“The food has been eaten,” the cat said.
“Then shoo. Go on, get out,” David said sternly, motioning it away with his hands.
The black cat left the shadows and entered a shaft of moonlight. Blue beams of moon glow played across its silky fur, showing wiry muscles that flexed below it.
Without another word, it turned and left the room, the fur of its back splayed, exposing its spinal cord, three-foot spikes attached to each vertebrae. They bobbed up and down like a cobra waiting to strike. The spines continued, their length decreasing along the crest of its skull.
David threw off his covers and rolled out of bed, his feet hitting the floor with a dull thud. Pain shot through his shins and he winced. He wasn't used to all the walking he'd been doing lately, and his legs rebelled every chance they could.
He looked over at his wife's side of the bed.
Empty...
It had been so for days, maybe weeks. Time meant so little now that even the clocks had stopped keeping track.
He'd sent her to stay with family when shit started going bad, with the promise that he would follow.
He never did...
He wasn't even sure if he had ever intended too. He hadn't cared for her in years, if ever he had. He wasn't even sure how long they'd been together anymore (there was that damned lack of time again).
He grabbed the snub-nosed pistol from under his pillow and checked the round. Two left: one for his attacker, and one for him. At least that was the plan. He'd seen it played out in the movies enough that it had to work, right?
It was dark outside, but that meant little. Things were so fucked up now that even the sky no longer followed the regular day/night patterns from before.
He pulled back the curtain and peered through the spider-webbed glass of his bedroom window. The stars that greeted his gaze were magnetic and demanded his attention. He stared, sure that the answer to life's current question could be found there.
A siren pulled him out of his trance, and he looked away. Other than the rare siren or dog bark (cats had ascended with the change... dogs were still just dogs), the world outside his front door had come up with a whole new set of sounds: Growls and shrieks unsettled the night, roars shook the foundations, wings—large and leathery—flapped, and legs—many and few—skittered about the shadows.
He navigated through his house by moonlight, expecting to run into the neighbor’s cat (he never did), and opened the front door. He went straight for the open road, which, although harder to defend, offered little room for surprise attacks. He had learned early on to avoid the shadows, which, out here, were worlds unto themselves. He had once run into a python as big around as his leg that moved about on human arms that grew from its side like centipede legs. Instead of restricting through wrapping its thick length around him, it grabbed him with a half-dozen sets of arms and began passing him upwards towards its mouth.
He emptied four bullets into the thing, which only pissed it off, but it let go. The gunshot had been a beacon, unfortunately, and all manner of beasts had closed in on him. His first night out on his own had almost been his last (and made him wonder if his wife ever found her way).
As was the case with most of his nightly sojourns, David was now in search of provisions... food (thanks to the cat), batteries, weapons, and the like; items that themselves had short lifespans, but would go a hell of a long way in prolonging his.
The houses on either side of his were burned out husks inhabited by ashen corpses. He had discovered that the entire block was the same, as was, for that matter, much of Arkham. If he had learned one thing (besides staying clear of the shadows), it was that fire didn't discriminate, but it did play with its food. There was no discernible reason why this house had burned but his hadn't, why this block was on fire but that one wasn't, other than that the fire was toying with the city, taking its own sweet time feasting on its flesh. Maybe saving the most savory woods and bodies for last.
Fire was the enemy of many of the creatures from beyond (what else could they be called? Because they certainly weren't from here…), and many of them burned. A foul and fetid smoke choked the sky and caused many to flee, but David remained. Just last week (or was it yesterday?), he visited the small shanty town of survivors in the center of town. Even traded with them a bit. The town was built from a variety of materials, including, he saw, the scales of the beast that burned there. It was several city blocks across and smoldering, embers of buildings beneath it. The people told him that it caught fire almost the very minute that it appeared and laid down to die. It didn't taste bad, they said, but he chose not to find out.
The city’s government was gone (holed up in concrete bunkers, no doubt), but several loyal men and women of the city’s fire and police departments remained. The fire department was solely there for medical aid, because it went without saying that they could not put out an entire city on fire.
Police cars still navigated the clogged streets looking for survivors, bringing back any that they found to the shanty town whether they wanted to be there or not. Strength in numbers, they said.
Sitting ducks, David thought...
As he crossed the street to the relatively untouched park a few blocks from his house, he stopped when he heard an odd noise. It sounded like someone puffing on a cigarette, only greatly exaggerated. Was someone following him? The neighbor's cat, perhaps, but he didn't smoke, as far as he knew (although it could have been a learned behavior, because his owner did). The eventual exhale gave away their position and he turned to see.
A man was face-down on the ground, with something naked and grey hunching over him. The creature had an oblong head and elfin ears. It turned to look at him, and he saw that it inspected him with six eyes in two columns on its long face. Its body was thin—almost skeletal—and its hands played upon the prone man like the legs of an encroaching spider. It felt beneath his shirt and in his pockets.
