* * *
“It’s Friday night,” her mother says, glancing around the parking lot. “Where is everybody?”
“Good riddance,” her father says. “Checkout will be quick.”
The girl watches the rivulets of wine creep across the pavement. “Maybe the store’s closed,” she says.
“They’re not closed, the lights are on.”
The girl looks through the windows. Pale fluorescent bulbs flickering faintly. Amorphous figures behind the dirty glass. “Can I stay in the car?” she asks.
“Of course not,” her father says.
“Come on, baby,” her mother says. “I’ll buy you a treat.”
The girl gets out and follows them to the entrance. She watches the shapes moving behind the windows. She sees heads and shoulders, blurry silhouettes in the pale light. The way they move is wrong …
“What a dump,” her father says, stepping over the mess of the overturned cart. “Cleanup!” he shouts as the doors slide open. And then he stops talking.
Hinzman’s Grocery is a clean, quiet store in a clean, quiet town, and the girl hates coming here. Everything is always the same. The same music on the speaker. The same boy mopping the floors. The same man running the register and making the same small talk to every customer, as if the ones next in line can’t hear his robotic repetition. How are you today? How are you today? How are you today? The store carries no books, no magazines, not even newspapers—nothing that changes. The store is static.
So maybe it’s just surprise that triggers the girl’s laughter when she sees the bodies. A giddy yelp like someone has goosed her. Harder to explain is the thrill that rushes down her spine, not fear but exhilaration, almost arousal. Like she’s stumbled through a secret door and discovered a secret world.
The bodies are like the cart outside, flabby arms sprawled on the gleaming white tiles, organs spread out like ruined groceries—smashed tomatoes and sausage links and of course the wine, the wine everywhere. But she spares only a glance for these gruesome heaps. She is more interested in the gray people hunched over them, tearing at their meat, gnawing at their bones. They look up at her. Their eyes are empty in a way she’s never seen before: no tight politeness, no stern purpose, no pained restraint or bitter resignation. Just pure, effortless, unapologetic existence, like lukewarm water flowing freely.
They stand up and move toward her and she has a wild urge to greet them. Hello, who are you? Where did you come from? What are you here to show us?
Then she feels pain in her arm. Her father’s big fingers digging into her flesh, dragging her back to the car. She hears her mother screaming. She hears her father cursing as he fumbles with the keys. The gray people are shuffling out of the store and spreading through the parking lot. Her father shoves her into the car and starts it and the tires squeal. She rolls around and bounces off the windows as the car swerves left and right—how strange, to be in motion without being belted tight!—and then her father utters a curse he rarely uses and there’s a crunching sound and the girl slams against the front seats.
She hears the engine hissing. The car is rocking back and forth. Gray faces peer in at her through the windows, expressionless, a rioting mob with the serenity of a church congregation, and then the girl is upside down, and hands are reaching through the shattered windows, big fingers clamping onto her arm, the wetness of lips—
* * *
The voices are muffled now, drifting down to her from somewhere overhead. She wonders how deep underground this basement is. She feels the weight of earth around her, cool and thick, alive with crawling things. She feels herself sinking.
A burst of static jabs her ears, startling her back to the surface—her eyes snap open wide, terrified, then sag shut again. She can’t hold them. The static pulses with a few hideous heartbeats, then fades into voices. Not her parents’ acrid whining but big, booming television voices. Voices that have the answers. The girl tries to listen, but she finds them hard to understand. They seem to be speaking a foreign language, one she’s studied a little but never mastered. The words blur and drift out of sequence as they filter down through the earth.
Rising. Killing. No time for funerals. Burn your family.
The girl writhes on the table. She clenches her fists, trying to squeeze this dream out of her head.
Outer space. Venus. Burn your family.
A spasm of pain rattles through her body. She’s so hungry. Dinnertime was so long ago. That thick hunk of raw meat dripping in its marinade, ripping in her fingers, her teeth—
“Baby. It’s Mommy.”
