Psycho Save Us

by Huskins, Chad

  “Sunny days,” Spencer sang, for what else could he do? “Everything’s A-okayyyy! Friendly neighbors there. That’s—where—we—meeeeeet! Can ya tell me how to get…how to get to Avery Street?”

  Spencer stepped over the pleading boy, holding his Glock in one hand and the silenced Uzi in the other. The flames parted at his feet, revealing more of the boy’s torment—the flesh on his back had been peeled back to reveal the sinew, the intertransversarii and trapezius muscles, as well as the latissimus dorsi, a triangle of rippling, bloody tissue from the shoulder to the hip. The detail to the illusion—if an illusion it was—was incredible. He looked on with the curiosity of an ornithologist, pausing at a possible new parakeet on his hands, but with many other new discoveries waiting all around, commanding his attention. He moved on.

  Flames danced up at him, climbed his legs a bit, children clambering for attention, and he thought he felt the heat now. Someone screamed from someplace deeper in the house. Spencer moved carefully. Though he knew this torment was not meant for him, he knew that he might easily get caught up in it if he allowed himself to be, just the way a bear trap might be meant for a dumber creature didn’t mean that a smarter one might not act carelessly enough to get stuck.

  More screaming.

  The flames shifted. Like grass in the wind, it all blew apart as though a great gust had come through. They moved up the wall, breathing. Yes, the walls were definitely breathing in and out, in and out, in and out. He smelled smoke, and coughed, even though he knew this mustn’t be real. It was both real and imagined. Somewhere between shadow and substance, it was as real as it needed to be.

  Blood. Blood dripped from a ceiling fan overhead, its flaming blades creating a nightmarish pinwheel. The blood dripped from the center of the fan. This felt real, but he imagined the longer he stayed here, the more all of this would seem logical. Fundamentally, he understood this wasn’t all just in his head. It was the girl’s doing. And mine too, somehow. He understood this, also.

  More screaming from somewhere inside the house.

  Spencer took a moment to look about the house, get his bearings. The seas of fire parted at times, giving him a glimpse of the furniture, windows, and television—the TV was on the Food Network, and the house was cooking up something that looked mm, mm good, glistening sliced ham with pillowy mashed potatoes and gravy with okra glazed with butter. But there was something else in there, too. Just behind the plump, mustached chef with the green apron, there was a woman being flayed alive and pieces of her were being placed out onto the grill, where they sizzled. “Oh, now that smells good already,” said the chef. Spencer spotted a piece of the peeled flesh, saw that it had a crimson bear tattoo on it.

  It’s Olga, said the Voice. It permeated the walls just as the flames did. In fact, the flames breathed when those words were spoken.

  Spencer didn’t comment on that. “Leave Dmitry to me,” he said. “That one’s mine. I deserve him.”

  Why? You could’ve called the police any time. You could’ve called them once you had the license plate of the Expedition.

  “And you and your sister’s throats would’ve been slit once their cop-on-the-take gave them the heads up—”

  You still don’t know that—

  “Yes, I do, but you don’t wanna believe,” he said, glancing out the windows. What parts of the windows he could see through the flaming curtains were scant images of a charred, tortured landscape. A post-apocalyptic scene that was the antithesis of everything Normal Rockwell ever painted. Someone screamed upstairs. A man. No, several men. “An’ ya can’t afford to kill me now. Ya still need me.”

  For what?

  “For this,” Spencer laughed. He approached the steps with the Uzi aimed up the stairs and the Glock aimed down the hall from whence he came. “I hope ya don’t think you’re doin’ this all on your own. No little girl ever thought up shit this fucked up.”

  The police are here. They’ll protect us!

  He smiled. “You gonna rely on others to protect ya, little girl? How’s that been workin’ out for ya so far, eh?”

  No reply from her.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway, sister. They’re out there, fighting at least a dozen angry Russians with machine guns. It’ll be a while before they clear this entire neighborhood.” He started up the steps, aware of the heat climbing up his back. The fire had started catching to him. It had started to become real. “Ya can’t keep this goin’ forever. You’re gonna need me. Now, where the fuck is Oni? He’s inside here someplace, isn’t he?”

