Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  “I wasn’t trying to get in. They voted me into your group. Sandy and Dr. Bendu did.” Peanut felt hot tears threatening to moisten his eyes, but he fought them back. “They chose me. They told me to join you guys, so I did.”

  “That’s even worse, kid. See?” Gavin replied. “This wasn’t even a life you chose. Your mama chose it for you. Mama shoved you through the door to keep her baby out of the brine tub, but that ain’t going to make a whole heap of difference by sundown.”

  “She wasn’t my mom.” Peanut searched their faces for some sign of reassurance that he’d misunderstood what Gavin had just said. He had to have misspoken, but none of the warriors would even look in his direction. Their eyes remained focused on the sea. Those heaps of blackened bones by their campfires weren’t from animals. Not all of them. He knew that now. Peanut didn’t know what exactly he’d presumed about their origin, if he’d even gone so far as to make any presumptions at all. He’d denied what was right in front of him from the moment he stepped into their barracks. Preoccupied with insecurities, hopes of fitting in, fantasies with Tara Riley, he’d chosen to ignore the flesh-eating ogres and trolls that were feasting on human flesh, all around him.

  “Don’t even think about running off,” Gavin said. “It’ll be worse if we have to chase you down.”

  Peanut’s heart throbbed dryly inside his chest. His lips and face felt numb, cold. Surely they didn’t really intend to butcher and eat him. “I’ve got good potential,” he replied, his quavering voice cracking.

  Gavin shook his head. “No, you don’t.”

  “I mean it. I can—” Peanut faltered. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It’s not that they were right … maybe they were, maybe he didn’t have any chance of ever belonging with a bunch of savages like them, but he suddenly felt ashamed. He was ashamed of having desired to become a monster like them, and ashamed he wasn’t worth more in their eyes than flesh to fill their bellies. He didn’t know which he’d choose anymore, if given the choice. Filled with the worst hopelessness and dread he’d ever known, Peanut gazed down at the rolling forms of black reptiles in the surf. There remained one other choice.

  “You had Atari yet in seventy-one?” Dre asked.

  “What?”

  “Atari. You had it?”

  Peanut shook his head, eyeing Dre with a sickened disbelief. They intended to butcher and eat him, but before they dragged him off to the cutting slab, these cannibals wanted to milk him of every last drop of humiliation. A few of the guys chuckled, covering their mouths with the backs of their hands. Peanut never would’ve imagined that he’d one day develop an inferiority complex over the decade in which he was born, but around the Bad Faces, he not only felt emasculated and useless, but he also felt like he was some kind of a relic, a circus freak from another era.

  “He ain’t had Atari? You old school, Cuz. You an old playback from wayback.”

  “How about Star Wars, dude? You ever heard of Star Wars?”

  “No.” Peanut stared down into the hungry sea. The churning waves were ready to receive him with their cold and deadly embrace.

  “Damn, son. You left just when the shit was fixing to get good. I feel sorry for your punk-ass.”

  “You the oldest dude here, except for the founders, and they all dead.”

  T-Lo’s gang rolled and hooted, slapping fives. They were right. Just like the Africans, Peanut was an outsider in their midst, but the barrier between them wasn’t language, it was time. So much had evidently happened between the seventies and the decades beyond that it seemed an impossible leap from his era to the next. Dread began to percolate into anger. There was nothing wrong with the time from which he hailed. In the seventies, at least people were genuine. They cared. They didn’t sit around dogging on each other. They weren’t obsessed with little trinkets of technology in their pocket. That was why Tara Riley was something sacred, who deserved to be protected from people like these. Peanut rose to his feet at the edge of the precipice.

  “What the hell you doing, son?” T-Lo scowled up at him. “Better sit your punk ass down.”

  He couldn’t take them all, but he could take one of them with him. He would take the worst one, the one he couldn’t bear to imagine being with Tara in his stead. Peanut seized the leather thong around T-Lo’s throat.

  “Hold up,” T-Lo shouted, leaping to his feet. “You lost your damned mind?”

