Irregular Creatures

by Chuck Wendig

  “Little Taye Tyler,” the crackhead said. “Making some very bold wishes, sweetie.”

  “Get out of here! I’ll call the cops!”

  The figure chortled. “Oh? And how, babydoll?”

  “I got my cell on me.” He thrust his hand in his jacket pocket to show he meant business.

  “You don’t got nothing in that pocket but a melted Hershey bar and a bundle of dreams. You ain’t brought a cell phone.”

  Taye’s guts ran cold. The creep was right. His fingers sank into the soft chocolate still in its wrapper. His fist squeezed around it.

  “Ready to play, honey?”

  “What’d you do with my friends? Where’s Little Bitch and Barley?”

  “They gone, but just for a second.” The grin got wider. “Streets and city ain’t nothing but a network of veins, nerves, and arteries, and I just used that to put ‘em somewhere else for a time.”

  “If you hurt them –“

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, cookie puss.”

  “C’mon, now. Bring them back and just… just leave me alone.”

  “But I got a gift for you. It’s a real good gift. What if I told you that I can make wishes come true? How ‘bout that?”

  “I don’t want that,” Taye said, but he wasn’t so sure. He wanted to dismiss this freak as nothing but a doped-up psycho, but…

  Taye’s eyes went out of focus for a second. For a half-moment, he was pretty sure that he saw bugs or worms crawling across those rags—and then he realized, those weren’t bugs. They were letters. Or symbols. Or something written down—letters that he didn’t recognize, not from this life, not from this world. And then they weren’t there anymore.

  “Why me?” Taye asked. It was the only question he could muster.

  “Funny,” the thing said. “Nobody ever ask why me before. You the first.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need. It’s a good question” The figure brought a dirty hand to its face, and drew a finger across the upper lip. Taye thought he saw a dark line there that could’ve been mustache stubble, or just a shadow. “I was like you once, little kid of the city and all. And I wanted out. And I never got out. City chewed me up. Ate my bones. Digested my heart and my spirit. Maybe I’m glad I didn’t because now I know shit about the city I never done know before. I know how the city eats, shits, and breathes. I know all its sweet spots. I know its wet spots. How to stroke its thighs to get it to do what I want, how to whisper in its ear to take me where I need to go. If I had gotten out, maybe I wouldn’t ever know that, and would that be a good or bad thing? Shit if I know.

  “So I got my reasons for giving you want you want here. First is ‘cause I like you, and I’m willing to give you what you’re asking for. Second is ‘cause I see something in your eyes that looks like a tiny match flame, so puttin’ you somewhere else now means maybe I don’t have competition later on—and honey, in my business, competition is a mean little kitten. Third thing is, well, let’s just say I’m trying to earn me a kind of merit badge like you might get in them Boy Scouts. I get my badge, I get a nice reward and I get to become somebody else. I’ve started my journey. Now I got to finish.”

  Taye felt a hard fist in his throat. He could barely swallow he was so scared. He was surprised his teeth weren’t chattering together. Part of him was really starting to believe what this nutbag was yammering on about. He saw something there, some weird energy coming off this freak like heat waves wiggling off a hot city street.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Taye said, voice shaking. He drew in a deep breath. “But I’m the fuck out of here.”

  He saw a little gap between the crackhead and the doorframe. He could make it. He knew he could. Taye bolted.

  His getaway sticks pumped like they’d never pumped before—and then the raggedy arms of the psycho reached out and enfolded him in the tattered cloak. For a moment he couldn’t move, his face buried in those rags. He smelled man’s cologne. He smelled flowers like rose-petals and lilacs. He smelled the stinking death of that poor bastard in the tub and he smelled an odor he’d never encountered before but somehow knew instantly—the scent of fresh cut grass. Then a thumb, slick and oily with blood and snake guts, pressed against his forehead from within the folds of the rag pile, and it made some kind of half-star pattern there, and suddenly everything turned upside-down.

  ***

  Beau woke up, his back against a mattress that was pressed up against a wall. It was daytime. Sunlight came through boarded up windows in crooked slashes. His eyes adjusted and he saw two roaches wrestling over a cigarette butt on the dirty floor. Next to him was half a bondage magazine, the other half pinned beneath an air conditioning unit. He felt good. And sleepy. And awake. He didn’t know what that meant or where he was.

  He moved his arm, and something bounced against his skin. He was wearing a moth-eaten blue blazer jacket with muddy footprints all across it, and his left sleeve was rolled up right against his flagging bicep. A needle wangled out of his arm, the tip still stuck in the artery that pounded at the crook of his arm. He looked at it with some distance, like maybe this wasn’t him. Like maybe he was watching this in a movie theater—or in a dream.

  Groggy, he stood up.

