"Karl, look. . ." Donna set her cup down and crossed the kitchen. She stared into his eyes. "Be careful. Okay?"
"Okay."
Another blast on the horn dragged Karl outside. He saw Frank's bearded face leaning out of the pick-up's window. "Jesus, Frank. Wake the neighbors, why don't you."
Frank grinned, waved at Donna standing on the porch and then positioned his hand over the horn.
"Don't even. . ." Karl threw his rucksack and gun carrier onto the extended cab's ripped back seat and climbed in beside Frank. He sniffed, caught the pick-up's familiar smells of bait, beer, sweat and motor oil. Cans and discarded shells rattled across the floor as Frank turned out of Karl's yard and drove past sleeping clapboard houses, heading north for Route 109. The sky had turned milky, the clouds hanging low to the horizon.
"You heard?" Frank said.
"Heard what?"
"Couple guys found a nest over by Eastham. Hundreds of deefs. Shot what they could and then vaped the shit out of it. The Guard's over there now."
To Karl, Frank's 'hundreds' probably meant a handful of bioanalog defectives; Frank liked exaggeration. "So what?"
Frank aimed the pick-up along the highway and rested his thick arms on the wheel. "So what? So there's bound to be plenty more coming our way. Yes sir, we're gonna get some action today."
Karl stared at the road. He'd hunted birds with Frank, deer and even moose; he'd never gone after defectives. But the posted Federal notices gave him no option: all licensed hunters had a legal obligation, a duty, and they received two hundred bucks for each proven deef kill.
The money didn't matter to Karl—he would have volunteered anyway, just as he had for the local Fire Brigade for eight years running. The Community had to come first.
Frank turned off 109 and followed the narrow side road until it became a rutted track. He pulled into a dirt lot and stopped next to a Parks Service notice board. Another pick-up, bulbous with chrome, stood a few yards away. "Shit. I thought we'd be the first."
"It's not a competition." Karl climbed down and reached for his bags. "Everyone's supposed to cooperate on this. Remember?"
Frank spat into the undergrowth. "Cooperate my ass. I got alimony payments to make."
Karl pulled on his hunters' fatigues, camo and fluorescent orange. He took a deep breath and held it; he liked this moment of calm before the hunt. The odors of grass and wet leaves. Birds scurrying through the branches. Peace.
"I picked these up from the Sheriff's station," Frank said, hauling out a yellow box from the pick-up. Inside, orange plastic sacks with the black horned biohazard symbols just visible. Frank gave a handful of sacks to Karl, then produced a black and yellow plastic cylinder with a trigger and nozzle. "Sheriff said we have to vape the area once we bag'em."
Karl stared at the spray. "Doesn't look like much."
Frank shook the cylinder. "Whatever's in it is keyed to the deefs, according to the Fed in the Sheriff's office. She said this goo munches on deefs and only the deefs. Harmless for me and you. And animals."
"Here's hoping."
Karl led the way into the forest, following the trampled hunters' trail between trunks of spruce and birch. His boots flattened the grass and collected fresh dew that darkened the toecaps. "You sure they're around here?"
"That's what the Feds reckon," Frank said. He carried his own shotgun angled across the front of his body at Port Arms, looking like the Guardsman he'd once been. "If the deefs come over from Eastham, they'll be heading west, so they'll have to come over the bluff."
Karl nodded and headed east toward Jefferson's Bluff. Karl's father and grandfather had hunted the same woods, and had taken him out as a child. Mike would join him soon if Karl could persuade Donna. A city girl from Albany, she hadn't grown up with the tradition, the sense of nature and the year's rhythm.
As he walked, Karl saw small creatures running for cover: rabbits, squirrels, sudden flashes of dark fur. He knew what the deefs looked like, or most of them, from the TV and netcasts: pale and sickly, with hairless gray or green skin. Could be as big as a full-grown dog, but usually smaller. Multi-limbed. Flesh erupting in random configurations, with chaos as both father and mother.
The stuff of nightmares.
Karl didn't want to see creatures like that slithering up Main Street or making nests in the high school. Who knew what diseases they'd spread? Or what they'd evolve into if people didn't erase them.