  I can feel him, she said finally, desperately. You have to kill him. But he’s…he’s…

  “He’s what?”

  He’s like you! He’s not as affected by what I’m doing.

  “You mean he’s immune to hell, or the idea of it, anyways,” Spencer said, nodding. “Yeah, I smelled that on him. He’s ready for hell, always knew he was goin’ there, an’ had no fuckin’ problem with it. My kinda guy. But there’s only room for one fuckin’ maniac on this planet. Where is he?”

  I don’t know. He’s here. He’s everywhere. All around you.

  At the top of the stairs, Spencer paused. On the floor were three older men, all of them bare-chested, all of them with tattoos on their arms of red bears, and all of them writhing in exquisite agony. Briars stemmed from their guts, and from their assholes, tearing through the cloth and crawling across the floor, up the flaming walls, and finding purchase in the ceiling. These outstretched vines pulled the three men up from the floor, suspending them in a web of briars and flames and their own blood. These would be the men that Kaley had seen playing cards in the kitchen downstairs when she first came in. Spencer knew this, because she saw his reaction and recalled them for him.

  One of the men’s pants had torn free thanks to the briars pouring out of him, and his scrotum dangled like a potato bulging from a small leather pouch. And something crawled around inside it, something bubbling, bobbing up and down beneath the skin, poking at the testicles curiously.

  Except for the occasional muscle spasm, the only thing moving on the three men were their eyes, which looked out at Spencer pleadingly. He stepped forward and analyzed them, relishing his position and theirs. This felt good. This felt right. It was as it should be, he standing and smiling, and they twisted and helpless.

  Then, all at once, one of them managed to scream. From mouths pushed permanently open by briars that worked their way up through the jaw and up through the roof of their mouths and through their nostrils, this one man screamed. He went into convulsions as more briars suddenly moved, spilling out from his own anus and slowly crawling into his throat.

  The flames all around him breathed. Spencer turned and saw something moving. A long, undulating tentacle moved out from a doorway down the hall, its serpentine crawl random, and it piled high on the floor. Its skin was translucent, and its insides appeared to be a gelatinous thing that pulsed with life, even as something inside struggled to get out.

  “You see it, too?” Whoever said it had a thick Russian accent.

  Spencer looked up. Dmitry stood on the other side of the slithering thing, which had no head and no tail that he could find. The Russian was at the end of the hall, standing inside a small bedroom and bare-chested like all the rest of his comrades, flames licking all over his body and tiny creature crawling about his shoulder, the same creature humping the poor lad downstairs. The little imp paused just above the crimson bear tattoo, licked it, and winked at Spencer. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Spencer told him.

  “You see something,” Dmitry accused, raising a cigarette to his lips. In his other hand, he held a .44 Magnum snub-nose. “I’m just wondering if you see the same thing as me. Or are we both seeing different things? They say heaven is what you make it. I always thought that was strange, you know? If that’s so, then everybody’s just walking around heaven really confused.” He took a toke, blew out smoke, which the imp quickly crawled to the edge of his face and inhale
d, lapping up the smoke like sweet juices from a watermelon. “So, is it the same with hell?”

  “There is no hell,” Spencer said. “Just earth. Good ol’ terra firma an’ a house with a little girl’s nightmare occupyin’ it.” He’s lost it, Spencer thought. An’ he’s accepted it. He’s accepted the reality around him. The others fight it, that’s why they suffer. As he considered that, he also felt the presence from her. She was around him, with him, to the point that, from one second to the next, he wasn’t sure where she ended and he began.

  “This thing in my hand,” Dmitry said. “It’s not imaginary.”

  “Neither are these,” Spencer said, and raised his weapons. He fired.

