“I’m full up,” The manager said. “No vacancy.” The man didn’t answer. He leaned, pushing his face inside the office. The manager pointed his shotgun at the man’s face. The gentleness left the vagrant’s eyes.
“Drugs?” The manager screamed in the other’s face. “Are you high? Fuck off or I’m going to blow your brains all over the fucking parking lot. The only person who’ll give a shit you’re dead is the pissed off wetback I’m going to have clean up your skull fragments in the morning.” The blanket dropped from the vagrant’s sloped shoulders, revealing his nakedness.
“What the hell?” The manager said as his eyes ran over the shrunken hull at the end of his gun. The grey man’s mouth dropped open to reveal rotten gums in a toothless mouth. Saliva seeped to the floor, thin tentacles glittering with razor sharp spines around black suction cups lowered from his jaw. The manager pulled the trigger. The shotgun didn’t fire. He pawed frantically at the safety with his thumb. The tentacles shot forward. The manager dodged with speed that belied his bulk. The appendages missed the manager’s heart, but stuck home in his left shoulder. The grey man inhaled. The manager shrieked as pain shot through his being. Muscles and sinew wrenched inside his body. He looked at his shoulder and could see it shrinking before his eyes.
“Eaten,” He thought. “I’m being eaten.” The manager struggled with the grey man in wild panic. Mere seconds had passed, but time seemed to slow where each moment felt like eternity. The office manager’s left hand ripped at his assailant’s face. He plunged a thumb into the grey man’s right eye, but the orb yielded like water against rock. A moment later, defense was impossible. The manager felt all the strength leave his arm. The flesh sank from the limb. His emaciated fingers curled inward. Rolls of skin hung limp off the bone. The grey man arched his back and heaved to get the last of the fluid. The wizened lines of the man filled out. His body tinged a healthy hue as the office manager’s body fluids filled it.
The tentacle spikes sank deeper into the manager’s body. They thrust into his main body cavity. The manager felt the world go black. In a desperate effort, he swung the shotgun with his right hand and hit his attacker across the face. The manager jammed the butt of the shotgun against his leg and pumped the already chambered weapon using his body as leverage for his right hand. He fired at point blank range. The bullet tore through the creature’s belly. Gore exploded out its lower back. The backfire knocked the manager to the floor. The tentacles ripped out of his shoulder with the fall. The manager fell. His bones, without muscle or blood, splintered under the impact of his body. The pain begged unconsciousness, but the manager slammed the butt of the shotgun against the floor, chambering and firing another round. The creature was blasted out of the doorway. It held its hands against its stomach, trying to stop the torrent of blood streaming onto the motel walkway. Its pinkish flesh quickly dissolved back to its grey. The manager watched as the mandibles slid back down the creature’s throat. The thing looked up from his wound at the manager. Its yellowed eyes showing neither feeling nor pain.
“Die,” The manager said. “Fucking die, you fucking thing.” The creature took a step forward. The office manager sat up. Pain from his arm shook his frame. He pointed the shotgun at the creature. “I’ve got another one ready for you.” The creature stepped back, walked away from office, and toward the line of motel rooms. The manager dropped to the floor, passing out completely.
The creature shambled down the corridor of motel rooms. It’s bloody hand testing each doorknob as it passed. Each door it tried was locked. It kept moving, finally coming to room three. It reached for the doorknob but saw the door was slightly ajar. It pushed the door open and walked inside.
