by Brian Keene
The trapdoor that had led into this subterranean chamber was somewhere behind her, but she wasn’t sure of its exact location anymore. She assumed that since she was close enough to the surface to discover tree roots, the ground beneath her feet would begin to climb higher, but it was hard to tell in the dark.
She kept moving. The air was still, without even the hint of a breeze.
Which was why she stopped in her tracks when a puff of rancid hot air suddenly blew across her face. Startled, Kerri lurched forward. Her arms bumped into something in front of her—something soft and slick and yielding. Flesh. Two powerful, hairy hands grabbed her wrists and yanked her forward. She stumbled as another blast of the creature’s breath assailed her senses. It stank like rotten eggs and feces.
Kerri screamed, and the thing in the darkness laughed. Then its arms snaked around her body and squeezed.
***
Just when he was beginning to think that he wouldn’t be able to take the silence for a second longer, Javier stopped and listened. There was someone up ahead of him. No, not just someone. There were at least two. Maybe more. His spirits rose for a second in the hopes that it might be the girls or Brett. But then his hopes were dashed. What followed was a bewildering series of noises—snatches of what sounded like conversation, but like no language he’d ever heard. It sounded like gibberish, constructed to almost make words. He couldn’t tell how far away they were. The voices weren’t alarmed, so he was pretty certain that they weren’t aware of his presence.
His bladder ached. He needed to piss, but Javier was afraid that if he did, the sound or smell would give his location away.
The sound of shuffling footsteps caused him to hunker down. They were coming from a different direction than the hushed voices. A moment later, a third speaker joined the fray, but unlike the others, this new addition was understandable—if barely. His voice sounded like he had a throat full of barbed wire.
“What are you two doing? I thought I told you to hunt! Bad enough we lost them all earlier, in all the confusion. The longer they’re down here running loose, the worse it will be.”
This elicited a garbled, excited response. Then the new arrival spoke again.
“See, this is why you should have stayed put and helped make man-pudding or tended to the fires. I knew you two weren’t old enough to hunt yet. Get on back. Noigel and the others will handle this.”
More chatter. This time, they sounded dejected.
“I don’t care. You can’t hunt if you’re standing around playing with each other’s peckers and making the milk come out. Now go on. Tell Curd I sent you back to help him. He’s got one hung up now, freshly cleaned and skinned. I want you to take all the bones and smash them open and pull out the stuff inside. The eyeballs, too, and his poop tubes. We’ll make a good pudding with it all.”
Another unintelligible response.
“Don’t be stupid. You can’t milk a man once he’s dead. Now get going.”
Javier heard them scurrying away. A moment later, the third set of footsteps faded, as well. He waited another ten minutes, until he was absolutely certain that he was alone again. Then, unable to hold it anymore, he pulled down his zipper and pissed. He wanted to groan with relief, but he held his breath instead. Javier shuddered at the sensation. The stream was hot and heavy and splashed back against his legs. He forced himself not to gag as the piss wet his shoes and cuff s. Then his fear evaporated and the anger came back, a deep and abiding rage that nestled in the back of his skull and pulsated with a life all its own.
Although he couldn’t be sure, it sounded from the conversation he’d just eavesdropped on that one of his friends had been caught and killed. He wondered who it was. Then it occurred to him that maybe the speaker had been referring to Tyler or Stephanie—or maybe somebody they didn’t even know. Somebody from the neighborhood, perhaps? Some drug addict or homeless person.
Who it was didn’t really matter. He intended to kill every single one of these fucking things he came across just the same. No more hiding. No more pissing on himself. No more being a victim. Javier shook his feet one at a time, grimacing at the feel of his wet socks rubbing against his soles. Then he moved forward again, walking carefully and doing his best to be completely silent.
He wasn’t sure how far he’d gone or how many minutes had passed before he heard the voices again. They were muffled and distant. He slowed his pace and crept forward, summoning all the stealth he could manage. His hands trembled and his teeth chattered from the adrenaline and anger coursing through his body. Javier resisted the urge to charge blindly forward, shouting with rage and lashing out in the darkness.
