by Simon Wood
She stared at the Polaroid she had taken of her new parents, pinned to the cave wall with razorblades. It was about time she showed them the keepsakes that made her happy. She gathered them together.
As she stepped from the cave, dirt fell from the rooftop. Within seconds the cave collapsed, swallowing itself. It had been corroding for weeks. Tammy had decided that this was her last visit. After tonight, she would have no further use for it. Strange that the cave chose to die then. It was as if it knew it was the end.
Tammy didn’t go inside her home right away. She stood on the porch surveying the suburban nightmare. Rain splatted on the windowpane, distorting the distortions inside. They were a ball of light again, floating and rotating in the middle of the living room. They couldn’t do a thing when they were like that. It was now or never.
Now, Tammy decided.
She burst into the house, unsheathing the carving knife from her belt. There was no fear. Success or failure didn’t matter. Action counted. The swirling light was naked and uncaring. Tammy drove the knife into the heart of the glow.
She half expected the knife to pass straight through it. It didn’t. Although it didn’t look like it, the light was a solid mass. The knife was buried up to its hilt in the glow. The light flickered and sheared in two, the pieces crashing to the floor. Severed, the light faded quickly. With its fading energy it lost integrity, changing back into her parents.
Ginny was dazed. Her father writhed, the knife a hideous dorsal fin. Tammy wasn’t about to give them time to recover. She squirted them with a Nerf water cannon stolen from a neighbor’s yard. Instead of water, gasoline splashed the parent-murderers. Tammy didn’t stop pumping until the pistol was dry retching.
“What have you done?” Ginny screamed, gas burning her eyes.
“I’m doing what I should have done ages ago. Before you took my dad.”
Her father groaned. Desperate fingers struggled to find the blade. Tammy pointed it out for him by stamping on the knife’s butt. He screamed at the discovery.
“You two are bad parents. I’d rather have no parents than parents like you.”
Ignited by anger, Ginny leapt. “You think you can stop us?”
Tammy anticipated her mother’s move. She took a step back and swung the hatchet she’d brought for just this occasion. The axe, honed every day for a week, sliced through Ginny’s neck like cream cheese. The head was separated from her mother. Just the way it should be. Her body flopped on top of her phony father.
“Is that the best you can do?” the head demanded.
Tammy knew the head spoke hollow words. Once severed from her mother the head was dead again. Before it could pour scorn, it shrank to its former self, decaying while it shrank.
“Let’s finish this thing,” Tammy murmured. She pulled out a Zippo lighter, lit it and dropped it on her parents.
They erupted. The old man tried to escape from her father but the flames beat him and he remained trapped inside. It was pleasure to see them burn.
The head, unable to speak, screamed obscenities. It was pathetic. Tammy could only laugh. And laugh. She snatched up the head and ran with it. Down to the river where it all began and where it would all end. She was okay. It was over. Life would start anew.
Rain peppered her face, but she didn’t care. She was happy and couldn’t stop laughing. Except, it wasn’t her laugh. It was the laughter of the demented, the insane. She hoped it was a just phase she was going through. Somehow, she didn’t think it was.
THE SHOWER CURTAIN
Steam swirled in the bathroom and Patrick wiped the condensation from the mirror to see his reflection. Although the temperature was balmy, he was shivering. The razor slipped from between his trembling fingers. It wasn’t the flu or malaria causing the shakes. It was the reflection—the reflection of a face in the mirror that wasn’t his.
The face was pressed into the fabric of the shower curtain. The contorted features stretched the material to breaking point until every characteristic of the man’s face could be seen. The reflected face dissolved as fresh condensation consumed the mirror.
Patrick knew no one was in the bathroom with him. He lived alone. The bathroom had no windows. No one could be playing a joke.
Too afraid to turn, too afraid to run, too curious to ignore, Patrick wiped the mirror clean again. The face was still there and this time it wasn’t alone. A woman’s face joined the man’s. Disembodied arms grew out of the plastic to join their disembodied heads. Their arms and faces pleaded. They needed his help. He turned towards them.