"Where the hell did they come from?" Karl asked.
"Take your pick. Original story I heard, they escaped from a lab. Guy I used to know in the Guard over at Burlington said he knew a guy who swore the government let them out deliberately to see how they survive. Scatter patterns. He reckons they're some part of the weapons program. Gray goo, he called' em."
Karl shook his head. Trust Frank to pick the conspiracy theory. Karl had heard many stories about the deefs: some company had created them for medical research and they'd been released by Animal Rights activists; aliens had dropped them to prepare the way for an invasion. It was all just so crazy.
But they'd appeared from somewhere. Back in '07, the TV news had picked up on stories of strange roadkill, things with too many arms and too many heads. Things like meter-long slugs and others like armored, headless cats.
"There!" Frank leveled his shotgun and then dropped it. "Shit."
A dappled brown deer stepped into a shaft of light and then darted away.
"When it's deer season, I don't spot a damn thing," Frank said. "But now I can't bag it. . ."
"It was too small, anyway." Karl concentrated on slowing his heartbeat; Frank's sharp response had kicked off an adrenaline reflex. Karl had almost shot the deer himself. He slapped at flies that were beginning to crowd his neck and face.
As Karl and Frank headed deeper into the forest, they saw two more deer and found tracks of other hunters: fresh imprints of patterned cleats. Karl swapped his camo baseball cap for a fluorescent orange one with the name of a defunct hunting outfitter on the brow. He scanned the forest and listened for sudden footfalls or voices, the click of hammers drawn back. The morning lulled him.
A sudden shotgun blast destroyed the forest's silence. Birds screamed from the trees and into the air. Two more shots thundered out in such close succession that they sounded like one.
Karl crouched down and saw Frank do the same. He waited. After the noise, the forest bustled like a nervous grouse; leaves twitched and trembled. Animals flashed through sunlight. When no more shots came, Karl and Frank followed the track until they saw a trio of hunters in a clearing. "Hey."
The two kneeling hunters looked up but didn't speak. With blue-gloved hands, they continued hauling red chunks off the forest floor and into yellow biohazard bags. The third hunter had a shotgun cracked open over his arm. He grinned. "Hey. How's it going?"
Karl nodded to the bloodied floor. "Looks like you nailed a couple of 'em."
"Two big ones. Just like that."
Frank walked up to the kneeling hunters and watched them bag the remains. "Jesus. What's that?"
One of the kneeling men held up a glistening, wriggling lump. "Looks like tentacles. Maybe feelers, too."
"This one's got flippers," the other hunter said. "And about six eyes, maybe more."
Frank shook his head. "Weird shit."
Back in school, that had been Frank's favorite expression. Karl remembered him using it for everything from music Frank didn't like to drugs he'd experimented with. But this time he'd used exactly the right words; Karl could see miniature arms and feet, fingers, bone and gristle, but all in the wrong order, the wrong scale and configuration. Life through an old carnival's trick mirror.
Karl took another step. The remains didn't look human; no way could you ever call them that. But they didn't look like animals either. Maybe something in-between, like Mikey's experiments with modeling clay. And nothing would look too pretty after a few shotgun blasts.
"Where you headed?" the standing hunter asked.
<
br /> Before Karl could reply, Frank said, "Down to the river. Bound to be a few down there. Specially the ones with flippers."
The hunter nodded. "Maybe we'll head that way too. Plenty for everyone, right?"
Karl and Frank left as the hunters pulled on face masks and began to spray the clearing. Karl led the way toward the bluff and away from the river. He found spoor near the trails, nothing he didn't recognize. As the sun rose, the mist cleared but shadows still hid most of the undergrowth. Karl concentrated on the sights and sounds around him and tried to push away the images of the dead deefs.
He thought about Donna and Mike back home. Parents had enough to worry about, what with drugs, diseases, car accidents, chance acts of violence, random shootings. They didn't need to add anything else to the list. Sometimes, as he watched Mike walk to school or play with the neighbors' kids, Karl couldn't breathe; something gripped his chest and wouldn't let go.
