by R. E. Vance
That’s really all there is to say. There is no angel or devil on my shoulder. There is just that creature’s open staring eyes, a Heaven now empty of a judging god and somewhere in the back of my mind, in my own reptile brain, that primitive and primeval part of the human mind that hasn’t seen extensive use since fire was a fad, where I can see my own eyes: little-boy blue eyes lost in the dark, so full of pain and fear.
Just like hers.
And a vow whispered in the dark between the sniffles and the tears, the runny nose and the bloody lip that no one—NO ONE—would be allowed to do this to another person.
And like it or not, the snake lady was a person.
Only a person could hurt that much and be that scared before they die.
I’m already on the road. On a bus or a train, it doesn’t matter. I’m coming for those men, those monsters. This isn’t murder, and even if it was, Heaven’s closed and I can’t imagine Hell cares anymore.
No, not murder … this is punishment. And an example will be made for the next brain-dead hick who gets it into his empty skull to butcher a creature to get his name in the paper. They will remember what I am about to do to the good ol’ crew of the Orca.
“Dah dum,” I begin to hum to myself as I enter what I think of as the “killing ground,” the sound of John Williams and great white sharks filling the space between the words in my head. “Dah dum. Dah dum dah dum dah dum …”
The trip down to where the good ol’ boys are located has all the inevitability of a migraine. I feel like I’m being pulled toward this confrontation, like a circuit plugged straight into their smiling “aw shucks” faces. I’m being drawn upriver through my own Heart of Darkness. Except instead of going up the Nung River, I’m on a bus going down Highway 55.
“This is the end,” I mumble. “My only friend, the end of our elaborate plans, the end …”
I get let off outside of a honky-tonk. It’s the only way to describe it. “Guitars and Cadillacs” is booming from inside, the redneck anthem. Cries of “Ooo-eee!” and “Yee-haw!” punctuate the night air.
And there in the middle of the parking lot dangling from a hook in the back of a truck … is her.
Her body.
She’s still hanging upside down like a stuck shark. Her breasts look deflated and I’m trying to believe she wasn’t further defiled, wasn’t further subjected to indignities. But I’m not that good a liar.
And she’s still afraid. Oh gods-who-may-no-longer-hear-me-above-in-Heaven, the fear is still branded onto her face. I can read her eyes as easily as you can read these pages. They made her watch while they hooted and laughed and pumped round after round of shot into her, first bird, then buck to finish her off. They took their time. Bled her slow. Did things to her they wouldn’t have dreamed doing to an animal—because, no, this was an object, a monster. Its freakish appearance granted these men carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to it.
Monsters don’t bleed, after all. They just die. And they know nothing of fear.
But she did … and I did.
“Shut up,” I hiss at myself as an old hateful chorus of voices reaffirms these terrible thoughts in that lizard part of my brain. “Shut up!”
↔
“Hey boy! What are you doing there?” An angry, indignant shape has wandered away from the bar and is currently confronting me in the parking lot by what is, I’m guessing, his truck.
I put on my best “gawsh mistah” face and turn with a guffaw. “Awww shucks, sirrrrrr,” I slur out, “I just wanted to see the Snake Lady, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Honest!” I jam my hands into my pockets, thumbs hitched on my belt hoops. I slouch my shoulders. “I’m harmless,” every inch of me says. For a moment I wish I had dressed in drag—I make a pretty convincing woman when I slip on a set of tits (ask anyone who’s seen me at Rocky Horror)—but pretending to be sexually attracted to this sadistic thug and his friends may be more than I am capable of right now, even if I did possess a shred of bisexuality.
“We’re calling her the ‘Dragon Woman,’ ” says Buford. I’ve named him Buford since it’s more distinguishing a title than “Dead Redneck #1” and because, unlike this scum, I don’t believe in dehumanizing my prey. I’m going to kill this man: here. Now. My eyes open and awake. Looking at him. Taking responsibility for it.
