He uncovered the bird cage, revealing two fat, brightly coloured parrots. He grabbed one and held it tightly on the table while he selected a large, cleaver-like knife. With a swift, skillful motion, he swung the knife – swoosh – and chopped the bird's head off. Then, with a scalpel, he sliced open the bird's belly. He probed inside and pulled out six round packets, then he chucked the carcass into the trash can beside the table.
He examined the packets. They were almost like eggs. Man-made eggs. Filled with heroin.
This was Stan's real business. He imported exotic critters from around the world. Some he sold upstairs in the shop. But most of them came in "special" shipments, full of small packets of junk.
The python was an experiment. One python could hold as much product as several small animals, reducing the number of shipments – and the risk. Stan was anxious to open it, but he wanted to do the second bird first. "Okay, birdie," he said as he opened the cage. "Your turn."
The bird squawked. "A-w-w-k. Your turn. A-w-w-k. Your turn."
Stan chuckled. He set the bird on the table, and it pecked at the silvery knives. "So, you like shiny things, eh, birdie? Not for long, I bet."
He held the bird down and raised the cleaver. Just as he started his downswing, CRASH! – a noise from upstairs. The door! Someone had broken in! Startled, he loosened his grip, and the bird fluttered away. "A-w-wk. Your turn."
He heard footsteps. Then – CRASH! They were trashing the shop.
Clutching the cleaver, he bounded up the stairs. He flung open the door and saw a man – skinny, long greasy hair, bad teeth, obviously a junkie. Stan recognized him at once, a low-life type who had scored from him before. He was hurling things wildly around the room.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Stan screamed.
The junkie turned, startled. He drew a handgun from his belt and fired a wild shot. BAM!! Stan dived for cover then scurried back down the stairs. He hid behind some boxes. The junkie followed.
"Where the hell are you, Stan? All I want is the smack, then I'll go."
Without getting up, Stan answered, "It's on the table."
The junkie took the packets. "C'mon, you got more than this. Cough it up, Stan. I got a gun here.” BAM!! He fired another wild shot just to prove his point.
Stan cringed. "There's a python in that crate," he called out. "The smack's inside it. That's how I smuggle it in."
The junkie saw the crate marked "Python." The slat on top had slid off to the side. The crate was empty. "There ain't no python in this crate, Stan. It's empty."
Stan jumped up. "What?!?"
BAM!! The junkie took another shot at him. It missed Stan again, but this time it was close, and with a CLANG it knocked the cleaver from Stan’s grip. It flew several feet and landed among the clutter on the other side of the room. “Shit!” Stan exclaimed, as he dived for cover behind the piles of boxes and cages.
"Bad move, Stan,” the junkie crowed. “See, I don't need you no more. All's I gotta do is find the snake."
Quietly, Stan inched toward the table. He needed one of those knives. Creeping slowly in the dark space behind the boxes. . . he suddenly found himself face to face with the python. He shuddered. It was a monster! Maybe twelve feet long.
In a panic, Stan scooted backwards, knocking over boxes and cages. The python slithered slowly after him. Stan stood up and leapt aside just as the snake lunged. It flew past him and landed in a pile of squeaky pet toys. Squeak-a-squeak-a-squeak-a.
BAM!! The junkie fired. Wild. Stan grabbed a broken cage and hurled it. It hit the junkie in the knees, tripping him up. He fell, and the gun skidded across the floor.
Stan rushed the table, grabbed the largest knife he could find, and pounced, but the junkie was too fast. He rolled to one side and Stan landed hard on the cold concrete.
Then the junkie was on his feet, kicking Stan's face, but Stan swung the knife and sliced the junkie's ankle. He fell to his knees, clutching the edge of the table for support. With an upward thrust, Stan slashed the knife through the junkie's throat, spraying blood everywhere. The junkie collapsed and pulled the table over with him.
The bird cage slid off the table, crashed into Stan's head, and knocked him cold.
When he came to, Stan immediately became aware of a sharp pain in his thigh. He looked down. . . and directly into the eyes of the python. Its full array of teeth, seventy or so razor-sharp, rearward-pointing daggers, were buried in Stan's thigh, gripping him tightly as its body coiled around him, constricting.
