Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  Instead, I find him. Standing there. Grinning.

  And then he punches me with a right cross that could crack a mountain. I fall back, hit the bed and drop to my ass. Clutch my nose. Broken, erupting blood.

  He walks in and shuts the door behind him. Removes his sunglasses and sets them on the end table. Slides his jacket it off and drops it on the bed.

  "You've broken protocol," I say and cough on blood. Spit. "You've broken the rules."

  "Bullshit, I won."

  "How? We haven't battled wits and you haven't given chase. I chose wits, you bastard."

  "I know, and I outwitted you."

  "At what point did that occur?"

  "I lured you into a false sense of confidence. You believed I was exhausted, not mentally up for the challenge, but I was. I was right out there the whole time and you never caught on. I outflanked you. I won."

  "That's not a battle of wits, you soft-headed ape. You tricked me and then assaulted me. You've won nothing.” I look around the room for a second. "In fact, I'd say you forfeited the contest tonight."

  "How so?"

  "Because we're still here. Everything is still here."

  He furrows his brow and looks around the room, too. Goes over to the window and looks outside. Then back to me. "Shit."

  "Grab me a towel."

  He heads to the bathroom, returns with a hand towel, tosses it in my lap. I press it against my nose.

  "Open the blinds."

  "Why?"

  "Just do it."

  He does.

  The last bits of the days light flood in, hitting me right in the face. I drop the towel and let the sun do its thing.

  "I've never seen this before."

  "I know."

  He takes a seat and stares in awe. "Does it itch or tickle?"

  "No. Feels warm."

  I touch my nose. Wiggle it. Right as rain. I wipe the rest of the blood from my face and mouth and then drop the towel and climb up on the bed. Sit and look at him. A lot of firsts today.

  "So now what?" he asks.

  I shrug. "Got me. This is new ground."

  He looks around the room like an answer might present itself. "Well, you're alive, everything's fine outside and I'm in no way feeling the drive to chase or battle wits."

  I sigh, searching my emotions, looking for that unimaginable burning to run when I choose chase. Or that concrete desire to hold my ground and level him when I choose wits. Neither are there. Anywhere. It's like I'm completely empty.

  "This is weird," he says.

  "Yeah."

  "It's like…I'm hollow or something."

  "Yeah."

  "So this is what it feels like."

  "What's that?"

  "When people bitch about not having a purpose in life."

  I smirk. "I guess you could say that."

  He drums his finger on the small desk. "There's got to be a consequence to this."

  I scratch my head and think about that. "You mean a price to pay for not following the rules?"

  "If there isn't, what's the point of our nightly game? No consequence, no reason for us to exist."

  "It would all be meaningless.” My stomach sours at the thought. The punk from earlier flashes white hot across my memory. All the shit I put up with, have put up with, endured, suffered, for guys like him, would have been for nothing. Unless there was a consequence.

  I grab the remote control from the end table and flick on the TV. Scan the channels.

  "What are you looking for?" he asks.

  "The price."

  "Is right?"

  "No, the consequence."

  "I don't—"

  He stops when I land on CNN. Breaking news. A massive earthquake has just hit southern California. Flapping heads talk about "the big one."

  "Well," he says. "There you go. Now we know what happens."

  I scan the news ticker at the bottom. Explosions, collapsed overpasses, buildings shaken to dust. All because he decided to play his dumb trick on me. Sadly, the monster earthquake makes me feel a hell of a lot better than I did a second ago. It's nice to know my existence isn't meaningless.

  "I got a bottle of Wild Turkey in my room," he says. "Want I should get it?"

  "Yep," I say. "That'll do."

  * * *

  He sits at the desk. I lay on the bed. We both drink Wild Turkey from plastic cups.

  “Why do you do it?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean why do you do it?”

  I think about the assholes I’ve dealt with over the years. “Because I’m supposed to. It’s kind of my reason for existing, you know.”

  “Yeah, but you see how these people are these days. They’re going to wipe themselves out before I ever plant you in the ground.”

  “Possibly, but we play the game until that happens.”

  “You could always quit. Let me do away with you. Then it’d all be taken care of.”

  “Trust me, I’ve thought about it on more than one occasion.”

  He sighs. Sips. “So why not do it then?”

  “You’ve already asked this question and the answer hasn’t changed. Because I’m supposed to.”

  “There’s got be something else there. I mean, yes, this is what we do. This is who we are. But they have changed so much. Hell, they haven’t sacrificed to us in who knows how long. It’s not unfair to think maybe our game should end because, brother, I’m pretty damn tired of playing it.”

  “I’m tired, too, but we keep playing. The darkness won’t prevail.”

  He smiles. Winks. “We’ll see about that tomorrow, I guess.”

  * * *

  We kill the bottle. He heads out around three in the morning. He stands in the doorway, back to me.

  “It’s weird,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, we’ve never gone a night just hanging out.”

  “True.”

  “Even when it’s wits I usually storm off in a fit of rage and kill some people.”

  “You don’t have to storm off and kill anyone.”

  “Hey, that’s how I take out my frustration. Losing to you every night for eons is a damn bit frustrating, if you know what I mean.”

  “Weird, I’d thought you’d be conditioned to it by now.”

  He turns to me. Smirks. “Fuck you.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Where do you want to meet tomorrow?”

  “The front-desk lady kept talking about a diner in the next town. We can meet there.”

  “Let me know when you get the name of the place.”

  “Will do. Off to bed?”

  “Nah. I don’t sleep while it’s dark. Too much energy. I’ll probably go find a whore. Fuck her and kill her.”

  I wince. “You have sex with them?”

  He shrugs. “It’s something to do. Mostly, I just kill them.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s my nature, remember. Got to feed the snake.”

  “Right.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He closes the door.