The plastic curtain hadn’t molded itself to the bodies behind it. The curtain itself was the faces and limbs. Patrick’s shower curtain was alive. It was too much to take. It was all his feeble legs could do to back away from the living shower curtain.
The curtain people watched Patrick’s actions with dismay and others came to their aid. Before he stumbled into the door, the curtain was a boiling cauldron of faces and bodies. As one new face came to the forefront another was lost. Each face was a deathly shade in the magnolia plastic.
Patrick groped for the doorknob. His hand snatched humid air three times before he clasped it. He twisted the handle but the door didn’t open. His clammy hand slithered off the condensation-slick knob.
The curtain was at full stretch with a dozen half-bodies extruding from the plastic. Patrick started to whimper as he smelled their sterile, rubber flesh. The smell had never bothered him before now. Not until it was part of a living thing.
A curtain ring popped and the molded faces came precariously close to his. Plastic mouths pleaded but without plastic vocal chords no words came.
Another curtain ring popped and a hand touched him. The limb’s warm but inhuman touch was all the incentive he needed. Patrick ripped open the door.
But the door opened inwards and he would have to run headlong into the curtain people’s snapping grasps. But he didn’t care, it would be only for a moment. He flung the door open and tried his best to ignore the intimate caresses from unwanted admirers. He flew out of the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.
The curtain rings lost their battle with the curtain people. He heard the rat-a-tat-tat of snapping rings and something heavy thudded into the door. He knew it was the shower curtain. Then silence. Only the whining of the the bathroom’s extraction fan could be heard.
Patrick slunk away from the door and plopped down on the bed. Water droplets from his shower still coated his body but sweat more than amply filled the gaps. He needed another shower but nothing would get him in that bathroom again.
***
Patrick came and went three days without using his bathroom. He chose to use the gym’s facilities rather than his own. He had bound the bathroom doorknob with an extension cord and tied it to a nearby closet door—just in case anything wanted to venture further than the bathroom.
But after three days he hadn’t heard a peep. Armed with a claw hammer, he decided it was time to win back his bathroom. He snipped the cord and it tumbled to the ground. He raised the hammer and slowly twisted the doorknob.
He expected faces, fluid in pliant plastic. But they weren’t to be found. The lifeless shower curtain lay fallen on the vinyl floor. The curtain people were gone.
But they had left a message. The curtain was puckered and wrinkled around a single word. The word was melted in the plastic like a brand into flesh.
“HELP,” it said.
The hammer sagged in Patrick’s hand. He bore the curtain people no malice. Their heartfelt message made him feel sorry for them. How the hell had they ever gotten in there?
No matter how much the curtain people touched him, Patrick wanted the damn thing out. He put the hammer in the sink and gathered up the shower curtain. His heart fluttered, half expecting the pale faces to spring back into life and take him. But the curtain didn’t as much as twitch. It was inanimate, just a plastic cloth.
He carried the curtain to the apartment complex’s dumpsters and dr
opped the bundle in. Immediately, it started to unravel like a flower coming into bloom. The corner popped out and the manufacturer’s trademark introduced itself—a pair of back-to-back R's with the company’s name underneath, Recycled Rubber Products, Inc. He gave the curtain another scrunching and crushed it with a car battery from the dumpster.
His bathroom looked bare without the shower curtain—not to mention the curtain people. He surveyed the room again. He could live without a shower curtain.
***
Patrick had been without a shower curtain for two weeks when he came across the newspaper advertisement. He didn’t know what made him follow it up. He had a perfectly good job as a sales engineer, so why did he send in a job application to Recycled Rubber? The thought crossed his mind when he read the letter inviting him to an interview. He came up with a thousand lame excuses but he put it down to curiosity. They made his shower curtain and he wanted to know how they did it. Were they all like the one he had?