It was about nine when Karl and Frank stopped by a switchback stream. Deerflies hovered above the trickling surface and buzzed around Karl's coffee mug. He waved them away and thought about the deefs back in the clearing. "You figure they can feel things?"
Frank shrugged.
"I mean. . .do they know what's going on?" Karl said. "Can they understand?"
"Not the way I hear it," Frank said. "Didn't you catch that program last month? They had that bald Professor guy—the one that does all the science shit—talk about them. He reckons they're just pieces of meat that got out of control. Way he explained it, they started off with a few cells, a few tiny machines, but then everything went haywire. Like cancer. They're walking cancer, deefs."
Karl poured away the dregs of coffee. "Come on. Time's wasting."
Frank yawned. "Shouldn't have had them beers last night. Or maybe it was the bourbon."
"Usually is."
Another twenty minutes brought them to the foot of the bluff. Gray stone sprouted through the forest floor and led up to the jagged spine of the bluff. Karl found the spoor beside the track. Green pellets the size of golf balls.
"I wouldn't want to eat what it ate," Frank said.
Karl signaled for quiet and pulled back the shotgun's hammers. He chose each step with care, avoiding brittle twigs and dark hollows. His heart raced. Every sound of the forest seemed amplified. He could taste the damp soil and decay.
More droppings. Flies zeroed-in on the waste and then peeled away as if they'd hit a plate glass wall. Karl hesitated, listening, then turned to the left. Something had rustled the arching fronds of a massive fern.
It moved again.
Karl signaled Frank to curve around to the left. He held the gun loose in front, ready to swivel and fire. His eyes caught a brief flash of movement; before he could pull the trigger, Frank's gun ripped apart the undergrowth. The shot left a gaping green hole edged with red.
Then something moved to Karl's right. He stepped forward but didn't shoot. The ferns made a tunnel between the old trees; something scurried along the tunnel, as fast as a small dog. Karl ran alongside and saw pale skin. With a deafening blast, the gun's recoil slammed into his shoulder.
Whatever he had hit screamed. The sound cut right through Karl's skull. He leveled the weapon for the finishing shot but the creature staggered along the tunnel. Karl ran to the edge of the ferns, squatted down and sighted along the barrel.
The deef saw Karl and froze. Two of its five legs ended in bloody stumps. Each of its three arms clutched a small gray bundle. A toothless mouth opened but no sound came out.
Karl felt the warm steel of the trigger. His blood pounded in his throat.
One of the three bundles in the deef's arms turned a puckered face toward Karl and mewled. It had the same hairless gray skin as its parent, the same cluster of eyes. Then the other two offspring opened their mouths and made the same sound. The deef pulled its litter close to its chest and tried to shield them with its deformed body.
A second. Two seconds. Then Karl took his finger from the trigger and dropped the gun's barrel.
The deef's body exploded. The blast of Frank's shotgun spattered the deef and its litter over the nearest tree.
Frank, gun in hand, ran over. "What were you doing, man? You had them right in your fucking sights!"
Karl ignored Frank and stood up, then had to double over and puke all across the forest floor. He emptied himself until there was nothing left.
"Karl? Karl, are you okay?"
Karl walked around Frank and headed back toward the trail.
"Karl? Come on, man; half of this is yours. Karl!"
As the trail joined the main path back to the parking lot, Karl hurled his gun into the undergrowth. His walk turned into a trot, then a run. He ignored the branches whipping his face and arms. He didn't take his eyes from the glimmer of clean sunlight ahead that marked the end of the forest; he was concentrating so hard that the simultaneous boom of the three hunters' guns seemed to come from a great distance. Only when their shots tore into him and spun him around did he realize it was too late. For him, for his family, too late. This was the beginning of the end of humanity.
Tom Brennan lives on the coast in Liverpool, UK with his wife Sylvia and many cats, and works 24/7 taking 911 emergency calls. He enjoys a wide variety of fiction, particularly SF/F, Dark Fiction, and Mystery. His favorite authors are Bloch, Gaiman, Dick, and Hammett. His short stories have appeared in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Nineteen, Writers of the Future, Dark Recesses, Story House, Indy, Baen's Universe, and many others. His favorite questions are 'What if. . .' and 'What are we doing to ourselves?'