  Faintly he remembered some homeless man. Or woman. Or whatever. Didn’t he/she give him something? He was struggling to remember when two men came into the room.

  Two big black men. Looked like identical twins in different clothing. One wore sunglasses. The other had a mouthful of gold-capped teeth.

  “There’s our man,” the one on the left said.

  “Bitch thief motherfucker,” the one on the right said.

  Beau was about to protest, to tell them, hey, you have the wrong guy, I’m just some loser from uptown, but he never got the chance. The two men moved fast. A fist shot out, popped him in the jaw. Blood went into his mouth as a tooth loosened. The other grabbed him in a fierce headlock, and started dragging him, kicking and gurgling, into the bathroom.

  They kicked another needle and a spoon out of the way, and threw him in a scummy claw-foot tub.

  “You stole our shit,” the one said.

  “Good shit, too,” the other added. “Some of that South Asian shit.”

  “It’s expensive.”

  “You owe.”

  Finally, Beau found his voice.

  “Wait! No. I have money. I have lots of money.”

  The one on the right laughed. “Naw, bitch. You don’t.”

  The one on the left didn’t laugh. He just shook his head and drew his hand out of his coat. In it was a big, nickel-plated hand-cannon. Not like the little bullshit bug-sized revolver Beau had in his bathroom. This piece could drop a fucking airliner.

  Beau started to say “Tommy –“ but didn’t get the chance to finish his words. The gun pressed against his forehead, where that she-male put its thumb. And this time, the gun went off without a hitch. Bang. In the nanosecond before death, Beau felt more alive than he’d ever felt before.

  ***

  Taye didn’t want to open his eyes because he knew he was still caught up in the crackhead’s cloak. He could still feel it tangled all around him like a body bag. And there was that smell. Cut grass. What did that mean? In the distance, Taye heard a sound like some construction equipment, like they were blacktopping something or filling up some potholes. Or maybe it was a monster, ready to come out of the darkness and chew him up with its big machine teeth. It sounded like it was coming closer. He felt the fabric all around him vibrate.

  Escape. He needed to escape or he’d be dead for sure. He held his breath for a few seconds and counted down from ten. His fists clenched, his toes curled inward, and when he hit two, then one, he spun wildly around, punching and kicking at whatever was holding him fast, and then he launched himself free.

  And promptly fell off the bed.

  He lay face up on the carpet. Soft carpet the color of a blue sky. This wasn’t his own carpet from his own bedroom. That carpet was t
he color of baby shit and was all fucked up with cigarette stains. He stood up. This wasn’t his room either. For one, it was bigger than his whole family’s apartment. Two, he didn’t have a TV in his room (much less a flat-screen that was almost as big as his family’s dinner table). This was a kid’s room. In the corner was a set of shelves that had model airplanes and helicopters. On the wall was a Harry Potter poster (who Taye noted looked a little like Barley, then again maybe he just thought all white people looked alike).

  That sound was getting closer. Taye walked over to the window and looked out. This room overlooked a big lawn, with a white gazebo and a blue-trim bridge over a tiny stream. There were men out there cutting the lawn with big industrial mowers.

  That explained the machine sound and the grass smell.

  But it doesn’t explain nothing else, Taye thought.

  There was a soft cough from behind him. Taye spun around.

  A white woman stood at the other end of the room, standing just in the doorway. She had severe cheekbones and small eyeglasses. Her hands nervously fidgeted with one another.

  “You want to come downstairs for a moment?” she asked. She seemed hesitant. And damn well she should be, Taye thought. I don’t know this lady. She seemed safe enough, though, unless she was going to turn into that freaky she-male hobo as soon as she got him out of his nice-ass room. Still. He nodded.

  Getting downstairs was its own ordeal.

  He figured they’d go out the room, turn left or right, head down a set of steps, and voila.

  But no. Long hallways. Dark wood trim. Lots of doors. Past a laundry room. Past more bedrooms. Past a room with pinball machines in it! (Taye noted that one; if he got out of this alive, he’d race back up here and get in a few games before he tried to figure out how to get back home.) Finally, after several hallways and several turns, then he found the steps. There he found the skinny woman who looked like a nervous bird. She held waved him downstairs, into a grand foyer with marble floors.

  She took him through more rooms until they reached what looked like a dining room (fit for a small army, it seemed). A dark-skinned woman in a maid outfit stood by the head of the table, and at the table there sat a folded cloth napkin, a spoon, and a dish of something that Taye couldn’t make out.

  “Rosita made pudding,” the woman said. “Chocolate. I know it’s your favorite.”

  Taye shrugged. It was, but he didn’t want to give this stranger the satisfaction. Still, his tummy grumbled, so he sat down.

  The maid and the other lady watched.

  He felt like a bug under a microscope. They expected him to eat? Fine, he’d eat.

