I tried not to notice when she skulked past me to her seat at the back of the classroom. Mr. Broomford was droning on and on about tectonic plates and shock tremors and a whole bunch of stuff I just couldn’t listen to. All I heard was Lucy’s low breathing behind me, the breathing that turned to snuffles and then sobs. Evidently news of Ted’s story had reached her.
I wanted to reach out when she ran past, to pull her back, but I sat dumbly as she fled down the corridor. Mr. Broomford stood in the doorway yelling about going to see Mr. Bellham if she didn’t come back this minute, and how it would go on her permanent record, but she’d split. After a minute or two he calmed down and went right back to boring the hell out of us, but my eyes kept flicking to the window. Nobody else saw her, head down and shoulders shaking, running to the school gates. The car park outside was almost empty and all eyes inside were on chalk boards as a pale Cadillac pulled up next to Lucy and a boy with light brown hair and a red jacket got out and draped an arm round her. She flung herself round his waist and, though he looked surprised, he seemed to offer her a lift. They burned rubber down the street and no one ever saw him again.
Mike’s disappearance was all over the news. His parents seemed like nice folks, just what you’d expect. I didn’t like seeing his mother cry. Lucy had three days off school, upset to be one of the last to see him, she said. Mary and Sam, practically electrified with excitement, told everybody how often the cops had paid her a visit.
A week later I was in the soda shop with half the school after class. Howie and Bennie were getting a kick out of telling two dollies how much we’d drunk the weekend before and the girls were giggling and sharing their own stories. It was starting to bug me. The truth was we’d drained a bottle of whiskey and passed out at Howie’s while his folks were away. No great shakes. I lifted my straw and watched the sludge drip down into the tall glass and tried not to think. “Hey, what’s with you Bill,” said Bennie eventually, “You’re a real wet rag tonight.” Before I had a chance to answer him the place was torn up with whispers and points; Lucy had walked in looking more sullen than usual.
“Well, of all the nerve,” said one of the school queen bees loudly.
“Get out of here, murderer.”
“Spooky Lucy! Spooky Lucy!”
“What did you do with his body?”
The cat-calling got louder and people started throwing screwed up napkins. She held up her arms and shielded her face, her eyes wet with tears. This only seemed to fuel their anger and they started making baby crying noises. The soda shop owner was yelling for everybody to shut up but nobody could hear him. I got out of my chair, ready to spring into action, but to do what? Why did she have to come in here? She caught my eye and I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Her hurt turned to rage, an animal fury. She ran back out the door into the night.
Unlike the campaign when Mike vanished, Lucy’s disappearance was nothing more than a spook story told at Halloween: the class nerd who got her own back on one of the most popular boys. Her parents, a sloppy couple without much bread, put up posters but otherwise nobody paid much attention. I thought about her and that weird forest smell a lot, especially when I was alone. Then, in the summer before I headed off to college in Virginia, the carnival came to town.
That night, with pockets of dough from shifts at the bowling alley, Howie, Bennie and I took in the sights. The air was sickly sweet with popcorn and cotton candy and our ears rang with screams and laughs. We ignored the acrobats and kiddie clowns and headed straight for the tents lurking at the perimeter—the sideshows. “Come see the headless girl, alive and real!” yelled the barker as loud as his yellow checked suit. We were tempted for a moment by the painting on the front of a bikini clad dolly with weird scientific jazz around her head, but Howie pointed further down. “I wanna test my strength, come on, it’ll be a gas.” We made our way through the crowds past the other barkers and painted promises of strange and new things until my eye settled on something.
“Hey,” Bennie said, “what’s up, too chicken?”
“No,” I was standing in front of the hoochie-coochie tent, looking at the picture on the side. “I’ll join you fellas in a second.”
“Alright,” they laughed and nudged each other, “just don’t let the hucksters get you.”