  It came barreling out of the underbrush with a guttural roar, slamming into T-Lo’s flank with a flash of bared teeth. The leather thong snapped like a rotten string in Peanut’s hand, as T-Lo was wrenched off the outcrop and flung into the brambles. He shrieked, as flesh tore from his bones before his body had even struck the ground. Warriors rolled and scrambled. Weapons clattered against the rocks. Peanut heard the snap of Gavin’s automatic rifle bolt, even as he snatched a dropped spear, and lunged at T-Lo’s attacker.

  Prattling gunfire shredded leaves all around him, as he thrust the spear in and out of the killer’s ribs. Beneath the snarling form, T-Lo thrashed in a fountain of its blood. In and out, Peanut plunged the red shaft into the spine, in and out, folding the madman’s paralyzed legs beneath him. The psychopath rolled into the vegetation with most of T-Lo’s throat still clenched between his teeth. Peanut leapt over the mortally injured warrior, and pursued his attacker as he scrambled for deeper cover, dragging his intestines behind him. Entangled in briars, he could only bare reddened teeth and growl.

  Peanut didn’t pity him, and he no longer pitied himself. He was still clenching T-Lo’s feathered necklace between his palm and the spear’s gory shaft, as he edged into the spiny brambles. The talisman belonged to him. He was just as certain of that fact as he was sure that its previous owner was already dead. Peanut raised his spear with both hands, and with a savage war cry, he reamed out the U.S. Marine’s eye.

  ###

  22-D

  “What happened in here?” Dr. Bendu shouted, staggering from one smoldering heap of flesh and bones to the next. “Meyer!”

  “Nurseworms,” the barber surgeon replied, his throat bulging with an involuntary gulp. “The patients were all contaminated, and my new assistant was bitten.” He shifted his weight from one flat foot to the other. “They had to be destroyed.”

  “Destroyed?” Dr. Bendu whispered, leering at Meyer through a haze of burning flesh. “As long as you’ve been here, as long as you’ve known me, the sole purpose of the existence of Briggstown has never been unclear.”

  Meyer took a step backwards for every step that Dr. Bendu advanced toward him. Meyer’s outward palms rose into a defensive gesture, gently tamping at the air. The cadence of his breathing hastened. Each drawn breath was sharpened by the constricting walls of his throat. Nate almost felt sorry for the guy.

  “A hundred-year tradition in the study of local diseases in an effort to strike back against those who condemned us to Hell, and when you came face to face with the rarest and most deadly malady ever recorded in this realm—you burned it?”

  “You make it sound so bad, Doctor, but they were spreading much too quickly,” Meyer replied, still easing backward until his heel struck the cavern wall with a resounding clack. “Lest we forget the lessons learned by Captain Briggs in his final hours, we’d all have been infected. Every one of us. They’d have erased our civilization by the day’s end.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Dr. Bendu crept nearer. “That, Sir, is precisely what makes nurseworms the perfect weapon for our purposes, and you destroyed it. Nate?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hold him.”

  Nate strode up to the cowering form against the wall. He wasn’t exactly sure how to hold a shuddering man who was making no effort to escape. Nate tapped his shoulder, as if to excuse passage behind him, and when Meyer leaned forward, Nate took him gently by the bends in his elbows. It felt rather awkward, not to mention unnecessary.

  “Please,” Meyer whined, “I was only thinking for the safety of our community.”


  “That is exactly why you failed us, Meyer. We don’t matter. None of us do. Don’t you understand that?” Dr. Bendu placed his palm against Meyer’s chubby cheek, and gave it a pat. “Everyone here is already dead.”

  The blade appeared with the speed of a striking viper. Before Nate realized what was happening, before Meyer could cry out, Dr. Bendu had stabbed him three times through the heart. As his murderer casually wiped the blood from his knife, Meyer emitted a bubbling wail. He appeared to deny that he was a dead man still standing, and rather, a child stunned by a sudden spanking. Nate didn’t want to hold onto him any longer, but he felt guilty letting him go, knowing that he was soon going to fall.

  “I think you like it a little too much. That’s what has always concerned me about you, to be perfectly honest. I think you might be a bit of a pervert.” Dr. Bendu lectured the barber surgeon as he crumpled to his knees, spattering the cave floor with his blood. He began to crawl away. “You think I haven’t noticed? Hmm? How many patients come in here, and how many actually leave? This room is less a hospital than an execution chamber. I’ve always feared that something may be wrong with your mind.”

