by Fawver, Kurt
As the fleshy shell opened onto a series of glistening crimson and purple pearls, Brian found his hand reaching out to touch Doug’s new form. The dog-creature didn’t back away or flee; rather, he leaned into Brian’s light touch.
Brian stroked Doug and Doug—the real, unmasked Doug—moved forward, a pink appendage snaking out from the rest of his beautifully convoluted mass. Brian let it flick up and down his fingers and his wrist, no longer terrified of its implications. It was, after all, just the dislocated tongue of a loving canine companion.
Sliding his hand back and forth over Doug’s back, Brian began to see marks scouring the muscle and organs. Whitish streaks cut across most—if not all—of the dog’s innards. Brian leaned in closer and realized he was witnessing the end-product of physical trauma. Beaten, kicked, slapped, or punched, Doug had been abused.
Tears welled up at the edges of his eyelids. He hadn’t cried since he was a child, but this evidence of abuse caused his walls to erode.
“Why?” he whispered. “Why would someone do that to you?”
Inverted Doug simply pressed closer.
Brian realized the answer was, of course, under his hand.
Someone who had pledged responsibility and care for Doug—maybe many such people—had seen this inverse side, this heap of sanguine fibers and pustules, and believed it to be, as Brian first had, a hideous affront to nature. At first, before they knew, these people would have given Doug food, shelter, and maybe even love. And Doug, for his part, would have given love back and allowed himself the tentative freedom to be the being he truly was—a bizarre, tangled mess of a dog. But the people didn’t like what they saw when Doug revealed himself; they turned away in disgust, probably fear. Some undoubtedly ran. Some chased Doug outside and locked the door behind him. Others hit Doug until he shifted back, into a form that they could understand, a form in which they could easily find their preconceptions and beliefs, a form that, in some haphazard way, mirrored their own. Doug’s life must have been hell. Never to be able to vomit himself forth, to make any connection with the people and things outside himself: this was Doug’s curse. He was a monster.
But he was also a very good dog.
Tears cascaded from Brian’s cheeks. He understood so well. He pulled Doug tight to his chest and petted the dog’s beating heart, glancing up to the window that was still streaked by rain. He understood oh so very well.
Suddenly, a balmy, tingling sensation passed over Brian. He felt as Atlas might if the world upon his shoulders suddenly crumbled to dust. Without worry, without shame, without fear of reprisal, Brian laughed, still crying, and, into Doug’s shorn face, breathed “Doug Doug Doug. You’re a good boy, Doug. You’re a good boy.”
He stroked the inverted dog’s head and noticed the skin on his finger beginning to unzip, flesh and fatty lumps rolling back, back into a place where they had no purpose or meaning. Along his outer thighs, he could already feel his muscle peeling away, marrow deep within his bones reaching out to the surface. The process wasn’t pain; it was relief. It was escape.
Brian moved onto the couch and let Doug slide into his lap. Fingers now little more than gristly clumps, he rubbed behind his dog’s ears.
One of Brian’s eyes popped free of its socket and Doug’s serpentine tongue shot up to lick it.
Brian chuckled.
They would be monsters together, then, and that was all Brian could have ever hoped for.
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Crowning
They called the disease epidermal fertilosis.
Some said it was a plague.
Others claimed it was a miracle.
In either case, the woman on the opposite side of the waiting room had contracted it in a very bad way.
Five massive tumescent sacs covered her body, the most noticeable an inflamed bulb that ran from the base of her jaw to the top of her shoulder and caused her head to tilt at a precarious angle.
The sac pulsed.
I slouched deeper into my chair.
The woman flashed a wide smile at me, half her teeth broken or missing.
“Twins. They’re always kickin’,” she laughed.
The sac pulsed again, harder, and began to strain away from the woman’s neck. Her eyes bulged. Her skin flushed. She stood, as though to signal for help, but, instead, made a wet, gurgling sound and collapsed to the floor. Her entire body twisted and writhed as sacs on her stomach, back, and legs also tried to break free from their moorings, perhaps sensing imminent danger.