  He reached for the spoon.

  And his hand was not the one that found it.

  He controlled the hand, to be sure. But last time he checked, his hand was black, not white. And this hand was fucking white. White like rice. White like marble. White like Barley. He jerked it back and the spoon clattered to the floor.

  The lady looked to the maid, and shook her head. “He can tell something’s wrong. He knows. I’ll just tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Taye asked, and he tried to put some anger in his voice, but that was before he realized that the voice that just came out of him was not his voice. He pushed the pudding bowl away from him in case it was poisoned.

  “Your father is dead,” the woman with the sharp cheekbones said. The maid—Rosita—made a small, sad moan.

  “What?” Taye said, standing up and eyeing up the exits to the room. “What do you know about my Pops? Nothing! Not a thing!”

  “Tommy,” the lady said, and Taye didn’t know who the hell she was talking to but she was sure as hell looking at him. “I know he hasn’t been around and I haven’t always… said the nicest things about him, but we were married for eleven years. He’s your father and was my husband and you can’t hate me for what happened.”

  Taye’s mind circled around these concepts like a moth orbiting a lamp bulb. Tommy. White hands, white voice. Mother, father, dead, big lawn, plastic airplanes. Did the homeless guy do this? He had to have. Where was he? Who was he? What happened?

  The woman continued. “He was… well, two boys found him in the city. He was on drugs, they think, and I don’t know why, but he was in some tenement complex. I don’t know what happened to him, Tommy, but he was a very unhappy man and he must’ve made some very bad choices.”

  Why did she keep calling him Tommy? A man found in a tenement, dead, drugs, spoon, needle, that smell. Two kids found him, not three? He was the third. He was the third.

  He plopped back down in the chair.

  The maid hurried over and patted him on the shoulder.

  “Rosita,” the other woman said. “Please take the pudding to the kitchen and put it in the fridge for later. Then take Tommy back upstairs and watch some television -- cartoons or something -- with him, will you? I have…” She paused and looked at a spot on the floor. “I have things to do.”

  And then she was gone.

  Rosita disappeared with the bowl for a few minutes, then returned to lead Taye (Tommy?) upstairs.

  As he walked upstairs, his own words in a different voice haunted him. I wish that things were different.

  They were different all right.

  But it would take him a long time to figure out if that was a good thing, or a bad thing.

  ***

  Flipping it all around, switching the shit up, screaming on the ground, supping from my cup. The she-male giggled a husky giggle and sauntered up to the barrel-fire where four other hobos gathered. Wispy red ash blew from the fire like flies aflame, circling in the air for a second before turning dark and disappearing.

  “If it ain’t the freak,” one of the bums—a toothless skin-kite named Moseby—muttered.

  “I feel good,” the she-male said, sucking in a tasty draught of burning air.

  “Shut up,” Hezzy Martha said, her leathery lips pulling back to show her nicotine teeth. “Got a cig? Or a sammich?”

  The she-male ignored her. “I done up a good deed today.”

  “That’s nice,” Moseby said, and spit into the fire. It sizzled.

  “It is nice, motherfucker. I think it’s my last deed. I think it’s time to walk with the gods, know what I’m saying? Dance with those bitches. ‘Bout time, you ask me.”

  “Uh-huh,” Scratch said, picking at one of his many sores lining his jawbone. “Glad to hear it, didn’t Hezzy tell you to shut the fuck up, you wormy little hermaphro –“

  The she-male exploded outward into hot white light and itty-bitty black disjecta, like bits of pepper in a sea of glowing milk. In that moment, everything changed. Hezzy Martha became a man. Moseby became a woman. Scratch turned inside out, his organs still pumping on the outside of his red, slick skin. The fire turned to a cloud of frost and, for a moment, the street corner was no longer bathed in night but was lit by the day’s sun. And then it was over, everything was done, the three hobos who lived were weeping, Scratch gave an exhausted wet sigh and died, and the freak was pleased because it was all over, he/she was what he/she was. The journey was over, and now the end was just beginning.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chuck Wendig is a novelist, a screenwriter, and a freelance penmonkey.

  He has contributed over two million words to the roleplaying game industry, and was the developer of the popular Hunter: The Vigil game line (White Wolf Game Studios / CCP).

  He, along with writing partner Lance Weiler, is a fellow of the Sundance Film Festival Screenwriter’s Lab (2010). Their short film, Pandemic, will show at the Sundance Film Festival 2011, and their feature film HiM is in development with producer Ted Hope.

  Chuck’s novel Double Dead will be out in November, 2011.

  He's written too much. He should probably stop. Give him a wide berth, as he might be drunk and untrustworthy. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs. He is represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agen
cy.

  You can find him at his website, terribleminds.