  Meyer stopped crawling once he’d made it beneath a workbench. Teetering on his hands and knees, his breaths rattled horribly in his throat. His head swayed from side to side. Falling droplets drizzled the stone beneath his chest.

  “Come, Nate. Let’s see what there is to salvage of this killer worm, if anything at all.” Dr. Bendu turned, as Meyer collapsed, his back heaving with snores of death that practically shook the cave.

  Nate felt the need to wipe his hands on the sides of his pants. Even though his palms weren’t bloody, they felt unclean for having held Meyer while Dr. Bendu stabbed him. He tried to ignore the dying man’s rattling honks, as he followed the witchman from one burned corpse to the next. They all looked about the same, charred and grimacing in lakes of rendered fat, burned to the extent that their genders were indiscernible.

  “I hope perhaps their core temperatures remained stable, even while the surface of their flesh burned away,” Bendu said, as he knelt beside one of the victims. His blade went to work, carving a circular incision around a corpse’s eye.

  Nate covered his mouth, as Dr. Bendu eased his fingers down into the incisions, and lifted out the steaming glob. He shook his head, and flung the roasted eyeball off into the shadows, where it bounced wetly around the cave floor. Next, he plunged the blade into the cadaver’s bloated gut. A geyser of steam spewed from the wound, around the blade.

  “I cannot believe this terrible misfortune,” he whispered, rising to his feet, and moving to the bedside of another cadaver. Again, the blade sank into the crisped flesh around the orbit, and began sawing a circular path around the organ. Gently, he pushed his fingertips into the socket, hooked them around the backside of the eyeball, and lifted. A small amount of steam accompanied a sucking noise as the translucent orb pulled free of its housing. Dr. Bendu sliced through the connective cordage, on the backside. He held the eyeball up to the glow of an oil lamp, turning his treasure back and forth between his nails. His eyes widened, and a barely perceptible smile curled the corners of his lips.

  ###

  21-F

  Fiery hailstones perforated the bellies of thunderheads, and streaked down from the sky. Moon Kiss had arrived on the far side of the world, and the annual tempests to which Gavin had alluded were already preceding the lunar spectacle that spawned them. Lightning pulsed hotly through the scum of swirling clouds, and the ocean below them groaned with godlike resonance. Offshore, breakers slammed the barrier reef with spectacular explosions. White jettisons leapt to catch electric bolts in a game of elemental tag. Below the outcrop, muddy tides rushed up into the jungle, scouring filth and debris from the jungle floor, wagging the sodden boughs and snapping trunks in devastating display of the sea’s greater might.

  Identified as the same U.S. Marine who unwittingly fired the first shot in what was to be a secret war between the castaways and Briggstown, the wild man was summarily decapitated. His devilish head was mounted atop Peanut’s killing pike. A dozen cupped hands plunged into the twin streams of his gushing blood, washing Peanut’s face and hair, stamping crimson handprints all over his body. The talisman of rex feathers once worn by T-Lo was secured around his neck. Bloody hands seized his waist, his thighs, and raised him like a child of the lightning. To a chorus of howling, and thunder’s deep rumble, he was initiated into their guild.

  ###

  23-A

  Peering from beneath her hood at the preparations in the plaza, Tara dabbed her scabbed lips with the lip of her tongue. Her lips were so badly split from the blows she’d received that she was barely able to speak, and smiling was as an act she might not ever perform again. Her body would heal. It hardly seemed possible, but she knew that it eventually would. Her mind, however, bore a different sort of wound that would forever fester. Tara added another stave of hardwood to the kiln.

  It was Margot out there, bound to the stake. She knew it was her, even though the young model was hardly recognizable without her flow of golden hair. The rain turned pink as it drizzled over her red cap of exposed meat. An angry, red cleft was hemmed from her naval to her sternum. God only knew what they’d done to her, and what they intended to do. The scene on the plaza looked like a stage for the burning of a confessed witch. Kneeling in a puddle on the flagstones with her elbows pinioned behind the pole, Margot swung her buzzard’s head to wail at those who passed her by, but no one paused in their daily habits to pay her mind. It appeared as though horrific sights in Briggstown were rather commonplace, where a hardened populace had been desensitized by their repeated exposure to brutality.