A nurse breezed into the waiting room from some unseen deathbed, glanced at the twitching woman on the floor, and blew away as quickly and mysteriously as he’d entered.
I remained frozen.
The woman on the floor squirmed toward me, still smiling.
With trembling hand, she pointed to the neck-sac.
“Help. My babies,” she choked, and fell back against the concrete floor, neck-sac bursting upon impact.
I couldn’t help but watch in wonder as strange liquids streamed out from a million perforations in the heavily striated flesh. My stomach groaned. My bowels clenched. Life oozed from the sac—deep red, yellow-green, off-white, black and brown all mixing together, pouring forth in rivulets of undifferentiated potential.
Suddenly, from out of the pools of muck and gore, a tiny hand reared up. It clawed through the open wound and yanked at loose flaps of torn skin, seeking purchase into the world beyond the woman’s neck. I felt compelled to help. I felt compelled to kill.
I did neither.
The other sacs continued to struggle for freedom, pulsing and straining outward in an attempt to escape their prisons of dying tissue. But none burst open. None tore through, save that one wavering, grasping hand.
I bent low in my chair and glanced at the woman’s face. Though the tensile strength of her muscles had expired, her smile, inexplicably, remained.
The hand and its five tiny fingers continued to slash through the antiseptic air.
I shrugged and shivered.
The nurse did not return.
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Rub-A-Dub-Dub
They were three men adrift on an ocean of remorse—or, at least, they were supposed to be.
Henry Hickson, a butcher.
Anthony Castro, a baker.
And LeMont Curry, an artisan candle maker.
Three criminals.
Three sacrificial lambs.
In their tiny, rusted, auto-piloting barge—a “Tub,” as was its idiomatic term among survivors—they floated ever onward, closer to Thalak, the Old One, the Scourge, the immense, psychic, pulsing thing in the sea that had so far killed or driven mad roughly half the earth’s population. When the trio reached Thalak’s edge, they would be engulfed within its maroon folds, swallowed whole, and digested so that the god could continue its reign of slow decay. They would provide sustenance for the great, miserable thing and—in death, in punishment—aid in its apocalypse.
But, for the moment, they were alive. And they were anxious, albeit for very different reasons.
Hickson kicked against his shackles—bolted tight to the tub’s iron deck—and swore.
“We can’t just sit here until the end,” he growled. “There’s gotta be a way to break free.”
Castro, eyes closed and lying prone under the blazing noonday sun, sighed and shook his head. Under his breath, barely a whisper to the other two, he muttered “It was trying to get free that landed us here.”
Hickson ignored him and, again, strained against the shackles. He was rewarded with only pain, a trickle of blood, and frustration.
He shook his sweat-laden head and slumped to the deck. “These are the only damn things that still work in this world.”
Balled up in a thin strip of shade opposite Hickson, Curry stared at the butcher’s struggle. A grin rose at one corner of his mouth. “What would you do if you could break them?”
Hickson glanced up and scowled. “You think
this is funny? You think sitting here on death’s cruise ship is fun?”
Amusement still fixed upon his lips, Curry shook his head. “Not in the slightest. I just wondered if you had a plan. If, you know, you actually snapped through them.”
Hickson glared at the candle maker, then broke off his gaze and looked to the preternaturally placid waters surrounding them.
“Actually, I do,” he said, his words falling solid, determined, resigned to an endless war.
“Really? And what’s that?” Curry asked, sitting upright and unfurling his thin, spindly legs.
Hickson shifted and reached into his waistband at the small of his back. He withdrew from its confines a narrow, sheathed cleaver. Holding it up before his face, he slipped off its leather case and let daylight glint against tempered steel.
“This,” he said. “This is my plan.”
Castro rolled onto his side and squinted at the blade.
“That’s your object of remembrance?” he asked, a tremolo of trepidation creeping into the question. “What did you do?”
Curry cocked his head to the side and squinted at the shining blade. “Good question. And, more to the point, what exactly are you going to do with that?” He motioned to the cleaver.