David was confounded by this. He had seen survivors rifling through the clothes of the dead for something, anything of use, but never one of the Beyonders. What was it looking for?
That puffing sound again, and the lower half of its face lit up. It's mouth was stretched beyond proportion, its lips taught, for it had stuffed as many cigarettes and cigars as it possibly could and lit them all at once. Dozens of them hung there, a chimney’s worth of smoke swirling about its head.
It continued to work on the man, never harming him in any way, and as quickly as it appeared, it was gone.
He ran over to the corpse, hoping that lightning wouldn't strike twice, and found an empty cigarette pack by its side.
Sirens and a gunshot told him it was time to move on...
Just beyond the park was Garrison Street, one of the more traveled (and now congested) roadways of Arkham. Being one of the major arteries out of town, it was now a graveyard of steel bodies abandoned or stalled, the owners gone or staring out the windshield without eyes.
Any car you could ever want was here for the taking, but it was useless because there was no gas. If any—and that’s a big if—had been left behind by scavengers, it had probably evaporated in the summer heat.
There could be unopened trucks full of treasures, however; some bodies were too foul for the looters to search, or items stuffed under seats that had been missed. David felt like he was at the mall with a fat stack of cash. Anything he wanted, as long as he could find it.
Car after car offered nothing but disappointment, although he had found a tire iron in the bed of a rusted-out truck that would make a nice weapon (when he wasn't using it to open trunks).
Up ahead he saw a prison bus, its front end smashed into the back of the car in front of it, which in turn caused a pile-up. He didn't think the weapons the guards carried (if indeed it had guards) would still be there, but it was worth a look. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel, his skin dried out and pulled tight over his bones. The holster at his side was empty.
Out of the corner of his eye,
David saw movement, but heard not a sound. He looked through the still-locked chain-link fence that spanned the interior width of the bus, bolted securely at the sides. Prisoners in regulation orange sat two to a seat the entire length of the bus, their hands still chained to the seatbacks in front of them, their legs shackled to the legs of the seats they died on. Their faces, still staring straight ahead, their necks stiff, were masks of ruptured flesh, blown out from within. As David made only the slightest sound, the owners of those faces revealed themselves.
Smooth crimson tentacles slid out of open pits and moved about, tasting the air. Their length surprised him, as they were already dangerously close to breaching the fence.
He backed down the steps and exited the bus. From the road below, he could already see that the faces had returned to empty masks...
Something had pushed aside the cars on the left-hand side of the road and one of the few remaining police cars had navigated down the lane until it could go no further. The siren had died long ago, but the roof lights still had life in them.
That meant gas, and maybe weapons. It also meant there could be a policeman around looking for survivors. He had no intentions of getting caught, or being forced into that shit-smelling town made from scales and car hoods.
He looked around, saw nobody, and hunched over, made his way to the car. The passenger-side window was shattered, and without thinking, he stuck his head inside. There, much to his surprise, was a riot shotgun, just lying on the seat. The owner of the gun was dead and bloated, his body sprawled across the backseat.
His mouth was open, pulled apart by a set of orange and white claws. The claws were at work, pulling out and pitching brain matter and flesh from the inside of the cop’s skull. It tossed the grey chunks into the air and they stuck to the backs of the front seats and roof of the car. The claws came out once more, and with a very audible crunch, separated the man's head from his neck, a spray of arterial blood just missing David's face.
David grabbed the gun and backed out of the window. He checked to see if it was loaded (it was) and leaned back in the car.
Should he waste a bullet on this abomination or just move on, he thought to himself, but he felt his finger already on the trigger, and went with it.
The creature had, by now, thrust its legs through the soft parts of the man's face and pushed its claws through the hole in his neck.
It was already moving over his bloated stomach and in his direction, so he pulled the trigger and blew it (and a good portion of the cop) out the back window.
The kickback of the gun knocked David on his ass, and as he scrambled to get up, he heard a click behind him.
More of those fucking crab-things coming to avenge their brother's death, he thought.
He stood, turned, and dropped the gun in one fluid motion, then he raised his hands, and started to say...
Another officer stood a yard’s length from him and had his 12-gauge cocked and ready. Before David said a word, the officer emptied both barrels into his chest, the blast throwing him into the side of the car. His body crumpled, and he hit the pavement with a sick, wet sound.
The officer approached, surely to finish the job, then screamed as something grabbed him from behind.
David, through fading, black-tinged sight, could see two things: a swarm of crab creatures, many wearing hollowed-out heads like a hermit crab would wear a shell, and a man wearing a laboratory coat carrying a flamethrower.
David could feel the heat from the flamethrower on his face, but could feel nothing from the chest down, and his vision was failing him.
The man, confident that he had run off the crabs (who carried the still-screaming officer with them), knelt down beside David and removed a bone saw from his bag.
