Night of the Mannequins

by Stephen Graham Jones

  It had been the same superhero movie we’d taken Manny to. I guess—I guess, working there, she only ever saw the credits and the after-scene, right? And, since we’d all watched the first two together so many times, now that she was shut off from us, pissed at us like she should have been, she could still sort of hang out with us by watching the third movie. Or maybe she just wanted to see it, yeah. Mom’s right, I always do make things more complicated, see motivations and agendas where there’s not much of anything.

  Still, this movie?

  “No, no, no,” I said, and shut my laptop, held it down with my hand like the truth was trying to rise up, force itself on me.

  That it was that movie downloading, it told me all I needed to know about how the world was working.

  What had happened was some trucker had been lollygagging down the road half-asleep—“lollygag” is my dad’s second-favorite word, and his favorite for his first son—but that trucker had been just driving half-asleep like they do, zombies of the highway, and he’d taken the exit without even registering he was leaving the interstate, and then something that had been crouched down on the road in front of him stood up all at once: a mannequin juiced on Miracle-Gro, grown up to sixteen or eighteen feet tall, probably. Maybe twenty. Anybody would have swerved away from hitting a walking nightmare like that, wouldn’t they?

  Shanna was surely already dead by the time Manny stood up into those headlights, though. He had killed her somehow, probably just strangled her with his plastic hands, then directed the truck through her wall to cover his tracks. That was why they hadn’t been able to properly tell what smear of meat was her, what was her mom, which was her little brother, what was dog and what was human.

  It had to be like that, though, for Manny.

  Otherwise we might clue in that he was coming for us.

  He didn’t count on me, though.

  5

  IF SHANNA’S MOM and little brother hadn’t died moments after her, with her, mixed in together with her—I guess you could say “because of her”—then maybe I would have let things take their natural course. Manny could have just waltzed in—my dad likes that one, too—he could have waltzed in in his stooped-over, giant way and strangled Danielle, decapitated JR, burned Tim, and, I don’t know, drowned me in the tiny-to-him toilet like I deserved for dreaming up that prank in the first place.

  We all kind of deserved it, I mean.

  I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences.

  And, to be clear, I was sort of making that up for Danielle and JR about not having been the one that put Manny on my dad’s motorcycle. I’d completely put him there, specifically to freak my mom out, make her drop the eggs or something equally hilarious. My dad left him there probably because it felt like at least someone was getting some use out of the bike he couldn’t ride anymore but also didn’t have the heart to sell.

  My case for Danielle and JR had been more convincing if I hadn’t done that, though. I probably learned it from my mom, even, using Miracle-Gro to cheat her garden bigger. That’s all lying about Manny on the motorcycle was: Miracle-Gro, to get this idea to bloom up in Danielle’s and JR’s heads faster.

  And it had still been a joke then anyway, right?

  It was. Hundred percent.

  Sure, Shanna was getting fired and on permanent lockdown, Tim was getting grounded until he grew a pair—his dad’s go-to—until he grew a pair and quit being a follower, and the prank hadn’t exactly shamed the assistant manager like I’d meant, but still, it wasn’t a total loss. We had the story of what almost was, didn’t we? That’s worth nearly as much, if you tell it right.

  Anyway, big surprise, before too long there were flyers stapled to every utility pole in the neighborhood. Evidently some deviants of one brand or another were breaking into everyone’s toolsheds and gardening supplies, making off with fertilizer, and probably—the word I kept hearing whispered was “surely”—surely selling it from the beds of pickups in shady parking lots. Just, evidently, in different bags, because it was never the whole bag of Miracle-Gro that was gone, but just the Miracle-Gro itself, scooped out the hole torn in the bag’s wide, vulnerable belly.

  Who would have ever guessed that’s what mannequins out in the wild eat, though, right? I mean, who ever even knew there was a “wild” for mannequins, but if there is, then: garden fertilizer?