The girl opens her eyes to escape what’s in her head. She sees her mother’s face hovering over her like a vast planet. That cloying, cradling smile, like she’s just given birth to her, like the girl still fits in her hands. “She’s all I have,” the woman tells someone somewhere in this dim basement, a truth more grotesque than she seems to realize—it’s a surrender, a suicide, and she will suck the breath out of her daughter as she dies. The girl hates her mother, the girl hates this woman, the girl wants to hurt her, she wants to—
No.
No she doesn’t.
Tears trickle into her eyelashes. Why are these thoughts in her head? How long have they been there?
She wants to warn her mother that she wants to hurt her. She wants to make her get away, but all her words are melting, concepts crumbling, memories blackening. With a final flicker of will, she drags her voice up from the silent pit inside her and she whispers, “I hurt.”
* * *
When the girl was a baby, she touched an electric fence. It is her only memory from those years, a jolt that cut through the fog of her prehistory and burned itself into permanence. It hurt. She has felt worse pain in the years since—bloody knees from biking too fast, broken limbs from falling out of trees—but at the time she touched the fence the pain shot right off her scale. She had never felt anything like that crackling in her nerves. Her infant brain hadn’t known such pain was possible.
As she lies on her back in the upside-down car, covered in glass like a blanket of diamonds, a gray-faced man bites her arm, and she experiences this transcendence again.
The pain is impossible. Absurd. Vastly disproportionate to the severity of the wound. The man’s teeth pierce barely an inch but they are electrified and poisoned and searing white hot. The pain burrows through her body, cracks her bones and splits open her muscles, yanks her nerves taut and strums them hard, a hideous chord jangling in her brain.
She screams so high no sound comes out. For maybe five seconds she screams, eyes bulging, throat straining—and then the pain stops. It rushes out from the wound and dissipates throughout her body, fading to a dull ache as her parents drag her away from the gray-faced mob.
They don’t notice she’s hurt until she collapses on a stranger’s lawn, facedown in the grass. She feels dirt in her mouth. A worm wriggles on her tongue. Her stomach rumbles.
* * *
Time is taffy. It sticks in her teeth and dangles down her throat, past and present twisting all through her, but it is not sweet. She hears shouts and screams up there on the surface, a man who isn’t her father shouting to a woman who isn’t her mother. She tries to imagine their faces, lit first by daylight, then by moonlight, then lost in darkness. She hears shattering glass and rushing fire, and a spike of terror stabs into her brain, but she doesn’t cry out. She doesn’t ask for her mother. Such soft filial instincts are charring in the heat.
Another crack of glass. Another burst of flame. She shudders on the table.
Why should fire terrify her? She has never been burned. It’s one of the few common injuries she hasn’t experienced. But while she feels these rational thoughts buzzing near the surface of her brain, she feels the fear somewhere deeper. Down in that dark, wordless place where the urge to run bumps into the urge to fight and the urge to eat and fuck and have babies, those primal marrow caverns where she feels that other thing. Reaching up. Rising.
&
nbsp; A loud noise outside. An explosion—fire. That terrible bright god that kills flesh and forests and worlds. Her fear surges to a shriek, but beneath it she hears something soft. A small, sad voice. The voice of a young girl, alone in the seething jungle that’s creeping into her head:
Am I dying?
She hears shouting and scuffling upstairs, snarled curses and hammers against wood.
Is this all I get?
She hears a gunshot. A scream. A nightmare of disjointed noise as she writhes on the table.
Is this all they let me have?
She hears groans from outside. Not her parents. Not the handful of frightened strangers who joined them. Dozens of people. Perhaps hundreds. Their groans drown out the fire and her fear. She stops writhing. She goes still. A profound calm washes over her body like a cool bath for a fever.
She lies there for a while. She hears nothing. Thinks nothing. As the gray gloaming in her mind fades to full black, she watches the stars come out. Bright, hungry pinpricks fill her head by the billions. There’s no moon, but she sees Mars. She sees Venus. She feels their strange music humming in her limbs, filling her empty body with power and purpose.
She hears footsteps on the stairs, and she imagines that they’re hers. But she’s climbing up, not down. She’s rising, carried aloft by that thing that rises with her.
