Everything Has Teeth

by Strand, Jeff

  Eventually the real rapist might be brought to justice, but Neal would be long gone, and it wasn't as if Mr. Simon would rush to the cops to confess that he'd murdered an innocent kid.

  The gun fired.

  Neal stood up and walked out of his temporary office (they were all temporary) just as Mr. Simon emerged from the other room. He was in a daze and tears streamed down his face. He handed the gun back to Neal.

  Neal glanced into the room. Derrick lay on his back on the plastic, still tied up, blood pooling under his skull, a nice little hole in the center of his forehead.

  Okay, so he'd misjudged Mr. Simon. Good.

  "You gonna be all right?" Neal asked.

  Mr. Simon nodded. He was wearing an old gray t-shirt that he could throw away without his wife noticing that it was gone, though it didn't look like he'd gotten any blood on it.

  "You go home, and you give your wife a great big hug, and you keep your mouth shut about what happened here. No tearful confessions, got it?"

  "Got it."

  "What you did was honorable. You made things right. That piece of human filth got exactly what he deserved."

  Mr. Simon wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve. "I'm not feeling guilty about it."

  "Perfect. Get out of here. I'll make him go away."

  Mr. Simon just stood there for a moment, as if he wanted to talk some more, and then he walked down the short hallway, opened the door, and left the building. The door swung closed behind him, locking automatically.

  Now Neal had to get moving. You never knew what kind of emotional state people were going to be in afterward. He'd once had a client call the police to confess during the drive home. Then the client had either lost control of his car or made an inept attempt to kill himself by crashing into a tree, followed by a successful suicide via dragging his wrists across the broken window glass. That had been a close one.

  He didn't think Mr. Simon was a suicide risk, but when you had a corpse to dispose of, it was never a good idea to procrastinate.

  Too bad he couldn't hire somebody to help with this part of the process. Dragging a body deep into the forest and burying it was a pain in the neck. Maybe I should get an intern, he thought with a smile. After all, this is educational stuff.

  Somebody began pounding on the door. Mr. Simon?

  "Let me in! Let me in!" Yeah, it was Mr. Simon. Neal had a sudden horrible vision of this building completely surrounded by the police. If that were the case, though, he'd like to believe that Mr. Simon wasn't so astoundingly stupid as to pound on the door to come back in.

  He'd probably just been struck by the realization that he'd taken a human life and freaked out. That happened the last time, too. Neal was going to start adding a surcharge for psychological counseling.

  The doorknob twisted a few times, and then Mr. Simon started kicking the door. "Please let me in, oh please God hurry please let me—!"

  He stopped shouting and kicking.

  Neal hurried over to the door and looked through the peephole. Mr. Simon wasn't there. Nor was there a blood-spattered serial killer holding an axe and Mr. Simon's severed head. There was nobody.

  "You need to just calm down," said Neal, trying to speak in a soothing tone of voice while still being heard through the door.

  No response.

  "You still there?"

  Nothing.

  Neal didn't have much choice except to open the door and find out what had happened. He couldn't just leave a dead body there if Mr. Simon had died of a heart attack or something.

  He opened the door, smacking into Mr. Simon's unmoving body. The man lay on his back, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, arms splayed out. His right arm was covered with...

  What were those things?

  Neal grabbed Mr. Simon by the ankles and dragged him back into the building. He closed the door and then crouched down beside him.

  There were two dozen—maybe three?—bugs attached to his skin. Ticks? Each one of them was a six-legged monster about the size of his thumbnail. How had they all gotten on the guy so quickly? There weren't even any bushes around for him to have walked through; it was a regular paved parking lot.

  Neal tried to flick one away. It twitched but didn't come off Mr. Simon's arm.

  Mr. Simon was still breathing. Neal gently slapped his face a few times. "Hey, wake up! Wake up!"

  No, wait. That was a mistake. Better to leave Mr. Simon unconscious and keep the noise level down.

  Neal pinched one of the bugs between his thumb and index finger and pulled. There was some resistance as it tugged on Mr. Simon's flesh, and then it popped off his arm, leaving a small bloody hole behind. Neal squeezed his fingers together until the bug burst.

