Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  Maria was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. She had long curly hair, big brown eyes, a brilliant smile complete with dimples, long legs with thick thighs and breasts the size of his head. At first he had felt guilty. He thought he should have been dating a black girl. He had even tried to keep their relationship a secret. But then he had given in to his emotions. His parents were both New Age Spiritualists, Pagans or Wiccans or something, and one thing they had taught him was that some things were predestined, the will of the cosmos and that’s what he felt like his relationship with Maria was, the will of the cosmos.

  Slowly, Martin had pulled back from his involvement in Men of African

  Descent and The Third World Alliance. He had never fit in there anyway and now he no longer had to pretend. He introduced Maria to his parents on spring break and then Maria had promised to introduce him to hers. Everything had seemed perfect but then something happened. Maria stopped calling.

  A few days before he was supposed to accompany her to her parent’s home in Boston she had stopped returning his phone calls. When he finally cornered her on campus she had been cruel and dismissive.

  “Look, I’m just too busy right now, okay?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

  “Then let’s talk about it.”

  “Martin, I didn’t want to do this right now.”

  “Do what?”

  “I think we should see other people. Maybe we should just be friends.”

  Martin was devastated.

  “Why? I thought we were in love. Why are you doing this?”

  “Martin, you’re a great guy. Really. You are. And I do love you. This just isn’t going to work.”

  “But why? What did I do wrong?” Martin was in tears and his voice was getting a desperate panicky tone to it. People were starting to stare and he could see that it was making Maria uncomfortable, but he didn’t care.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that we come from two different worlds. Look . . . ” She lowered her voice and pulled Martin in closer so he could hear her without making a scene. “My father doesn’t want me to see you anymore. He wants me to date an Italian boy. Maybe you should just find yourself a nice black girl.”

  Martin felt like he’d just taken a knife to the chest.

  “What?”

  “It’s just not going to work between us. I’m sorry.”

  She turned and walked away, leaving Martin standing in stunned silence, his mouth hanging open and tears streaming down his face. This was his first experience of genuine racism and it made his stomach revolt.

  Martin ran to a nearby trash can and threw up. He had just been dumped because he was black. He couldn’t believe it. He refused to accept it.

  Martin continued calling Maria, stopping by her dorm, sending flowers and notes, emailing her, waiting outside her classes to speak with her until she called campus security and they warned him to stay away from her. After he ignored their warning and tried to pull her out of class he’d been sent to the Dean’s office and sent home in disgrace. His Harvard career was over. Since then he’d been working on his own solution to the race problem. He had set out to make one race. If everyone on the planet looked the same there would be no more racism.

  Martin’s adopted father was a genetic research scientist, but he was also an occultist. Martin found this no more odd than Christian biologists and archeologists of which there were more than a few. His father had books that he had collected over the years from all over the globe, rare books on Paganism and spirituality, dozens of books on Wicca and some darker books on spells and demons. Martin read through them all as he continued to mourn the love of his Maria and dream of a better world. He then began reading through his father’s books on genetics and stem cell research. Finally, he found his answer in an ancient tome written in Latin called The Book of A Thousand Sins and a textbook called Recombinant DNA and Genetic Engineering. Between the two of them Martin held the keys to a new race of man.

  Chapter 1

  My name is Spencer Logan. I’d been a volunteer with Operation Rescue for over two years when I got the call. In that brief time I’d been on over four dozen searches. A lot of kids go missing in Vegas. Sin City draws predators and irresponsible parents in equal numbers. Our recovery rate was greater than fifty percent. That made us one of the more successful such programs in the country. Most of the missing kids we managed to locate were the ones who’d just wandered off and gotten lost or decided to run away for some reason. When a kid got snatched off the street by a pedophile or a gang or a pimp our success rate dropped to thirty percent. Only ten percent recovered alive. The bodies we found still haunt me. Every one of them. But some more than others. Some are full-fledged nightmares.

  Doing this kind of volunteer work exposes you to the most heinous and horrific aspects of humanity. There is no limit to the terrible abominations people will commit to satisfy their perversities, for the sake of sexual release. I have seen innocent children mutilated beyond all sane imaginings, found their bodies scattered across playgrounds, crushed into sewers pipes and tucked into trashcans. I would have quit long ago, saved myself the nightmares, except not helping makes the nightmares worse. I can’t stand to think that there are children out there, lost, in the hands of some pervert, that I could have helped find. So I look for them. I volunteer for every search. I am the hero. I wish I could stop.

  I started carrying the gun over a year ago. After I was gut shot by a guy who’d kidnapped his own daughter and was holding a gun to her head when we found him in a park a mile from his house. His name was John Brown and he’d reportedly gone crazy when his wife died a week after their baby was born. He kidnapped her from her grandparent’s house after they’d won custody of the child.

  John Brown didn’t look like a pervert or a lunatic to me. He looked disturbingly mundane, right up until he pointed the gun at his daughter’s head, until I rushed in to try to stop him from killing her and he turned the gun on me.