***
Derek dreamed of his daughter. He sitting on his couch watching her run round and round the living room. She was a delightful four-year-old. Her hair stuck out in all directions in unkempt, thick curls. She wore her usual self-selected crazy attire. This time it was a Superman cape, rain boots and a princess tiara. She was making herself dizzy and squealing with happiness. Derek fought the urge to stop her running. He was worried she would get hurt. She fell to the floor and laughed as the world spun before her eyes. She stood up once her vision steadied, and ran over to her father. She tugged Derek’s pants leg, begging him to come and play. Derek felt too tired to get up and play with her. He told her to keep running, and he would be right here watching. His daughter continued to tug at his leg. She punched him playfully on the thigh. His thigh hurt from the blow. He told his child to be gentle. She whimpered at his gentle discipline and went back to tugging at his pants leg. She pulled so hard that Derek began to slip from the couch. He told her to take it easy. He was beginning to be frightened of her strength. She leaned over and bit his thigh. Blood spouted, splashing over her face and hanging in droplets from her curls. She pulled hard, ripping him off the couch and onto the floor. He screamed. His daughter jabbed her cherub hand into his thigh. She shoved hard, pushing her hand into his leg up to her elbow. She tried to pull her hand out but was stuck. She began to cry. Derek reached out and patted her blood splattered cheek, trying to comfort her. He reached his other hand over and grasped her stuck arm by the elbow. He pulled, but her hand was stuck. Blood welled from the hole. He pulled again. The arm wouldn’t budge. His daughter began to cry harder. He tugged and said soothing words to his little girl.
Derek woke to his body being roughly jarred and shaken. His eyes melted open. His vision was blurred. He blinked but his eyelids were empty of moisture. His leg was throbbing. He felt his hand gripping wet and warm, yielding yet firm like the aged stalk of a thick plant. Pain ripped through his leg. He could feel a pulling sensation from his hip to his calf. His vision cleared. He looked at his lower body to see the creature hunched over his leg. Its mouth tentacles stuck deep into Derek’s emaciated thigh. Derek gasped in horror drenched awe as the man-thing sucked his leg dry. He screamed, tearing at the creature’s tentacles. Derek could feel the ready, rhythmic pumping of his life’s blood being sucked into the parasite. The motel room floor was covered in blood. Every ounce of Derek it took into its body seeped out of its gut-shot stomach. Derek pulled at the creature’s undulating mandibles but they wouldn’t budge. Derek reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out a thick folding knife. He let go of the creature’s tentacles and opened the blade.
The pain in his leg seared though him as he leaned forward and plunged the knife into the creature’s throat. Over and over he stabbed. His efforts only made the creature suck harder. Derek stopped stabbing the throat and slashed at the creature’s tentacles. He made a cut deeply into many, but didn’t sever any completely. Upon receiving the gash the creature pulled the tentacles back into its mouth and lunged forward, punching Derek in the face. Derek braced against the blow, but it came softer then he thought. The expected the hard bones of the creature’s knuckles were of the density of soft cartilage. He was struck across the bridge of the nose. It was like getting slapped in the face with a cooked salmon. The back of his head bounced off the floor from the blow, but it didn’t hurt him. It only succeeded in clearing his alcohol addled head.
Derek rose at his torso and slashed with the blade, looking to kill. He cut a gash in the creature’s chest. The creature stood up, trying to get out of reach of the knife. Derek lunged with his blade. He jammed the knife into the creature’s groin, cutting its penis in half. The creature fell backwards against the motel wall, knocking over its ancient RCA television. Derek tried to stand but his left leg buckled and broke under his weight at the knee. He screamed a slew of curses and grabbed his destroyed leg. Ice seemed to crawl up his body. Incredibly to him, his hands fit easily around his appendage. His broken leg was four times smaller than his other one. All tissue was drained from it, leaving nothing but sagging skin and bone. He fought hysteria at his disbelief at what he was seeing.
The door to the room banged open. The manager, bloodied and half his body shrunken from the creature’s feeding, stepped
into the room. His shotgun held in his right hand and steadied by the skeletal fragments of his left arm. He fired at the creature. The bullet exploded against the creature’s left thigh, amputating its leg. It fell to the floor and writhed like a leech in a bucket of blood. The recoil of the blast dislocated the office manager’s right shoulder. He fell in a heap on the floor.
“Hey asshole,” Derek said. “I want my twenty bucks back.”
“No refunds,” The manager said.