  If he yanked each one of these off, there might be so much bleeding that he'd have to take Mr. Simon to the hospital. He could just dump him off in front of the emergency room, but that was still too risky. There'd be cameras. They were supposed to part ways immediately after the execution and never see each other again.

  Neal needed to burn them off. He wished he hadn't quit smoking two hundred and sixteen days ago.

  No, wait. He had a lighter in the trunk of his car. Not for cigarettes; it was part of his bug-out bag in case he needed to flee without notice. Bug-out bag. Heh.

  He stood up and reached for the doorknob. Hesitated.

  Don't be ridiculous. They aren't going to jump out at you.

  Yet something had happened to Mr. Simon. He hadn't just reached into a big box of bugs.

  Neal lowered his hand. Until he knew for sure what was going on, he'd stay inside.

  He kneeled back down and examined Mr. Simon's arm. Were the bugs getting larger, engorged with blood? He couldn't quite tell, but they seemed to be pulsating a bit. Though Neal was far from squeamish—he'd watched people die some pretty horrific deaths—this was really creeping him out.

  He plucked off and crushed another one of the bugs. Wiped the gook on Mr. Simon's jeans. Crushed a third. The wounds didn't seem to be very deep, so maybe there would be no need to actually stop the bleeding.

  Mr. Simon opened his eyes.

  Looked at his arm.

  His silence ended.

  "Quiet!" said Neal, even though he'd probably be reacting the same way if his arms were covered with blood-sucking bugs.

  Mr. Simon began to frantically bat at his chest.

  Neal pulled up his shirt. He'd assumed that the bugs were only on his exposed flesh, but no, there were more of them on his chest than his arms.

  There were also some bloody holes.

  Had the bugs come off, or...?

  No. He watched one of them quickly disappear. They were burrowing.

  Burning them off was no longer an option unless he went out and got a goddamned flamethrower. What the hell was he supposed to do? Pick hundreds of them off, one by one, and risk getting them on his own flesh?

  Neal certainly wasn't calling 911. Not that an ambulance would arrive in time anyway.

  The only plan that made any sense was to keep Mr. Simon as quiet as possible while he died. And if that meant bashing his head against the floor a few times until he lost consciousness, so be it. It would probably be an act of mercy.

  As if realizing what he had in mind, Mr. Simon stopped screaming. Then his eyes widened as he looked at something behind Neal.

  Neal quickly glanced over his shoulder. Nothing there.

  Should he offer some meaningless reassurance?

  "You're going to be fine," Neal said, as a trickle of blood ran from the corner of Mr. Simon's mouth.

  "What are you?" Mr. Simon asked.

  "Huh?"

  "Please don't."

  Neal realized that Mr. Simon wasn't talking to him. He was hallucinating. Maybe seeing God, or the other fellow.

  "I had to!" said Mr. Simon.

  His arms and chest were completely red now, and few of the bugs were visible anymore. Splotches of red began to appear on his pants.

  "I...had to," he repeated, bare
ly audible now.

  Then he died.

  Neal moved away from him. What the hell had just happened? Had he gone outside and rolled around in bug-filled dirt? Neal had never seen anything like this, and he'd seen some seriously deranged shit.

  Now he had to dispose of two bodies, and be really freaking careful about—

  "Hello."

  The voice, low and reverberating, came from behind him. Neal spun around. This time there was something there.

  For several moments, Neal couldn't quite process what he was seeing. It was the shape and size of a human, sort of, but a human made out of blood, like a clear glass blood-filled figurine without the actual glass.

  Hundreds of bugs swirled around in the blood.

  It didn't have a mouth, but Neal felt like it was smiling at him.

  "Hello," it repeated. Still no mouth.

  "Uhhhhhh..."

  "Be polite."

  "Hello?"

  "That's better."

  "What the hell are you?" asked Neal, even though he knew the answer was "some sort of fucked-up hallucination."

  "Guilt."

  Neal gaped at the blood-bug-thing for a moment. "What?"