  I stare at the ceiling, pretty sure this will never happen again.

  * * *

  The name of the place is the Yellow Rose Diner and Fill Station. Basically, your run-of-the-mill food stop on the asshole edge of nowhere, but the coffee’s decent.

  The sun dips low, painting the town in shades of sepia. The air is still and dense, like mounting tension. Like the whole place might explode at any moment.

  Then again, maybe it’s just the diner. Has a weird feeling to it. Darkness. Like when I’m around him. A type of darkness that wants you to hang around just long enough to see you dead.

  The bell above the door jingles.

  I look up to see him.

  He sees me. Approaches.

  “How’s the food?” he asks, dropping into the chair across from me.

  “I’ve had better.”

  He looks at my empty p
late. “Doesn’t seem to have prevented you from eating it all.”

  “I learned from the other night. No way I’m entering the gulf without a full stomach.”

  The waitress arrives. I ask for a refill on the coffee. He orders country fried steak, a side of Texas toast and a coffee of his own.

  “So, anyway,” he says, “after I left you last night—”

  I hold up my hands. “I don’t want to hear about what you did to some poor whore.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “We’ve got to settle the terms for the evening.”

  “Fine, but then can I tell you what happened?”

  “I guess.”

  He pulls out his pen and Moleskin. “Okay, what’ll it be?”

  “Chase,” I say.

  He writes it down, along with our names, the date and the location. Puts the pen and Moleskin back in his jacket.

  “So, last night I pick up this really young whore and take her back to the room. Do my thing. Set her up nice and good for the kill. But the whole time she’s blabbering about her kid and how she doesn’t want to lose it. How she wants to live.”

  “This is not what I want to hear.”

  “But this you do. I didn’t kill her.”

  I blink. “What?”

  “I didn’t kill her. I let her go and took off before the cops showed up.”

  “Why?”

  The waitress returns with his food and the coffee. When she leaves, he says, “Because I’m tired of it. All of it.”

  I sit back, eyeing him. Wondering what this was all about. I sip coffee and think maybe this is wrong. There’s some kind of con here.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says around bites of chicken fried steak. “The monster is all of the sudden a softy?”

  “Something like that.”

  He nods. “I get it, man. The thing is, it’s true. I didn’t want to kill her and so I didn’t. Got me thinking a lot.”

  “I bet.” Still don’t feel good about this.

  “Got me thinking how you’re a lot like them.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ll never quit.”

  “Oh, humans are pretty damn good at quitting.”

  “Sure, on an individual and societal level, but they will not quit living. These monkeys should have died long ago. Yet here they are, persisting, because here you are, persisting.”

  I shake my head. “Wonderful. You’ve finally figured out they’re around because I’m around.”

  “No, I figured out how to win.”

  For some reason, I swear everything has gone quiet and the entire universe is listening to us.

  “You see,” he says, “last night I got it all backwards. Tricked you, as you put it. But I also learned it doesn’t have to be chase or wits. It can be both.”

  I feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. “What have you done, Apophis?” It’s the first time I’ve used his real name in thousands of years.

  He sips coffee. “What never occurred to me. Why not end you by ending myself?”

  He opens his jacket enough to show me the explosives taped to his torso. My eyes bulge, moving from them to his smiling face. He closes the jacket.

  “The moment you get up from this table and move away, I will follow. And then we all go boom. So, who’s your daddy?”

  I shake my head. “No, this isn’t right.”

  “Relax, it’ll all be over soon.”

  “This isn’t a chase.”

  “It is, and it’s finally over.”

  “This can’t be—”

  “You knew it would end someday, Ra. It can’t last forever. These humans have had their time.”

  I blink tears, looking at the souls around me. Them, all of them, about to blink out of existence.

  “I kind of like this place,” he says, looking around the diner. “Has a certain feel to it.”

  I look from the people and back to him, staring, pleading.

  “One last sunset.” He shakes his head, eating more of his food. “Enjoy the coffee.”

  The darkness pushes in. Enveloping me, the world, as the sun disappears over the horizon. The life giver. Life. All of it. Gone.

  “You know what?” he asks. “I’m going to miss fried food. Well, that and the booze.”

  The long bright descent.

  In the end, the darkness prevails.

  Erik Williams is a former naval officer and current defense contractor (but he’s not allowed to talk about it). He is the author of the novels Demon and Guardian from The Fallen Series, and Bigfoot Crank Stomp, as well as numerous works of short fiction.

  His world is paper and ink. He writes, he edits and he writes again.

  He currently lives in San Diego with his wife and three daughters.

  “Mystic” ©2016 Jonathan Maberry

  “The Protector” ©2016 Tim Lebbon

  “Moth Frenzy” ©2016 Lucy Taylor

  “Family Bible” ©2016 Ed Kurtz

  “Life, or Whatever Passes for It” ©2016 Durand Sheng Welsh

  “The Shed” ©2016 Joe McKinney

  “The Greatest Gift” ©2016 Graham Masterton

  “The Lady of the Minch” ©2016 William Meikle

  “Beholder” ©2016 John McCallum Swain

  “Orphans of the Air” ©2016 James Lowder

  “Party Monster” ©2016 Charles Austin Muir

  “Gator Lake” ©2016 Nancy A. Collins

  “Superheated” ©2016 Yvonne Navarro

  “Burning Leaves on an Autumn Day” ©2016 Ray Garton

  “The Long Bright Descent” ©2016 Erik Williams

  "Grey Matter Press has established itself as one of the premiere purveyors of horror fiction currently in existence via both a series of killer anthologies -- SPLATTERLANDS, OMINOUS REALITIES and EQUILIBRIUM OVERTURNED -- and John F.D. Taff's harrowing novella collection THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS." -- FANGORIA Magazine

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