As he progressed, he noticed a spark of light ahead, coming from the same direction as the voices. When he got nearer, he saw that it was a flashlight beam—weak, but still effective in this near total darkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust and then moved forward again. The conversations continued, the speakers oblivious to his presence. He tiptoed closer, until he could see their silhouettes. Then Javier paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the sudden light. He took slow, shallow breaths and tried to remain completely still.
There were three of them. He couldn’t see them clearly. They were too close together, but he could make out enough to disgust him. The only similarities he could see in them was their utter wrongness. Two were malformed. Their skin was slicked with greasy perspiration, and their brittle, matted hair was thin and long, as if it had never been cut. They wore no clothing, but they’d painted themselves with mud and wiped it away in strategic places to act as distinct markings. Both were decidedly female.
The third figure was a man. At first, Javier mistook him for a female, but when he looked closer, he saw that it was really a man wearing a woman’s tanned and preserved skin. He wondered if this was the same maniac Brett had encountered, or a different one with a similar fetish. The man seemed older than the females. He was taller and equipped with broad shoulders that bulged through his suit of skin with each small move he made. Horrified, Javier wondered how he’d fashioned the gruesome outfit to cling so tightly to his body. Skin tight, he thought, and had to bite his lip to keep from screaming.
He studied the man more intently. As far as Javier could see, there was no fat on his body. The woman-skin suit didn’t bulge from a potbelly or prodigious abdomen. Javier had little doubt that the thick fingers on the man’s hands could gouge through the hard-packed dirt around him with ease, and the length of his fingernails suggested that digging like a mole wouldn’t be anything new for him. Most surprisingly, Brett’s belt dangled from the man’s clenched fist. This was the same attacker that had ripped it from Javier’s grasp during the initial fight!
Javier turned his attention back to the women. The one holding the flashlight had hard muscles along her bare back. Her fingers, however, had fused together with thick knots of gray flesh that made her look as if she were wearing baseball gloves on each hand. The same excess skin covered the rest of her body, beneath the mud, from her face to her legs, like obscenely swollen scar tissue.
The other female looked very young, maybe a preteen, and while the hair on her body was fairly thin and plastered down with mud, it covered her entire frame. Her eyes seemed too large for her head, in much the same way as the Japanese cartoons seemed malformed, but without the same symmetry. One eye was oval shaped but oversized. The other was almost perfectly round and seemed to bulge from the socket.
“We haven’t seen anything, Scug,” the woman with the flashlight was saying to the man. Javier had to strain to understand her. The woman’s voice was slurred and slow, as if she were speaking with a wad of cotton balls inside her mouth. The man, Scug, leaned forward, also listening to her intently. Javier wondered if the scar tissue on her body was also present on her tongue or the roof of her mouth.
“I didn’t ask if you’d seen anything,” Scug said, and Javier recognized his voice as the one he’d heard earlier, chastising the other freaks. “I asked wher
e you’ve been.”
She pointed around with the flashlight, and Javier ducked to avoid being seen as the beam swept overhead.
“All over down here. They couldn’t have come through here. Maybe Noigel got them all.”
Scug sighed. He sounded exasperated. He grabbed the belt with both hands and cracked it. The women jumped.
“Noigel couldn’t have killed them all,” he said. “Because when I left Noigel, he was still playing with the one he’d killed.”
The females giggled.
“Was he doing that thing with his pecker?” Scar-Face asked.
Scug nodded. “Yeah. He split the guy’s head open on the wall and then fucked the crack. Don’t know how he keeps from cutting himself on the skull fragments. Them things can be sharp. But he loves it. Maybe he’ll let you lick the brain juice off his pecker later on.”
“Un-uh,” Scar-Face protested, her eyes wide. “He’s too big for my mouth, and last time, there were fleas biting my face. He’s got a nest of them down there.”
