The Influence

by Bentley Little

  Was he behaving oddly? Ross wondered. He didn’t think so, but then everyone probably thought they were acting normally.

  He thought of the inappropriate dreams he’d had about Lita.

  “So no one seems to know what that thing is,” Jill said. “You didn’t happen to get a picture of it, did you?”

  He hadn’t even thought of that. Stupid. He’d had his phone with him and could have easily snapped a photo. “No,” he said. “I wish I had.”

  “But you’d recognize it if you saw it again, right?”

  It had been curled up in a fetal position, so he wasn’t exactly sure what its body looked like, but there was no way on earth he could ever forget that face. “I’d recognize it.”

  “Could you draw it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not really…I don’t know how…” He took a deep breath. “I can’t draw.”

  “Could you describe it so I could draw it? Like a police sketch? You describe the nose, the eyes, whatever, then you look at my drawing and tell me if I have to make something a little bigger or move something to the right…”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “All right, then. If I can come up with what you think is a pretty fair approximation, we can scan it into your computer—you have a scanner, don’t you?”

  “What kind of an engineer would I be if I didn’t?”

  “We can scan it into your computer and then show it around to, I don’t know, anthropologists or parapsychologists or comparative religion experts or something, and see if anyone recognizes it and knows what’s going on.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” he said admiringly.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t think of it.”

  “Well, I…”

  “It’s probably part of the same behavioral pattern that keeps men from asking directions. You guys just want to stumble along by yourselves and try to figure things out on your own, even when there’s a whole world out there waiting to help you.”

  “I was going to say it was a lack of imagination on my part, but I like your explanation better.”

  “So when do you want to do it?”

  “How about tomorrow?” Ross said. “This is actually supposed to be my first day of work and it’s half-gone already.”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  “I have a bunch of emails to read and specs to sort through, and I want to make a good impression. My friend Alex kind of went out on a limb for me.”

  “I understand. Do what you have to do. Call you tonight?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” he said.

  “With bated breath?”

  “With my pants around my ankles.”

  She laughed. “That’s what I like to hear.”

  They hung up, and he actually did turn on his computer, but there was the sound of a loud engine in the yard, and he looked out the window to see what looked like a miniature tanker truck pull up in front of the Big House. It had to be Jackass McDaniels’ friend Fred, the septic tank servicer, and, unable to stifle his curiosity, Ross went outside to see what was going on.

  McDaniels must have already filled in his friend about what had happened this morning, because the big bearded man in the flannel shirt who was standing with one foot on the ground and one foot on the bottom porch step was already regaling Dave and Lita with stories of unusual things he’d come across in the past few weeks.

  “…and I heard a thumping from the tank in back of my truck. I pulled over, thinking I’d accidentally left the pump on, and this thing looked like a big ol’ snake with a pink triangle head came flying out of that opening in the top there. Scared the shit out of me! For a second, it looked like it was going to fly away, but then it kind of dissolved into little strings that looked like spaghetti, and they fell back on the tank, slid down the sides and wiggled off into the dirt. Like I said, I didn’t suck up anything like that from their septic tank, and I know I tightened the lid on that opening.” The man saw Ross and nodded in his direction. “Hey.”

  “My cousin Ross,” Lita said.

  “Glad to meet you.” He grinned. “I won’t make you shake hands. Knowing the work I do, not many people want to anyway.”

  “So, did you come across anything else?” Dave asked.

  “Lotta small stuff. Nothing major like that. But yesterday, something kind of weird happened. I’d cleaned out three systems and headed over to the leech field to empty the truck. Only after I hooked up the line and reversed the pump flow to drain it out…there was nothing there. My tank was empty. Somewhere between that last house and the leech field, all that effluent just…disappeared. I don’t know how, don’t know where, but it was gone. All of it.”

  “So you heard Jackass’ story,” Lita said. “How much are you going to charge us?”

  “A flat one hundred if there’s nothing unusual. Any weird shit—pardon the pun—and it’s double.”

  Lita and Dave looked at one another, a nod passing between them.

  “All right,” Dave said. “Do it.”

  Ross stayed around to watch. He really should have been working on his project for the floor mat company—he didn’t want to start off by making a bad impression, not after being unemployed for so long—but he thought about the bright green string that came out of the kitchen sink when McDaniels cleared the drain, and the tiny pink creatures in his shower water, and wanted to see what would come out of the septic tank.

  It was a nearly hour-long process, and for a long while, they knew nothing. Some gray-black sludge leaked out around the edge of the thick pump line inserted into the top of the buried septic tank, and when Fred shone a light into the tank itself, the sewage inside looked the same, but it was not until the tank was drained, and Fred climbed up on his truck to examine the contents from above, that he determined there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  “A hundred bucks,” he announced.

  Dave wrote out a check, and they watched him drive off, as though waiting for that triangle-headed snake or some other impossible creature to fly out of the truck on its way down the drive. It wasn’t until he had driven past the palo verde tree and disappeared that they all turned away.