  He got away that day, left me bleeding in the playground sand under the swings, praying that the bullet hadn’t hit my spine and turned me into a paraplegic. I was okay. The wound was through and through. When we discovered his daughter’s body a day later, decapitated with her heart ripped out and bible pages stuffed in her chest cavity where her heart should have been, I felt guilty for having spent those twenty minutes waiting for the ambulance, thinking about myself instead of her. I think about her now though. Every night.

  Every time I see an Amber alert, it’s her face I see as I pull myself out of bed to hunt through trash cans and public parks. It’s her I keep hoping to find. She was only six weeks old when she died. In my dreams she’s every age from twenty-five to two months. All the ages she never got to see. Her father had the decency to shoot himself too. At least that’s something.

  Just before John Brown shot me he’d said the same thing to me this guy said. That’s why I pointed my gun at him. That’s why my finger tightened on the trigger and I thought about shooting him in the face. I didn’t want to get shot again.

  “You don’t understand. Nobody understands. She’s not human! She killed Mellissa, my wife! Drained her dry. I’ve got to kill her.”

  It wasn’t verbatim, but it was close enough to make my skin crawl and bring back all the fear and anger of that day, watching John Brown point a snub-nosed thirty-eight at my stomach. The parallels don’t end there either. This guy also lost his wife weeks after she gave birth. Just like John Brown’s wife, his wife died of massive blood loss. The doctors said she must have hemorrhaged during child birth and continued to bleed little by little for days. I knew all about him. I do research now. I look up everything I can about the children and their families before I go out on a search. I don’t want any surprises.

  “She’s not human, man. I swear. I’ll show you.”

  I warned him not to move and cocked the hammer back on my Sig-Sauer .380. I could feel m
y legs and hands begin to shake as the adrenalin flooded my system. This guy didn’t have a gun. He had a knife. I had the gun. Still, I was terrified. I kept thinking about how close I’d come to dying the last time I confronted one of these nuts by myself. I kept thinking about the ten-foot rule and wondering how fast this guy could cover the ten feet between us with that knife before I squeezed off a shot. I looked around to see if any of the other thirty or forty volunteers had caught up to me yet. But I was on the other side of the park in back of the public restrooms and behind the dumpsters. I’d followed a hunch and strayed away from the rest of the search teams.

  “Don’t fucking move, dude.”

  His daughter’s name was Naima. She had tan skin and thick curly brown hair, big puffy cheeks with dimples and eyes as black as the night surrounding them.

  “You’ve got to believe me. Somebody has to believe me. Let me show you what she is.”

  When he started sawing his daughter’s arm off I almost shot him. My pulse rate rocketed and I began to hyperventilate as my bloodstream filled with adrenaline. I felt my finger tighten on the trigger. I clenched my teeth and squinted my eyes and prepared for the report and the recoil, but then I hesitated. Something was wrong. The child wasn’t screaming. I could feel myself getting woozy. Everything was closing in on me, my vision was narrowing to a pin-dot. All I could see was the blood. There was so much. It seemed impossible that something so small could contain that much blood. Then the baby started to laugh and it was full and deep and throaty and not human at all. It sounded mechanical, like the laugh of a full grown man put through a synthesizer, or the roar of an engine. Her father began to shake. He seemed absolutely petrified and only then did I realize that it wasn’t me and my little gun he was afraid of; it was the chubby little child in his arms with the curly brown hair and shiny black eyes and rows and rows of needle-like teeth behind huge billowy lips like suction cups on a guppy or a leech.

  “What tha fuck?”

  “You see it don’t you? You see it. She’s not right. She’s some kind of monster.”

  I couldn’t trust myself then. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing or hearing. I wasn’t about to make any decisions based on any of the things that were happening in front of me because none of them could have been real. Babies didn’t laugh like that. They didn’t have teeth like piranhas and eyes like sharks. And their arms didn’t grow back when you sawed them off despite the fact that I was now watching the little girl’s arm regenerate even as her father attempted to saw through her humerus.

  “That’s enough! Stop it! Put her down now!”

  He shook his head back and forth. There were tears streaming down his face and his mouth was open as he tried to find the right words that would convince me to kill the child or let him kill her or whatever he wanted from me. But he complied. He laid the baby down on the asphalt and backed away. Then the thing started scampering toward me.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  The baby was on all fours. Not crawling like a normal baby but hunched over so that its legs were straight and its arms were touching the ground in front of it as it crossed the distance between us faster than it should have been able, grinning and giggling, its needle-like smile getting closer to me. I stumbled backward and began firing, missing three times until the thing was almost on top of me. Then it leapt.