Mr. Flores was a stout man who breathed heavily but moved with a quickness of pace that gave the appearance he was aided by unseen hands. He interviewed Patrick and ran him through potential tasks he would perform as a production worker. Mr. Flores seemed satisfied that Patrick was the kind of man Recycled Rubber was looking for and told him so.
“Any questions, Patrick?”
“I was wondering if I could have a site visit?”
“Of course.” Mr. Flores led Patrick through the plant. “We manufacture many different products here—bathroom products, kitchenware, etc. There isn’t anything we can’t mold into any shape here at Recycled Rubber.”
They stood on a mezzanine and Mr. Flores pointed out different production stages from their vantage point. Patrick’s face sweated under his safety glasses. The heat from the ovens on the shop floor was intense. Flores walked Patrick into the cooler confines of the raw material stores. A truck was backing into an unloading bay and a forklift was ready to receive it.
“Ah, you’re just in time, Patrick. We receive about four deliveries a day from various sources.”
“What, raw material suppliers?”
“No, as our name implies, all our products are recycled. We take our deliveries from all different sources. This load is from Goodyear, but we take old rubber products from anyone. Then we melt them down into a liquid state and make them into new products. That’s the beauty of thermoplastics.”
“Very eco-friendly.”
“Quite right.”
Mr. Flores completed the tour and thanked Patrick for his time. A week later, Patrick had a letter offering him a position on the nightshift. The money wasn’t as good as his sales job but he took the job nevertheless. On the first of the month, he was a Recycled Rubber employee.
Patrick spent a week working on each of the different production processes to give him a full grounding in Recycled Rubber’s operations. This week, he was in the raw materials department. Jose, raw material’s leadman, took him through his paces.
“We unload the trucks and grade the material by product type. If the plastic is best suited to Kitchenware then it goes into the Kitchenware store.”
“How do we know which plastic goes with which product?”
“Simple, man—experience. Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up.”
The bay door rolled up with a judder.
“Show time, man.”
The unmarked truck slid into the building. Being unmarked and black gave it a covert quality. And the cover of night only accentuated the situation. The driver opened up the trailer.
“Sorry, guys, no pallets this time. We’ll have to hand off.”
Jose cursed in Spanish.
The driver tossed Patrick a vacu-packed bag. The weight threw him back three steps. If the weight wasn’t bad enough, the flexibility of the bag made it even more difficult to carry. He peered through the clear wrapping and saw the bag was filled with rubber sheeting.
“Where do you want this, Jose?”
“In the checking area,” he said, carrying two bags easily.
Patrick flopped his load onto one of two forty-foot long benches. The checking area’s limits were emphasized by yellow paint.
“Start piling them on the floor,” Jose advised.
It took the better part of an hour to unload the truck and send the driver on his way. Jose slit the first bag and tore off the wrapping. Patrick did likewise.
“We have to cut out anything that isn’t rubber or plastic. So, studs and zippers have to go.” He unraveled the black-gray rubber sheets—but they weren’t rubber sheets.
“Jose, are these body bags?” Patrick took a step back.
“Yeah, man.”
“Jesus. Have these been used?”
Jose laughed. “Of course, man. What’d you think?”
The thought of touching the bag that a corpse had been slopping around in made his flesh crawl. The scent of rubber filled his nostrils and slithered down his throat, tainting his taste buds. He was glad it wasn’t decomposition he smelled.
“Are these things clean?”
“Relax, man. They are all sanitized by the time we get hold of them.”
Gingerly, Patrick approached his body bags. “Sick, dude.”
Jose laughed again. “You’ll get used to it.”
Patrick wasn’t so sure.
“So what’s the story?” He copied Jose and filleted the bag, removing the zipper and tossing it in the trash.
“Body bags can only be used so many times before it becomes impractical. Especially with the police and sheriff’s departments.”
“Why?” Patrick started on his second body bag, ignoring his unpalatable work in favor of Jose’s explanation.
