Savage Species

by Jonathan Janz

  In the uneven glow of his mining helmet light, he watched Red Elk place the Ruger’s barrel against the Night Flyer’s temple. There was a concussion and a spray of wetness. Then he and Red Elk were tumbling into the darkness.

  Part Four

  The Arena

  Chapter One

  Jesse awakens in his grandpa’s living room. He knows this isn’t possible, but the ratty green carpet, the recliners worn shiny with use, even the huge console television are items he recalls from his childhood. It occurs to him he might be dead, that he’s in some unremarkable purgatory—this isn’t glorious enough to be heaven and it’s way too mundane for hell—but he also suspects he might be in a coma. He has a vague recollection of the Night Flyers, of their earsplitting screeches and the dizzying sight of Emma being borne away over the endless drop. He wonders if the others have been eaten the way Clevenger was. The thought troubles him, and he brushes it away.

  The living room is just as he remembers it, only there is no sign of recent habitation; this too troubles him. The television is not only dark, but its enormous, olive screen is dusty from disuse. There is no glass of 7-Up fizzing next to his grandpa’s favorite recliner. No morning paper either.

  Yet the house is not devoid of life. He is as certain of this as he is that something terrible is about to occur. He pivots his head with a slow creak of tendons and peers fretfully down the hallway. It’s not much of a hallway, only two rooms on either side and a bathroom straight ahead, yet now that short hallway seems interminable. He does not want to walk the fifteen paces to his grandpa’s room, but he finds himself doing just that, his nerveless feet treading the tattered green carpet, and then he is outside the door.

  Jesse imagines the room within: redolent of talcum powder and Old Spice aftershave and arranged with militaristic order. Grandpa was in the service—Air Force mechanic—and his time there instilled in him the habit of making his bed each morning, of folding his underwear neatly within his bureau drawer even though no one—not even his wife—would ever know he folded them.

  A brutal railroad man begins swinging a sledgehammer within Jesse’s chest cavity, the iron head striking just under his right pectoral muscle, the ache spreading down to his solar plexus, his belly, and Jesse leans forward breathlessly on the wooden door.

  The door opens, and his discomfort and fear curdle into revulsion. The familiar smells of powder and aftershave have been routed by old feces and the halitosis of one who is being eaten from the inside out.

  The croaking voice from the bed makes him jump.

  “Ten years too late.”

  Jesse shakes his head, mouths the words Tried to come, Grandpa, but he can’t make a sound.

  “Tried to come, my ass,” his grandpa says, and despite his anxiety and breathlessness, Jesse is compelled to study the wasted figure on the bed to confirm it is indeed his grandfather. In life the man had seldom sworn, and never in such a curt, sarcastic voice.

  “You either go somewhere or you don’t,” the corpselike face growls. “You want to see a person, you see him. Nothing stops you if you care about someone.”

  Jesse can’t respond. What’s there to say?

  The face, he notes with quiet dismay, is sunken and creased, the folds like some old, musty tarp heaped in a corner and colorless with age. The whiskers are black and sparse, with salty tufts sprouting from the jawline, where the nurse’s razor has missed. His grandfather was a thin man most of his life, but the figure on the bed is an animate skeleton, the splotchy skin bagging down around the elbows as though a molting process has begun.

  “You’re a superficial little bastard, you know that?”

  Jesse looks up, stunned, and sees his grandpa watching him. As if to confirm the caustic declaration, Jesse finds himself looking not at his grandpa’s irises but rather at the red troughs of sagging eyelid that form their southern borders.

  “That’s right,” his grandpa says, “focus on the ravaged body.”

  Jesse shakes his head.

  “The one time I needed you.”

  “No.”

  “Rebounded how many missed shots for you? Ten thousand?”

  Jesse closes his eyes, the hot tears squeezing through.

  “How many times I pick you up from little league practice?”

  “Every afternoon,” Jesse whispers.

  “I ever miss a game of yours?”

  “Not one.”

  “Didn’t I read you books?”

  “You know you did.”

  “Frog and Toad and Dr. Seuss and those goddamn Clifford books.”