  Throwing back her head, Margot beseeched the heavens with the squalls of an ignored child. Thunder replied, shunning her with its titanic rumble. The doomed girl slumped to one side, and hung sobbing from her bonds. In a way, she was a condemned witch. At least, that was the evil guise that fate demanded she wore in her final hours. Briggstown was nothing if not swift in its judgement, and merciless in the deliverance of its penalties for transgressions, be they real or perceived.

  The warriors who’d fallen upon she and Margot made a point of justifying what would be lengthy and repeated assaults as a form of justice served on the behalf of their murdered brother, who was allegedly shot down in cold blood by one of the castaways. The toll of vengeance that was then exacted on them was one that they could barely afford. The jungle secreted everything that happened to them, every hour of it, until they emerged through the curtains of vegetation forever twisted as those vines, and utterly defiled. No one asked. No one who looked upon what remained of them questioned what had happened. No one cared. It was as though their ordeal in the jungle was nothing more than a nightmare that was hardly worth retelling, when everyone in Briggstown had suffered a similar dream.

  A few heads turned as Margot was approached by a pair of men carrying tools, and a collection of nameless fitments. The one in the lead Tara recognized as the local scientist and inventor, Dr. Bendu. A wraithlike entity, he appeared to glide over puddled flagstones through the downpour, his clawed fingers moiling over one of those rectangular telephones that seemed to fascinate everyone in the village. His assistant followed him closely with a tattered umbrella positioned over his master’s head, protecting the little piece of technology from the elements. Dr. Bendu knelt before Margot, his cloak clinging to his dark skin, as he connected the device to a set of wires that protruded through the stitches in her chest. When the wiring was complete, Dr. Bendu wrapped the telephone in clear plastic, and with the same material, strapped it to Margot’s chest.

  Tara lowered her hood. She blinked her swollen eyes in disbelief, and covered her mouth, when she realized that the mad scientist’s lab assistant was none other than Nate. Abandoning her station at the pottery kiln, Tara bolted out across the plaza, and into the storm.

  “Nate?” she said, gaping up into the eyes of the man hovering over
Dr. Bendu with the black umbrella. “What are you doing?”

  “You should probably go,” Nate replied. The inner-light that once shined from within his fatherly eyes was gone, extinguished by whatever horrors had been repeatedly thrust upon them.

  “Where is Sandy?”

  The musculature of Nate’s face gave an involuntary twitch. “You should probably go.”

  Dr. Bendu grinned up from the umbrella’s shadow. His serrated teeth caught every flash of lightning. Seemingly from out of nowhere, a gleaming dagger appeared in his hand. “The eye,” he said, extending a clawed hand at Nate’s chest.

  Probing his bulging shirt pocket with evident disgust, Nate produced a jiggling globe of translucent flesh, festooned with dangling bits of tissue. As he placed the horrid trophy in the center of Bendu’s palm, Tara found herself the focus of one of Sandy’s green eyes.

  Dr. Bendu sliced an incision across the iris, and he laid his knife on the ground. Holding the pierced organ as though it were a shot of liquid gold, he ordered Nate to tilt back Margot’s head. Through the tiny slit in the eyeball, probing snouts emerged. Writhing, dabbing, a mass of living vesicles peered around at the outside world.

  “Pry open her mouth,” Dr. Bendu crooned as Nate wrenched back Margot’s screaming head. “Use my blade to coax her open if you need to. We can’t afford to waste a single worm.”

  “Oh my God,” Tara whispered, clasping her split lips with both hands. It hurt so bad to grimace, but she could not stop from shaking her head in denial. How could they have fallen so fast, and so far, from the decent people they’d been just a day ago?

  The device wrapped in plastic, wired and strapped to Margot’s chest, was now discernible as some sort of an electric timer. The countdown showed less than ten minutes remaining on the screen. She staggered back one step, and then another. When Dr. Bendu tipped the squirming organ over Margot’s gaping mouth, and squeezed, Tara spun, and ran away. She couldn’t bear to witness anything more in this place, this living hell whose demons corrupted every soul who passed through its rolling gates.