Splinters

by Matt Carter

  had done to such a beautiful animal. It had wandered into the street, confused, probably hungry, and now it was going to die in pain because of what I had done. It looked at me accusingly, its beady eyes almost glimmering in the faint glow of the streetlights. For a moment, it almost looked human.

  After that, things started happening extremely fast.

  The deer cocked its head with a sound like snapping wood. It opened its mouth, I thought to let out another pitiful bleat. Instead, it let out a high-pitched, warbling roar that sounded like an unholy cross between a bird of prey, a rattlesnake, and a pig being slaughtered, punctuated with more loud, wooden-sounding cracks and pops. The deer’s whole body shuddered violently, and shapes that looked like several different, angry animals trying to escape shifted beneath its fur. Its neck contorted horribly to the side. It opened its mouth for another roar, too wide, its bottom jaw seeming to detach completely before splitting in two like an insect’s mandibles.

  Each separate prong of its antlers opened at the tip like a carnivorous tropical flower, and when I found myself looking into the glowing buds of a dozen-odd eyes, some segmented like insects, some horribly human, I felt ready to go completely insane.

  Thankfully, Mina kept a clearer head. Without fear or hesitation, she approached the deer monstrosity with the lighter and red cylinder she’d pulled from her purse at the ready. Calmly, almost mechanically, she used them to aim a stream of flame at the beast. It dodged easily, barely singeing its fur as it let out another of its terrible roars. The deer beast turned its head to me, the thing now lopsided with large, tumorous growths, opening its mandibled mouth wide.

  I stood in shock, transfixed by the horror before me as it spat a black, gecko-like tongue at me. It wrapped around my legs like a snake, pulling me to the ground. Hitting the asphalt brought me back to my senses somewhat, enough to have me clawing at the ground and crying out for help as the powerful tongue dragged me closer to the monster’s mouth. I could feel its mandibles closing around my shoes, the stinking slime of its mouth dripping on my bare leg.

  Then there was Mina, pulling a large knife from her bag and darting over to me. With practiced precision, she forced both of her hands into the deer’s mouth, hacking at the tongue and dropping me to the ground. The beast let out an indignant howl as it backed away, and, for a brief moment, I felt relief.

  The next thing I felt was the tongue, still wrapped around my ankles, growing hundreds of centipede-like legs before it started to crawl quickly up my body toward my mouth.

  “Get it off, get it off of me!” I cried as I fought with the powerful creature.

  “I’m trying!” Mina said as she knelt down beside me, helping me wrestle with the tongue-centipede. After we broke its death grip around one of my legs, she scrambled back to her bag, picking up her improvised flamethrower.

  “Throw it!” she yelled, motioning to an empty section of street. She didn’t have to tell me twice. With all my strength, I hurled the writhing monstrosity onto the street’s double-yellow line. A jet of fire spat out of her flamethrower, engulfing the tongue-centipede, which crackled and screamed and skittered toward the forest.

  The deer monster let out another of its roars. I turned, watched as its body stretched and contorted with that same terrible snapping wood sound. The fencepost I had rammed into its side wobbled about, was sucked into its body, and rocketed out the other side, clattering bloodily into the street. The gaping wounds I had made in its side began to stretch and widen, splitting open as the deer monster ripped itself in half.

  The two halves toddled about unsteadily at first, but new limbs soon grew in to remedy that problem. Three giant spider-like legs burst from the back of the front half, while the back half grew one large, thick leg that ended in what looked like a clawed hand. Where organs should have been, the back half grew a toothy, triangular mouth rimmed with black eyes and tentacles ending in vicious-looking hooves. Two large, crab-like arms burst from the side and clicked threateningly as the creature tested out its new limbs.