  Still, some of that Miracle-Gro, probably most of it, it wasn’t only dirt minerals and plant vitamins. Our neighborhood is competitive, I’m saying. Same way Olympic athletes might resort to steroids if they think they can get away with it, a lot of our neighbors, my mom most definitely included, had been opting for the least eco-friendly, closest-to-radioactive grow-fast stuff they could buy. And, the thing was, they knew it was dangerous to play with, worse to ever consider actually eating. How I knew that? One or the other of the neighborhood SUVs was always pulled over at a farm stand to buy some organic vegetables, the kind that wouldn’t turn their families into instant mutants.

  So, Manny, I had to imagine, from eating that every night for two weeks, he had to be three or four times taller than he’d been for that truck driver, by now. Meaning? He was a kaiju, pretty much. The mannequin version of Godzilla. And, being that massive, that towering, that scary, the only place he could hide anymore would be Lake Ray Hubbard, which, tellingly, was three or four feet fuller than usual, full enough it was flooding some of the close houses.

  I’m not in AP math, so I can’t do the numbers for how much water a fifty-foot-tall mannequin would displace, and then factor that into the grade or whatever of the slope around the lake over here on the Rockwall side, but if I could, I know they’d match up perfect.

  Manny had to be giant by now.

  And, in his dim, slow-thinking way, he still had the four of us in mind—four because he didn’t have to think about Shanna anymore.

  For all I knew, he was even like Frankenstein’s monster, right? Maybe he hadn’t killed Shanna on purpose, had just been trying to, I don’t know, hug her. Maybe he’d just been so happy to see her again after all these years. But we’re so fragile compared to a monster like him. He doesn’t know his own strength. He just knows he’s lonely, and probably afraid. And he doesn’t care what moms or dads or little brothers or sisters are in the way of him not being lonely, he’s just scared without anybody to play with.

  Or?

  He hates us.

  He remembers everything in perfect detail, he’s been watching us walk back and forth through my garage for the last three years, never giving our old best friend a second glance.

  Either way, we were dead.

  Really, I figured, it would be better for the world if we all just killed ourselves. Except of course that would break our parents’ hearts and set bad examples for our little brothers and sisters, and everybody at school would have to go to endless assemblies about what to do if you get invited to participate in a group suicide, and we didn’t want to be remembered like that. It’s much better to be on the murder victim wall, right? The Died Too Young wall?

  And, I say “we” here, yeah, because I assume that to be the case, but, I mean, Tim still wasn’t supposed to be talking to us, and when I tried to conscript JR in using the vaguest possible outline of “Manny is a giant who’s after us,” so we could go to Danielle as a team, he kept asking if this was a joke or from a movie or what. Meanwhile, Danielle had just, for reasons un-understandable to anyone remotely sane or with an ounce of taste or self-respect, started hard-core dating Steve from her yearbook team, so that pretty much just left me to stop the big mannequin killing spree, didn’t it?

  Sawyer, the only one who figured it out. The only one who knew it was okay if Manny came for us, but it would be way uncool if he also killed our families.

  It’s kind of heroic, really.

  Not that it felt that way.

  Tim was first.

  6

  WHAT I DID TO
get ready for what I had to do was download not the movie we’d sneaked Manny into—that server pinging would be asking Manny to come kill my family—but one of the earlier ones in the series. I even legit-rented it the day before, left its three-hour ass playing on my laptop so it would go over right before the rental expired, so long as our router didn’t reset. Translation: I was home the whole time, trying to stream that movie into my eyeholes before it went away. I’d have to be a crazy person to rent it and not watch it, wouldn’t I? Especially with the deadline on it only three hours away, and me getting warnings every few minutes that I was wasting my gift card?

  My dad would probably even defend me, if it came to that. It’s important to reinforce responsible behavior. Never mind that we have the same movie on DVD in the living room, which was his purchase, so we could bond over the action scenes or learn from the upstanding values or pretend not to be eyeballing the skintight costumes or whatever. What would be important was the “responsible behavior” part of it, this being the “first time in recorded history”—my phrase, which he stole, and has been using against me—this being the first time I’d ever exhibited such unteenagerly behavior.