  "Guilt. Benjamin Simon was consumed by guilt for the terrible thing he did. Eaten alive. But he didn't suffer long. His agony was over in minutes, not days. And they didn't crawl on his face. Didn't devour his eyeballs. Didn't burrow into his tongue while he screamed. It would have been so much more awful for him if he'd committed more atrocities. Worse ones. If anger and anguish weren't an excuse."

  Bugs began to fall out of the blood. Dozens. Then hundreds. Then thousands.

  They didn't even crawl across the floor. They were just suddenly upon him.

  "I hope your conscience is clear."

  CRY

  My tears spill onto the keyboard as I write this.

  It's pretty much because I just finished rubbing freshly sliced habanero peppers into my eyes, which is something I do every once in a while. It all started when I was six, and I thought "I wonder what would happen if I did that?" So I tried it, and it sucked, and I didn't do it again right away. But after three or four weeks I succumbed to the temptation, and now it's a semi-regular thing.

  You're judging me, aren't you?

  As you read this, you're developing an air of superiority, simply because I rub burning pepper juice into my eyes and you probably don't. That's all right. You're entitled. I mean, if I watched somebody jab themself in the face with a fork, I'd say to myself, "I am more intelligent than that person."

  Okay, that's a lie. I jab myself in the face with a fork almost as often as I do the habanero thing. Not hard enough that it goes in one cheek and out the other, but enough to make four red marks that leak. And then I put antiseptic on it, both to keep the wound free of infection and because of the interesting sensation that occurs.

  Some might say that I have a problem. To them I say...well, I can't really argue their logic. I do have a problem. I don't stand there pouring alcohol on facial fork wounds and think that I'm being normal.

  Oh, by the way, my name is Herbert Gomast and I am twenty-six years old. I guess I should have started with that instead of rushing right to the self-torture stuff. I have blond hair, blue eyes, a bit of a gut, a unibrow that you can't really tell is a unibrow because it's blond, and I live in Seattle.

  I didn't cry when I was born. In fact, the doctors weren't completely sure that I was even alive when they pulled me out, because my mom had died a few minutes earlier.

  My dad didn't blame me for the death of my mother. I appreciated that. Your home life is much better when your dad isn't constantly bellowing, "What kind of a monster child would kill his own mother?" Technically, it was my fault, but it's not like I did it on purpose. I wasn't an unborn infant hanging out in the womb going "This bitch is toast!"

  I had a relatively normal childhood for a kid with no mom. My dad did think it was kind of weird that I never cried, and he mentioned it to my aunt. She said that when somebody is given the gift of a child that doesn't wake them up at all hours of the goddamn night with crying fits, they should accept this precious, precious gift and not cause The Lord to say "You want a crying kid? Oh, I'll give you a crying kid!"

  When I turned six, my dad died. It was sad enough that he died at all, but he died on my birthday, and he died because he'd inhaled too much helium from my balloons (at my urging because his silly high-pitched voice made me laugh), and when he collapsed he fell on my birthday puppy.

  But I didn't cry. I was sad, yeah, but I didn't cry.

  At the funeral, I overheard some relatives talking about how weird it was that my dad was dead and I wasn't crying. My grandmother thought it was flat-out creepy. So I walked right up to the casket and I scrunched up my face and I tried to cry. It didn't work. I was more inclined to scream in terror over being so close to a dead body, though I didn't do that, either.

  When they lowered the casket into the ground and everybody was blubbering, I tried to figure out what they were doing right, but I simply couldn't get my tear ducts to work that way. I faked it by rubbing my eyes and making sobbing sounds, just so my grandmother wouldn't think I was creepy.

  I went to live with my aunt, who treated me well and had cable. She was an amateur chef who was constantly inventing new dishes, and one day she was cutting up some habanero peppers for an exciting new dish. The phone rang, and she told me not to touch anything while she went to answer it.

  I walked over to the kitchen counter. I wasn't tall enough to see the orange peppers, but I was tall enough to reach up, grab the edge of the cutting board, and pull it down. Sliced habaneros went everywhere.