  “One for each of us,” Mina said. She looked scared. I didn’t know she could look scared. She went to her bag, pulling out the goo-streaked knife she’d saved me with and what looked like a disposable camera with two muted metallic spikes sticking out of one end. She put each weapon in one of my hands before picking up her jury-rigged flamethrower.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Improvised stun gun. You’ll get one or two shots at most, but it should help. Creature Splinters are very hard to kill, but they are not very smart, and they can feel pain. Hurt it, keep it distracted while I kill the other one with fire, then I’ll deal with yours,” she said simply.

  “That’ll work?” I asked.

  “Probably,” she replied humorlessly.

  As I looked at the two monstrosities standing before us, finally finished transforming, I thought it was a task that was easier said than done. Then they charged us, and I didn’t have much time for thinking.

  It was not an organized fight, nor was it a clean one. We didn’t choose our targets, we didn’t decide the terms of engagement, we just fought for our lives. I mostly fought the back half, dodging the clumsy swipes of its claws as I tried to get in every stab I could with Mina’s large knife. Jamming her improvised stun gun into a particularly soft part, I watched the creature go rigid and shudder violently, howling in pain. Then it knocked me back to the ground. Without even thinking, Mina helped me to my feet. A moment later, I was doing the exact same for her after the deer-front sent her rolling roughly on the asphalt.

  The ground was streaked with whatever it was this creature considered blood and stray bits of flesh as I hacked at it and Mina kept it at bay with the flames. With the way the creature grew new body parts and shifted its old ones whenever we hurt it, it was impossible to tell what progress we were making. I looked to Mina to see if she knew what was happening—her face only showed determined ferocity.

  Still, we must have been doing something right. After only a few minutes of fighting, the two limping, shuddering halves of the deer monster limped back together, reconnecting in a mess of distorted limbs and hastily-grown tentacles. Though it looked fully capable of healing itself, we had clearly hurt it badly.

  With our backs to the SUV, the panting, grunting deer-monster stood before us, looking fully ready to charge again. Though hobbling about on no fewer than nine mismatched legs, it darted for us with startling speed. We jumped out of the way, watching it hit the SUV like a freight train, crushing in its side and smashing all of its windows. I expected it to turn on us at any moment, ripping through the SUV like tissue paper, but something unexpected happened.

  It was stuck.

  Its antlers, so wide and jagged, were lodged tightly in the shattered remains of the car. It thrashed about and howled its unholy howl as it struggled to get out, and, in a moment, it would probably just shed the antlers and be back to chasing us down.

  Then I smelled it. The rich, unpleasant smell of gasoline. A puddle was forming beneath the car; it must have ruptured the gas tank when it hit.

  “Mina,” I said, pointing at the puddle.

  She knew what to do. Aiming her crude flamethrower beneath the car, she let out a quick, short blast of fire. It caught quickly, and we began to run down the street.

  I didn’t see the car explode, but I saw the night sky light up, could feel the heat licking at my back and the pieces of debris raining down around us (the SUV’s jaunty vanity plate reading CATDOC nearly clocking me in the back of the head). The creature’s horrible, strangled screams filled the air. Lights came on in the house the SUV was parked in front of, and a bald, middle-aged man in glasses came running outside. I watched him grabbing at his head, screaming about his car, blissfully unaware of the horror that burned to death inside of it. If the last ten minutes had been any less terrifying, I would have felt guilty about what we had done to him.

  We ran around the corner. I was panting and ready to fall over. Despi
te some scrapes and bruises, Mina looked surprisingly composed.

  Finally gathering myself a bit, I said, “You were right.”

  “I know,” Mina said, without adding, I told you so. “You’re bleeding,” she said, eying the gash on my back.

  “So are you.” I pointed at the scrapes on her forearms.

  She looked at them idly, as if just noticing she had arms. “So I am. I’ve got a very comprehensive first-aid kit in my room. If you come with me, I’ll help fix you up.”

  It wasn’t a request. She began walking, and though I still didn’t entirely trust her, it’s hard not to follow someone after sharing an experience like that.

  9.

  What That Was

  Mina

  I was stuck working by a strongly scented ginger candle perched awkwardly on the windowsill. It had been between that and turning Ben around so the injury faced the light by the doorway. There was no telling when Mom might come home, open that door, and ask me for a rundown. At least the flame made a convenient place to sterilize the needle.