  So, my cover was in place. My alibi was streaming in my bedroom, which I wasn’t in.

  The next part hurt, hurt like you wouldn’t believe, chipped an actual piece off my soul I’m pretty sure, then made me swallow it, but it was for the best.

  Thing was, not like this is news, but Tim, in addition to his big sister just off to college, he had two little brothers, right? Not to mention a mom and dad who were mostly not terrible, who should have grounded him for making them come collect him at the movie theater on their date night. Like all of our families, though, they were potential collateral damage, innocent parties Manny would crush when he reached down through their roof for the kid he used to play with, the kid who used to love him.

  And of course we’d all held Tim’s little brothers when they were twin babies, held them under supervision, and his mom had chaperoned our bowling parties and museum visits, video’d our recitals, and his dad, I guess he’d never done anything super great, but he did have some old car in their garage he was always saying him and Tim were going to fix up one weekend. It was much more than a weekend job, was more of a “get a different car” kind of thing, but, with dads, sometimes it’s the thought that counts, and his dad for sure had a lot of thoughts. Tim’s big sister might get out alive when Manny came calling, but that’d just be because she was living in a dorm up in Denton. But who knows, maybe Manny comes knocking when she’s home doing laundry, right?

  So, like I say, I’m not some AP math whiz, but even I can see that one dead sophomore is so much better than a whole family. It might even make the four of them left, like, bond together more, watch out closer for each other, take more trips. Tim’s dad, ex-dad, former dad, grieving dad, whatever, he might even take the twins out to the garage, to work on that hopeless car.

  Thing was, though, since I was the only one who’d figured out the path Manny was churning through what had been our group of pranksters, that meant it fell to me to do something about it. Warning Tim would do no good. I could reach him, could find out what game he was logged into and chat him up, but what would I say? “Hey, Tim, Manny’s been eating my mom’s fertilizer, man, and if you want to save your family, you maybe’d better, like, hang yourself in the closet or something, cool? You with me on this?”

  His first question back would probably be along the lines of “why me,” as in, Why just him, as in: Why not you too, Sawyer?

  He’d be right. People being politely asked to kill themselves have lots of very good, on-point questions. I’d have to explain that it would be me, it should be me, it was going to be me, but for now I was the one saving everybody. My time was most definitely coming, though. If I wanted my family to live through this, then I could no longer be just an eventual victim. But first I had to rush around, get things done, save everybody’s families until Manny didn’t have anybody left to kill, and would have to back off.

  And, anyway, I mean—Tim’s mom finding him hanging by the neck in his own closet? Really? That would break her heart, would probably destroy the family just as much, only slower. Running away couldn’t be an answer either. From Manny’s height, he would see us scrambling over county lines, start striding that way, stepping on whoever, it wouldn’t matter to him. Then it wouldn’t be only our families dying, but completely uninvolved families, times ten, times twenty. And then the air force would probably get involved, and Rockwall, Texas, would be this big national incident blowing up on the evening news.

  No, this had to be me. I had to toughen up, like my dad was always telling me.

  You were right, Dad.

  Thanks for the advice, man.

  7

  SO, WITH THAT MOVIE playing on my laptop, the garage door still up like I’d “accidentally” left it after dinner, the overhead light long since cycled off, I cleared a path in front of my dad’s heavy old Kawasaki, rolled it out to the curb, swung a leg into the creaky saddle, and let gravity and the long slope down to Wilshire take us, popped the clutch at the very end.

  When the engine caught, the motorcycle’s thready headlight kicked on, its beam shining into the ditch, courtesy of my dad’s big wreck. I reached over, straightened the headlight back to center, then followed it. The pegs and bar on the right side were bent up and jagged, the foot brake over there ground half off, the twist throttle catchy, but JR had a dirt bike we’d all lived on freshman year, out at his place. After riding it into the ground a hundred times each, a beaten-up street bike was gravy, was cake, was the most docile pony.