I pushed the flap aside and stepped into the darkness with a bunch of other sweaty men. I needed to see it to believe it myself. There, up on the small stage swinging her hips with two tired looking dames, was Lucy. Her costume, if you could call it that, was a leopard two piece, and there was not a single mark on her thighs. She winked exaggeratedly as men threw her coins, her eyeliner like a cat’s and her black hair teased up and glossy. I felt things I didn’t expect, a raw heat in my chest and my groin. I badly wanted to run onstage and touch her all over. To my amazement she not only saw me but gestured with a slight nod of her head to the back of the tent.
I waited, my heart wearing tap shoes, until she’d finished dancing before sneaking back out into the open and heading for the back entrance. A big lug stood with his arms folded and for a second I thought I’d have to forget the whole thing, when Lucy came out wrapped in a robe. “Hang loose, Abe,” she said—no, she purred—and stalked towards me. “I know him. I’ll be back before the next show.”
We settled down behind one of the trailers. I didn’t know where to start and the words came out before I could stop them. “When I saw you that time, at the soda shop, I wanted to help, it was...”
She shrugged and turned slightly, the lights from the rides playing over her pale face. “That’s alright. I figured you couldn’t do anything because of your friends. I liked Mike. I guess I just wanted to let everyone know how sad I was that...” She stopped, and I regretted what I’d said.
“You got a raw deal, but you don’t have to stay away. There’s plenty of things you can do in town.”
She arched a penciled eyebrow. “Work at the library while all my classmates go to college?” I didn’t have an answer. She leaned into me and I caught the smell of the woods beneath her musky perfume, “I know why you wanted to speak to me.” Her lips tasted like raspberry Tootsie Frooties and her hand snaked down to my pants. I felt myself get hard and made a small whimpering noise; so much for being hip. She didn’t seem to mind and threw off her robe. “Look me in the eyes, won’t you, the whole time?” It seemed an odd thing to say for someone so fast, but I was ready to agree to anything. She unzipped me and wrapped her arms around my neck real tight, and I started to feel like I’d been tied to a dangerous animal. I pulled back and she kissed me again until I almost relaxed, but something was wrong. Real wrong. I opened my eyes and looked into hers—they weren’t just brown but green and amber too. I could have stared at them forever, but I forced myself to look down.
It was then that everything changed. Marks were appearing over her thighs and growing larger, the bigger ones already fully formed mouths smacking their lips and gurgling, fat tongues all pointing toward me. I yelped and tore away, but not before I felt one of the slugs track its slime across my leg. “No, come back,” she wept, “I’m so hungry, please!” I left her crumpled on the ground and ran, leaving Howie and Bennie—who disappeared that night—and didn’t stop running until I was in the safety of my bed. I pulled the covers over my entire body and didn’t stop shaking until morning, and all I could see over and over were black gaping holes. I thought about her that night and every night after, the taste of raspberry Tootsie Frooties and her leopard two piece, but most of all the smell of the woods. Sometimes in my dreams I imagine branches tap-tapping at my window, but they can’t be real, it’s just the breeze. I’m sure it’s just the breeze.
PEAR PEOPLE FROM PLANET 13
M.P. JOHNSON
The Journal of Observational Science posited that UFO sightings would quadruple if people simply looked up. Earl Manner couldn’t look up, and that’s why he didn’t see the flaming metal tube plummeting through the night sky a few miles ahead. He
could barely see past his pickup’s windshield. The wiper fluid had run dry and his dull blades barely cut through the black spaghetti confetti of splattered insects. Even if he could see, he had dedicated his attention to fighting through the vitriol that Daniel, his twelve-year-old son, spewed at him.
“I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon as a family,” Daniel whined. If he crossed his arms any tighter, he would have shattered ribs. “But mom would push you in.”
“Daniel!” Earl struggled to avoid driving into the massive puddles creeping up to the highway, the result of rain falling too fast for the South Dakota soil to absorb. The water had become the breeding ground for the insects that danced their final jigs in the pickup’s headlights.
“Fire!” Daniel pointed out the window. “There’s a spaceship on fire!”
“There’s no such thing as space...Oh.”