  Several things happened at once. The slithering thing in the hallway churned, perhaps alarmed by the sudden burst of gunfire. As it did, it absorbed most, if not all, of Spencer’s bullets. When this happened, the flames diminished—they didn’t vanish, they just lessened in intensity—and Dmitry fired back. He unloaded the snub-nose, but none of the bullets hit Spencer. Real enough, he thought, and tossed down his Glock when it was empty. He fired the Uzi in short, controlled bursts until it too was empty. The writhing tentacle slammed against the wall, and where it did, flames bloomed in a way that would’ve been gorgeous under any other circumstances.

  Dmitry flung his Magnum to the ground, and ran out from the bedroom and directly at Spencer, who did the same. The tentacle surged, and amid the cramped hallway, flames, and men choking on the briars pouring from their own bodies, they collided.

  DAVID WAS GLAD to see the SWAT van pulling up, and the other three patrol cars and the FBI’s SUV right behind them, with the three agents hopping out with Leon Hulsey diving for cover behind the rear wheel of David’s car as soon as he exited. He moved fast for such a big guy, and joined the firefight before asking any questions. Leon shouted, “Where?!”

  David pointed up the street, to the open windows from the houses on the left. Leon poked his head out from cover and fired five rapid shots from his Glock, a suppressive fire accompanied by SWAT when they came spewing out the back of the van. They took up cover at the rear of their van, two men peeking around the sides of the open bulletproof doors and firing in controlled bursts at the houses the helicopters (there were two of them now) had highlighted with their searchlights.

  The street was alive with echoing gunfire, and very little verbal communication passed between any officers, especially SWAT, who did almost everything with hand signals. Two of them came out the back with Remington 700 sniper rifles and dived for cover behind the other squad cars, and popped up to start setting up their shots.

  Shots were rained down from the helicopters, the sharpshooters getting an angle on some of the gunmen in the top floor windows.

  This whole thing’s a clusterfuck! he thought, and knew that he was partially to blame. Instead of backing out of Avery Street and waiting for backup, he’d stayed and started firing back. He couldn’t escape for the hail of gunfire, and this required more officers to put themselves in the line of fire to back him up. This put even more officers in jeopardy, but now their vehicles had formed a wall, and there would be no escaping the cul-de-sac—

  One of the SWAT members went down. A bullet had clipped Warwick, who went spinning to the pavement. Within the span of a second, one of his teammates reached down without thought and grabbed the handlebar at the back of his armor, which allowed for easy dragging of a wounded man.

  Then, automatic gunfire poured out of two more windows. David spent time enough at the gun range to know the sound of high-powered rifles. Leon and the other agents dropped back behind his car when the glass of the windows exploded all around and the rest of the squad car’s tires were finally blown.

  “Officers down!” he heard over his radio in between salvos from their enemies.

  David watched as Hennessey quickly issued orders to his teams. The SWAT team started moving cover-to-cover up the yard of the house on the right. A pair would lay down suppressing fire while four others moved up, and then the two at the front would lay down more suppressing fire, allowing the guys at the rear to catch up. They took cover behind a van parked in the driveway and made their way to the side of the house. The two snipers fired from where they’d set their rifles up on tripods on the hoods of the squad cars. David, the other officers and the sharpshooters in the choppers also gave SWAT suppressing fire while they moved to the back yard, where they would be in shadows and away from the windows with all the gunmen.

  Then, all at once, bullets danced on the pavement on this side of David’s car.

  “Behind us!” Leon shouted.

  He turned and saw two men running for cover behind a mailbox, firing not-so-wildly, in a crouch and their weapons held tight to their shoulders. One had a shotgun of some kind, the other something along the lines of an M16. Agents Stone and Mortimer were taking cover behind their SUV, which was the direction the newcomers had come from, and were already gunned down by the time David caught sight of them.

  God damn jackalope!

  Keitrich was down, and McDevitt had been seeing to him when the gunfire erupted from behind. Keitrich was still conscious, though, and fired his gun one-handed from where he lay half in his partner’s lap, bleeding out and possibly dying.

