He would do it. The thing had heard Valerie. Had to have. He looked over at her, more unconscious than asleep. Animal or entity, it would know there was prey in its own nest. It would investigate tonight. He must go to it before it came to him...
Yes. Yes – he would do it.
-3-
George wrote a note to tape to the front of their portable TV, letting Valerie know where he was/what he was up to should she awaken before he got back (if he got back). While he wrote it, he glanced over at the TV, which ran with its sound turned to a barely detectable murmur. He narrowed his eyes at the screen, trying to decipher what the grainy, apparently live footage was showing.
Was it a skyscraper in some city (which city? did it matter? some foreign city where it was already dark), taller than those around it? A deformed, lumpen skyscraper that had to be, in fact, an organic thing? There were tracer bullets or rockets streaking toward it from several directions. The video flared with static, jumped, the image was almost lost. Did the skyscraper sway radically, suddenly? Were those arms coiling, uncoiling, at the summit of the thick, towering stalk, as if it were a sea anemone of gargantuan proportions?
How many of the many people in all those city buildings had been poisoned by the sun on the Fourth of July? How much time had it required to become contaminated – a few hours of direct basking in the sun, or as little as fifteen minutes? Hadn’t they listened to the doctors, he thought, who always stressed how bad the sun was for you? Bad for the skin. (How true that had proven!) Skin cancer. This mass change, maybe, being the ultimate, purest form of cancer...
How many of those people condensed within the frame of his television were like him, hiding by both day and night for different reasons, waiting for...what? The sun to reconfigure? For the monsters to revert? For the army to rescue, for chaos to retreat, for reality to resume? How many of them down there were Changelings, probably swarming the streets like cars had once swarmed them, like boiling masses of maggots from this distant view? Hadn’t a lot of them already been maggots, in a sense? Hadn’t they merely been recast into the form that best suited their souls? Drug dealers, rapists, gang bangers, murderers, racists of every color, lawyers, welfare frauds, businessmen who moved their companies to Arizona so they could pay Mexicans minimum wage and put people like him out of a job (before he got his current job, if he could call it a current job; how many of his co-workers were like him, how many not?), abusive parents, fondling priests, terrorists and rude cabbies, religious fundamentalists and road ragers, dog kickers and telemarketers, mafiosi and fast food cashiers who could barely speak English and always got your order wrong. All revealed as their essential selves in the silver light of the new sun. Reincarnated into a living afterlife, hell for the humans, heaven (for all he knew) as far as the Changelings were concerned. Maybe he was one of the unlucky ones. Maybe this was the Apocalypse, Judgment had been passed, he had missed out, and being a maggot was bliss. And why should he have survived their fate? Was he so better a person? Was it karma, a blessing, a curse? Had it really been a random event? Had he been spared for a reason? Did God have a stake in this conflict? Or had the sun changed Him, too? Was that God he saw on the screen now, blind head of Medusa snakes churning, like a brain with all its tightly coiled tissues come undone in a cosmic wind?
Even with the TV’s sound so low, he could hear a long, foghorn sound that he knew must have come from that looming giant, rolling over the city like thunder...
Then the image flared again, and was lost for good this time, and after several moments a grim-faced man came on. George found he didn’t want to know what the grim-faced man was saying to the camera.
He taped the note over the man’s face, where Valerie would notice it. Then he tucked a hammer through his belt. A screwdriver with a long blade. He held a butcher knife in his right hand. In his left, he picked up the small metal trash bucket in which he had dropped the excised piece of Valerie’s flesh. A glance at her, then he was mounting the stairs to their kitchen...
Nothing much looked amiss. There was no debris, no chaos. He even heard birds chirping outside, and some wind chimes hanging from his neighbor’s porch tinkled drowsily in the thick, languid air. The shades were down, though, and curtains drawn to keep out the mercury-colored, mercury-poisoned blaze of the sun.
