by Nick Keller
“Probably Kerry and Munica,” Ally said.
“That’s right,” Roy said. “I’ve spoken to them, and they have tremendous concern and respect for you in your pregnancy. Stay close to them, Ally. They’re your friends. There’s a good bond there.”
Ally’s hands went to her belly. It was still flat, but she could sense the life inside it. “They told you?” Ally asked.
“Yes. It wasn’t easy for them. They’re very loyal, and I sense love there. Do you?”
Ally shrugged again. “I guess so.”
“Hmm,” Roy droned before chancing, “but not exactly like the love of parents.”
Ally shot him a look of shock, almost betrayal. What a horrible thing to say.
“I would very much like to talk to you about your experiences that day. We’ve all got them, Ally, and…” He took a moment of bitter self-reflection before continuing, “none of them are good. But there’s no shame in them. None of it’s your fault, Ally.”
Ally thought for a moment staring out the glass partition into the hallway. Then she looked back resolved to get her story done with. “I came home that day. Me and Benny.”
Roy perked up, eyed the doctor, looked back at Ally. “Okay. Benny. Is that your boyfriend?”
“Yes. Was.” Now there was anger in her, very subtle, very hidden, but there.
“I see,” Roy said. “Your baby’s father, then?”
“Uh-huh.” She took a prolonged breath and continued, “That’s when it all happened. That’s when… everything was different.”
Roy leaned up onto the counter and said, “Tell me.”
“We went to the gym. Benny and me. I had to practice. There was a meet coming up, the first. And Benny, he liked to watch.”
Roy raised a hand stopping her and said, “You were at the gym?”
“Yes.”
“On the day that it happened?” Roy asked sounding perplexed.
“Yes.”
Roy and the doctor exchanged a skeptical look, confusion crossing both their faces. Roy looked back. “Did you and Benny perhaps, go to the lake afterwards?”
Ally drew back at the question and said, “The lake? Uh—no.”
Roy leaned back thoughtfully and said, “Huh. Okay, what happened at the gym?”
Ally flushed. “We went… to be… alone.”
Roy nodded, blinking. “Did the two of you make love, Ally?”
Ally considered her response. She was pregnant. Everyone knew it. There was no hiding the truth. Not even for a sixteen-year-old sophomore. She looked down and groaned, “It was our first time. We had never… you know… done it.”
Ally curled into him once their lovemaking had finished, and being there, with her head rested on his shoulder, one hand curled in tight to her side, the other pronging gently over his hairless chest, she felt strange and grown up, as if in this moment, right here, right now, she had become the bigger, better version of herself, an adult shedding away the child she once was. It felt wrong. It felt heinous and premature, like everything was suddenly alien to her. And she liked it. She liked it a lot.
Benny broke the silence with a giggle.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s nothing.”
“Benny,” she pressed.
“Oh, it’s just… ah, nothing.”
She grabbed his inner thigh with her fingernails and said through playfully gritted teeth, “What is it?”
He half laughed and half winced saying, “Ow, ow, baby!”
“You better tell me!” She clamped him harder.
“Okay okay, I will, jeez!”
She let go.
He took a breath and said, “If I died today it would be okay.”
She raised herself up on an elbow and gleamed into him. “Double-yoo tee ef, baby?”
He shrugged and said, “It’s just… you know. This is it. Right here. I don’t need anything more than this.” He looked at her “I’m in love, Ally. And it feels, like—awesome.”
Her eyes welled up, so she blinked and then leaned in and kissed him hard—Benny would say, hard core. This lingered on for a long moment before he pulled her off him, and sat bolt upright. “Shit!” he cried collecting his cell phone.
“What?” she said.
“It’s after four. I gotta get you home, baby!” he cried.
When they left Franklin Pierce High School they entered a world that would not recognize them. The humans once known as Ally and Benny had changed, become something fundamentally different. They were new people now, lovers of the world, ready to face what lay before them together, as one. Unfortunately, the world they entered was one neither of them would recognize, either. Not even at its fundamental core.