Hickson remained silent, studying his tool. What he saw upon its surface—his reflection or his sins or maybe even a past foolishly cut through with hope—Curry and Castro could not know.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Hickson began to speak, a low, brooding volcano within this throat erupting vengeance and sorrow.
“What I’m going to do with this,” he said, slashing the cleaver through the air, “is find a justice that’s been missing for a very long time, a justice that my wife and my daughter deserve.”
Castro shook his head and again rolled onto his back.
“There is no justice in this world,” he said. “No justice at all. Just legitimized prejudice and revenge.”
“Fine,” Hickson rumbled. “Fine. Justice, revenge, prejudice—whatever you want to call it, I’m going to have it. That monstrosity in the sea deserves every swing of my arm and every letter of my family’s name I’m going to carve into it.”
Curry slid forward, somehow still in shadow, and asked, eyes slivered, “And why is that? What’s brought you to this tub? What did Thalak do to you other than destroying life as we all knew it? What makes your crusade so important?”
Hickson rubbed his eyes and, under stricture of the shackles, stood as best he could.
“Back on land,” he said, turned toward the glass ocean, perhaps seeking the memory of a man he’d once been, “I was a butcher. Before the purges, before the concentration zones, I ran a little shop in a little town in a part of Pennsylvania that most people would only visit if they were lost or on a hunting trip. My wife, Val, worked part-time at Wal-Mart during the day, but she helped out at night, wrapping, packing, feeding the grinder if someone wanted ground meat. It was a twenty-four hour affair during deer season. Pretty successful, all in all. We made a decent living. Owned a little ranch-style house. Sometimes we hiked the mountains on weekends. Sometimes we rode four-wheelers—you know, ATVs—over our neighbors’ unkempt fields for fun. Did a lot of target shooting and beer drinking at our friends’ places. You could’ve called us hicks, I guess. I just thought of us as rugged.
“We had a daughter, too. Black hair, green eyes. Like a cat. Kitty, we called her, though her name was actually Stephanie. Smart. Too smart. She knew when and how to bend the truth so that she’d get her own way. She probably would’ve made a good lawyer in another place and time. She was everything for me and Val. She was our first, our only. And she was barely four when Thalak rose, when it hit us all with that very first psycho purge.
“Val didn’t survive it. Happened a Sunday afternoon, you remember that? I was outside, doing something that now seems like a stupid waste of time—planting new bushes or weed whacking or something like that. I remember smelling grass, then this . . . weight. This unbelievable squeezing weight. You know what I mean. Thalak’s feelers. I knew that something big and powerful and beyond my sense of . . . of . . . well, everything, was searching me over, hard, and boring into my thoughts. And that’s when I heard Kitty screaming. She and Val had been baking cookies for her to take to her preschool class. Val’s eyes had burst right in front of her. There was blood dripping from my daughter’s lips. Four years old. Her face covered with her mother’s ruined brain. Apparently Thalak saw something in Val’s head it didn’t like, some kind of rebellion that I didn’t have in me and Kitty couldn’t yet understand.
“After that, for a long time, Kitty was never more than ten feet from me. I had only to look over my shoulder and there she’d be, standing behind me, waiting for me to tell her that everything would be okay or that the people she saw wandering the roads—the strange, hairless, overly-tanned men and women in dark red clothes—didn’t mean anything. Of course, I couldn’t tell her that. All I could do was hug her. And even that didn’t help much, because soon the strange men and women, the bishops, came with their disciples and rounded us up. They took us to the Baltimore CZ, which is where I guess you guys ended up, too, since we’re all on this tub together.
“In the Balt CZ, for the past eight years, I continued to butcher what few livestock they let us have. I bought chickens and pigs when I could and tried to run a small shop again. Mostly, it was a failure. Whenever I actually had meat on the shelves, the bishops would stop in and take all of it for their ceremonies and feasts. Never paid me a dime. ‘Communal tithing,’ they called it. The price to be protected from Thalak by its own servants. Bullshit. Communal tithing left us without electricity half the year and without food some weeks.