If he boarded all the windows, would the Changelings notice it when they came along this street? Would it only attract their attention? Once again he decided to leave them as they were.
After filling a glass at the sink and downing it, he crept along into the living room. As yet, he had heard no sounds from the floor above, not the slightest creak of a floorboard. It was usually that way, in any case. At a living room window, he peeked out at the street. It had always been a quiet street, even before the end of the world had arrived. No cars. No people. No monsters. Toward the end of the street, though, he saw a crow picking at a scrap of something in the middle of the road. Something crisped black, it appeared.
He unbolted, unlatched the door into the front hallway...cracked it so as to peer out first with one eye...
It was dark in there, with the shade drawn on the small window in the front door. But the thing that lived upstairs was not sleeping in the front hallway, had dragged no charcoal remains of a victim in there with it. Just the bottled up, fermenting heat. He eased himself into the hallway, eased the door shut behind him, heard the lock in the doorknob snick. He had the key in his wallet.
There was no snail trail of slime on the front stairs that led to the second floor. No smudges on the wall, no posts knocked out of the handrail. But it slithered up and down these carpeted steps nightly, silently, he knew. He had heard the front door close, and the screen door slam.
Before creeping up into the murk of the second floor landing, he turned to the front door instead. Opened that, then after looking out of the screen door, opened that too and stepped out onto the porch. He wore no protective hood or long sleeves but he had already poured lighter fluid into the trash can. He danced down the porch steps, placed the bucket in the gutter in front of his house, lit a match and tossed it into the bucket, bolted back onto the shaded porch. He watched until flames started to rise. He’d come back for the bucket after. He didn’t want to linger to smell Valerie’s skin as it cooked. He hoped the rising smoke wouldn’t stir Mrs. Parker from her dreams. Hoped the cooking flesh wouldn’t arouse her appetite.
Back in the hallway. Again, contemplating those shadowed stairs.
Switching the butcher knife to his left hand, George placed his right on the handrail and pulled himself up onto the first step, as though he were hoisting himself up some looming craggy cliff face, howling winds threatening to sweep him off to his death...
If the door were locked, he had the key for that, too. Mrs. Parker had given a spare to Valerie, in case she ever needed to let herself in and assist the old woman. Stroke. Heart attack. But they had never anticipated her current condition. In a nightmare, perhaps.
He was halfway up now, paused there to lean his hearing forward.
He heard a helicopter approach. Pass overhead. Fade. Then silence again. No restless movements from inside the apartment above. Just birds chirping outside. Wind chimes tinkling in barely moving air as thick as stew.
Up the remaining steps...up the perilous cliff face...
There really wasn’t much of a landing outside Mrs. Parker’s door. Just a window with a ledge in front of it, upon which rested a parched, dead plant and a few knickknacks too poignant for him to bring himself to look at. Posed on the top step, he put his shoulder and ear to the door, listening for the last beats from a dying heart. Still no sounds from within. He realized he had already closed his free hand on the brass doorknob. It became slick, immediately, with his sweat.
He wouldn’t need the key; the knob turned in his grip. Mrs. Parker was less afraid of the outside world than he was.
It seemed he took an hour to tease the doorknob around until at last, at last, the metal tong
ue withdrew and the door came open a sliver. He tensed, nauseous with anticipation, with dread, imagining the Changeling lurking on the other side, just waiting to launch itself at him. His heart was a fist clenched tight with the fear that the door would squeal on its hinges. There was no squeal. And when he had the door opened inward six inches, he saw no sign of the apartment’s tenant.
The door was open wide enough for him to poke his head in. He darted looks this way and that...
The shades and curtains were drawn in here against the sun, too. It was gloomy, but he could see that there was disarray. A chair knocked over in the bedroom to the right, and some ceramic trinkets shattered on the floor. To the left was a short hallway with a bathroom and the kitchen branching off it, he recalled, and the living room was at its end. The long strip of rug in the hallway was bunched up and folded over itself, from something heavy having dragged itself across it.