The drive home was quick. Two miles down Robinson Rd., around the corner at the fourth stop and onto Rayburn St. Having tasted love in all its forms for the first time, Ally hardly noticed the man standing on the side of the road staring blankly into his hands while a limp puppy lay silently at his feet, nor the four cars that had been pulled over onto the side of the road, all of them with idling engines, nor the two young kids standing in a front yard, both of them looking up at the sky with their heads lolled as far back as they would go, both mouths open and slack, eyeballs rolled up, as if they were sleeping while standing on their feet.
Benny’s Corolla pulled up and he put it in park. They looked at each other. “You think he’ll care? Your dad, I mean.” Benny said.
“We’re only twenty minutes late. I’ll just tell him I had to train extra,” and then with a devilish giggle she said, “my naked luh-verrrr.”
He forced a gulp. “Jesus, Ally…” he moaned.
“C’mon you big scaredy cat,” she said and got out of the car.
“Hey!” he cried in a whisper. She ducked down to look at him through the open door. “What if they can smell us?” he said.
“What?”
“You know, sex. They say you can smell sex on people.”
“Who said that?”
“The experts. The sex experts.”
“What do they know?”
“Hello! They’re experts, Ally. And they say you can smell sex on people.”
“You mean, you can smell the ‘F’ word?” she teased.
“Don’t say that, baby.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Look, if they can smell sex, then I better not go in there alone.”
“Awe gee,” Benny muttered and killed the engine. Walking to the front door, Benny took a large breath to calm his nerves, then gave himself a good nod. His eyes drifted over to the neighbor woman who was standing in her front lawn with her head down, swaying back and forth, smacking her head against a tree, repeatedly. Back and forth. Back and forth. He ignored it with a pathetic grumble and followed Ally up to the door.
“Just act normal,” she said.
He mouthed the words Right. Just act normal, just act normal, just act…
And then they entered the house.
“Ally, you don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Roy Stanton said with that soothing voice. “I want to set aside a special time to discuss it.”
She nodded glumly, “Okay. But what about for today?”
Dr. Kinder said, “Rest, Ally. Tomorrow we’ll run your vitals. I expect you’re in excellent health, and I want to keep it that way.”
She agreed, “Okay, Doctor.”
They waited for her to leave before sharing a conspicuous glance with the other.
Dr. Kinder said, “She wasn’t at the lake—on the water—when it happened. Nor was she in the air. She was on land. Not isolated.”
“Yes,” Roy added. “She was completely exposed, just like all the rest of them. So…”
“Why wasn’t she affected?” Dr. Kinder asked.
“I do not know,” Roy Stanton admitted, deeply curious.
“What do you think?”
“I think it adds a certain complexity, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Kinder walked over to the glass partition to see Ally move away do
wn the hall, then he turned back with a very thoughtful sigh. “Yes, a certain complexity in deed.”
They stood in silence for several seconds before Sergeant Oleman said, “What if she wasn’t affected… because of the baby?”
Dr. Kinder and Roy Stanton looked back at the sergeant, then to each other, and Roy gasped, “My God, I think he’s right.”
Egg
There was that door. 13B. The science lab. Ally’s gaze was fixed on it, drawn to it by her knowledge of what was inside that room. Her face crawled into a slow sneer as she stared at the door lever aching over it, even reaching for it with a slow, quivering hand. She stopped, pulled back, looked back down the hall from where she’d come. There was no one. The animal of anxiety was waking inside her, but today, perhaps inspired by her conversation with the doctor and Roy Stanton, she felt a need to defeat the demon that haunted her. She had to face it, to defeat it. She cranked the door handle. The door gave a click, and the room pulled her inside.
Ally stood in the dark barely able to distinguish the shapes in this room, but underneath the quilt of darkness were long lab tables set in rows—seating for students. At the front was the professor’s station, a long table with dual sink fittings on either side and an unidentifiable heap strapped to its surface. That was it. That was… the thing.