  “Finally!” Lita said, the relief audible in her voice as she hurried into the house. “Now I can go to the bathroom.”

  TWENTY FIVE

  It was after midnight, but Cameron was wide awake, sitting in his locked bedroom on the edge of the bed and drinking Jim Beam out of the bottle. Every few minutes, he would get up, walk nervously over to the door and press an ear against the wood, listening.

  Something was out there.

  Something big.

  Something slimy.

  He had not seen it yet, but he’d heard it, making a wet slurping sound as it moved down the hall, and it was what kept him from falling asleep. He had no idea what it was, but he could imagine it eating through the door to his bedroom, slinking across the floor and killing him in his bed in an agonizing and unnatural way.

  Cameron sidled over to the closed window, parting the curtain just enough to peek through the glass and see the yard below. The smokehouse was still locked—and that thing inside it was dead anyway—but he had no doubt whatsoever that it was the source of this horror. It was the source of everything that had been happening since New Year’s Eve, and when morning came and the sun was up, he was going to go out there, set fire to that bullet-ridden body and put a stop to it all. He didn’t care what anyone else said; this was his property and his decision. Fuck the superstitious assholes around here. This wasn’t one of those church fairy tales. This was real, and he needed to put a stop to it before things got even worse.

  He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and flattened against the wall, away from the window, afraid of being seen. From somewhere outside came a sound that could have been the cry of a woman. It rose in pitch and volume, as though about to turn into a scream, then lowered into laughter that became a terrifying guttural chuckle. He waited until the noise had subsided, the
n hurried into the center of the room and back to the bed, finishing off the last of the bottle and letting it fall from his hand onto the floor.

  Despite Jorge’s iron hand, several of Cameron’s men had run away, back to Mexico, maybe, and even some of the wetbacks who’d defected to his place from other ranches had changed their minds and left. The place was noticeably shorthanded, and if half of his cattle hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be enough workers here to take care of the herd. As it was, he was not sure how much work the remaining hands were doing. Jorge seemed to have them busy with other projects, mostly in and around the smokehouse, and Cameron knew the reason why.

  That thing was calling the shots.

  Even though it was dead.

  And if he didn’t put a stop to it now, well… who knew what would happen?

  Why in the hell had he put the body into his smokehouse to begin with? What had he been thinking? Maybe he hadn’t been thinking. Maybe it had been thinking for him. Because all of his original reasons had turned out to be nonsensical. He’d wanted to hide the body so no one would find out what had happened: but half of the town had been at the party and those who hadn’t had soon learned about it from someone who had been. He wanted to somehow harness the energy he’d sensed in that horribly alien form: but he had no idea how to do that, and he’d discovered almost immediately that the power was affecting him rather than the other way around.

  So what had kept him from acting sooner?

  He wasn’t sure. But his life and livelihood had turned to shit since New Year’s Eve, and if Cameron had any hope of turning things around, he had to take action now before it was too late.

  There was that slurping sound outside his bedroom door.

  Unless it was too late already.

  From somewhere on the ranch, someone screamed. It did not sound close by—not the barn, not the corral, not the barracks—but seemed to originate farther out, in the open grazing area. There was only the one scream, then silence, and Cameron imagined that one of the wetbacks had attempted to sneak off and had been stopped by… By what? Jorge wielding a machete? A hideously deformed cow with crazed red eyes and vampire fangs? Nothing he could conjure up seemed too farfetched.

  Eventually, somehow, he fell asleep. He’d been trying to stay awake, and he didn’t know when he had dozed off, but he awoke in his bed, and outside the sun was up. His head was pounding, and his mouth tasted like an iguana had just taken a dump in it, but he was no longer afraid, and he unlocked and opened the door, striding down the hall to the stairs. He half-expected to see slime coating the floor, dripping from the walls and ceiling, but the hallway looked the same as always, and he took the steps two at a time, intending to get some matches from the kitchen, then some gasoline from the garage. He was going to torch the smokehouse and that demon inside it before anyone could stop him, and then this nightmare would finally be over.

  He grabbed the box of matches from the top of the refrigerator and went outside.

  His men, seemingly all of them—or all that were left—were standing in a Hands-Across-America line blocking the front of the smokehouse, as though they already knew what he planned to do and were determined to stop him. The wetbacks stared intently as he marched down the front steps and across the dirt, Jorge, in the middle, following his progress with particular interest.

  To the right of the men, alone in the dirt at the edge of the drive, stood an unkempt man holding the strings of several barely aloft balloons. The balloon man was whistling a tune that was at once eerie and familiar, and it took Cameron a moment to realize why he recognized the melody—it was the tune the cat had been whistling in the vet’s office.

  Holding onto what scant courage he had left, Cameron ignored them all and walked purposefully over to the garage, where he pulled open the door and went inside, picking up a half-full can of gasoline. His men were obviously under the control of that thing—he himself had felt the first faint stirrings of trepidation, which told him that he’d better act quickly while he still had the will—and his plan was to either go around them or rush through them, douse the smokehouse with gas and toss a match. If any of them tried to put out the fire, he would stop them. Somehow. His goal was to burn the shed and the body inside it, no matter what.

