Demons, Freaks & Other Abnormalities

by Michael Laimo

  “Damn, it hurts John. Hurts so much...”

  “Hold on,” I said, then pulled away the other. Shirley yelled again, and I froze in shock as I held it out in front of me. Amazing, I couldn’t believe what I was holding in my hand. The damn thing had teeth. A shitload of them too, as sharp as tacks, filling its round, puckering mouth. A flap of bloody skin dangled from its lower lip. Shirley’s skin. I rolled my gaze back towards her leg. From where I pulled the slug away remained a nasty bleeding wound, like those all over the man that had come bounding in.

  Which reminded me...

  I spun around and beheld a crazy scene. Evidently, the injured man had dragged in more than his fair share of crawlers. I watched as they unearthed themselves from beneath his clothes and attempted to skim away, leaving moist and shiny trails on the floor. Allan was leaping about like a lunatic, trying to stamp them all out, doing his best to sidestep the spilled candy bars. His shoes were nearly lost beneath swathings of slug mush, and flat patches of gelatinous gore polka-dotted the tiled floor.

  As Allan trampled the fleeing slugs, droves more slithered all over the downed stranger, sucking at his skin, crawling from his mouth and nose, one trying to force itself from his left eye. The poor bastard seemed to have stopped breathing, his body twitching at the limbs.

  A group of slugs had gathered at the puddle of spilled beer near my feet. I stepped back, nearly slipping on one that met its fate beneath my left sneaker. Shirley had crawled to the far side of the store and shrunk down in front of the slushie machine. Tears flowed from her eyes and when her sour gaze met mine she erupted in a terrified bawl. I raised my hands to try to calm her, but then I started to hear a spraying sound. I quickly twisted around to find Allan leaning over the slug-man, the inhaler now traded in for a can of bug repellent. His right arm was stretched out in front of him, the nozzle twelve inches away, coating the slug-man with a thick foamy layer of noxious stuff. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a nasty sight.

  “Allan!” I finally yelled, but he kept on spraying, his grin taut and maniacal.

  I ran to Shirley and crouched down next to her, trying to offer her as much comfort as I possibly could through my shaky embrace. She hid her face in my chest as I watched Allan emptying the contents of the can on and around the slug-man.

  He looked up at me, heaving, eyes wide and crazy.

  Shirley pulled her head up, sobbing. “I-Is he dead?” she stuttered. Her tears were cool and wet on my shirt.

  Allan nudged the unmoving man with his boot. “If he ain’t, then there’s no helping him.”

  I personally didn’t know what to think at the moment. Here was the Sheriff of our little community, the one person who needed to be trusted and called upon during moments of distress, now a culprit of sorts. He certainly didn’t make any effort to help the guy. But then again, he protected us. And himself. I guess that counted for something.

  I shook away my rambling wisdoms, suddenly aware that it had stopped hailing.

  Allan staggered to the front counter, hands gripping the edge, supporting his weight. His head slumped in anguish.

  I threw a quick glance outside.

  Abruptly I froze, utter disbelief nearly paralyzing me, a sight so grotesque I had to question as to whether I would come out of this alive.

  The windows were completely covered with them. Slugs of all sizes and denominations. Black ones, white ones, red ones, some with stripes, some spotted. Many of them normal-sized, three to four inches in length, some of them monster-sized, a foot or more long, all of them bathed together in an orgy of slime so dense that not even the faintest kiss of night could be seen beyond their soft white underbellies.

  “What do we do?” I yelled, not realizing that Shirley and Allan had not yet seen the union of slugs on the windows. Allan spun and staggered back at the sight, Shirley shrieked as if her heart leaped in her throat. What an insanity! These slugs, squirming in a riotous jubilation, their puckering mouths secreting a thick mess on the glass, some of the bigger ones possessing bulbous eyes at the ends of their horns that slapped against the glass, peering in at us. I shuddered, then took in the whole startling picture, beyond the few eyes I’d picked out, and saw a multitude of the buggy peepers skimming the glass at various locations. Looking. Seeing. They were watching us.