George planted his first step over the threshold. Flowed inside the apartment like smoke. He left the door wide open behind him, in case he had to plunge through it to escape.
Shit, he thought. He could clearly smell the smoke from the trash can fire out in the gutter. Well...for all he knew, the Changelings couldn’t smell, anyway.
Right or left? Bedroom or hallway?
Bedroom, he decided. Bedroom first...
Immediately upon leaning into the room he saw the thing on the bed. Immediately he realized that the burnt smell he’d detected wasn’t coming in from outside, but from this horrible scorched mass.
Though she was all but unidentifiable, he knew this was Mrs. Parker. Too weak, too afraid, to rise from the bed as one or more of the Changelings bore down on her? Or had they killed her – fed on her – elsewhere, and merely left her remains here? He could see a wedding ring on one black stick of a finger, and a familiar steel medical ID bracelet around a crumbly ebon wrist. Yes...there was no question...it was her.
So – the noises they had heard over the past few weeks. Not Mrs. Parker coming and going in the night...but one or more of their other neighbors, they turned into Changelings, returning to feed on her repeatedly...
He was infused with guilt. If only he and Valerie had got to her first. Rescued her, brought her down in the cellar with them. They had panicked, thought only of themselves the first night they saw the Changelings in the streets. They had assumed Mrs. Parker had become one of them, as so many had. Yes, they had tried to call her later that night on Valerie’s cell phone (phones were still working up until a week ago). There had been no answer. They had called, from the basement, repeatedly in fact. But still, they had assumed too much. What if she had been too weakened with fear to rise from her bed to answer the phone? How long, how long had she been alive before the first Changeling reached her? He could only hope that they had got her that first night. That she hadn’t been alone up here, terrified and confused, for long...
In a closet he found a spare blanket, and he covered her body entirely with it. There wasn’t much to conceal, anyway; she was more like the remnants of a campfire than a human being.
Now, he took an empty pillowcase for a sack and turned back toward the hallway that led to the kitchen...grief and guilt already nudged aside, replaced with relief that his upstairs neighbor was not a Changeling and the realization that her kitchen could be ransacked for food. Maybe there were even some items in the fridge that hadn’t expired; frozen dinners they could cook in the microwave downstairs, their own stock of these having run out already.
For a few moments he just stood in front of the open fridge and freezer doors, basking in the chilly air as it wafted over him. There were indeed frozen dinners they could cook in the microwave they had carried down to the cellar. He dropped these into the bag. The milk in the refrigerator was obviously bad, but there was a half-full bottle of root beer. Cheese slices. And the cupboards around him had to be full of boxes of cereal they could eat dry, cookies, crackers, canned vegetables, canned tuna and meat and...
The Changeling reared up to fill the narrow threshold that led into the hallway, blocking his exit, trapping him here in the kitchen.
The high, almost electronic chittering sound it made was like knitting needles driven into both ears until the points clashed against each other in the center of his brain.
George had never seen one in the light before. Had never seen one of them this close. And they hadn’t seen him, before, either. Not in their present incarnation, at least.
(On TV one night, he had watched an afflicted patient in some military base’s hospital transform into a Changeling. It was not a gradual process. It seemed that the pale medallion-like shape – whether burned onto a chest, back, thigh, or forehead – would abruptly became an open, swirling vortex of flesh. A volcanic crater, out of which lava poured furiously, instantaneously, in all directions...covering and consuming the body. But this lava was really a translucent, silvery matter like the gelatin a canned ham came packed in. And when the entire form was encased, the arms absorbed and shortened until they were less than nubs, the legs fusing into a dolphin-like tail but without the flukes at the end, it resembled nothing so much as a kind of cocoon woven from raw protoplasm. In less than a minute, the afflicted person on TV had transformed into what had appeared in front of George now.)