Just as they could snatch the scent of a human out of the air, its unmistakable odor grabbed her by the brain stem. It wasn’t body odor, exactly, but the stink of rancid milk mixed with burnt rubber, or burnt flesh. She couldn’t fully identify it; she’d never smelled the soulless before. Whatever it was, it raped her mind.
There was no sound, just perfect silence, until Ally flipped on the light switch. There was a moment of realization, and then it screamed at her lifting its head up and gleaming forward at her. Ally flinched, nearly turned and ran, but she controlled herself, fought to maintain composure. The thing wiggled under its restraints, flexing with its arms and legs, throwing spume into the air from the cavity in its head once referred to as a mouth.
Ally felt herself freeze. The thing settled after it realized there would be no escape from its tethers and turned its head toward her. Their eyes met each other; Ally’s a terror-filled gleam of human emotion, the thing’s were like two white light bulbs plugged into its head, glowing. They were lifeless, but radiant. Dead, but somehow animated.
Ally approached it, studying its form, its being. There was no symmetry to this creature, but a boney torso, one arm longer than the other, a head that was slowly losing whatever human disguise it once possessed. She wanted to vomit on it, wanted to mutilate it to death the way it seemed to want to mutilate her.
The way these things had mutilated Benny.
Ally shut the door behind Benny ushering him quietly inside her parents’ house. The TV was on in the living room. Ally’s father was across the room in his usual spot, brow down, face bearing no immediate expression, hypnotized eyes beaming forward at the TV.
“Hi, daddy,” she chirped setting her gym bag on the nearby table stand.
He didn’t respond.
Benny didn’t say anything. Didn’t even move. Just stood there in the entryway.
“I said, hi daddy,” Ally repeated.
“You. Ever. See. These. Things?” he murmured.
Ally stopped and looked over a little baffled. “What, dad?”
He pulled his hands up to his face, palms open and lax, showing them to her. He said more slowly, “You ever seen… these things?”
Ally giggled. Benny froze.
“Daddy, what are you talking about?”
His eyes drifted to her slowly, under some lazy intention, as if drunk. “What’re these things?” he said barely more than a whisper.
Ally flinched at him curiously, if not a little concerned. “Daddy, are you okay?”
He just looked at her, blank.
Benny cleared his throat and interjected, “Hello, Mr. Philburn.”
The man’s eyes adjusted slowly, dancing across the room and fell on Benny. “Who in the fuck’re you?”
Ally nearly choked. “Daddy!”
He looked back over, the head rocking slowly like on a loose swivel. “What?”
Ally and Benny exchanged a look, one they didn’t recognize, not even in each other. She snapped back to her father and said, “Where’s mom?” The nerves strained her words when she spoke.
“With me,” he mumbled.
“Huh?”
The sharp, rhythmic sound of a butcher’s knife came at Ally so piercing that she jerked and spun around. Her mother was in the kitchen through the wet bar, chopping vegetables.
“Uh, mom?” Ally chanced.
Her mom’s head swiveled over, eyes beamed at her, the knife never halting, continuing its up, down, up, down, chop, chop, chop. Then her head, slowly, as if captured under some unseen control, swiveled back to its business.
Benny could see the concern on Ally’s face. He could feel it. “Ally?” he said. “Why don’t we go?”
“Umm…” she stammered.
Her father sneered, “I can smell you.”
“Oh, God,” Benny said under his breath.
Ally went, “Huh, daddy?”
He got slowly to his feet and the look in his eyes was not of some fatherly concern. This was different. Perfectly foreign. His words were slow and drunken when he muttered, “There’s juz’ somethin’ wrawng wit you, Al-lee-girrrrl. You seem, I dunno, too…” and he gave a breathy chuckle, “alive.”
Benny put his hand out, reaching for her. “Ally, let’s just go. C’mon, baby.”
The father’s head whipped toward Benny so quickly the man’s neck went craaack! His lips pulled up into a mad dog’s sneer, drool visible.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
The chopping from the kitchen stopped.
Her father’s head turned back toward Ally. She froze, unable to comprehend this behavior, her eyes huge, betrayed.