“That’s protein. You should just pick them off and eat them. Might be all you get anyway. Worthless as you are, it ain’t like you’ve done anything to earn tonight’s feast. And we ain’t had a bounty like this in a long time.”
Scar-Face pouted. “Be nice to us, Scug. I’ve been teaching the young ones how to talk.”
“Well, it ain’t working. Now let’s get back to it. One of the females gave me the slip earlier. Need to catch back up with her again. The rest of them too.”
The hairy, silent female suddenly whipped her head in Javier’s direction and sniffed the air. Her lips quivered, and her eyes seemed to grow even wider. A thin line of drool dripped from her open lips.
“What’s wrong with her?” Scug asked. “Shine that light-tube over that way.”
Before he could move, Javier found himself pinpointed in the flashlight beam. All three freaks cried out in surprise and alarm. Javier knew exactly how they felt. Before he could even breathe, the hairy girl was in motion. She ducked low and charged him, her fingers spread like talons.
Javier tried to block the attack by throwing up an arm, but he’d been motionless too long, and his legs were wobbly. Instead of countering her charge, he stumbled off balance and slammed against the wall. He had enough presence of mind to turn his hip and protect his privates, but he was too late to stop the assault. The girl hit him hard and fast, her ragged fingernails ripping into his sleeve and into the flesh of his arm. Screaming in pain, Javier tumbled backward. The girl held on to his arm and fell over with him, landing astride his chest. She snarled, sounding more feral than human, and drove a fist into his abdomen. The air whooshed out of Javier’s lungs. She followed up the punch with a second to his balls.
Javier fought back about as effectively as a toddler. He tried to sit up and push her off him, but the girl swiped out with one arm, backhanding him. The force of the blow slammed his head against the packed earth beneath him. Stars danced across his vision. Her nails tore into his arm again. Javier felt a burning sensation, and then warmth trickled down his wrist and forearm. The pain was intense, and his stomach roiled.
The girl’s face moved in as fast as a striking cobra, and Javier snapped his head to the side just in time to avoid having her teeth peel part of his cheek away.
“Jesus Christ! Get off me, bitch.”
“Let’s give her a hand with this one,” he heard Scug say. The freak’s harsh, phlegmatic voice was tinged with amusement.
The girl uttered a grunt and tried to hit Javier again, even as she used her legs to pin him in place. Her head darted forward, teeth snapping. Behind her, Scug and the other woman came closer, their expressions wild and ravenous. The flashlight in the woman’s hand was metal rather than plastic, and Javier knew that if she managed to hit him with it, the tool could do some damage to his head.
“This one’s still got some fight left in him,” Scug said. “We’ll have to bleed him out a little before we take him back. Make him weaker. Not enough to kill him, though. I hate dragging their bodies back. It’s much better if they can walk on their own. Curd says so, too. He says the fresher the kill, the fresher they taste.”
Javier tried again to force the girl from him and sit up, but before he could, the others fell upon him, pinning his arms and head in place. They stretched his arms out, pressed their talon-like fingernails against the soft flesh of his wrists, and slashed across, drawing blood. Javier squirmed and bucked, but their combined strength was too much for him. All he could do was scream.
“That’s enough,” Scug advised the women, licking his lips as he watched the blood flow. “Don’t go any deeper or he’ll bleed out too quick. We just want him weakened. Not dead. Not yet, at least.”
“You motherfuckers,” Javier gasped. “You filthy goddamned—”
Scug struck the side of Javier’s head with his knuckles. Javier tried to bite the freak’s hand, but Scug jerked it out of the way before he could. His teeth snapped down on nothing but air. He felt warm wetness streaming down his hands and dripping from his fingertips.
Scug dangled the belt, swinging it back and forth in front of Javier’s face. “You been looking for this? Your girlfriend recognized it earlier.”
Javier felt veins throbbing in his forehead and neck. “What did you do to her, you fucking freak?”
“Don’t worry,” Scug taunted. “She got away, but she won’t be free long.”
“This one’s dangerous,” Scar-Face observed. “We’ll have to take his teeth out. Want to do it now or wait till we get home?”