—GOD'S WORK
by Matthew Lee Bain
The roadkill was staring at her. The eyeballs bulged from its squashed face. It smiled with a wide mouth full of sharp teeth, tongue hanging, exhaling a greasy stench.
The hitcher swallowed, gripped her pack a little tighter, and edged farther down the roadstead. The blacktop smoldered like a grill, filling the air with dizzy waves of heat. She struggled for a full breath, unpent breasts panting beneath a thin, yellow shirt. Aside from the strip of highway, she could make out nothing but sand and scrub brush. Somewhere, far off, behind the waves of heat, there might have been hills or mountains, maybe a city, but. . .
The hitcher stripped her pack from her shoulder and, crouching, began to dig through it. She withdrew a brown thermos, unscrewed the lid, and brought the lip to hers. Not much more than a kiss of liquid. Her tongue was quick to savor the drops from between the dried cracks of skin. Wiping her head, she returned the thermos to her pack and stood. She took a long look down the highway—one way, then the other—which blurred on, out of sight.
"Off the edge of the world—fuck." Her eyes slowly slid around the empty, empty landscape. Slinging the pack over her shoulder, she continued west, away from the roadkill. After a few steps, she heard the growl, far-off, but deep. She squinted over her left shoulder. The growl was growing into a roar. Holding her palm up to shade her face, she widened her eyes. A bright shining spot, like a small silver sun, was coming down the highway in her direction.
"God," she prayed. The small silver sun formed into a tall pickup truck. The hitcher jumped and waved her arms, screaming as loud as her dry throat would allow. The roar grew until the truck slowed to a stop in front of her. She heaved a sigh, on the edge of tears. The driver's door cracked open, and a set of heavy boots hit the ground. She looked up—took a few steps forward—but could not see around the cab. A gloved hand reached over the truck-bed and removed a stain-painted shovel. Her heart jumped. A tool that size might as well be a weapon. She backed up a few paces, feeling the instinct to run. But run where? She'd be as good as dead. A moment later, there was a long grating sound, as the shovel was scraped over the blacktop. The pancaked mammal arced into the air, landing in the truck-bed; the shovel followed after with a dead clatter.
"Hello—", she said, but the driver side door slammed shut. "No, wait!" She ran, jumping onto the side of the truck.
The putrid waves of stench emanating from the truck-bed overtook her. "O, Ghogd," she gagged, losing her purchase. She fell, ass-first, into the gravel. Struggling to her feet, she screamed, "Wait!"
The passenger door cracked open like an icebox, and a face, five-days unshaven, peered out.
"Hop up," he said with a droll smile.
"Oh, thank God you came along," she uttered, hopping in and slamming the door.
"You're welcome," he answered.
The silver truck roared down the highway, westward bound.
***
"Where were you headed?" he said, looking her up and down from the corner of his right eye.
"What's that?" She squinted.
"Where were you headed 'fore I stopped?" he said over the whirr of the truck.
"Oh," she laughed, "just out of Bum-Fuck Egypt or wherever you call this."
"Bum what?"
"Bum-Fuck Egypt."
"Bum-Fuck E-Gypt?" His face split open with laughter.
"Well—I haven't seen a pyramid, but I wouldn't be surprised." She smiled.
He puckered his lips and squinted. With a snort, he reached across her to the glove compartment, his grubby fingers popping the door to rifle inside. Withdrawing a half-crushed cigarette pack, he held it up to show a camel-headed mascot in front of a pyramid.
"Found one," he sputtered with laughter. The hitcher smiled, shifting in her seat. Taking the brown, tree-shaped air freshener down from the rear-view, the driver replaced it with the camel and pyramid. She stared at the air freshener with a crooked smile. Wheezing, the man composed himself.
His mouth sidled over to the right side of his face, where it cracked open.
"Hey," he said, his voice deep and serious.
"Huh?"
"Hey," he whispered, poking her arm with his dirty index finger.
"What?"
"Know what?" he continued, leaning in, tilting his head like he had a secret.
Horror Library, Volume 4 Page 13