She sits up.
There’s a man on the floor, a heaping portion of life just lying there unused. She takes it. She feels it slide into her growling belly and spread through her thrumming bones. She feels strength. She feels clarity. She feels hunger—not just in her belly but in her feet and hands and teeth, in her chest and groin and in every organ, a relentless desire free of doubt and fear.
A woman wanders down the stairs. She moves toward the girl, tilting her head from side to side, simpering, whimpering—“baby, poor baby,” over and over—and some distant part of the girl throbs with loathing. What is this quivering mass of confusion and conflict? Why did she do whatever she did to get here? Why did she make choices she didn’t want and slacken at the thought of undoing them? Why does she stagger toward the girl with her arms outstretched, begging to be consumed?
Something is wrong with this woman. The life in her meat is tainted. The girl’s hunger twists into rage and disgust.
She kills the woman. She has to. But she doesn’t eat her. She leaves her intact, and somewhere in the jungle that has filled every crease of her mind, that tiny voice calls this a kindness. A chance to become something else. To finally become strong.
The girl climbs the stairs.
There is a man she’s never seen before waiting at the top. She approaches him and he runs from her. He hides in the basement. But there are others. So many others. She can sense them out there—smell them, hear them, feel them, that thing lurking in everyone’s bones, waiting for its chance to rise.
She stops pounding on the basement door and slowly turns around. She is surrounded by strangers. She is a girl in a crowd, unsupervised, unprotected, unafraid. She listens to their groans and hears her own among them. The whole universe is groaning: the atonal choir of the planets, the rumbling bass of the blackness behind them, the howling of the jungle in her head. She looks into the eyes of these people and sees what she saw before: pure, honest, unbridled existence. A primal truth older than life. And now she knows what it is.
The girl and her new family wander out of the house. Into the streets. Into the world.
WILLIAMSON’S FOLLY
by David J. Schow
The thing from outer space did not come by night.
It did not sizzle Earthward from the troposphere like a sulfur match scratching against starry blackness, to land in some farmer’s remote field and disgorge a blob. Instead, it punched a hole in a cloudbank like a huge, blunt bullet, just after lunchtime. It came down with the scream of a buzz-bomb to tear through the roof of Handelmeyer’s Hardware, destroying most of Aisle Four (all your gardening needs) and splitting the brick wall of the First Federal Credit Union. It put a big ding in the east face of the vault but did not breach the sandwich of layered steel and reinforced concrete. The contents of the two-room safe and the fiscal hoardings of approximately thirty percent of the population of Williamson, Nebraska, remained inviolate. Luckily, there were no casualties apart from Alma Teetle’s claim that she had turned her ankle while dropping a fifteen-pound bag of birdseed in Handelmeyer’s Aisle Three (pet supplies). She was swiftly quoted by Olnee Strats of the Williamson Star-Ledger: “Then the roof came apart and it sounded like the end of the world.” It was the seventh time Alma’s picture would appear in the modest local paper. She organized nature hikes and pamphleteered a lot about missing pets and animal rights. Her old frame house on Siddons Street was mildly notorious as an unlicensed menagerie for ferals. She usually smelled of cat pee and was somewhat of a fidget-pickle.
The duly appointed law enforcement officers of Williamson deployed—all five of them. Olnee Strats took a lot of pictures of the “devastation” (his word) on what was shaping up to be one of those rare days that merited a special edition. Since the Star-Ledger was the only surviving newspaper in a town of twenty-five thousand citizens (the Bugle had folded in 1965, and good riddance to it, as far as Olnee was concerned), the story was an exclusive that Olnee’s wife, Emmalene, would happily vend to the wire services. Olnee’s Linotype operator and chief printer, sixty-seven-year-old John “Blackjack” McCormick, would earn himself a shot of overtime. Before now, the headline for the next edition was to have been a bracing piece on the acquisition of new, clearly labeled litter receptacles for the intersection of Main Street and Grand Avenue, the heart of Williamson’s business district since it featured the most traffic lights—four.
