What the Hell Did I Just Read

by David Wong

  Chastity said, “The what?”

  I said, “What he’s referring to is slang, for a, uh, substance. Think of it as a performance-enhancing drug for people with any kind of paranormal abilities. Or whatever. It’s the reason we can do what we do.”

  John said, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that on the Sauce we would be able to see through the thing’s camouflage, through the whole illusion.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “it’s moot, because we tossed our only vial of the stuff into the river.”

  Chastity said, “Well, that conversation was a good use of our time.”

  I said, “All right, so we go in and we talk to it and try to find out what it wants. And if what it wants is to feed on us and, uh, breed on us, then what?”

  We all just looked at Chastity. Only she could say this.

  “We kill it. Only cure for a parasite.” She looked at us. “Any idea how we do that?”

  John said, “They don’t like fire.”

  Amy said, “We’re not going to start a fire in an occupied motel.”

  Chastity nodded. “So much crack in this place, fire would get the whole town high. No, we got to take him somewhere else, away from all the people. Mikey and your dog both.”

  John said, “I know a place.”

  All four of us cautiously approached the motel room door, the only one of us who was armed was Chastity, with her revolver. John asked her if she wanted him to take the gun.

  “No. If this goes wrong and something has to be done, it’ll be me who does it.”

  I said, “Just be ready—this thing is going to try to pull on your heartstrings. It’s going to play up the little kid stuff, he’s going to bat his eyes and say, ‘You wouldn’t shoot me, Mommy!’ You sure you’re ready for that?”

  “Nope. But I’ll do it anyway. If you’re tellin’ me you wouldn’t have any problem pulling the trigger in that situation, well, that ain’t nothin’ to brag about.”

  She steeled herself, pushed open the door, and screamed.

  From the neck down, the creature standing in the doorway was little Mikey Payton, just as we’d seen him, wearing a faded LeBron James T-shirt. From the neck up, he was Diogee. Specifically, the ass part. The dog’s two rear legs were draped over Mikey’s chest, its tail stuck straight up into the air where Mikey’s forehead would have been.

  The dog’s anus opened and closed like a mouth and said, “Look, Mommy! I’m a butthead!”

  Chastity slammed the door.

  I said, “Okay, I was … not expecting that.”

  The huge, gun-toting, screaming black woman had drawn the attention of the bikers around the burn barrel. The fat guy from behind the counter leaned his head out of the office a few doors down, looking annoyed. It sounded like motel rules were being broken.

  Lemmy Roach said, “Chastity? What’s happening?”

  I said, “Nothing to see here! It’s fine!”

  Then the curtains of our room were ripped aside and what appeared there wasn’t Mikey, or the dog, or dog-butt Mikey. It was a naked young woman, visible from the hips up. She was splattered with blood and appeared to have one wrist shackled to a headboard with a pair of handcuffs. She pressed herself against the window and screamed, “HELP! THEY’RE GOING TO KILL ME!”

  Two more guys ran out of a nearby room to join the bikers at the burn barrel. Roach yanked a pair of short shotguns into his hands and screamed, “THEY’VE GOT LACY!”

  I was, in that instant, sure that no woman named Lacy had ever existed. I was also sure that every single person in the vicinity would instantly remember Lacy, have a head full of fond memories of her, and feel an overwhelming urge to protect her.

  Roach led a pack of bikers toward the door, each of them drawing firearms. Chastity screamed at them to stay back and, when they refused, brandished the revolver.

  “You go in there, you’re gonna die! It’s a trap!”

  Of course, the bikers had no reason whatsoever to believe this was anything but the ravings of a lunatic who had kidnapped a female friend of theirs, and also they had shotguns. The sound of conflict had carried across the grounds and room doors were popping open all around us, disgorging biker dudes eager to join the fight. One woman in black leather quickly hustled away three young kids—some of these bikers had families.

  The “woman” behind the glass continued to scream and beg for help. John, Amy, Chastity, and I faced a phalanx of shotguns and black leather.