“Kitty—now ‘Cat,’ as she insisted being called after she turned ten—had no interest in butchery. She started going out, getting away from me and our rundown shack. She spent a lot of time at the tiny CZ library, reading books about spies and heists and back alley deals. Crime drama stuff. She said she wanted to be master thief. I laughed and thought ‘whatever.’ Just a kid’s hope to have more than four walls and a bed, which, really, was about all we did have back there. But Cat didn’t cause trouble in the education center and she didn’t have ‘bad’ friends, so I wasn’t worried about her. I was more worried about where our next meal would come from. After all, we couldn’t live on water and old jerky year-round.
“Somehow we always scraped by. A tough life, not many frills, but okay, considering half the world was dead and even more of it was dying. One thing I always made sure of, though, regardless of how hungry I was or how much the roof leaked or how long I chopped and hacked in the shop: on Cat’s birthday, I bought her something nice. One year, a huge stuffed dog. Another year, a crystal statue of a dragon—she loved dragons for some reason. Last year, a gold locket with Val’s picture inside. I tried . . . I tried to make sure she felt that surviving this hell another year was something to celebrate. I tried to make her feel special, even if that word doesn’t mean anything anymore.
“Well, this year, being twelve and ready to take on the world, Cat apparently decided that for my birthday—a big one, I turned forty—she needed to get something impressive for me. But she had no money. No allowance, obviously. Nothing but her mind. Her sharp, beautiful mind. And so she did what she wanted to all along: she became a thief. She went out one night, broke into a general goods store, and stole a set of Shun Pro Sho knives. They were behind thick glass, in a case with jewelry and guns and other stuff that no one can afford now. She picked them because they looked, she said, ‘like the knives of an ancient warrior.’
“When I unwrapped them on my birthday, I knew it wasn’t right. These were expensive pieces of cutlery. Really expensive. Even before Thalak took over, a set of these things would’ve cost four hundred or five hundred dollars. I didn’t know how Cat had gotten them. I couldn’t know. But I figured it couldn’t be legit. So I just smiled and hugged her and hid my shaking hands in my pockets. They
were the best birthday present I’d ever gotten. They were also the worst.
“Two days later, the bishops came to our house. They knew. They always knew. Thalak is constantly watching. It wasn’t a matter of proving guilt or innocence. It was a matter of deciding the severity of her punishment.
“The bishops held one of their trials. I spoke for my daughter. I showed them her record at the education center. I explained that without her mother, she had a hole in her life. I said she was just a kid and kids make mistakes and that she wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. They didn’t care. They asked Cat why she did it, why she stole knives that were worth more than her father’s entire business. She answered ‘Because my dad deserves to have something more than just me.’ ”
“The bishops didn’t think so. They’re nothing if not thorough. They had researched her library checkouts and knew she’d been reading about crime for the past couple years. They knew her interests and her strengths. They knew she would only get better at stealing as she grew older. At only twelve, she’d found her way into a closed shop and into a secure case without setting off any alarms. The bishops were worried about the future, worried that Cat would end up stealing bigger things, more important things, secret, powerful things that no one should ever own. And so they sentenced her to the Tub. Twelve years old. Sentenced to be sacrificed.
“Their official reason—I memorized it—was that ‘as theft is indicative of rebellion against the accepted social framework, the girl poses a long-term risk to the stability of the Order of Thalak, as she may incite or perpetrate more significant acts of disruption as she ages.’ I threw curses at the judge who read that decision. I leaped out of my chair and rushed him and punched him, square between those glassy blue eyes that all the bishops have.”
“They gave me six months in prison for that punch. I sat in a concrete cell and refused to eat or drink, but the bishops strapped me to a table and injected me with fluids to keep me alive. Six months. I never saw Cat chained to the deck of a tub. I never had the chance to hug her or kiss her one last time. I never waved to her as the tub drifted off to Thalak. I never got the opportunity to say to my daughter ‘whatever else happens, I’m proud of you.’ No. I was in a concrete block. For six months. And then, I was released. And my life was supposed to go on.