“Evidence has been spoiled because of the chemicals used to clean the body bags or particles left behind by the last occupant. Not all the blood and tissue is totally removed.”
Patrick’s hands tightened as he felt the inside of the bag. He wondered whose blood and tissue was coming off on his hands.
“If you don’t like touching them, put on some rubber gloves.”
Patrick followed Jose’s suggestion. He snapped on the first glove.
“But don’t ask what they were before they became gloves.”
Patrick didn’t.
He returned to his work. It was appalling to think about what he was doing with these body bags. Slicing, cutting, and throwing the metallic entrails in the waste made him feel like a mad scientist performing perverse operations on unwilling victims.
“So do the cops get much for these body bags? There has to be a couple of cruisers worth here alone.”
“No. They’re free. They can’t get anyone to take them and most counties are asking all government departments to recycle. Lead by example and all that bullshit.”
“How conscientious.”
“But it’s not just the cops,” Jose continued. “The military keep us well stocked too.”
“Long live a violent world.”
“You said it, man.”
It took half their shift to prepare the body bags for the next stage. They loaded the bags onto a handcart and wheeled them over to Jose’s pet.
“Meet Jose junior, man. He’s a hungry child.”
Patrick stared into Jose junior’s mouth. A multitude of lethal blades intermeshed with each other. He was glad the machine wasn’t on.
“We can’t just melt the bags down as they are. It would take too long and wouldn’t mix well with the color pigments we put in. So, Jose junior takes care of it for us.” Jose patted the machine and showed Patrick to the rear. “And, this where little Jose takes a dump.”
A mobile hopper was pressed up against the back of Jose junior. Scattered in the hopper lay the remnants his last meal—various colored penny-sized pellets.
“Can I leave you to get on, man? I want a smoke.”
“No worries.”
“Cool.”
Jose started the machine. Jose junior whined into life. His blades flashed in an
ticipation of a feeding. Jose dropped in the first body bag. Little Jose gobbled it up with relish. His wail changed momentarily as he chomped through his rubber snack. Patrick demonstrated he understood Jose’s directions as best he could above the din and Jose slipped out a side door, cigarette in hand.
Patrick continued to feed Jose junior. Each body bag disintegrated on contact. Rubber shards spewed upward only to fall into Jose junior’s unforgiving teeth for a second time.
Happily, Patrick disposed of the body bags. They were ugly things in shape and purpose. It was a pleasure to see them destroyed.
Patrick snatched up the next bag and shook the folds out of it. It hung like a cheap suit and he shook it again. The body bag refused to lie flat. In fact, the bag had shape. He felt the shape develop in his grasp. He now held a pair of rubberized wrists. He wanted to let go but couldn’t. The wrists slipped his grasp and rubber hands seized hold of his arms. A black-gray face bulged in the fabric and stared him in the eye. It tried to speak but only the putrescent waft of death slithered from the slit. This body bag hadn’t been cleaned.
Patrick fought his gag reflex. He was wrong. He didn’t want to know these people. He got rid of the curtain people and he would get rid of the body bag man. He edged over to Jose junior and flopped the bottom of the bag over the side. The body bag man gripped even tighter to Patrick as he dropped him into the hungry blades. The blades tore at the rubber flesh. The body bag man’s face contorted and his grip loosened.
Patrick, dragged down by the body bag man, straightened as Jose junior took over. But instead of his balance returning, it worsened. He glanced at the floor. It writhed with body bag people coming to life. They trembled beneath him. He couldn’t ride their rubber wave and toppled into Jose junior. He watched the body bag man disintegrate before him and knew he shared the same fate.
***
The woman panicked. She clutched her towel like it could help her. Patrick reached out for help. His plasticized flesh stretched easily to touch her. She slapped his hand away. She didn’t understand. She was like all the others before her. He hadn’t understood at the beginning but he did now. The curtain people had explained it all. They were the restless and they needed their release. Would they ever find anyone who could help?