  I cut the engine just down from Tim’s house, coasted into the trees, tensed up because, with the headlight off for this final approach, I might be about to get sliced in half by a barbwire strand I wouldn’t see until too late.

  Five minutes later I stepped through the sliding glass door of the second side of the garage his dad had converted into an insulated room for his pool table, just, he’d spent so much releveling the concrete floor that there hadn’t been any money left over to Craigslist what he was leveling the floor for.

  The door from the garage to the house was locked, but the key was down a ceramic frog’s throat on the other side of the room. I apologized to the frog for making it party to this. In my head I was thinking that the frog thought it was a watchdog, that it had kept Tim’s family safe all these years. And if mannequins can walk and talk, then why not, right?

  Two creeping minutes after that mumbled apology, I was standing over Tim’s sleeping form in the bedroom I still called his big sister’s, since he’d just moved into it. He’d fallen asleep in the office chair at his desk, his soldier on-screen caught in a loop of respawning, since this was a hacked game, one he could never lose.

  Moving slowly, zero noise, I sidled in alongside him, reached past like I was his third arm, and got his character out of that loop, but still, when I leaned up from that, Tim was watching me with sleepy eyes, like I was maybe a dream.

  “Saw?” he creaked, stretching it into a yawn, and of all the moments of this whole thing, this was by far the longest one. It was like the world was suddenly this huge balloon inflating around me, everything swelling at once, the pressure all around pounding in breath by breath. I hadn’t expected him to say my name, I mean, hadn’t expected him to call me what he and no one else had been calling me since third grade. I hadn’t expected him to not even flinch from me suddenly being there in his room, in my long-sleeved black undershirt from skiing, my mom’s black balaclava on my head, my hands in black leather gloves even though it was hot, which should have told him everything he needed to know about my plans.

  My eyes maybe got a certain shine to them here, my voice a kind of quaver, my chest a cold hollowness I’d never really known before.

  It’s not easy, killing your best friend. One of them, anyway.

  But, I told myself, this was the only way to save his family from Ma
nny. It was for the best. There was no other choice. If he could, if he knew, he’d tell me to get on with it already.

  “I’m sorry for this, T-man,” I said to him, and stepped around behind him, a hard loop of light strung from hand to hand, pulling tight around his neck, right where spies in the movies always do it, like the windpipe has vertebra, and what you have to do is slip between two of them.

  The line was the glow-in-the-dark filament or cord or whatever you call it from the new edger my dad wouldn’t let me use yet. The glow-in-the-darkness was complete stupidity, because who edges at night, everybody would complain about the sound, but still, the one my dad had bought had been the last one on the rack, and it came with a pair of safety glasses tinted in some way that made the glow string really pop, so you could get that edge right where you wanted it.

  As for that spool of glowing string, it’s like fishing line times a hundred, will only break from slapping into the edge of concrete ten thousand times at high speed. I leaned back on it, each end already looped into junked joysticks because I knew the line would slip from my gloves otherwise.

  Tim fell back into me, away from being choked, and I set my feet, let him kick his desk, which dislodged his mouse, switched tabs on his screen and started the video he’d had ready behind the game, for after he made the next level and could stop.

  It was the movie we’d taken Manny to. The same one Shanna had been pirating.

  I slacked off the line a bit, said without thinking, “Why—why this one?”

  He just pulled at the line with his fingers, pulled like if I’d let go please he could maybe explain why this movie tonight, but I was in too far to stop now, couldn’t let him get enough breath to answer me, because then I might not start in again. But then he did kind of answer. He scrabbled in his pants pocket, kicking to get the angle right, and pulled up that torn ticket stub he hadn’t been able to find the night of the prank. Like showing it to me now meant “admit one,” I guess? And it kind of did. He had paid for the movie, so downloading it now was just finally using his ticket, was hardly even illegal. But still. I wasn’t an usher, right? I didn’t have a flashlight to cup in my hand, make his ticket stub real. I was something completely different.