  Roach, brandishing a total of four shotgun barrels by himself, screamed, “CHASTITY, YOU’VE GOT THREE SECONDS TO PUT THAT DOWN AND GET OUT OF THE WAY!”

  John said to him, “This may seem like a weird time to ask, but do you know Ted Kno—”

  There was a commotion at the opposite end of the parking lot. Everyone spun around to see three black NON trucks come barreling in. There was no entrance to the lot over there, they just smashed through the motel’s sign and flattened a row of shrubs, skidding to a stop. A dozen black cloaks flowed into the parking lot, bringing their weird-ass weapons to bear.

  The naked woman in the window screamed and pulled on her restraints.

  The downpour chose that moment to resume.

  The nearest NON cloak was the same one that had led the charge into John’s living room that night weeks ago—or at least, this one was wearing the same puffy-cheeked infant mask. It opened its baby mouth—it had tiny little rubber teeth—and said, “STEP AWAY FROM THE ORGANISM.”

  Thinking back, I’d say this was a mistake. These instructions made perfect sense to me, John, Amy, and maybe Chastity. That was it. No one else in that crowd knew what “organism” they were referencing, or where it was, or in what direction they should step in order to find themselves “away” from it.

  Most of the bikers had now trained their guns on the NON cloaks, with a few seeming to remember that their most urgent task was to free their beloved Lacy. We all stood that way for a moment, getting drenched in the downpour. To me, it seemed like a perfect time to just slip away and let these people fight it out amongst themselves, but there was no way to communicate that to the other three in a way that wouldn’t tip off everyone else.

  At the window, “Lacy” screamed, “HE’S COMING! OH GOD, HE’S COMING!”

  A muscular arm reached in, grabbed her hair, and yanked her back onto the bed, letting the curtains fall closed.

  That did it.

  Roach yelled, “Get off her, you sick son of a bitch!” and sprinted toward the door. He pushed past Chastity and blew the doorknob off with his shotgun. He yanked open the door and plunged inside.

  Five seconds later, a spray of guts and black leather flew out of the door.

  What walked out the door next, was a torso.

  “Lacy” only existed down to her waist, which ended in rows of tiny fuckroach feet. She came scooting out of the doorway, the disembodied man’s arm (which ended at the bicep) still clutching her hair.

  Chastity said, “Oh, shit!” and shot at the Lacy thing with her revolver. It flinched and pulsed, the fuckroaches giving up their disguise for a split second each time a bullet struck home.

  The NON cloaks screamed at Chastity to stop, in their weird pseudohuman voices. Then, Babyface fired a blue beam that was presumably intended to scramble her brain in some way that’d neutralize the threat. It missed, and instead hit a member of Christ’s Rebellion. The man screamed, “VIOLENCE IS WRONG!” He then threw his gun aside and lay down on the soaked pavement, appearing to go to sleep.

  The Lacy torso waddled its way toward the bikers, the spell having been thoroughly broken at this point. They opened up on it with their shotguns, blowing off fuckroaches with each blast. Babyface commanded them to stop shooting the specimen, and when the bikers didn’t comply, another blue beam was fired at them. It hit a biker with a glancing blow that just brushed the back of his hair. He blinked, confused, then started firing his gun wildly into the sky screaming, “FUCK YOU, MOON!”

  The rest of the bikers were now torn bet
ween the disembodied torso monster and the squad of spooky assholes shooting shafts of magic at them. Some turned their shotguns on NON, knocking down black cloaks and making a strategic retreat across the parking lot, toward where their bikes were parked.

  Apparently frustrated at being ignored, “Lacy” dispersed completely into a swarm, the creatures whizzing around until they coalesced into a group of six severed heads, each of the same elderly woman, floating a few feet off the ground. The biker nearest to them had time to scream, “GRANDMA, NO!” before they launched themselves at him and started eating his face. The man tumbled to the ground at my feet …

  … and onto the pavement rolled the brushed steel canister.

  The vial Amy had chucked into the river three weeks ago.

  The one that contained the Soy Sauce.