  Fucking Jack Ching Bada-Bing! David briefly thought of Beatrice, her marred hand, and how it meant she would work a desk job for the rest of her career, if she was lucky, and she had always despised desk jockeys.

  His eye still hurt. And though he would later regret it, that was actually the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  David stood and ran around his patrol car. He heard Leon shout something at him, but it never fully made it to his ear for all the gunfire. A bullet zipped so close past his head that he felt the wind breaking. He ran for cover behind the same van SWAT had taken cover behind, then darted around and leapt across a short picket fence into the next yard. He took cover around the side of the house, amid shots that tore across the front lawn and drew a line towards him. You’re mine, Jack Ching. Nobody else gets to have you.

  David pressed his back against the wall and peeked around the corner. When he saw that gunfire had been drawn elsewhere, he dipped around to the front porch and crept along in a low crouch.

  THEY WERE TWO of a kind, both constructed with the same wrongness at their foundation, yet everything they’d experienced since birth had helped to shape them into different kinds of monsters.

  Kaley stood at the center of the basement, standing over Olga, watching as great grasping hands pulled her deeper into the flames, boiling her skin. She’d started to sizzle. She got up to run but was flung against the wall, and then slid along it as though Earth’s gravitational pull had decided to go another way. Olga was finally flattened against the ceiling.

  Kaley looked around, saw Bonetta lying on the ground, clawing at her own face, bringing blood. Maggots had started pouring from her skin and eye sockets. As much as Kaley wanted to dispel this, she couldn’t. Discounting Shan, there were only two other people utterly untouched by what she’d unleashed, but whereas Shan had the charm to protect her, both Oni and the monster had acceptance. They had accepted what they were. Cut from the same cloth, Nan would’ve said. They be cut from the same cloth, chil’.

  While Olga struggled against hands that stretched out from the ceiling—children’s hands, trembling with fear, and rage—Kaley slowly turned back to the door where Shannon was being held. It was wreathed in flame. Inside, there was a dark void, a blind spot to Kaley’s telempathy. Shan, the girl who earlier tonight had told Big Sister to watch out for the tiny beetle, had warded herself against the Ocean of Sorrow currently flooding the house.

  A hideous creaking noise went throughout the basement. Then, there was a sharp snap. Kaley turned to find the walls breaking apart. One piece came away, and crumbled to the floor. And whereas there ought to have been sheetrock and insulation, there were instead rippling, pulsating slabs of pink, slimy meat that looked like
tonsils the size of engine blocks, one piled on top of the other. The walls were filled with them. Green and blue veins climbed up through this meat, and blood coursed through them. The house breathed, and the flames were ventilated in and out through the slight gaps between each tonsil.

  A red, viscous liquid poured from the ceiling, and then collected around her feet in great pools. Kaley knew that this was both real and unreal, both shadow and substance.

  “What…” It was Olga, up on the ceiling. “What…are…you…doing…to…us?” Then, just as stupidly, “Why? Oh, God, whyyyyyyyy?!”

  “If you don’t know now,” Kaley said, “you never will. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I truly, truly am. I…I don’t know how to stop it…” But neither one of those things was entirely true. Kaley wasn’t entirely sorry, nor was she entirely ignorant of how to stop it. Part of her—the part shared and enlightened by contact with the monster’s heart—relished the Rapture. And, she was ashamed to say, she couldn’t stop herself, no more than Olga cold stop her loins from going wet at the sight of a new child to torture and film, nor more than Mikhael and Dmitry could stop themselves once they felt their loins filling and going hard at the same thought. It was compulsive, it felt right, it felt good, and, in many ways, she would hate herself for the rest of her life, much the way the Oni family hated themselves when they went to sleep at night.

  All except for Dmitry. He was no one special. He wasn’t the patriarch of the family—she now sensed that that dubious honor belonged to the tattooed man upstairs. Dmitry was only unique in that, whereas the rest of the family had a semblance of family unity amongst their own, he had none. He was a loner, a divergent creature, one that had learned to operate within a certain set of parameters in order to survive, but was still a man apart.