The creature sprang from the floor. It seemed to defy gravity as it vaulted in an eight-foot arc from across the room. It’s body akimbo in its leaping assault. A mass of blood, torn flesh and dead eyes, it landed on the manager. Its mouth opened, shooting out its wounded tentacles like a blanket of cut eels. They impaled the manager through his left eye and jammed into the center of his brain. The creature sucked hard. The office manager’s head imploded. The creature vacuumed out the man with dizzying quickness. The skin of the man, once stretched taut by obesity, fell about him like rolls of fabric. The genetic matter leaked in red waves from the wounds of the creature. Derek watched in awe as the creature turned toward him and launched again. It pinned him to the ground.
The tentacles shot toward Derek’s eye just as he punched the creature on the temple. The blow was enough to make the deadly nozzles of the beast miss him and scrape the carpet next to his head. Derek grabbed at the tentacles quicker than the creature could pull it away. He bit down on the clot of rope-flesh and ripped his head sideways, tearing the creature’s mouthpiece in half. The creature reared back and put its hands over its mouth. It fell sideways. Derek pulled himself forward, ignoring the throbbing pain of his dead leg. He ripped his knife out of the beast’s groin and tried to stab it in the face. He missed. He swung again but his immobile leg made his movements almost comical. The creature slid away from him.
“You’re hurting now? Aren’t you?” Derek said. He brandished the knife at the beast. He saw the yellow eyes look over his head at the door behind him. “You want to leave? Just try and get passed me. A couple more slices at that ugly face of yours is all I need to end you.”
The creature turned toward an A/C wall vent and ripped it off, exposing the small ventilation duct. It stuffed itself head first into the hole. The creature pushed and rolled. Derek laughed.
“I don’t see where the hell you think you’re going,” Derek said. Suddenly a large jettison of blood flooded from the creature’s body, striking Derek with such force that it drove him backwards. The creature emptied itself of fluid as it impossibly crammed itself into the ductwork tube. Derek crawled toward it. The intensity of his agony made every movement a monument of torture. Inches felt like miles. Derek saw the creature work its body over halfway into the ductwork tube. He remembered the feeling of the creature’s soft bones when it struck him as he saw its hips flex, bend and fold into impossible smallness. Derek gave up his crawling. He knew there was no way he was going to catch the creature before it escaped through the hole. Seconds later, it was gone.
Derek rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. His breath came in short gasps. He was delirious from the pain in his leg. He felt the pulsating ache of the dry and shriveled appendage. He wondered just how much the creature took from him. He wondered how dead he was from the waist down. He heard a noise at the door and raised his head to see what it was. Standing in the doorway were three of the grey men. Their sunken eyes burned yellow. Their mouths were open, salivating tentacles drooped from their jaws. Their skin was deeply lined with the texture of a dry corn husk.
“I’ve really go t to learn to lock that door,” Derek said. He looked down at his body. Blood seeped from the puncture in his leg. He felt dreadfully week. “There’s not much left of me,” Derek said. “Enjoy the fucking appetizer.”
They set upon him.
Justin Hunter has four published novels. JWK Fiction has published his dark fiction novel, Nostalgia. Severed Press has published the black horror comedy series Chet & Floyd vs. the Apocalypse: Volumes 1 and 2. MorbidbookS released a hardcore bizarre genre novel, What's Eating Keegan the Vegan. Justin Hunter has also been published in several anthologies from presses including J. Ellington Ashton Press, Emby Press, Strangehouse Books, JWK Fiction, NoodleDoodle Publications, and Great Old Ones Publishing. Mr. Hunter is also an ongoing contributing author to the flash horror anthology Demonic Visions series.
A NATURAL MOTHER
AMANDA M. LYONS
“Babe, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be-”
“No, no you just aren’t being supportive, and you know that doesn’t help with all of this going on. Let me try, let me make the effort.”
He can see how tired she is, the baby nestled in close to her breast and nursing while she tries to stay calm, to not take the news too badly. She’s been at this for a few months now, struggling to make the baby’s weight come up and nursing so often that she can hardly do anything else. Some of it is the normal stuff; he knows that, but this? She’s struggling and sometimes he worries she might have post partum, that she could-He speaks before the thought can come again, circling like a vulture in his thoughts.