  14. A BRIEF HISTORY OF INVASIVE FISH SPECIES IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND THEIR IMPACT ON INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE

  After Amy pitched the metal vial into the river, it in fact did not float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, as she had hoped. That would have required a series of remarkable coincidences, considering how many opportunities there are for a floating object to wash ashore or become ensnared in some obstacle along those hundreds of miles of heavily traveled waterway. The object did, however, make it to the Mississippi, where it was promptly swallowed by an eighty-pound Asian carp.

  The carp boasted a proud, heroic lineage (though of course it was not aware of this, or anything else aside from a vague sense that being a fish was pretty sweet).

  You see, it is well known that the best way to catch catfish in the Mississippi is with cruelty. You simply take a smaller, living fish, ram a hook through its back, and secure the line to a float or an anchor. The terrified, impaled bait will desperately try to swim away until its frantic struggle attracts a catfish that will swallow it whole. In the 1970s, fishermen started using Asian carp for their live bait operations, but the carp quickly turned the tables—they ripped themselves free from their rigs, found mates, started families and, having no natural predators, promptly spread down the Mississippi like a conquering horde.

  It was only a few years ago that someone had the bright idea to catch and export Asian carp back to China, where they can still fetch a high price as a delicacy. Thus, the carp that swallowed the vial was caught the next day by a commercial fishing vessel owned by a man named Jon Minchin. The fish, with the vial lodged in its throat, was taken back to port and then crammed alive into a freshwater container along with a hundred other carp just like it. The container was then transferred by forklift into the belly of an airliner. As the carp swam in its cramped, dark prison, it had no idea it was being flown around the world and, in fact, did not even know it lived in a world that could be flown around. It should be noted that four minutes after offloading the fish, a crew member on Minchin’s boat tossed a cigarette that ignited fumes from a leaking fuel line. The ensuing explosion killed two men.

  The carp containing the metal vial arrived at a massive fish processing facility in Nantong, 7,370 miles away from where it had been caught. There, a machine designed to lop off the head of the carp smashed into the metal object in its gullet, causing the blade to shatter. This sent a shard flying into the neck of an unfortunate line worker who bled out in forty-three seconds flat. An hour later, the line repair tech, a twenty-three-year-old man named Mǐn, replaced the ruined blade on the fish decapitator and, during cleanup, found the strange metal vial wedged in the works. Recognizing it as some kind of foreign object and not a loose part of any of the machine’s components, Mǐn washed the metal cylinder and marveled at its properties. It felt cold, as if refrigerated from the inside, but was otherwise featureless—no seams where it could be opened, no inscriptions or decorations. It had mangled the teeth of the processor, yet had not a scratch on its surface.

  Mǐn decided to take the object home. His young wife suffered from multiple sclerosis and was unable to work a day job. However, she had an artistic streak and had discovered that it was therapeutic for her to make sculptures out of found objects, welding the pieces together and selling the finished products on the Internet (if, that is, it was one of the few pieces she had not grown too attached to). Mǐn thus tried to bring home any items he thought she would find interesting (though regardless of what he brought her, she would always smile and make the same little sound every time, as if gasping with delight).

  A week later, the metal vial had become the torso of a sculpture in the shape of a steampunk robot, its joints and limbs made up of springs and gears she had recovered from an old clock. The parts were held together with glue, as she had found the metal of the vial could not be welded or soldered. Still, she had finished the figurine and put it up for sale on the online craft marketplace Etsy. A week later, it sold to a teenager in Spain named Juan Jimenez. Unfortunately, he would never receive the item; the international FedEx flight carrying the parcel crashed into the French countryside, killing everyone on board.

  In the name of international cooperation and improving safety standards, the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) frequently sends teams to assist in the investigation of crash sites around the world. The lead investigator, named John Mindelson, discovered the vial when he accidentally kicked it, his attention drawn to this lone unburnt object in a twisted pile of scorched metal that had been roasting in jet fuel for several hours. The vial was clean, the other parts of the sculpture having been blasted neatly off its surface. It seemed impossible that the item could be a factor in the crash, but he kept finding his curiosity drawn to it, particularly the way in which it seemed to always remain about thirty degrees below room temperature.