It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man, I can hear ol’ Clint say in my head. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have …
“Well, son, step on up. Don’t be shy!” The good ol’ boy Buford glad-hands me, smiling so broadly he looks like he’s ready to swallow his mustache. “I’ll show you the gun that slaughtered a bona fide demon from Hell.”
I make my eyes as wide and innocent as I can, even as the rest of Clint’s words make my blood run cold.
We all got it comin’!
“No kiddin’?” I say aloud and gape. “Why, I sure would like to see the gun that slaughtered a bone-fine demon from Hell.”
Still grinning, Buford the Dead Redneck #1 reaches into his pickup truck (because of course he owns a pickup truck) and removes a shotgun, Walmart Generic 12 gauge special, the kind of shotgun you get with enough cereal box tops and missing teeth. It’s the same gun he was holding in the picture I first saw. I know everything there is to know about how to own, operate and dismantle the damn thing, thanks to the manufacturer website’s fine collection of online owner’s documents.
But I continue with my ignorance as he throws—throws—the gun to me. One quick heft tells me that, yes, it’s loaded.
“It ain’t the flaming sword of the archangel Michael, I reckon,” he drawls, “but when I drew the bead on her out in the thicket, I held it steady until I saw the whites of her eyes, and … BLAM-O!” He pantomimes helpfully.
“Close enough to see the fear in her eyes, I wager,” I offer conversationally as I thumb the safety off and take aim at the center of his mass. “Yeah!” I laugh reassuringly as the realization of what’s happening comes crashing down on him. I laugh again because, in his moment of dawning comprehension, oh how much he looks like my old man. “Just like that!”
Like the man said …
BLAM!
… we all have it coming.
They manage to hear the gun blast and Buford’s expiration cry over the sound of Dwight Yokam from in the bar. Buford himself is no longer smiling as he lands on his back with his chest open and on display, rib cage shredded like confetti and spewing his various soft bits.
The look of sheer panic and dawning terror in his eyes is priceless. I wish I could stick around to appreciate it, but his friends are coming out of the bar. First to come out is another familiar face, one more of the great-white hunters from the newspaper article. I drop to a kneeling position, swivel up and fire the second barrelful of shot directly into his face. Down he goes. This convinces everyone else to dive for cover. I figure even a jerkwater full of back-births like wherever the hell this town is can figure out how many rounds are in a double-barreled shot gun. So holding an empty on them doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.
Besides, I’m not done yet.
Even as they start to peek their ten-gallon hats, I’ve already taken a running leap into the truck that has the woman’s body still dangling from it. The keys are still in the ignition—I guess Buford had more stops to hit on this magical tour of death and alcohol abuse, but I’m not complaining. Even as I twist the keys and gun the engine away, the back window erupts in glass and gunfire. I feel a serious lancing pain in my right hand and it goes numb. Whoops, guess I’m a southpaw now … but there’s no way I’m letting these inbred jerkwaters reclaim this poor woman’s corpse to parade around and receive free drinks and accolades. Sorry, ain’t happening.
But as I’m peeling out, the last of Dwight Yokam and gunfire wrestling around with Clint Eastwood for room between my ears, a stray thought clicks:
Did she just … move?
Beyond all the swaying and the flying bullets and the speed of the truck rac
ing into the dark of night, the dead woman dangling from the back rig indeed appears to be moving.
The plot thickens …
↔
A left, a right and I’m deep in the woods. I probably have angry, gun-toting hicks looking for me, but I need to check this out. I hop out of the car and then wince and look at my hand. Damn, it’s a mess—the thumb is hanging on by a thread. Piece of glass, bit of bullet, doesn’t matter: it’s out of commission.
The slight bulge of movement from somewhere within the serpentine body draws my attention again. I find an enormous Bowie knife on the seat next to me.
“That’s not a knife,” I quip in my best Paul Hogan accent, “that’s a poorly concealed penis metaphor!”
Her body bulges again, near the abdomen, and you don’t need to be an expert on gorgons (Thank you, passion for Greek mythology) to tell that someone has a bun in her now-defunct Easy-Bake oven.