A metal tube the length of a jet rose out of the puddle. Reflected in the still surface of the puddle below, the flames seemed immense. The tube hadn’t fared any better against the swarm than the pickup, which looked as though it had picked up a cheap fur coat along the way. On the tube, the insect corpses fed the flames.
“What do you do when you find a spaceship in the ditch?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t know, what?”
“I don’t know either. I’m still working on that one.”
“This is no joke.” Earl climbed out of the truck and waded into the puddle. It seemed to go on forever in the darkness, as if everything except the highway had been submerged.
Earl swatted through the cloud of indistinguishable bloodsuckers that buzzed toward every accessible orifice. Despite the insects playing tag in his nostrils, he caught a familiar scent. Darla, his ex, made one dessert: a baked apple. This wasn’t quite the same. Once, she had experimented with a baked pear. It had almost disintegrated in the oven. It hadn’t smelled quite right, like it was trying too hard to be sweet, like it wasn’t confident in its fruitiness. That’s what Earl smelled now.
Something floated to the surface of the water and grabbed his ankle. He jumped. When he saw what had attacked him, he composed himself.
“You okay?” Daniel asked from shore.
“Just a tree branch,” Earl replied, staring at the stick as the flickering firelight gave it the illusion of movement. “It startled me.”
“Dad,” Daniel said slowly, “there isn’t a tree for miles.”
Earl jumped at the sudden pain in his ankle. Stick claws tightened. He fell backwards into the larvae-infested water, kicking furiously.
Daniel splashed in and stomped on the branch, hitting a sweet spot. Claws withdrew from Earl’s flesh and he broke free. Dripping wet, he and Daniel ran to the pickup, not looking back at the mass that slowly rose out of water.
“What was that?” Daniel asked.
“I’m not interested in finding out,” Earl said, hitting the gas. “Let’s find someplace to dry off and call the police. That’s all we can do.”
Daniel hugged his father, a rare gesture. Whenever Earl thought about how much he loved his son, one moment reappeared: He and Daniel—then seven—lying in the football field outside Preven Elementary, burned out after learning that they both stunk at the game. Daniel hugged Earl and said, “You’ve got good dadness.”
Those words hadn’t been said since, but Earl heard them whenever his son hugged him.
Under the Holly Cove Motel’s neon pink sign, a woman in a short skirt, fishnets and high heels stepped out of the lobby, skittered across the parking lot and climbed into a semi-truck. Covering his son’s eyes, Earl parked the pickup. “Let’s just call the police and go. We’ll find another place to dry off.”
The white-haired man at the desk didn’t look up from the charts he examined, nor did he bother to hide his flask when Earl and Daniel entered.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Earl said, “but a spaceship crashed.”
“Already?” the white-haired man asked.
Earl looked closer at the charts: diagrams of the solar system. Xs and circles, words like “Yes!” and “Here!” scribbled so fiercely they had ripped the paper. “What do you mean, ‘Already?’”
“I thought it would be a while.” The old man shoved Earl and Daniel back into the parking lot. “Where did it crash?”
“Take a guess, Mister,” Daniel said, pointing down the highway.
“Oh my,” the old man replied.
Earl pulled his son close. Down the centerline hopped things no human had seen before, things beyond the scope of comprehension. Just looking at them made his mind ache, as if he had been asked to calculate pi using forks and spoons. They each had a single leg like gnarled wood that culminated in a claw. Knowing he had been so close to one of these things made him shudder, a sensation amplified by the sound of their claw-tips dragging against the blacktop—a cat’s teeth scraped across a chalkboard. Something seemed familiar about their inverted light bulb bodies.
“Dad, they’re...pears.”
Earl agreed. Dark freckles covered pale green skin. At the point of greatest width, they peered through blackened divots lined with tarantula leg lashes that writhed at everything in sight. He saw hate in those non-eyes. Hate or hunger, or that combination of both that came from crows as they watched him pass on the highway while picking away at pieces of mangled squirrel. Some of the pear people had fared worse than others in the crash. Chunks of white fruit flesh, glistening with juice, had been torn or caramelized. Insects swarmed the wounds.