Horribly, Javier was reminded of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon he’d watched as a child. Elmer Fudd was hunting Bugs, but the wascally wabbit had convinced the hapless hunter to shoot at Daffy Duck instead. What followed was a routine in which Bugs had asked, “Would you like to shoot him now or wait till you get home?” Despite his terror, despite his pain, even despite the feel of his own warm blood trickling down his wrists like syrup, Javier grinned at the absurd memory.
“We’ll wait,” Scug said. He climbed off Javier and motioned for the females to do the same. Freed of the weight, Javier drew a deep breath. His chest hitched.
Scug slapped Javier again. “On your feet now. Don’t make me ask twice. If you do, I’ll cut off your pecker and stick it in your mouth to wipe that stupid grin off your face—bleeding out or no. Bet it would be the first man-chew you’ve ever had, huh?”
Something in the man’s tone told Javier that Scug wasn’t exaggerating. He would do that very thing. Javier didn’t know what the bizarre term “man-chew” meant, but the rest of the lunatic’s intent was crystal clear. Groaning, Javier slowly got to his feet. Each of the women seized one of his arms, and with Scug leading the way, they marched him into the darkness.
SIXTEEN
Leo and Dookie both leaned against the door, their ears pressed to the rough wooden surface, listening intently.
“Still don’t hear anything,” Dookie said. “It’s all quiet and shit. If they’re in there, then they ain’t talking.”
Mr. Watkins nodded. “I just wish we knew for sure before we go kicking that door down. I didn’t tell you boys before, but earlier, while you were checking the windows, I could have sworn that somebody was watching us through the peephole.”
“Did you see them?” Leo asked.
“No, I didn’t see anything. It was more of an impression. I felt them standing there, you know?”
Chuckling, Markus elbowed Chris in the ribs and whispered, “Mr. Watkins is all psychic and shit. He’s like the ghetto version of the motherfucking Ghost Whisperer, yo.”
“Shut the fuck up. Show the man some respect.” Leo glared at them both. Then he turned his attention back to the older man. “So who do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Watkins said. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. If it was those kids you spooked earlier, then I would think that they’d have called out for help when they saw us. Unless they’re more scared o
f you guys than they are of whatever is inside that house.”
“If there’s even anything inside that house,” Markus muttered.
Mr. Watkins made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Well, step on up and be my guest, sunshine. You can be the first one through that door.”
“Can’t,” Markus said.
“Why not?”
“Cause you ain’t got the door open yet.”
“I told you, I’m thinking.”
Markus grinned. “Sounds more to me like you’re talking, rather than thinking. Maybe you don’t want to go inside. Maybe all this talk about doing the right thing and helping out our neighborhood and change is just bullshit.”
Leo stepped toward his friend, fists curled. Anger coursed through him. He couldn’t believe that Markus was being so disrespectful. Sure, Markus always had an attitude. He’d walked through life with a chip on his shoulder for as long as Leo had known him. And yeah, until tonight, Mr. Watkins had been a grumpy old fart. But regardless of any of that, Mr. Watkins didn’t deserve this shit. He was just trying to help. After all, they had knocked on his door. If it hadn’t been for them, he’d probably be asleep by now.
“Yo, I told you to show him some respect. The hell is wrong with you?”
“Screw you both.”
“Come on,” Jamal pleaded with Leo and Markus.
“Both of you just need to chill out.”
Markus refused to back down. “The fuck you gonna do, Leo? You want some of this?”
“You want to fight? Well, come on.”
Dookie, Jamal, and Chris backed away.
“Come on,” Leo challenged again.
“Don’t think I won’t. I’ve had it with your bullshit.”
“The fuck are you talking about, Markus?”
“You ain’t the boss of me. You ain’t our leader. You ain’t shit. Talking about change and doing the right thing and helping people out—when has anybody ever helped us out? Nothing ever changes for us. All you’re doing is dreaming, Leo. You’re a damn fool.”