  Jesse hangs his head.

  “We looked at the sports page together,” his grandpa goes on, “talked about who was hitting and who wasn’t.”

  “Every day,” Jesse agrees, “all summer long.”

  A palsied finger shoots out, jabs him in the arm. Jesse sucks in a startled breath.

  His grandpa’s crooked teeth are gritted in rage. “And don’t you give me any of that modern crap about brainwashing you with sports and letting a kid find himself. You loved that stuff as much as I did, and you know it.”

  “I did, Grandpa.”

  “And when you got into taking pictures, who bought you a brand-new Polaroid?”

  “You did.”

  “And film. Christ, you went through it like it was free, but did I complain?”

  “You never complained, Grandpa.”

  The corpselike body astonishes him by sitting erect, the yellowed nest of pillows around him retaining his shape.

  “Then where were you, Jess? Why’d you abandon me?”

  Jesse is holding back the tears now, humming in misery.

  “You’re not gonna run away this time,” his grandpa growls.

  The door behind him slams shut.

  Jesse murmurs, “I failed you, I’m sorry.”

  He moans at the flare of hostility in the man’s rheumy eyes.

  “You failed, huh? I’m sorry, Grandpa, and all is forgiven? Well, to hell with that.”

  His grandpa thrusts the covers down, revealing impossibly skinny legs, bare and hairless below the hemline of the stained hospital gown. The legs swing toward Jesse. The feet are swollen and plagued by open sores.

  “Please let me go,” Jesse whispers.

  “Ohhhh,” his grandpa says, bloodshot eyes stretching wide, “‘let me go’, the boy says. Well I’d say you did go, didn’t you? Went everywhere but the hospital.”

  “Grandpa—”

  “Went to your made-up girlfriend’s house for dinner, took her to the drive-in.”

  “Grandpa, please.”

  “Named her Juliet. Kind of an idiot you think I am anyway? Juliet? Why didn’t you name her Ophelia or Miranda or Lady Fucking Macbeth instead?”

  Jesse tries to grope for the door, but his hands hang limply at his sides.

  “That was the biggest insult,” his grandpa says. “The condescension. Why didn’t you just tell the truth, ‘I’m scared of coming over there and I’m a lazy, selfish prick’. It woulda hurt, but at least I wouldn’t think you thought I was an idiot.”

  “I didn’t think—”

  The curtain-rod arms shoot out. “The hell you didn’t!”

  The praying mantis body rises toward him.

  “And the worst part,” his grandpa croaks, the exposed lower teeth so crowded Jesse can see several places where one tooth overlaps another, “the worst part, my unfaithful, lying grandson, is how I only asked for one thing from you your entire goddamned life. Just one thing.”

  Now the livid face hovers inches from Jesse’s, the death smell rotting out of the wet mouth.

  “You remember what I asked, boy?”

  Jesse squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head weakly. Of course he remembers. One day late in his senior year of high school he’d been worrying about how he’d pay for college, his mother having saved next to nothing, and Jesse himself with only a hundred or so in his account. His grandpa matter-of-factly fished an envelope from the
table next to his recliner and handed it to Jesse. When he opened it he discovered it was a college fund with more than enough to carry Jesse through his undergrad years and maybe a little further. He took in his grandpa’s quiet smile, too moved to speak, and his grandpa had said, “Just be there for me when I need you.”

  Jesse sobs, makes high, keening sounds, but he can’t sink into his grandfather’s arms because the man he loved is gone and has been replaced by this vengeful doppelganger.

  “‘Just be there for me’,” his grandpa repeats now. “Was that too much to ask?”

  “No.”

  “Yes! Oh yes it was, my boy. All I wanted from you was a little time, some diverting conversation. We cancer patients tend to value that, you know. It makes the end more bearable.”

  A rustling sound fills the small room, and at this Jesse opens his eyes and sees his grandpa has opened his gown to reveal a horror of a body. The skin of the chest is peeling in charred curls, revealing portions of the ribcage and the pink-black lungs within. The belly too is being eaten away by maggots and slugs, the purple organs within a squirming refuse heap of decay.