  Not for the first time, Ben’s phone and mine announced almost simultaneous incoming messages.

  Haley.

  Aldo.

  Neither of us looked. We’d each answered once that we were safe, full details to follow, but we still hadn’t discussed what those full details were, so there was nothing more to report.

  There had been no time to rearrange the room for his benefit. It was slightly guarded against Mom, with the decoys prominently displayed on the board and mentions of the Council minimized, but the shots of Ben and other subjects who had obviously not been saying “cheese” at the time were hard to miss.

  “You haven’t stopped watching me for a moment, have you?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t try to pull the needle away and run for the door, but I still felt like I should try to justify myself.

  “I couldn’t just leave you unprotected.”

  It looked at first like he might protest, but he didn’t. Maybe the gaping Splinter-inflicted hole in his back had something to do with that.

  “You’re . . . not bad at this.” He changed the subject. The position of the gouge seemed to have him more worried than the severity because it prevented him from supervising my work. “You’ve, um, done it before? For real?”

  “As often as I’ve had to. More often than I’d like,” I answered. “We don’t go to the med center if we can help it. Too isolated, too many potential Splinters, too many excuses to get someone alone for long periods of time.”

  He didn’t jump on this opportunity to contradict me. He even looked like he might be thinking about all the time Haley had spent there, not that it had mattered for her by then. I kept stitching as quickly as I could, trying to get it over with the way Aldo always asked me to while squirming and slowing me down.

  Ben, on the other hand, had turned down both the whiskey and the biting stick I kept for Aldo, didn’t comment on my pace, and barely winced when I pushed the needle through. If he hadn’t been gripping my bed frame so hard, I would have wondered if he could feel it at all. I couldn’t see his hand, but I could feel it shaking all the way through the mattress.

  “If you could go to the med center, would they know how to handle it?” he asked with a forced smile. “I mean, do you do anything special to it?”

  “No, just the usual things. Garlic. Aconite.” I broke a bulb off one of the garlands around my bed and hit it against the wall to break off a few cloves. “You’ll probably want a buddy to remind you when to reapply it for the first few lunar cycles, but the condition’s perfectly manageable with proper education.”

  The shaking spread beyond his arm for a moment, and he let go of the bed just long enough to run his hand nerv­ously through his heartthrob hair, setting the sweatier parts on end.

  “S-seriously?”

  “No.”

  It took him most of the length of a stitch to respond.

  “Did you just make a joke?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited for the space between stitches where I was in less danger of slipping before throwing the loose cloves over his shoulder at me.

  “That’s not funny!”

  “It isn’t? Huh. I was sure it was.” I let him wait while I brushed the garlic skin out of my way. “They’ve sliced me up plenty of times,” I admitted. “There aren’t any side effects, and they don’t seem to be able to copy humans without getting them to wherever it is they take them.” I pulled the next stitch through maybe harder than I needed to. “But of course, if I hadn’t been cornered under a gas tank and a layer of flammable residue, I could have taken care of it faster.”

  “If you hadn’t been under that car, I’d be the one sewing you back together!” he snapped. “And I didn’t hear you arguing when it was charging you!”

  “I didn’t have much choice when it was charging,” I pointed out, “after all the time you wasted getting in the way, comparing how tall you were!”

  “That would have made a real deer back off!”

  “Well, it wasn’t a real deer, was it? And if you’d listened to me, you would have known that it wouldn’t care how big you were or what you stabbed it with or how bravely you can stand your ground!”

  I expected him to argue back again, and when he didn’t, I thought back over what I’d said and wished I’d said it another way.

  “ . . . Brave?”

  “I don’t mean it was a good thing to—”

  “Thanks for not letting it get me.”

  I took a stitch to find what felt like the correct answer to this. “Thanks for trying not to let it get me either.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I waited until I was tying off the suture to ask the next question, to make sure it was definitely my best possible guess. I wanted to get it right.