  Had my aunt been irresponsible? I don't think so. The knife itself was well out of reach. Just imagine if I'd pulled down the cutting board and a great big knife dropped onto my head. It wouldn't have mattered if I could cry or not. She'd been meticulous with knife safety, and how could she know that I couldn't be trusted around peppers?

  I picked one up off the floor, looked around to make sure my aunt didn't see me eating food off the floor, and popped it into my mouth. Then I immediately spat it out and reacted in a manner that would have made a pretty good YouTube video if that service had been around back then.

  I don't quite remember how my six-year-old mind made the leap from "That tastes terrible!" to "I wonder what would happen if I rubbed that in my eyes?" But my mind did, and my hand carried out my mind's request to satisfy its curiosity.

  Tears flowed.

  My first thought was that my eyeballs were melting, so I quite naturally panicked and shrieked. Moments later, as my aunt held my face under the bathtub faucet, I realized that for the first time in my life I had cried.

  It really wasn't all that great.

  I wasn't able to explain to my aunt why I had done such a thing, and I think she just assumed that, like most six-year-old boys, I wasn't particularly smart. I didn't have any plans to repeat that experiment until the following month, when we were watching a really sad movie about two best friends who had two separate terminal illnesses. One of them finally died, and the other one couldn't go to her funeral because she couldn't get out of her hospital bed. In the last scene, the friend who was still alive stared at the hospital ceiling and whispered about how she wished she'd had leukemia instead of AIDS, because she would have died sooner to join her friend in Heaven.

  My aunt cried and cried over this movie. I wanted to cry along with her and couldn't. I mean, I wasn't a sociopath; I recognized the sadness of this situation. I asked if I could get an orange, and my aunt said yes, so I went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and quietly took a habanero out of the plastic bag. I broke it in half, rubbed each half on my eyes, and though the hellish burn made me feel like I had a blowtorch pressed against each orb, I couldn't deny the results: fresh tears!

  "What's wrong with you?" my aunt asked as I returned to the living room, without an orange.

  "The movie sadded me," I said. (Rememb
er, I was six.)

  My aunt held me under the bathtub faucet again and warned me that I could go blind if I kept doing stuff like this. It bothered me that she'd been able to see through my scheme so easily. Did real tears not burn like acid when they came out?

  I kept doing it. My aunt always scolded me and rinsed my eyes out. She never took me to therapy, which in retrospect makes sense because therapy is pricey, but when I look back at my childhood it does sort of disturb me that she didn't stop buying habanero peppers.

  I didn't cry when I got knocked off the swing set at school, or when I slipped on ice, or when I was forced to eat a peeled M&M that had neither the taste nor texture of a peeled M&M, or when I accidentally walked into the girl's bathroom and Jimmy Zepp saw me and told everybody and all of the kids at school laughed at me and called me a girl.

  The only thing that made me cry was the peppers. And then, when I was sixteen, the fork.

  I'd come home, mowed the lawn, trimmed the bushes, and washed the car, so when my aunt placed that plate of spaghetti down on the table in front of me I was absolutely ravenous. I twirled some on my fork at lightning speed, and whisked the fork toward my mouth.

  Before you roll your eyes, rest assured that I'm not trying to use my extreme hunger as an excuse for accidentally jabbing the fork into my cheek. I'm not trying to suggest that you would have done the same thing. Even without knowing you personally, it's reasonable to say that I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have. But I did, and as I sat there with a spaghetti-covered fork jutting out of my cheek, I cried.

  My aunt, normally so kind, understanding, and politically correct, asked me if I was retarded.

  I removed the fork, ate the bite of spaghetti, and then rushed to my bedroom to weep in privacy. Why had this happened? I'd felt worse pain than this, and I'd been more humiliated than this, so why did this elicit tears?

  After the wound healed, I jabbed myself again. I cried.

  After that wound healed, I jabbed myself again. Cried again.

  The third time, I cried, but not as much, so I went back to the habanero trick. I discovered that by alternating the two methods, I got maximum tears, and I could cry on a regular basis and feel normal.