  Allan started walking toward them.

  “Allan, what are you doing? Get back here!” I retreated to the slushie machines, Shirley had taken refuge in the storeroom. I could hear her bawling through the closed door, calling for me.

  Allan stood inches from the glass, neck craned forward, eying the slugs with morbid curiosity. “John, you see the eyes? They can see us.”

  “Allan, get back here.” As much as I urged him, I was unable, like Allan, to rip my sights from those tiny eyes, eyes which moved and rolled around in an almost human-ish nature. They were freaking me out. Bad.

  Allan placed a finger against the glass.

  It shattered.

  The sound the implosion made could’ve deafened a hundred men, a great crash that toppled jars and cans from shelves, shook the walls, set the slushie machine aflow. The wall of slugs plunged in atop of Allan, sending him to the floor. All around him the crawlers splattered the tiles, hunks of falling glass shattering into a dissemination of tiny shards. The storm’s fury whipped about, sending magazines and newspapers flying across the store like birds.

  Amidst the fury I saw Allan trying desperately to get to his knees, his face a mask of blood, hunks of glass sticking from it at various angles. He made a feeble attempt to crawl to me but in no time the slugs were upon him, slithering with an alarming, snake-like precision. Some of them leaped from the ground, arching their bodies like inchworms then bounding forward and attaching themselves to Allan’s body, producing pig-like squeals as they did so. Many slithered beneath his pant cuffs and shirt sleeves, their trails evident by the moving wrinkles beneath the fabric of his uniform. He swatted at them in a maniacal manner, some meeting their fate beneath his hands. But they were too many. When he tried to scream, they crawled into his mouth, muffling his cries. When his eyes bulged, they ate at them, sucking at the vitreous fluids. Finally, Allan collapsed next to the stranger, blood dribbling from the multitude of slug bites on his exposed skin. His body convulsed, became lost beneath a solid layering of marauding slugs. He looked like a great piece of chocolate under siege from an army of ants.

  This all happened so fast that I had only precious moments to protect myself. The slugs started coming after me, at least a dozen of them slithering away from the two bodies--hunks of white bone had begun to show through the stranger’s disappearing flesh--leaving silvery trails on the floor as they came. The first one to reach me was damn near the size of a football, so I did what seemed natural: I kicked it. It went flying across the store, hit the wall behind the register, stuck there for a few seconds, then plopped to the ground, leaving a sticky mess in its wake. Another had begun to nibble at my shoe, and I kicked it away. I backpedaled to the door of the stockroom, grasping at the knob. It was locked. I screamed for Shirley. More slugs came, staging their attack on me.

  Finally, the door opened, and I fell into the stockroom.

  I looked up and saw that Shirley had donned a pair of rubber utility gloves. After slamming the door shut--and severing a rather big, nasty one in half--she plucked the three or four crawlers that had started tearing at my pants legs and showed them their destiny beneath her shoes.

  “Thanks. You all right?” I asked, breathing heavily.

  “I was gonna ask you the same thing. What’s happened to Allan? I heard the crash.”

  “Front window caved in. They started crawling all over it. It gave in from the weight.”

  “Allan?”

  “They got him.”

  For a moment I thought Shirley wanted to embrace me, but then she held back, pulling her gloves off in frustration and burying her head in her hands. I cursed myself for the want of Shirley’s comfort at
that moment--there were two dead men in my store, one of them a friend. I should have been overcome with guilt, dismay, revulsion, a million other emotions. But selfishly, all I wanted was Shirley.

  We remained unmoving and silent for what seemed a very long time, but was perhaps only a couple of minutes. The rain had ceased completely now, the screams and wheezes of pain from the store long quieted. Silence fell upon us, eerie and foreboding. I wondered if the slugs had finished with the two men and had begun their retreat.

  Shirley sidled up next to me, her shoulder touching mine. I shivered. Then she said, “John, I hear something.”

  “What is it?” My ears still had a ringing in them from the window’s implosion.

  “The door,” she said, her voice rising in a panic. “It’s creaking, John. I-it’s creaking.”