  “Are we bonding now?”

  He glanced back at me, as far as he could with the needle still attached, as if checking. “I’m not sure.”

  I cut the thread, poured an extra splash of rubbing alcohol over the finished job, topped it off with a layer of Neosporin, and covered it with one of the extra-large adhesive bandages in the kit I keep under my bed. He tensed harder against the sting for a moment before finally letting go of the bed again.

  He turned around to look at me, and even though his was just an ordinary, genuinely human body, something I’d spent hours upon hours researching, hoping to find some detail that the Splinters couldn’t replicate, I had some difficulty looking at him until he’d untangled his shirt and pulled it back on.

  Even then it wasn’t effortless.

  I’d washed my hands and the places where the skin was missing from my arms before getting to work on Ben, and I’d told myself the rest could wait until I could hear him on the program bug, safe as he could be in that guestroom bed.

  I’d have to get in and plant some better bugs soon, I realized. Its battery had to be on its last legs.

  I was arranging my kit for storage when Ben pulled it across the bed toward himself before I could close the lid. He stretched one of my arms across his leg, and started to roll back my sleeves. I pulled away.

  “You’ll feel better when we get it over with.”

  He said this as firmly as he kept his grip on my right hand, thinking I might be hesitating over the pain. I hoped, when he peeled the fabric away, that the abrasions might be bad enough to stop him from noticing anything else.

  They weren’t.

  I’m a quick healer. Everything from fractures to the flu, I can shake off in well below-average time. My skin is very difficult to scar, but the life I live has been more than up to the challenge. A particularly deep gash circles my right arm just below the elbow, branching down toward my wrist in a few places. Ben startled slightly when he saw it and then politely tried to look at any other part of my arm as if he hadn’t noticed it at all.

  “This isn’t my first Splinter attack,” I explained.

  “What was that
one pretending to be?” Ben asked, glancing back at the twisted, bone-deep, purplish trench in my skin. “A cougar?”

  Yes, I should have lied.

  “A bear?” Ben gave me another chance, but I didn’t take it.

  “ . . . A person?”

  I could see him already trying to come up with a rational explanation, probably imagining some ordinary human hurting me badly enough that I’d had to construct the Splinter-filled hell I live in just to process it, before his eyes shifted back to the fresh scrapes, remnants of the very real Splinter attack he’d just lived through with me. What exactly he made of this, he didn’t say. He just doused my tweezers in alcohol as easily as if he handled them every day and started picking the leftover bits of mulch and stray asphalt out of my skin. I didn’t object.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “Now nothing,” I said. “Now you go back to your mom and the Perkinses and enjoy the rest of your visit, and I go back to keeping the Splinters off of you until you can make a safe distance, and maybe I’ll be able to do it a little better if you don’t make me pretend I’m not doing it at all.”

  “No lecture?” he asked. “No Splinters 101: There’s More to Them than Killer Deer?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?” he asked.

  “You would have gone to the center if I hadn’t.”

  “What happened to ‘you need to hear this whether you believe it or not?’ What happened to ‘I need you to join my crusade?’”

  “You turned me down,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, so now you’re done talking to me?” He sounded hurt, as if I were accusing him of making the wrong choice instead of the right one. “Okay, fine. I’ll start, and you can tell me when I go wrong.” He selected every word slowly and carefully while he collected all the little unidentified fragments from my arm in an old Petri dish that had never been able to contain a specimen for any useful length of time. “I think . . . I think we were attacked by something I’ve never seen before, or heard about, or read about, something that’s not in any textbook, and I think you’re maybe the only person who can tell me what it was. I think there’s something freaky as hell going on in this town and a lot of people in it creep me out.” He started on my other arm. “I think you know something other people don’t know, or won’t say, but I don’t think that’s proof that there are things like that passing for human, never mind that any of the particular humans I know are like that. That’s what I think,” he concluded. “How am I doing?”