Placing a hand six inches higher than the crown of the bulge, I block my eyes from the sight as I begin to cut along her swollen abdomen—just in case those stories of people being turned to stone turn out to be more than clever marketing.
It’s an egg. Large, leathery, with an opalescent quality to the shell that gives it an iridescent shine in the light. Something bulges inside against the surface and, faster than you can say “John Hurt,” I drop the thing.
Which leaves me totally unprepared for when it splits open and a flying projectile containing a tiny fanged mouth leaps out with a hiss and bites my already wounded hand.
“Motherfu—!” I pull away and stare as half a tiny little girl and half a green anaconda pulls itself hissing from the mess of her mother’s form. The little girl regards me with all the hatred of the freshly born. That is when I notice that the hand she bit, the previously injured hand, has gone from searing hot pain to an icy numbness.
In that moment, I know I am dead.
I sigh and slide to the dirt ground opposite her as she finishes extraditing herself from her mother’s womb. She looks well and truly pissed, and I can’t I blame her—it’s a shitty way to come into the world, alone and fresh out of your mother’s corpse.
As she slithers messily toward me, I can see her more clearly: from the waist up she possesses the dimensions of a young girl, maybe one year of age or so. The exception is her “hair,” which resembles nothing so much as a nest of serpentine dreadlocks that have yet to either wake up or smell the coffee. From the waist down she has a thick, serpentine body that must have violated the laws of physics somehow to fit inside her mother’s womb.
She’s advancing on me now, hissing, drooling, scales and claws and venom … it’s all very dramatic.
Well, I suspected that this would be a one-way trip so what shall my legacy be?
“We begin with the seventies,” I narrate in a calm tone that draws her up short in surprise, “which, aside from Star Wars, Alien and a few other lesser-known sci-fi and fantasy gems, really didn’t have much going for it.” I settle against the truck. “As far as comic book adaptations go, DC was the first to get quality films of its kind into theaters, starting with Reeves’s Superman. Now, yes, there was a definite pattern of downhill quality that even Terrance Stamp and Gene Hackman couldn’t save by number three, I’ll admit it … but for the longest time, they were it—until Tim Burton brought us Batman in ’89, with the incomparable Jack Nicholson giving us a Joker we would not see again until Ledger in ’08, which would lead to a posthumously awarded Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Burton’s sequel in ’91 was also extremely compelling, after which Schumacher took over and it all went to hell.”
She has stopped looking angry and now looks to be confused, which might be the surest sign of intelligence I’ve seen from her yet.
“Here, you look hungry.” Gripping the last remaining scraps of skin holding my thumb into place, I twist once and pull. There is a momentary pang of physical discomfort, but her venom seems to be taking care of most of that. I dangle what used to be my thumb before her like a fish before a seal. “Come on! Waste not!”
She flicks her tongue out and promptly misses, smacking me in the face instead. Gently so as not to mortify her still-developing sense of ego and to avoid getting bitten again, I place my severed thumb on the tip of her forked tongue and let go. There’s a sound like a window shade being pulled and released and she slurps up the digit whole.
“That’s a sweet girl,” I comment wryly. She seems to find me to be in good taste. She also seems mollified, or at least less inclined to kill and eat me. She crawls toward me and promptly climbs into my lap, looking remarkably human and content for something that’s definitely not one and shouldn’t be the other.
“So, after Schumacher destroyed Batman, comics were pretty much doomed until X-Men came out in 2000. Anno Domini and Hugh Jackman delivered us all from what could have been yellow spandex and heartache.” I look at her and, when she looks back at me, there’s a moment where I actually think she’s listening and may not actually be thinking about what the skin on my face tastes like.
“I heard them over here, Pa!”
And the moment is over. I close my eyes and listen: boy doesn’t sound older than fifteen, which means that if I’m lucky, he’s naïve and an inbred moron. Carrying her as best I can, I stagger and crawl and slither (heh) as far away as I can from the truck.