  I took a step forward, looked down, at the bottom of the door.

  From the half-inch crack between the floor and the door a few slugs emerged, their amorphous bodies flattened and squeezing through from the pressure of what I could only envision as a million of the slimy fuckers pressing in from behind them. Once in the room with us, their bodies twisted and writhed about, reassuming their naturally globular state.

  Shirley and I stood incapacitated, dread and the sudden complication of not knowing what the hell to do robbing us of our wits.

  Shirley screamed.

  The slugs continued to squeeze through. Those in the room began their approach towards us.

  I shot wild glances about the stockroom, thinking crazily of Allan and his bug spray assault that had seemed to work. Maybe I could find a can in here...

  Shirley screamed again.

  I looked to the floor. They were multiplying, more of them making their way through the small space.

  I heard a soft tearing sound, then a horrible squeal.

  Of all the things that had gone wrong tonight, something had finally gone right. I couldn’t help but smile at the sudden glint of light appearing at the end of this long, terrifying tunnel, a light that gave me--and Shirley--a promise of hope that we just might come out of this mess alive.

  We had a weapon.

  Salt.

  The faint tearing noise I heard was Shirley ripping open the aluminum spout from a cardboard canister of Morton’s Salt. We had at least a dozen of them on the shelves back here, we used them to fill the shakers by the popcorn machine. Shirley was standing over a foot-long meaty slug, shaking the canister, coating it as if it were a yummy treat. The slug let out a series of shrills like nothing I’d ever heard before, like a mouse under the paws of a playful cat, twisting and turning and convulsing before virtually melting away into a shriveled lump of orange jelly.

  “You’re a genius!” I yelled, rushing past Shirley to retrieve my own ammunition.

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek, then proceeded to spray the floor with salt. The slugs squealed and shrank in agony, the salt burning them up like acid, eating away at their wet coatings and reducing them to clots of sticky matter. When all were defeated in the room, we attacked those pressing in at the base of the door, using up two whole canisters. The harsh combination of salt and melting slugs acted as a perfect sealant so that no more could get in.

  When our attack had finally come to a conclusion, Shirley and I huddled together at the rear of the stockroom (armed, just in case we missed any). Shirley slept the night in my arms, and I stood vigil until the faintest beams of daylight leaked into the stockroom between the thin spaces at the sides of the door and the frame.

  ~ * ~

  There really is no happy ending to this story. When Shirley and I emerged from the stockroom, all the slugs had met their fate under the heat of the morning sun, nearly coating the town in sticky orange goo. No one could explain the odd phenomena, and no one really talked much about it after everything was cleaned up. It’d been reported that the slugs fell as far as fifty miles away, and that they did a good number on the local livestock. I also heard that outside of Allan and the stranger, there were only another two fatalities.

  As far as Shirley goes, I haven't seen or heard from her since. She left me that morning, and hell, I can’t blame her for not wanting to come back. I guess my dreams of being stranded with her had kinda come true. I’d return those moments in a heartbeat just to know where she is now. Hopefully in the city, fixing to start a family.

  Me?

  I cleaned up the store, replaced the windows, restocked the shelves. Now, it’s business as usual.

  But, there was one small thing, something I failed to mention to anyone, and it’s been on my conscious ever since.

  You see, after the bodies had been taken away, while I cleaned the store, I found a something else. It was cradled under the counter by the cold medicines, hiding.

  A tarantula, about a foot or so in legspan. It had a human finger in its mouth.

  It met its fate beneath my shoe, but to this day I wonder: what will fall from the skies next time a bad storm rolls around?

  Whatever it is, this time I’ll be prepared.

  The Chicken Man

  Inside the holding pen, hell reigned.

  One hundred degree heat and clouds of ammonia and fecal matter beat down upon Dave Richardson as he grabbed a chicken making a valiant bid for escape. For the millionth time he wondered if the chickens knew their fates had already been written. Shit, he thought. If it weren’t for Delmar, these chickens wouldn’t even exist in the first place.