Though the Changelings most often moved about on their bellies – flopping awkwardly, horribly, fish drowning in air – they could also rear up like a cobra, as this one did. Their convulsive wriggling movements and gelatinous appearance suggested a snail or some other mollusk...boneless...but this creature was vaguely backlit by a shaded window, and George could just make out the silhouette of a human skeleton, largely intact, buried at the center of the rubbery, silvery flesh...
The neck of the thing, if it could be designated as such, was surmounted by a writhing forest of translucent arms, the same faint green color as the sun’s new halo. It reminded George of that towering sea anemone creature he had seen on television only a short while ago. The Changelings’ leader? Their god? Or would all the Changelings, eventually, grow to such a scale?
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted, and backed off, holding the knife out in front of him. Passing it quickly to his left, he scooped up a large can of tomato sauce from the counter and hurled it at the thing as if it were a grenade. The can thumped off its neck, and the creature recoiled just slightly. Instead of its high chittering, it gave out a low, deep croak that made the windows and his eardrums rattle. Day voice. It wasn’t much better than night’s bleated chants...
The eyeless head lowered. The undulating stubby tendrils parted to reveal, at their center, like the pistil of a flower, a circular lipless mouth – a toothless black well of a mouth slicked with a thick mucus, silver as melted metal. Wisps of smoke began curling out of the foul-smelling gullet, and even across the room from it George began to feel the intense heat generated within the thing’s guts...which could be seen through the flesh of its body as mere cloudy shadows grouped around the human skeleton that was its core, and the only remaining evidence that it had once been human.
Somehow a horrible thought pierced through his crackling terror...
It had once been human.
But where had it come from just now?
Up the stairs, behind him? Following him into the apartment? But it was sunny out. It couldn’t have come from outside...
It might have come from the basement, however.
“Valerie,” he whispered. “Oh my God...Val...”
Then their improvised surgery had been in vain. It had come too late. The new sun’s poisons already too assimilated by her system...her cells already tainted, mutated...
“Val!” He screamed it this time, as though he might actually appeal to the creature for reason, for mercy.
It inched its bulk into the room. Backing him up more against the counter. He made a threatening lunge with the knife to keep it at bay, and picked up a coffee can to hurl at it next, though this was three-quarters empty.
More
smoke streamed out of its throat. The air actually began to ripple fluidly in front of its gaping mouth, a dragon bringing up its flame. That round, black hole of a mouth whose celestial opposite blazed in the heavens outside...
There was a window over the sink behind him; he knew it was probably too small for him to fit through, and if he turned his back on the Changeling it would surely seize hold of him before he could even open it, no matter how sluggish or disoriented the nocturnal creature might be in these hours of daylight...
Daylight.
He threw the coffee can; the entity jolted back with another rumbling sound, though the can bounced off its tentacles lightly. But it gave him the seconds he needed to spin, grab hold of the window’s drawn shade, pull its edge and let it go. The shade sprang up, the sunlight sprang in. The Changeling had no eyes, but its skin must be sensitive to the direct sunlight, however that light might have spawned these beings in the first place. With a louder croak than before, a sound that vibrated the bones in his body, the Changeling began to withdraw from the threshold. It did not ignite, did not turn to ash, like some vampire...and because the light was just as dangerous to him as it was to the creature, he had to duck down below the edge of the counter...but he knew he had a chance now to escape the thing. If he could just get it to withdraw fully to the landing, he might be able to turn down the hallway into the living room, where there was a back door and external wooden fire escape as dictated by law. He’d be in the sun, but he’d be able to race around the house to the porch again...
He heard a sound that was maybe a hawk screeching, maybe a human cry. At first he thought this was some new sound the creature had made (an expression of pain, he hoped), but then he heard a loud humming thwack of metal against the Changeling’s body. It looked as though there was a person inside it, besides its own undigested skeleton. But the person was not inside it; behind it, and this time he saw the spade rise up and crash down on its body again.
Doomsdays Page 11