“Kid,” I tell the little bundle of scaly joy resting in the crook of my arm, “I don’t know if they have the concept ‘snow job’ on your planet, but for the next few minutes, give me your best outraged monstrosity demeanor, all right?” I raise my voice. “Oh, Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you—is that you, son?” I add as much drawl to my voice as I think I can get away with. “Hurry! I got the monster cornered! She took a piece o’ muh hand!”
The boy enters the clearing, and though Junior here looks as thick as discount beef and twice as ugly, I make it look like I think he’s Elvis risen as I paint my best approximation of a joyful expression across my face.
“Oh, thank Jesus, you’re here to save me from the alien!” I gush.
Our hero Junior here was expecting any number of situations ranging from something biblical to violence in accordance with the World of Warcraft. A drooling moron babbling gratitude to his “rescuer” was not on the menu. “Now you just ho-ho-hold it right there, mister. You killed those m-men.”
“She made me do it!” I cry piteously and shove the reptile girl forward for viewing. Automatically she turns and hisses up at me. I suddenly wonder if she’s smart enough to not try to rip my throat out with Elmer Fudd Jr. brandishing his shotgun at us. Apparently my concerns are unwarranted. “She took control of muh brain with her space alien powers!”
Now, admittedly, the caricature I am affecting could have his brain controlled by a channel clicker, and I’m banking that Junior here is cut from the same cloth: knock-off Fruit-of-the-Loom. Sure enough, I’m right—Junior’s guard drops, the gun lowers and he turns away from me to yell behind him, “Over he—!”
And I throw the child at him. Granted, there are certain ethical implications to throwing a small child at a gun-toting redneck, but I’ve just committed multiple acts of homicide so I’m already in serious karmic debt. What’s a few more charges?
Apparently my decision to use her as a ballistic missile did not take her completely by surprise. With a move right out of Aliens, she collides into his face, wraps her tail around his scrawny neck, grips his head in her tiny claws … and proceeds to sink her fangs right into his skull.
Junior is too surprised to scream; his mouth is just making that gaping-fish O of surprise that the well-and-truly screwed make in their final moments. He goes down hard and starts convulsing as little Missy’s toxins slam into what passes for his brain with the intensity of a freight train.
“Ooooh,” I groan. “That had to hurt.”
Making sounds best described as “indescribable,” Junior shuffles off this mortal coil. The wee one extracts her fangs from his skull and p
roceeds to cheerfully eat his face.
“Don’t forget the cheeks,” I comment, starting to feel very numb and cold. “Four out of five cannibalistic psychiatrists say that cheek meat is extremely tender.”
But she does not appear to be an aspiring epicurean in her first hour of life as she happily tears off his nose and crushes it in her jaws. She seems to be delighted by its consistency. I cannot help but be reminded of that time I accidentally ate a chicken gizzard off a Cracker Barrel buffet from … somewhere I cannot seem to recall at the moment. My central nervous system’s shutdown sequence is in full swing.
“I’m guessing … not into being breast-fed,” I mutter, more to myself than anyone else. I listen to her deceptively small but powerful jaws finish crushing bone and cartilage into so much mealtime morsels. My words seems to get her attention, and honestly, the look on her face is such an endearing combination of pediatric indignity at being interrupted at her meal and wide-eyed curiosity that I cannot help but chuckle, “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.” And I manage to drag Junior’s shotgun toward me with my foot and heft it in preparation of the arrival of his friends and loved ones. Something about the Second Amendment and “cold dead hands” flickers behind my eyes, and I cannot help but giggle just a little.
Meanwhile, she appears to be finished with Junior for now. He’s going to have to be identified by his dental records (unless she ate those as well; I am uncertain), as the front portion of his skull can only be accurately described as “absent.” She slithers toward me. I cannot tell if it is near-death delirium, but I swear she appears to be getting larger, trailing behind her dead skin, shed and forgotten. She crawls up into my lap and I exhale hard: she’s definitely getting heavier.
“Ooof! Geez, that redneck went straight to your hips.” And then I realize she has no hips. “Never mind.”