  Delmar created. Delmar laid down the law. And Delmar slaughtered.

  He chased the chicken in a rambling circle, slipping in a thick patch of manure as he grabbed the thing around its genetically altered bulk. This one was as plump as they got! The chicken clucked up a frenzy, pecked furiously at Dave’s hands and drew blood, adding to the fifteen years of battle wounds he’d accumulated. No pain registered. He’d lost all feeling in his hands years ago.

  A pair of handlers followed close behind and retrieved the escapee. The man on the left, like his handler associate, did not speak English and forced a smile as the chicken attempted another escape, feathers flying everywhere.

  It was here that Dave reminded himself how lucky he was to have a job. Didn’t matter that the place was rife with disease, filth, and rot. The damn immigrants were showing up by the truckloads and were willing to work for half the pay and barely any benefits, and that was all that mattered. They also wore industrial gloves and surgical masks, a commonsensical precaution not even considered fifteen years ago when Dave started working at the Delmar plant.

  The Government had turned a blind eye long ago to these “contract growers”, as the corporation made certain that Uncle Sam’s palm was well-greased (and not just with chicken and turkey fat). Apparently the growling stomachs of the American consumer were paramount to the aches, pains, and diseases of a few thousand illegals.

  But what about me? he thought, wiping filthy sweat from his brow.

  Dave was one of the unlucky ones who’d started working the slaughterhouse assembly line years ago. He began as a handler, gathering the chickens by the thousands (one at a clucking, scratching, poking, pissing, shitting time) and stuffing them into containers where they would be driven to the plant for processing. He would handle approximately eight-thousand chickens a day, and had the scars to prove it, not just from the scratches and the biting, but also the disfiguring diseases he’d obtained from the feces and urine that’d seeped into his wounds. His hands had become a purple knot of scars, and as far as he was concerned weren’t worth protecting with a pair of gloves. It slows down production, he’d once argued to plant supervisor Edwin Stroebecker, that good-for-nothing chicken-ass, who’d insisted that all new workers wear protective gear. It lowers our insurance rates was chicken-ass’s reply, and he’d sent Dave on his merry way, brandishing that hideous gap-toothed grin of his, spitting tobacco juice in Dave’s path.

  After two years on the job, Dave was promoted to the position of “hanger”. For an additional eighty bucks a week, he
’d spend two four-hour shifts fastening the feet of thirty birds a minute into metal shackles on a rolling conveyer. Bucking and thrashing, the chickens would travel twenty feet into another room where they were dipped into electrified water and consequently stunned.

  Farther along, their dangling heads were efficiently lopped off by a razor sharp metal wire, but only if the bird was properly shocked. Sometimes the charge in the water wasn’t turned up enough and the chickens came out of the water quite alive and conscious. The “lopper” would then miss a lot of these chickens and slice across their breasts instead. Bleeding to death, these chickens were considered waste, and subsequently dumped.

  In one eight hour shift, Delmar turned 150,000 live chickens into packages of ready-to-eat meat.

  It was in his position of “hanger” that Dave collected some additional injuries: two torn rotator cuffs from the repetitive movement of hanging chickens (one every two seconds, eight hours a day). More cuts on his hands and arms; eye infections from feather dust and spraying urine; respiratory ailments that resulted in a daily routine of coughing up blood and brown hunks of lung.

  After five years of hanging, Dave was promoted to foreman—the position with Delmar he held today. Not only was Dave earning more than twice the salary as those starting out as handlers or pen cleaners, but he was also in charge of those working the eight hour shift he was on.

  “Don’t let any more of ‘em git away,” he told the handler, who smiled idiotically and nodded as he shoved the chicken into a container already holding three birds. The handler pressed against the caged door with his hip and squeezed it shut, crushing the head of the chicken he’d just captured.

  As long as they were alive and properly stunned when they hit the lopper, then that’s all that mattered.

  The containers were carried from the truck into the slaughterhouse. The workers there joked amongst themselves in Spanish and many of the cages were tossed back and forth. Some of them were dropped. The chickens in them clucked in frantic protest.