“Trust me,” he said. “I'm a doctor.”
*****
David found himself in bed with his wife, inside his wife, but he was watching from an open door. It was his bed, his body, his wife... he was sure of it. The tattoo of her name, written in Egyptian hieroglyphics (just one of the many mistakes he made during his marriage, but at least few could read it), flexed with the muscles of his upper back as he entered her. His head was lowered, her legs around the small of his back, as they worked together. If they had one thing they were good at, it was this, but it happened so rarely.
He felt confused and dirty, watching himself in the act. Had his soul left his body, and his body not found out? This was doubtful, since religion was one thing that he had neither the time nor patience for.
He rubbed his closed eyes with the flat of his palms, explosions of light obliterating the dark, but when he opened them, there they were, still knotted together in a sweaty embrace.
A mix of bravery and curiosity caused him to speak, and in an instant, he wished he hadn't.
“Who are you, and what are you doing with my wife?” David asked, and the couple stopped, his wife reaching to pull a sheet over the body he had seen so many times.
He (at least the he that was in front of him) raised up in the darkened room and turned his head.
“I am you, David; or at least part of you,” it spoke through large canines and a black-nosed muzzle. Its eyes were piercing and rimmed with fur, its ears clipped and standing at attention. The dog-head was sewn onto his body with surgical precision, fur covering the connection point on his neck. Beneath that, however, was a bloody mess of mangled flesh and exposed organs.
The gunshot wound.
David looked at his wife for a second before she covered completely, and he could see that her stomach and breasts were blood-stained smears.
“I hope you are enjoying your new...” the dog-headed David continued.
*****
David opened his eyes and looked around. The room was clean, but not hospital clean. Still, it gave the impression that medicine was performed here.
He was unable to turn his head, or feel much from the neck down, but when he tried to turn over, he did have limited success.
There was a table in the room (at least the part he could see), and set upon it was a laboratory of mismatched items doing a variety of things. Liquid dripped, bubbled, and followed a maze of tubing to a rather large beaker that it was slowly filling. The green liquid shimmered in the low light, casting ripples of color on the walls and ceiling.
Feeling was returning slowly, but not of motion or movement, just mind-numbing cold, especially in his extremities. Pain was also returning... mostly in his neck. His chest was completely numb (which, given the extent of his injuries, was probably a good thing).
He heard a door close, but it was muffled, so he felt safe that it wasn't behind him, or at least in the room behind him.
Footsteps behind the wall told him a person was traveling away from the room at some speed.
A gunshot caused the feeling in his body to return with some urgency, and his first thought was to get out of bed (or whatever he laid upon) and hide. He willed himself to roll over; nothing happened, so he tried again.
Movement. Barely, but it was there...
He tried once more, and then he was falling, and falling some distance. He had rolled off the bed (which he now saw was a metal table) and hit the ground with a thud. There was—and this was a good sign, at least—no pain in his shins, only the dull throbbing in his neck.
His point-of-view was barely a couple feet off the floor where he lay, so he decided that without realizing it, he had already gotten up on his hands and knees. He could still feel very little, but the floor was cold to the touch. He assumed he was naked, but couldn't be sure.
He tried to stand, but the motion was denied him, so he did what he could...
He crawled...
The footsteps were coming back from the way they had gone, and he saw that there was a door at the head of the table on which he had laid. He moved with as much speed as he could and slipped into a space behind the table of scientific apparatus, a space nowhere near big enough for his almost six-foot frame.
What th
e hell is going on here? he thought. I'm going to die without ever finding out.
The door opened and the man—the one he remembered from the street—entered the room. He stopped just short of the bed and looked about the room.
“Jehovah,” he said. “I'm here to help you. Please come out.”
He was looking right at David's resting place. Who the hell was Jehovah? Was there someone else in the room that he didn't know about?
“I have to check your stitches,” he continued. “Check for tissue rejection.”
He took a step in David's direction...
David ran for the door as best he could on his hands and knees. He tried to stand once he had entered the hallway, but his body just wouldn't cooperate.
He heard the man enter the hall and follow him.
“You can't get out, and...” he said, “you are in no condition to be up and around.”
David realized that he had gone in the direction of the gunshot and wondered what awaited him there. It couldn't be any worse than...
He stopped. What was he running for? The man had helped him, hadn't he? He spun around and saw that the man had removed his gun from its holster, and he had it pointed in David's direction.
David took off again, still crawling, several times falling face-first into the floor. He made a strange tick, tick, tick sound when he ran that confused him, but there was no time for that now.
He entered an open door and cried out...
Before him, slouched in the corner, was his body (the destroyed chest cavity giving it away)... topped with a dog's head.
It reached out for him, and got a bullet between the eyes. The dog's head slumped over and separated from the body, rolling to a stop just in front of David.
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