  Jesse gags, claps a hand over his mouth.

  “Sure, puke your guts out,” the thing that could not be his grandpa says. “It’s what I did. And I did it all alone, didn’t I? Your mom came around sometimes, but we were never as close as you and I were. Or at least as close as I thought you and I were. But you—” jabbing a finger into Jesse’s sweat-soaked shirt, “—you proved me wrong, didn’t you? It was like you wanted to punish me for making that one request of you.”

  The dying face shoves into his, rancid spit flying from the wasted lips. “Well, you punished me good, didn’t you? I saw you every week of your life until I went downhill, and then you didn’t show up for six stinking months! Didn’t even come to the hospital when I was so drugged up I couldn’t move. Your mother begged you and begged you, but you used every excuse imaginable to make sure I didn’t sully you with my death.”

  And now the face is altering. Even through Jesse’s tears he can see the rheumy eyes turning green and changing shape, the nubby brown teeth elongating and tapering at the tips.

  The thing that had been his grandpa but is now one of the Children seizes Jesse by the wrists and thrusts his hands into the writhing cesspool of its belly, the maggots squirming hotly against his fingers, the pulpy intestines perforating around his nails, seeping their shitty discharge over his knuckles. The now-pale face looms before Jesse’s. It opens its flyblown maw and clamps down on Jesse’s cheek and crunches through cartilage and gristle. Jesse wails into the scalding wet stench as the creature’s black tongue snakes out…

  “…sorry,” he mumbled, “…sorry I failed you…”

  Something hard struck his cheek, and at first he thought it was the creature chewing his flesh. In terror, Jesse opened his eyes and immediately closed them, the light slanting down at him too fierce.

  The palm tapped his cheek again, with even less finesse than before.

  “…you with me, kiddo?” the voice said.

  Jesse nodded, his skull suddenly awash in pain.

  “You better get your ass in gear,” the voice said. “I don’t think we have much time before they find a way through.”

  Jesse brought up a hand to block the light. “Could you…” he said. “Can’t you point that thing somewhere else?”

  The light immediately went away. He remembered the cache of supplies under the house, the explosion. Remembered the ambush in the cave, Debbie’s scissoring legs drizzling blood. Recalled the endless passage through the tunnel, Emma’s black lace panties. Thought of Ruth becoming a hideous bat creature, the thing digging Clevenger to ribbons. Saw with sinking dread the Night Flyers swooping down and snatching Emma and the others.

  Looked up into Frank Red Elk’s impassive face.

  “Sounds like you got some issues to work out,” Red Elk said.

  Jesse groaned. He endeavored to take in the immediate area, but the vicious pulse in his skull overwhelmed him.

  “My dad got cancer too,” Red Elk said. “Only his was from smoking four packs of Lucky Strikes every day.”

  “Grandpa didn’t smoke,” Jesse said.

  “Still died, didn’t he?”

  Jesse returned Red Elk’s pitiless gaze a moment longer. Then he made it up on an elbow, looked around. “Where are we?”

  “Where you think? We’re underground.”

  “Yeah, but…where’d the Night Flyers go?”

  Red Elk shook his head. “Those things were attacking us, and I thought we were finally gonna get our tickets punched. I shot the one carrying me and ended up riding with you and your creature a few seconds.

  “We got lucky. I got that cocksucker in the head. It let us go right before it slammed headfirst into the entrance of this tunnel. You and I tumbled inside, and the rocks over it gave way. That Night Flyer got buried under the debris, and the only thing we got was a knock in the head for you and a messed-up back for me.”

  Red Elk tapped the mining helmet on Jesse’s head. “Good thing you were wearing that. I think you landed right on your head.”

  Jesse sat up. “They took the others?”

  “Others are probably better off. We might die in here.”

  “They took Emma.”

  “All of ‘em,” Red Elk said. “Carried ‘em the same direction they took the professor.”

  Jesse thought of the Night Flyers winging down into the stygian valley. It made him want to cry.

  As if reading his mind, Red Elk said, “You and the girl were gettin’ on well, weren’t you?”