  This baby, just weeks out of the womb, crouched low like a cat and sprang into the air until its face was even with mine. It’s jaw unhinged, opening wide like a snake, until I was looking straight down the thing’s throat. The last bullet went straight into its mouth shattering teeth before blowing out the back of the thing’s head. It fell to the dirt squealing and screaming and snarling, blood and saliva foaming from its mouth. Legs and arms twitching and convulsing like a dying cockroach, then it righted itself, returning to that bizarre four-legged crouch, only now the top of its head was missing from just above the nose. It sniffed the air as if searching for me, then it smiled again and once more leapt into the air. I cracked it with the butt of the pistol, beating it back down into the grass, pulverizing what was left of the thing’s head until it lost all cohesion, disintegrating into formless strawberry pulp.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “That was my child.” He looked down at the ruin I’d made of his offspring and breathed a long sigh, all the tension draining out of his face and posture. He looked calm now, at peace. He dropped the knife and it landed in the grass with a dull thud.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Daryl Thompson, and I had just murdered his infant daughter. I had come there to rescue her, to save her from a father that I believed had gone insane. Instead, I murdered the child myself. I was still breathing hard, sweating, heart pumping like a heavyweight boxer. I had killed this man’s child. Only we both knew that what I’d just destroyed was definitely not a child. Not a human one anyway.

  “What tha fuck was that thing!” Now that it was over, my mind was failing to make sense of everything and that was driving me into a panic.

  “I’ll tell you the whole story, but right now we’d better get out of here. Those gunshots have got everybody in the park scrambling and you’re covered in blood.”

  I looked down at myself and sure enough my arm was saturated in red all the way up to the elbow and my face and chest were splattered with flecks of crimson.

  “Come on!” he yelled.

  We jogged deeper into the park, the darkness swallowing us up as we circled back toward my car.

  I was still trembling when I climbed behind the wheel. I was thinking about the shell casings I had left behind and wondering if the cops could somehow trace them to my gun. I knew you were supposed to pick up your shell casings but wasn’t exactly sure why. I assumed they could trace them back to the store where I’d made the purchase with my own credit card. None of that really mattered anyway. A baby had been shot and bludgeoned to death in the area where I was supposed to be searching for her, and I had left the scene of the crime. I would be a suspect before they ever ran any ballistics. Either that or they’d figure that Daryl had kidnapped me. Either way they’d be looking for my vehicle. I pulled the car out of the little gated community and onto the freeway. Then I pointed the gun at Daryl. My adrenaline was still pumping hard. I was scared, confused, and angry at being made a child murderer even if I had no choice.

  “What the fuck is going on!”

  “My wife was abducted.”

  “I thought you said she bled to death after giving birth?”

  “Before that. She was abducted from our bedroom in the middle of the night. It was aliens, man. Some kind of creatures from space or something. I watched them take her, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t stop them. They hit me with this green light and it made my muscles freeze up. I couldn’t stop them. When she came back the next day she was pregnant. They put that thing in her.”

  It was insane. I would have thought it was all bullshit if I hadn’t seen that thing scamper across the grass at me, grinning at me with those needle-like teeth.

  “What were they? What did they look like?”

  Daryl pulled out a cigarette and lit it up, inhaling deeply and blowing it out slow. He didn’t even ask me if it was okay to smoke in my car and as much as I hated the smell of cigarette smoke I let it slide under the circumstances.

  “I couldn’t really see them. They were wearing black hoods.”

  “Hoods?”

  “Yeah. They had these big black hoods on their heads and they were wearing long robes.”

  “So how do you know they were aliens?”

  “Because of that paralyzing thing they did. That had to be some alien shit right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I drove for another mile, thinking about what he said. We passed another Amber alert bulletin about his daughter. This one had the description of my car including the license plate number.

  “Shit!”

  We needed to get off the freeway.

  “S
o what do we do?”

  “We need to get a new car.”

  “I mean what do we do about these aliens? They could be kidnapping and impregnating women all over the place.”

  “I’m not sure I believe this is some kind of invasion. I mean, I believe you about the abduction. I just think it might have been something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know . . . something.”

  Daryl stared down at his lap and seemed to be struggling with something.

  “There was something else too . . . the reason I tried to kill my daughter. The night before my wife died I heard voices.”

  “Voices? Where?”

  “Coming from the baby monitor. We had one in her crib with a receiver by the bed and I woke up at about one o’clock in the morning one night because I heard whispering coming from the baby monitor. It sounded like two people talking real low. I thought I was still dreaming. I tried to go back to sleep, but then I heard the whispering again.”

  I swallowed hard. “What were the voices saying?”

  “They were saying things like, ‘Kill the whore and her weak husband. Eat them up. Feed the litter. Strip the meat from their bones and suck out the marrow. We need food to grow strong.’ I ran into the bedroom and for a second I thought I saw someone standing over Naima’s crib. It was like a shadow but more solid. Then it turned its head . . . or what looked like its head and it looked right at me and just faded into the darkness.

  “I turned on the light and there was no one there but me and Naima. She was awake and just staring at me. She didn’t cry. She didn’t smile. She just stared at me. It freaked me out so bad that I just backed out of the room and turned off the light.