Stan was completely immobilized, except. . . his right arm was free. He saw the cleaver, on the floor, inches away, his only hope. He stretched. . . stretched. . . it was close. . . so close. He almost had it. . .
Then, a flapping sound.
The parrot landed near the shiny knife. It pecked at it a few times, then grasped the handle with its beak and dragged the knife a few inches out of Stan's reach. "No!" Stan cried. "N-o-o-o-o!"
At that moment, the python released its grip on Stan's thigh and slithered up along his body until Stan was staring at it, eye-to-eye. The python opened its mouth and unhinged its jaws. Horrified, Stan gazed helplessly into the huge maw.
The parrot released its grip on the knife handle. "A-w-w-k. Your turn," it squawked. "A-w-w-k. Your turn."
Food Bank
by Dylan Keeling
She had known, before they ordered a thing, that tonight was the end. He had begun to shout at her that week; to interrupt her, and comment on what she should wear. But they took their seats, near the riverside view of the London skyline, and she decided, vengefully, not to end it until he had paid for one more meal.
She made it an expensive one: three of the priciest starters, the stuffed lobster, a truffle salad side dish, the cheese-board to finish and, her sadistic piece de resistance, the most luxurious wine on the menu, nearly nine hundred pounds. She savoured every mouthful of it, relishing the taste of his evaporating money, before considering him a few moments. His shirt was pink and very smooth; his face was ageing into bitterness, though she had found it attractive at first.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, carefully. “About us.”
“Ugh,” he sighed. “Where’s this going, sweetheart?”
The woman made a valiant, a heroic, attempt to look apologetic – the maliciousness inside her could not be allowed to show for a moment. “I-it’s not working at all, darling. I’m sorry.”
Forty-five minutes later, she was standing at a random corner, one of the strange collisions in London between posher houses and the edge of a crumbling estate. It was night, and as she waited for the cab she had called to this strangely familiar address, the word he had spat rang in her ears: Bitch.
“Bitch.” And why not? With a glow of pride and a full belly, she smirked at the name. A Bitch was nobody you wanted to mess around with. A Bitch was someone who got an expensive meal for free, and went coldly, smugly home alone.
Perhaps because of this confidence, when the diminutive figure moved away from the undergrowth towards her, surprising her, nonetheless a weary, terrible part of her nodded inside: Okay, bring it on. This is what happens to people like me, in places like this.
So as the boy casually (oh, so casually!) came to confront her under the lonely streetlight, the woman’s heart pounded, but at the same time she felt ready, fortified by “plonk” and rich seafood.
The boy, from his small hoodie, only asked, “You all right? Are you lost?” but all the woman heard was menace. She rooted in her handbag for cigarettes, hoping to seem unbothered. The wine surged in her bloodstream, making her fingers clumsy.
“Maybe I can help you,” he proffered, eyes dull.
She scanned the empty street as she lit a cigarette. “Most certainly not,” she replied. Where was the taxi?
“Have you just been to a restaurant?”
At this, she frowned at him. “What I eat is none of your business.”
“Yeah.” He bit his lip, and clapped his hands toget
her. “You know there’s been murders round here.”
Of course!
Quickly, like a startled cat, she looked again at the estate name. She had heard it in the news three times this year. “What do you know about murders?” she demanded.
“I know how they did them.” He sounded frightened.
It was not clear where the conversation would go or end up – she was beginning to soften towards him, this scared little boy – when a sound of clanking, the deliberate striking of metal against metal in an echoic space, changed everything. The boy jumped, startled, said a single high-pitched sentence, then turned and hurried away to a staircase on the estate, the woman left standing.
He had said: “It’s my brother.”
She would have simply turned away, relieved, except that the banging continued, and she thought – or imagined – another sound, a high-pitched, rather feeble keening like an animal being tortured.
This wail accompanied the new sound of someone apparently kicking a metal fence at the base of the stairs and hissing, “Would you shut the fuck up, you cockroach!” Unable to decipher what was happening, the woman found herself pulled nearer, compelled to explore as if dreaming.