“Ally, let’s go!” Benny cried.
But she was mesmerized at her father, frozen, staring at him, waiting and wondering, terror slowly dawning in her eyes.
Her father mumbled, “Baby, I want to eat. Your. Meat.”
His hands went up, leveled at her throat, and he lurched forward.
“No!” Benny screamed launching himself at Mr. Philburn. His car keys clattered onto the entryway tile. The father was taken off his feet as the two went crashing down, and the noise that came up from the man was not Ally’s father. It was hellish and abstract, a high shriek of some demon’s howl. Ally’s father cranked himself into a contorted, unnatural position, grappling Benny to the floor, and came at him with an inhuman strength—like a python and a rabbit, clamping at his neck with a gaping mouth. Ally glimpsed a plug of glimmering flesh come off her boyfriend’s neck. It was in her father’s mouth like a slice of pizza. And then, something that Ally’s mind comprehended as tomato sauce fanned into the air.
“Dad-deee!” she roared out, hands to her face.
Benny screamed using words that were garbled and filling with liquid, “Ally, go! Go! Go!”
Then, as if in an abstraction of real life, she heard her mother calmly mutter, “Want spaghetti tonight, dear?” She stood there in the dining room, eyes like a void, holding the butcher’s knife in one hand, the other hand a bloody stump—no fingers, save one dangling by a thread.
Chop. Chop. Chop.
And then, Benny choked and spumed the words, “Ally, Git ounnuff ‘ere!”
The keys were in her grasp, the door flung away, the car door jarred open, the Corolla engine cranked to life, reverse gear jerking her out of the driveway, breaking to a stop, jamming into DRIVE, moving forward, screaming down the street, onto Rayburn, little four cylinder screaming like a bat out of Hell, back onto Robinson Rd, gas pedal to the floor, the open road hauling by, all before she knew what happened. And now the radio was clamoring at her, so she jammed on the brakes and listened. It told her to get to the junior college.
And when her mind blinked back, there was a man shambling toward her, flapping a puppy violently in his hands, and hissing the words living girrrrl!
Vwoom!—she stomped the gas pedal leaving him in her dust, fading away and away in the rearview.
There was a pair of scissors in Ally’s hand. She didn’t know where they had come from, couldn’t remember picking them up, but staring down into that thing strapped to the table, which was gleaming back up at her, she rearranged the utensil in her hand so it sat in her fist like a dagger. Drawn by the impulse of hatred, she moved to it a step at a time, until she stood over it, looking into it. It wiggled and bucked uselessly, snarling up at her.
“Die,” she whispered. “I want you to die.”
She raised the weapon slowly over her head, positioning her stance, readying a kill shot. She paused feeling the darkness inside her invade what humanity they left for her. “Diii-eee…” she groaned.
“Ally!” came a voice from behind.
She blinked out of her trance and spun around.
It was Sergeant Oleman. Dr. Kinder slid into the room from behind him, eyes wide, hands forward in a neutral gesture. He stopped several paces from her and said calmly, “Ally, dear heart, don’t do that. We need her.”
Ally heaved, coming back to herself, and lowered the scissors. They slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. She turned to look down at the creature bound before her. It twitched and moved in a strange articulation. Like a palsy sufferer—something completely alien to the way humans moved. It sickened her, and she hissed, “It’s not a her. It’s an it!”
Dr. Kinder moved to her cautiously, then gathered the scissors from the floor, laid them aside, and stood over the creature, his hands resting on the table. “Yes, but we want to make it a her again.”
“How?” Ally asked, her voice seasoned with disgust.
Dr. Kinder looked down at the creature writhing on the table. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we can.”
“What do you mean?” Ally asked.
He looked at her for a moment. “It’s complicated, Ally.”
But there was no complication in Ally’s glare, only simplicity. She moved to the scissors and took them back up. Dr. Kinder watched. He thrust a hand at Sergeant Oleman motioning him to stand down. Ally shook her head and said, “I want to kill it.”