  More out of blind curiosity than anything, Mindelson decided to ship the object to a private aviation forensics laboratory in Wichita, Kansas, for analysis. This time, the cargo landed safely in Newark and soon after, the vial was on a courier truck heading west. The route to Wichita would not have taken it through Undisclosed, as the interstate bypassed the town completely. However, the driver of the courier truck, Minnie Johnson, heard from dispatch that traffic was backed up on said interstate for miles due to a truck full of bees that had overturned, blocking both westbound lanes. Dispatch did not let her know that a young man in a passing vehicle had jumped out in order to rescue the driver of that semi, only to be attacked by bees and promptly die from anaphylaxis.

  Minnie was forced to exit onto highway 131, toward the creepy small city she always tried to avoid whenever possible. Two minutes after entering Undisclosed city limits, the driver approached an overpass and saw some dumb fuck in a Range Rover trying to pass a semi in the eastbound lane, setting the SUV on a collision course with Minnie’s own goddamned face. Minnie braked, but knew that it ultimately would have no effect on how this situation would play out—she had nowhere to go and at best could decrease the amount the Ranger Rover’s cabin was compacted by 10 percent or so, to make it a little easier for the highway patrol to dig the body parts out of the wreckage. The life or death of the Range Rover driver was entirely in their own hands.

  She felt only a split second of relief when the Range Rover jerked aside and threaded the needle between Minnie’s rig and the one in the other lane. That’s because right behind the suicidal Range Rover was a psychopath with an even more fervent death wish—the driver of the flat-black truck had his goddamned headlights off. Minnie uttered just one syllable of what was going to be an extraordinarily creative string of profanities before her rig slammed into the truck. Both vehicles went tumbling over the railing, the cab never detaching from the trailer, leaving it and the driver’s shattered body dangling off the overpass just a few feet above the roadway that crossed below.

  Passing under the overpass at that exact moment was a pack of six motorcycles driven by members of the Christ’s Rebellion gang led by Lemmy Roach, with John “Beergut” Klosterman bringing up the rear. Beergut happened to glance up exactly at the moment that the horrific collision took place overhead
, a semi-trailer rolling and flying to pieces, sending cargo raining down on the roadway around the bikes. Beergut was so busy dodging debris that he did not feel that a single, metal object had landed in the sweatshirt hood that was draped between his shoulder blades. The cylinder would remain there until he would tumble to the ground in the parking lot of the Roach Motel, being bitten by the flying heads of his own deceased grandmother.

  15. SOY SAUCE

  I reached for the vial, but Chastity yanked me back up to my feet. Damn, she was strong. She screamed, “LET’S GO!”

  John saw what I was reaching for, and lunged for it. He accidentally kicked it away instead, sending it rolling across the pavement. A running biker stepped on it, causing him to trip and fly backward, breaking his neck when he landed awkwardly on a parking block. This caused the vial to roll forward again, right toward Amy, who picked it up in stride.

  We all went stumbling away from the chaos. We were cut off from both of our vehicles, which were parked behind the bizarre three-way maelstrom behind us. We ran across a row of Harleys and without hesitation, Chastity jumped on one and kicked the engine to life.

  John stopped, saw what she was doing, and straddled the next bike over. He started it, yelled at Amy to jump on behind him, and she did.

  I do not know how to drive a motorcycle.

  John peeled off down the street, and yelled back at me something that sounded like, “BEANIE WIENIE!”

  Chastity turned back to me and said, “What are you waiting for? Get on!”

  I did.

  We dodged through the sparse nighttime traffic and I thought I was going to die. The raindrops were cold needles on my face. We followed John out to the industrial park, not too far from the ice factory where all this bullshit had begun. I knew where he was going. There were several vast buildings in the neighborhood that belonged to businesses that hadn’t survived the economic downturn this town had gone through about seven economic downturns ago. One was a former beans-and-wienies cannery, a sprawling, gray structure with giant, rusting metal letters welded to the front that said,