it, like moldering leaves, strong enough to overpower the smoke from Phil’s cigarettes, Abe’s cigars. It was taller than any of the men by a foot or more, and there were signs in its ragged fur they did not care to read: bare spots, and rings around wrists and ankles worn bald and red.
It found Abe’s model ships. These were arrayed on shelves sponge-painted blue to simulate ocean waters. The ships were delicate constructions of thin polished wood, with thread for rigging and real cloth sails. Each had taken Abe a month to build, and there were nine of them, one for each month since Corey left him. The beast picked one up and blew on its sails. It was the Bonne Homme Richard.
Abe set down his cards and prepared to say something, but the beast got bored and carefully set the ship back on its custom-made stand. Then it ambled over to the table, as though for a closer look at the game.
It grabbed Greg’s beer bottle and poured the contents straight down its throat without spilling a drop, set it down empty.
“Learns quick,” Phil said.
The beast snorted and shook its head like it was in on the joke, and Greg thought, okay, maybe this will work.
Lilith was still up when he got home that night—Greg could see her through the front window. A black and white movie was on television, and in that light the living room looked black and white, too, with Lilith the black and white wife, her nightgown made of bluish light, her pinned-up nighttime hair an illusion of elegance.
She would want to know how things had gone. It had been her idea to bring the beast to the poker game, “to socialize him,” she had said. And that was when Greg noticed she called “him” the thing Greg called “it.” He had felt responsible for the beast the moment he saw it. But it was Lilith who took it into the backyard that first day and washed it, not with the hose, but with shampoo and warm water from a bucket. Lilith who had made a bed of old blankets in the garage, who peeked in on the beast while it slept. Greg had agreed to take it to Abe’s not because he thought getting the beast out of the house would be good for it, but because he thought it would be good for her.
They went in and the beast waited beside him while he took off his jacket. It watched each of his movements, making Greg more aware of them, too: down off the shoulders, left arm out, right arm out.
Lilith came from the living room and said, “Oh God, he’s bleeding.”
She took the beast by the arm and led it toward the bathroom. Greg followed. When she switched on the light he saw the dark patch below the beast’s right ear, remembered how it had bumped its head getting into the car. The blood had matted the fur down to its shoulder and was dripping onto the linoleum in red coins.
Lilith whispered consolingly as she searched for the wound with her fingers, but the beast didn’t seem to know it was hurt. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink and found peroxide, cotton balls, scissors.
“Head wounds just bleed a lot,” Greg said, “even small ones.”
She didn’t say anything, and there wasn’t space for all three of them in the bathroom, so he went to the kitchen for paper towels to clean out the car. He couldn’t find any. He filled a bowl with water, took the sponge from the sink, and went outside.
On the back seat only a little blood was smeared, but Greg took his time cleaning it up. A light was on in the house across the street. He saw Mrs. Heck peering at him, her curled silver hair hovering at the edge of the lace curtains. Her husband Bill Heck, dead fifteen years now, had been a friend of his father’s, had fought with him in the war, and Greg remembered her at their house some Sundays, seated in a corner with a pair of scissors, carefully cutting coupons from the newspaper—their newspaper—and stuffing them into her purse. Greg had almost expected to see her at his father’s wake last week, sitting in the back row, cutting coupons. But she hadn’t come to the wake.
Greg closed the car door so that the interior light went out—now he was invisible. He whispered, “Your move, Heck.” The woman emerged from behind the curtains, realized she’d been caught, and quickly withdrew. A moment later her light went out. Greg got out of the car and poured the water onto the lawn.
Back inside, he could hear Lilith’s voice coming from the garage. She wasn’t singing, but the words had a lullaby quality about them.
He sat down and watched the movie while he waited. A pair of cops had just stepped out of their car in front of a big house on a hill. The house looked like his father’s, not because of the hill but because of the old slate roof, the big porch, the broad woods behind it. The cops looked business-as-usual as they climbed the porch steps and rang the doorbell, but the music suggested trouble.
Lilith came in and Greg said, “It went well tonight.”
“I don’t want a divorce,” she said.
Five years together and neither of them had mentioned the possibility, so Greg said, “That’s good.”
Now they were both in that black and white world he’d glimpsed through the window. Her hair was down, messier without the pins. He had no idea what she was thinking. Then she came across the room and straddled him where he sat, blocking his view of the television. She kissed him very seriously. The music on the television reached a crescendo and one of the cops said, “Oh, for the love of God,” and the other said, “Get ahold of yourself, son,” and when Greg kissed his wife he smelled in her hair that faint rotting-leaves scent beneath the sweetness of her shampoo.
Phil’s son Gordon raised his hand in Greg’s third period history class and asked, without waiting to be called upon, if the monster was coming to school for Halloween.
Gordon’s question came out of nowhere; they were talking about the bombing of Hiroshima. But Greg had expected the question, not just because Phil would have told his family what happened on poker night, but because all day Sunday the neighborhood kids rode their bikes back and forth in front of the house, hoping for a glimpse of the new lodger. And Lilith, not wanting to disappoint, dressed the beast in a pair of faded blue overalls and took it outside, even let some of them touch its fur.
Gordon went on, “I was just thinking, it’s like it’s already got a costume.”
Greg rolled the chalk slowly between his fingers. “We’ll have to see,” he said.
On Thursday, skeletons, witches, and mummies poked their heads into Greg’s classroom. Gordon was dressed as the beast itself, with pointed ears on top of his head and false hooves over his shoes. But Greg, himself costumeless, said, “Sorry, kids. It got a bad cold and couldn’t make it.”
Greg looked sick, too. He hadn’t been sleeping well, he needed a haircut. He took his break in the teacher’s lounge and Meredith, the assistant principal, pulled him aside. “Greg,” she said, “you never took any time off while your father was ill.”
It was
true he hadn’t missed any classes, but he’d thought that was a good thing. There had been only those long nights beside the hospital bed while the morphine doses were rising, Lyle muttering commandments regarding the upkeep of his lawn, hedges, and roof gutters. His father’s face had been whiskered for the first time Greg could remember, and when he saw him again in the casket, he wondered who had shaved him, whether they had used warm water or cold.
Meredith said, “You could take some time now if you need it, Greg. It’s just that some of the parents are concerned. I heard that you spent a week and a half on the Holocaust. The World War Two unit’s only supposed to be a week long.”
“A week didn’t seem like enough time,” Greg said.
“It isn’t, but you know they get this stuff again in high school.”
He was thumbing the school’s copy of the newspaper. Meredith looked at it and said, “Have you seen the letter to the editor yet?”
Greg turned the page and read aloud, his voice making the statement into a question: “Devious elements springing up around this town like mushrooms overnight?”
The author was anonymous.
“It’s just one person,” Meredith said. But as she left, Greg noticed a few of his colleagues, silent in their seats, exchanging glances.
Lilith was in the kitchen when he got home, the beast seated on the chair before her, waiting patiently while she trimmed off clumps of fur with electric clippers. “Sorry,” she said to Greg. “You’re going to have to sharpen these by the time I’m done.”
He went to the office and graded papers until the buzzing stopped. When he came out again, Lilith was sweeping mounds of hair into the trash. The beast was gone.
“So it was nothing but fur after all.”
She nodded toward the bedroom. “He went that way.”
Greg loosened his tie and went down the hall. The beast was curled at the center of the bed, brown hairs shedding onto the white comforter. Pale flesh was visible under the coat now. Greg grabbed its arm. “Come on,” he said, “off the bed.”