As a benefit of being surrounded by farmland, Williamson was a minor Union Pacific rail hub. Its principal commodities were cattle and calves, soybeans, dairy products, and wheat, all of which required processing. Most of the beef was rawhided directly to the big Kendrick Meats slaughterhouse five miles southwest of the center of town. Academics from Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture often conducted field research in Williamson, and a good proportion of the eastern suburbs were occupied by retired military, many of whom were former missile silo workers. The next nearest town, Humbridge, was twenty-five miles away. The Chamber of Commerce (Lyle Witwer) liked to pitch Williamson as a “more nature, less noise” type of environment for those seeking a “neck of the woods” without the urban cacophony of, say, Lincoln, the state capital. The Williamson economy was vibrant enough for Joselle Turner to actually turn a buck by running a bed-and-breakfast place.
But there was not a preponderance of what might be called “local scientists,” and was therefore a scenario in which Dr. Manny Steckler’s phone was fated to ring sooner or later.
Dr. Steckler had moved to Williamson ten years ago, in 1958. He quickly grouped local physicians into a sort of co-op—one of the first of its kind for this neck of the country—and founded the Williamson General Clinic two years later. The populace seemed to like the arrangement, and Steckler’s then-innovative model had been copied in other towns of similar size, especially those communities that could not support a full-blown hospital. So it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world that once Sheriff Joseph Delaney had gone on the record for Olnee’s tape recorder (“It’s a miracle nobody got hurt, except of course for Missus Teetle; everybody should stay calm; we’re looking into it”), he would ring up Dr. Steckler—who by broad taxonomy was close enough to Delaney’s brand-new need for an “expert”—double-quick.
Delaney said, “Doc, I’m gonna need your professional input on something like this, if you don’t mind. Shouldn’t take too much time. I’ll buy you a coffee.” This was no casual largesse. Delaney always mentioned the coffee as a homey, small-town inducement; a just-between-you-and-me familial ritual. He favored two cafes on Grand Street, where he usually got the coffee for free, with a wink and a smile and a refill and all. Later, he deduc
ted this cost of doing business at a set rate on his tax returns, with a name from his notebook to go along with each transaction or consultation.
What the hell, the coffee at Diane Crispen’s diner was always great, anyway.
At the time of Delaney’s call, there were exactly nine recently deceased people in Williamson. (For a comparison figure, it should be noted that there were only 360 students matriculating at Williamson High School.) Six of these were in the basement morgue of the Williamson General Clinic.
* * *
The six dead bodies cooling off at the clinic, in order of age, were:
Eleanor “Hattie” Brainard, ninety-two, natural causes (myocardial infarction), a grandmother eight times over who had outlived her husband, Kenneth, by a decade and change, their union constituting one of the area’s three silently condoned biracial marriages. Since they had come from out of state, already hitched, there was nothing much anybody cared to do about it. But there was always talk.
Charles Lee “Chuck” (also “Champion”) Greene, eighty-one, natural causes (died in his sleep from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), Loving Husband, Devoted Father, all the usual eulogistic stats, a litter of descendants, a raft of vague compliments, and nobody apparently knew one single real thing about him, except that he was a four-pack-per-day chain smoker who had served in the navy during the war. No one was even sure which war anymore, not that it mattered worth a rat fart.
Paul “Sonny” Brickland, fifty, who basically drank himself to death in five months flat once he found out he had bowel cancer. Prior to that he had been a machine operator and farmhand on Lester Collins’s soybean spread, living rent-free in a tarpaper-roofed shack on the far end of the acreage, near the water pumps. Paul had joked that when he died, he planned to be so pickled in alcohol that it would take his corpse months to start rotting.
Jason Allan Lowwens, thirty-four, death by misadventure (auto accident), the regional district manager of the biggest Chrysler dealership in Custer County, had been driving red-eye from god knew where on his way back to Lincoln to see his wife; he dozed off at the wheel and plowed his lovingly restored 1935 Ford Woodie into the guts of a power tower that overcooked both him and his ride. Folks who read about the mishap in the Star-Ledger had always found it curious and noteworthy that Lowwens was not driving a Chrysler.
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