“The lactation lady says that she’s not gaining the weight on your milk alone, that we’re going to have to consider supplementation. I know you’re trying, babe, I know how badly you wanted this to work, just you, but…”
He watches the tears as they start to fall from her eyes, tracing down the lines that seem to never leave her face, and he can’t help but look away, to try and make the words come out of his mouth one more time, in the hope that he’ll be able to sway her. “We’re going to have to get that can of formula down; we’re going to have to consider giving it to her so she gets enough. She said they have this thing, this SNS? That can help you give it to her and still have her getting your milk-”
“That’s giving up! It’s failure! It means I failed to be a real mother, it means I will never be enough! Don’t you understand?” She was a weeping mess, Caroline letting go of her breast and joining her with a confused and despairing wail he could hardly bear to listen to, not after so many nights like this. So he went outside for a cigarette, hoping that she could calm down a little, feed the baby a little more, and get some sleep. If nothing else, he knew that he was a good man, that he was trying to be a good husband and father to his family. He was trying and, in time, she would have to listen. At her heart, Emily was a great mother who loved both of them more than anything else in the world. She wouldn’t risk her daughter’s health to live up to this ideal; she just didn’t want to feel as if she had failed at something that meant so much to her, not after everything else that had gone wrong.
That was the heart of the matter. Things had gone wrong, she had struggled to create, she had struggled to have so many things in her life that everything that didn’t turn out as she’d hoped became a failure. Everything she counted as a failure ate her up, made her afraid that nothing would ever be right for her. He’d heard it all often enough, had listened as she listed off all of the things she was not able to manage in her life. He loved her so much, but goddamn it he wished she could see past all of it.
It wasn’t that he didn’t get it, wasn’t that he didn’t understand. Losing their first baby, a boy, had hurt them both; losing her mother had driven daggers into her shortly after the loss of the baby. He got those; he understood the complexity of them, the pain and the anxiety that things would never be the same. What he couldn’t get past was the blame, the mountain of guilt that she dumped onto herself each time. It drove daggers into his heart; it made him want to scream, to roar at her. You’re enough, damn it! You are enough, and you have always been what I wanted, what I needed. When you are like this, when you can’t even see the strength in your heart and the weight of your beauty I want to-I want to explode, but most of all I want to cry and I want to tell you to stop, that it hurts me more than it even hurts you. I-
“Babe? She’s asleep, um, do you mind if I get a shower?” He takes a d
eep breath and turns to look at her silhouetted in the light of the kitchen’s open door. He loves her; he loves her more than anything, and so he takes her in his arms, gives her a kiss and nods.
“Yeah, babe, go ahead, and I’ll make us something to eat, that’ll help. I got her if she wakes up, don’t worry.”
After the first solid rest she and Caroline had had in days, she seemed to be feeling a lot better. So he came up with an idea, a little outing to keep the mood going. “Hey, Em! Did you want to go to the bookstore, maybe get some books and a bite to eat?”
He could hear her little giggle of delight from the other room and smiled. “Yeah, babe, that sounds great!”
They wound up going for burgers at a takeout place before they did anything else, hunger and the sheer pleasure of avoiding cleanup and cooking a godsend after weeks of trying to keep up with it all. Caroline dozed off in her car seat as they ate, and he let her go in on her own. At least until the baby woke up, that was what he told her as she left. Lost in his phone for a bit, he didn’t realize how much time had passed, not until Em came out, all apologetic, but in high spirits.
“I know the consultant told us it was hopeless to go without supplementing, and if it doesn’t work I really will listen, but I think I may have something. I found a book, a book of holistic methods for mothers. Well, that and a stack of my gothics.” She blushed a pretty pink, and she looked so much more like herself that he didn’t even question it, didn’t dare to, not now.
Within Stranger Aeons Page 20
