by Victor Allen
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The next time it happened was only a week later, and I was better prepared for it. Almost as if it were planned, Joyce was already asleep. When the hot flash came over me, I thought Dear God, not again. I rushed to the bathroom, my back already beginning to hunch over. My shirt buttons popped off and rolled across the tiled floor when my chest swelled and deepened. My palms broadened and fingers shortened, growing claws. The pain was blinding as the atavistic ritual ground on. The now familiar sensation of avulsing bone shot through my limbs like glassy splinters. My silhouette streamlined from the Michelin Tire man to a sleek predator.
I stalked from the bathroom, my ripped clothes hanging in tatters. I padded up to my wife’s sleeping form, watching her sleep in her China Whore robe. How easy, I thought, to drag her out of bed and tear her to a ripped and ghastly rag doll. But something stayed me; something more powerful than the transformation.
I left my wife and went to my son’s room. His tiny blue eyes were open. My huge, shaggy head loomed over my son, its shadow blotting out all of his facial features except his eyes which looked like pale saucers. A strand of viscid drool hung in a runner from my jaws. I felt the thick sinews in my neck contract automatically as I readied to strike.
But I didn’t. It was a far more difficult thing to do this time, but I turned away.
I fled my house, loping down the back streets, my nose testing the air for that smell. And then I caught it, coming from a darkened, below street level flop house on an outskirt of a seedier downtown district. Blue and red neon signs, flashing traffic signals, and traffic sounds were subdued down the stairs which led to the grimy abode. The squeak of scurrying rats was the loudest sound in the hovel.
I didn’t even bother to conceal myself from the pimps and junkies that stared at me with blasted eyes as I descended the concrete stairwell. Through the window I saw a woman who might have once been pretty. She sat in repose, her back against the wall. A tourniquet was strapped around the bony remnants of her upper arm, a syringe on the dirty floor next to her.
With a mighty leap I crashed through the window and hurtled into her with every bit of strength I possessed. With one of the odd sensations prevalent in this weird life, I noticed the woman’s name on an eviction notice on the floor. Cheryl Coombs. I marveled that I could still read in my state. Cheryl Coombs would never have to worry about an eviction notice or global warming anymore.
She put up a less than satisfying struggle and I knew my needs this night would be satisfied without further interruption. I ate until I was bloated and left her limp body in the cold, impersonal garret.