  Jesse glanced at him to see if he was being mocked. But for once Red Elk seemed serious.

  Red Elk studied his face a long moment, turned and aimed his light down the tunnel. “We go that way, we’ll follow the same general path those Flyers took when they kidnapped the girls. But there’s a problem.”

  “Looks okay to me,” Jesse said.

  “From here,” Red Elk agreed. “Until you round that bend up there and the tunnel narrows to the width of a bratwurst.”

  “What about…” Jesse started to ask, but when he turned and his mining helmet lit up what was behind him, he understood how truly screwed they were.

  The tunnel was choked with rocks.

  Red Elk said equably, “Reckon we’ll have to blow up the place, see if this old thing still works.”

  Jesse watched him slide the ancient stick of dynamite out of the red gym bag with quiet alarm.

  “Question is,” Red Elk said, “which side do we blow?”

  Jesse eyed the pile of crushed rocks with mounting dread. “It’s got to be here, doesn’t it? I mean, it leads back to where we were attacked, but at least it leads somewhere.”

  “That’s one argument.”

  Jesse became aware of the grit in his mouth, the taste of it chalky and highly unpleasant. “What’s the other argument?” he asked.

  “We could jam this,” Red Elk held up the faded red stick, “in the bratwurst hole.”

  “You said yourself, that tunnel is impassable.”

  “As it is,” Red Elk said. “But I shined my light into it and was pretty sure it opened up about six feet in.”

  “And then?” Jesse said. “What if it narrows again after that? What if the tunnel just ends?”

  “I don’t think so. You’ve been out a good twenty minutes. I spent the majority of that time at the hole listening.”

  “So?”

  Red Elk’s face grew doubtful. “It sounds crazy, but I swear I heard a baby crying.”

  Chapter Two

  He feels big. Not just big, but big, a sensation not only of physical strength, but of actual size as well. He’s not holding the flashlight, but even as he stares down at his hands he can detect a difference in their size. The growth of his knuckles, the length of his fingers, hell, even the expanse of his palms is substantial. At first he was pissed as hell about Sam Bledsoe putting them all on a flashlight bat
tery ration. Who the hell did he think he was, the goddamn chancellor of the cave? In fact, for a good while he’d been pissed about everything. From Charly’s grinning treachery to Bledsoe’s general assholery, it had pretty much been a carnival ride through his worst nightmares since heading belowground.

  But none of that stuff seems to matter. He’s big now, bigger than he’s ever been, and he’s surcharged with an energy that makes his teeth vibrate. His dick has been hard for a good twenty minutes, and it’s not just Mel’s proximity that’s causing his dog to howl. Sure, she’s driven him crazy since the first time she showed up in his office wanting a grad assistant’s position… Eric smiles at the memory of how coolly he put her through the motions of interviewing:

  I see, I see. So how long have you been interested in coaching at the collegiate level?

  Mel answering while he leans over the desk to get a good look at those endless brown legs and a hint of aquamarine panties peeking at him from under the hood of skirt.

  Eric pretending to be impressed with her answer and telling her what a sacred responsibility it is to be entrusted with the futures of thirteen female athletes.

  Mel’s eyes, deadly serious, lock on his in that solemn way. He pretends to write something on his blotter so he can risk another glance at that maddening V of underwear. He hunches closer to his desk, scribbling nonsense—maybe she’ll just think he’s nearsighted—and actually begins to sweat from the strain of peering up that sober black skirt. He spies her panties again, and they’re darker than he’d originally thought, closer to green than blue, some color his wife would call Sea Foam or Essence of Birch Leaf.

  When he looks up from his graffiti-scrawled blotter, she’s staring right at him. And not just at him, but into him. She knows what he’s been up to, or at least she thinks she does, and he tries not to blush, but he knows from the hot feel of his cheeks that his face is redder than a beet.

  But amazingly, her expression is not one of disappointment or outrage, but of naïve excitement. The face of a young woman who’s heard about such clandestine things but has been so isolated from those who might do them to her that standing on the brink of this world is exhilaration enough to make her chest heave.