She picked up pace when the boy’s voice called out, “Kim, she’s coming! Stop it!” – then slowed at the corner to take in the view.
Underneath the stone staircase was a dark corner, fenced off for maintenance storage. A small figure, a little girl, was inside this fenced area, hitting the mesh with a small, closed hunting knife, held upside down. Her eyes were wide and terrified, and a furious older boy, a skinhead in a fraying pullover, kicked again at the outside of the mesh, seriously rattling it. The girl retreated, whining, between some storage tanks and a rusting porter’s trolley.
On seeing the woman come nearer, the younger boy seemed to twitch with a flash of fear. “Kim,” he alerted the older boy, who turned and saw her. For a moment the skinhead examined the child behind bars again, taking in how it must look, then he glanced nervously back at the woman – whose rage at what she saw was overwhelming her fear – and fumbled in his pocket.
Before the woman could reach him, the skinhead produced a key. He inserted it skilfully into the gate’s padlock, twisted it, unhooked the padlock, then with a shifty glance, ditched the padlock on the stone ground and grabbed the younger boy, pulling him away.
They scarpered, and the woman surprised herself by throwing her lit cigarette at their fleeing backs. “What is wrong with you?” she shouted, her voice bouncing off the brick. “You foul boys!”
Turning back, she saw the girl wore a wretched T-shirt that still said “BLING” in faded letters, and had a haunted stare. “Are you all right?” she asked, opening the gate.
The trembling girl raised a hand, and the woman’s mouth went dry at the state of the girl’s wrist: she was so thin! The wrist was like a shrink-wrapped bone, the hand unnaturally large. Her eyes were deep-sunken and her cheekbones sharp and almost white. The poor mite was about six, and skeletal.
“Hello,” the woman greeted her, bending down. “What’s your name?”
The girl just stared.
“My name”, the woman offered, “is Sandra.” She hesitated. “You can call me Sandy. That’s. . . what my sister used to call me. Are you cold?”
But what a stupid question – of course the girl must be cold! Sandy looked at her fur coat and then, unwillingly, slipped it off and wrapped it around the girl’s bloodless shoulders. “Did they lock you in there?” she asked.
And now the girl responded: a brief, miserable nod.
Sandy licked her lips, concerned, thinking. “Do you live in one of the flats round here?”
Another nod; the little girl pointed a spindly finger up the stairs. Sandy glanced up, then nodded, making a snap decision. “I’ll take you home.”
She was leading the girl to the staircase, marvelling at the thinness of her, when suddenly the girl gripped Sandy’s elbow tightly and pointed into the open courtyard, where a mist had begun to coalesce. At first Sandy heard, and saw, nothing – certainly nothing to justify the girl’s moaning and frantic tugging at her arm.
Then she saw them. The boys had returned, but with others. Sandy had an instant’s heart-stopping vision of some six or seven figures, male, female, all kids, running at them, from out of the mist. One shouted with incoherent rage; another, a female voice, called out, “Fuck you, bitch!”
And the little girl was off, scampering up the stairs in terror, wearing Sandy's coat.
No time to get her phone out, no time to hesitate. Clutching her handbag in a death grip, Sandy ran up the stairs after the girl, who hesitated on the second landing to let her catch up.
As they ran further up together, Sandy wondered at the silence. On one floor, the door at the end of the hall shut just as they passed. “Hey!” she cried out, lungs bursting; but the girl had run on and the others were still in pursuit, so she quickly gave up and continued.
Where were the parents of these kids, the authority figures? Where was anyone? Several flats had boarded-up doors and windows, and plants had died in pots in most of the halls. One flat on the third floor seemed to have had half its contents chucked out on the walkway, broken bedstead and grease-spotted duvet and all.
In all her life, Sandy had never run so hard, never felt such mounting terror. She found herself wondering what a childhood like this would have made of her, and even for some reason thinking of the suicidal insanity of the human innards when denied sustenance for too long. . .
She remembered hearing somewhere that the body, in starvation, began eating itself; the digestive system literally consuming the meat of the organs closely pressing against it on all sides, and she almost began to visualise what, if anything, would be the result on the human mind…
Almost. Instead, as she reached the fifth floor, the starving little girl she was fleeing with turned to her and, with great seriousness, pointed left, at a door a few yards down the hall.