“Back inside!” Earl grabbed Daniel’s hand and pulled him back to the lobby. Doors slammed as other motel guests locked themselves away, screaming and cursing. The old man ushered Earl and Daniel up the stairs to the attic.
Standing by a small telescope, he introduced himself. “Doctor Tartan Smith, astronomer.” He spun the telescope like a cat playing with a string.
“Astronomer?” Daniel asked. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re not old enough to look for jobs yet kid, but when you are, tell me how many openings you see for astronomers. It isn’t an easy job to get, and if you do get it, you best not foul it up by discovering a planet populated by malicious fruit-like creatures and pissing in your boss’s thermos when she doesn’t believe you. If only that dumb broad had listened, we wouldn’t have to deal with this.”
“You knew about these things?” Earl asked. The sound of a single leg hopping up the stairs put fear in his voice.
“I’ve known about them for years. I watched as they devoured every last one of the meat plants on their home planet, as they built that crude ship and prepared to search the universe for nourishment. I never thought they’d make it here, not in that ship, but whatever alloy they used managed to penetrate our atmosphere.”
As the attic door rattled under the strength of the creature outside, Earl asked the most important question: “How do you kill them?”
Tartan stumbled around the room, shoving things aside until he found a long model rocket and handed it to Earl. “It’s a goddamn pear, man! Smash it!”
Earl held the rocket like a club. “Get behind me,” he ordered.
“What do you do when fruit knocks on your door?” Daniel asked.
Earl shrugged, recognizing his son’s old joke.
“Vitamin,” Daniel said.
Earl pulled the door open and let all the stored tension out of his shoulders with a single swing. The rocket struck beneath the bloated pear’s eyeholes, cutting out a swath of fruit flesh that splattered across the room, white chunks in a fine mist. He dropped the battered rocket and waited for the creature to fall. How could it not, with ten percent of its body dripping from the model planets that dangled from the ceiling, disintegrated like the pears Darla baked so long ago?
It didn’t fall though. It just stared, the cut a crooked smile under its eyes. With a sudden forward movement, it head butted Earl across the room.
The doctor charged, wielding his telescope over his head like a spear. He drove it i
nto the spot between the pear’s eyeholes. It stuck, but the creature still didn’t stop. It rolled onto its back, reached out its stem-leg and grabbed the doctor’s neck. As it pulled the doctor closer, the tendrils around its eyes stretched and grabbed, like furry baby fingers. They dug into the doctor’s face, pulling out chunks of meat and dropping them into the black eyeholes. The old man’s screams couldn’t bury the sound of flesh being devoured by tiny teeth somewhere inside the creature.
As Earl lay shaking on the other side of the room, the creature wrapped its wooden foot-claw around Daniel. It pulled the child close, rolled out of the room and down the stairs with a seemingly endless series of thumps.
“It took Daniel,” Earl said to himself.
He sat cross-legged on the floor next to the doctor’s twitching, faceless body. Crying seemed like the natural reaction, but he didn’t give in. Darla had tried to take Daniel away during the divorce. She had not succeeded, and she had tried harder than that godforsaken pear. He could hear her grating voice: “You wouldn’t let me have custody, but you let some mushy pear monster take your son away?”
No. The answer was no.
He refused to let that creature do what his ex-wife couldn’t.
~ ~ ~
Knowing he couldn’t take the pear people on by himself, he assembled troops: the truck driver, Todd, with his forearms like roasted hams, and Hula, the lady of the night, who focused more on her hot pink manicure than her armament: an old baseball bat. Todd carried a tiny pistol. “My dickweed insurance,” he called it. Everyone else remained behind locked doors or splattered across the parking lot.
“Thanks for volunteering,” Earl said, leading his troops to his pickup. As they climbed into the back, Earl warned, “Watch out for bugs.”
“It’s not bugs I’m worried about,” Hula said, kicking off her stiletto heels.
~ ~ ~
American Nightmare Page 7