  Carrying the gas can, he walked out of the garage—

  And saw the line of ranch hands blocking his way.

  In astonishingly quick time, they had moved en masse from the front of the smokehouse to the front of the garage. Jorge was at the fore, no longer part of the line, and it was he who pointed to the gas can. “What is that for?”

  “You know,” Cameron said, and tried to move past him.

  Jorge blocked his way. “No, sir. You cannot.”

  “This is my house, goddamnit, my property, and I’ll do what I want with it! You cholos don’t fucking decide what happens here, I do!”

  “No.”

  Cameron lashed out, hitting Jorge across the face. The foreman did not fight back but merely smiled, blood seeping between his teeth. The sight was both sickening and frightening.

  Behind the other men and off to the right, the balloon man was whistling that maddening tune.

  “I need to do this,” Cameron said, and even to himself it sounded as though he was begging.

  “No, sir,” Jorge repeated softly. “You cannot.”

  Cameron pushed the foreman aside and found himself grabbed and held by two men he didn’t even recognize. Joe’s workers? Jack’s? The others separated, formed parenthesis to either side of them. Jorge reached out and quickly took the gas can from his right hand. Someone else grabbed the book of matches from his left.

  In the dirt behind Jorge was a body, and when the foreman stepped aside to put the gas can down, Cameron saw that it was Rudolpho, the kid he’d Sanduskyed, only he was dead and lying on the ground, and between his legs sprouted an enormous erection. His skin was an odd amber color, and though there were scrapes and cuts in it, there was no blood.

  His must have been the scream Cameron had heard last night, but he didn’t even have time to think about it because while the two men continued to hold his arms, Jorge unbuckled Cameron’s belt, unbuttoned his pants and yanked them down around his ankles. He was turned around, dragged backward, then shoved down onto the dead Rudolpho’s crotch. The corpse’s stiff penis was obviously supposed to penetrate him, but it missed at first, just poking skin. Then he was wiggled around, readjusted, and shoved down again, and this time the cock found its mark. He screamed as he was entered, feeling the dry hard organ rammed inside him. It broke as he was pushed all the way down on it, and the agonizing penetration grew twenty times more painful as his insides were jolted sideways. Something obviously ruptured within him, because along with the mind-blowing pain came a dribble of warm liquid that had to be blood.

  The men let him go, and Cameron was left to fend for himself as, crying in anguish, he tried to pull away from the corpse and get off the broken erection that seemed to be stuck inside him. Finally, he succeeded in releasing himself, and whimpering like a beaten puppy, he pulled up his pants and hobbled back into the house, shutting and locking the door behind him before collapsing on the floor.

  TWENTY SIX

  In the dream, Father Ramos was in a small dark room that he didn’t recognize but that he knew was Cameron Holt’s smokehouse. He was not alone. There were others there—Holt’s foreman Jorge, parishioners of his like Cissy Heath, even that lunatic Vern Hastings—and they were all gathered before the angel, which was unmoving but glowing. It was curled into a fetal position, and although it had been killed, there was life within it yet. That life was responsible not only for the shimmering radiance but for the creation of the shell-like layer that had formed from fused sections of the body and started to encase the blackened figure.

  It resembled nothing so much as a chrysalis, and Father Ramos understood that it was in the process of becoming.

  This was why God had not punished them. His angel was not really de
ad but was transforming into something else.

  An avenger?

  Father Ramos would not have been surprised, and he was filled with dread at the thought of what might happen when the metamorphosis was complete. His eyes focused on the silently screaming mouth, filled with sharp needle-like teeth, and he shivered as he imagined those teeth ripping into flesh and tearing apart the people who had shot their guns into the sky.

  And those who had let it happen.

  Like himself.

  Father Ramos awoke, suffused with a feeling of foreboding. He was supposed to perform an early morning mass and then hear confessions, but a much stronger impulse gripped him, and he put on his clothes and, without showering, shaving or eating, drove over to Cameron Holt’s ranch. Jorge was waiting for him by the cattle guard, and as they looked at each other, an understanding passed between them. Jorge had had the same dream, he realized, and all of the others he’d seen probably had as well.

  “Go,” Jorge said, gesturing back up the drive toward the house and smokehouse. Though the chain was down this time, the way was blocked by recently installed metal posts that had been cemented into the ground and prevented any vehicles from going through. Father Ramos thought of the last time he’d been here, when his goal had been to give the angel a proper burial in the hopes that it would put an end to all that was happening, and he understood why the posts had been put up. He was probably not the only person who wanted to bury, burn or destroy the body, and he recognized Cameron Holt’s desire to protect it because he now felt the same way. The dream last night had awakened something within him, and though he was still frightened of the angel—and feared God’s wrath—he knew that the way to salvation lay not in trying to cover up the past but in embracing the future.