“. . .Your home?” she panted.
“Mmm. . .mmhmm…” the girl nodded, catching her own breath with difficulty.
They went to the door and Sandy started collecting her thoughts. There would be a parent here. She could use her phone. Get help, backup. She drew deep breaths as the girl knocked, preparing herself to speak.
But the door opened and all she saw was a family of children with shattered faces and staring eyes, filthy sodden rags on their backs, reaching for her. About five kids, all under ten, all as stick-thin as the victim who had led her here. . . the victim who now was pushing her into their grubby, clutching hands.
As they pulled her down, as they ripped at her clothing with ragged nails, Sandy thrashed with her arms and kept trying to wriggle free, but she was outnumbered by the hands undoing her clothes, working her high-heeled shoes off, pulling her blouse over her head, yanking harshly at her bra.
She missed the moment her ringing phone got smashed; she was shrieking, her naked back scraping the floor, watching the skinhead pat the little girl approvingly on the shoulder of Sandy's fur coat. “Nice plan, girl,” he pronounced. “Worked a treat.”
The little girl silently opened the hunting knife. When a kick pounded into Sandy’s belly, some of the rich, expensive lobster dinner inside spurted back up to her throat and tongue, but the little girl paid no attention; she was sawing off the front half of Sandra’s right foot. Sandy thought, hysterically: so this. . . my death. . . she. . . she won’t even. . . speak to me. . .
But as the little girl turned the severed hunk of foot toenail-downwards and raised the fleshy, bloodied inner part to her open mouth, she momentarily caught Sandy’s expiring gaze, and her eyes narrowed. “Hello, Food Bank,” she said.
Silver Load
by Steve Pool
I hate hunting Rats. Other creatures are no problem. I’ve been bit, scratched, slapped, burned, and infected by just about every kind of monster, demon, or undead thing over the past few years – I was even stung by a
wyvern once. Just part of a pest exterminator’s job. But wererats – I just call them Rats, with a capital “R” – are different. These creatures make me nervous, probably because they are like us in so many ways.
So my business phone rings and I tell myself to let it go a bit. Work’s been slow lately, but I don’t want any prospective clients to know that. The Caller-ID number displayed belongs to one Robert Hanley, a bureaucrat down at the Interagency Rodent Extermination Task Force, the City’s unofficial werehunter department, among other things. The IRETF only calls me whenever it finds itself short-handed dealing with some werebeast outbreak. We in the business call these jobs “silver loads” on account of the ammo that we use (silver) and the run-around we often get trying to deal with the City afterwards (as in a load of…). And to think that I could have been a priest.
Turns out I knew the place that was having problems: a little mom-n-pop grocery in Murray Hill around Second and 38th. I pull up, and everything looks fine, very peaceful. I knew it wasn’t, of course. Beasts will often lay low, waiting for a good moment to hit someone when any potential witnesses are looking the other way. Sometimes the cleverer ones will attempt to lure a potential target into a trap with promises of drugs or sex or whatever.
Knowing how people are, the first thing I do is put a padlock on the front door, because some idiot will doubtless come stumbling into the store at the worst possible moment, looking for diapers or hooch or something, and just complicate matters.
You’ve got to know your lycanthropes in this job. Everyone knows about Mr. Werewolf. Shoot it with a silver bullet, right? Not actually that easy in my experience, unless you’re using a hunting rifle from far away. You’ll never get close enough to use a pistol. I find that about fifty pounds of beef is sufficient to pacify them. They won’t fetch a stick for you after that, but you can get a lot closer to them. Wereboars don’t hunt; they scavenge. Leave a smelly treat in a cage and they’ll walk right on in. I don’t know anything about werebears. If we had any around here, I wouldn’t answer my phone. A buddy of mine in the business once caught a weregator; told me that it didn’t work very well. I guess real alligators are more dangerous. There may be weresquirrels, werepigeons, or werekitties out there too, but I haven’t come across any of them yet. Never a dog. Dogs lost their feral a long time ago, thanks to us.
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