by Lucy Snyder
“I … I was thinking maybe we could see that new Ryan Gosling movie?” she said. “But maybe that’s too much of a chick flick for you. That new thriller is playing here, we could see it, instead, if you want?”
“Whichever you’d like is fine,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter what we watch, as long as I can see it with you beside me.”
She decided on the romantic comedy. He paid for their tickets, and they walked into the darkened theater and settled themselves in seats on the back row.
Gordon scarcely paid any attention to the trifling film. His tools, which he’d carefully stowed in the bottom of his shoulder bag, were whispering to him, begging him to use them. Their voices were low and slithery.
He poked the bag sharply with his foot. “Shut up. You’ll scare her away,” he muttered at them.
The voices died down to a low, electric hum.
“Did you say something?” Judy asked.
“No, nothing. Just stubbed my toe.”
A few minutes later, during a particularly romantic scene, he reached over and took her hand. She seemed surprised at first, but then her fingers laced into his and she relaxed.
By the time the movie was ending, she’d snuggled up close to him and was resting her head on his shoulder.
Hook and line, he thought. Now I need to find a place to sink her.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked as they stepped out of the theater.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, taking his hand again and tucking the bouquet under her arm. “It was wonderful. The ending was just dreamy. Thanks for inviting me; I’d have never gone to see it on my own.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” he replied.
The tools were hot in his bag, and they burned uncomfortably against his ribs. It annoyed him that they were being so impatient. He was in charge here. They’d have to wait for him to decide when the time was right. It wasn’t just a matter of taking her body, after all; true seduction was all in the brain. Only when she’d told him the secrets of her soul would he know how he should harvest her.
“Would you like to get some coffee or dessert?” he asked her.
“Could we go for a walk, instead?” she asked uncertainly. “It’s such a nice night, and the park will be pretty in the moonlight.”
“A splendid idea,” he agreed, trying not to smile too eagerly. The tools flared painfully.
“You’ve been so nice to me,” she said as they walked hand-in-hand under the wrought iron archway that marked the entrance to the park. “I mean, you’re a real gentleman. Not like most of the men I’ve known. Ever since the fire …” she trailed off, staring into the distance. Then she shook herself from her reverie and smiled at him sadly. “It’s just ever since then, I think I’ve had bad karma. I didn’t seem to attract nice guys anymore, so I sort of stopped looking. And then you came along.”
“Well, you’re a very special woman to me. I think we were meant to meet.”
He stopped on the path and pulled her close to him. “Would it be all right if I kissed you?”
She stared up at him, and her face darkened in horrified recognition. Her smile faded, and her eyes started to fill with tears. “Oh no …”
He mentally cursed himself. Too much, too soon. “Shh, shh, it’s all right, what’s the matter?” he asked, fishing a handkerchief out of the side pocket of his shoulder bag.
She took the hanky, but pulled away, turning her back to him as she wiped at the tears. “I’m sorry. It’s just, in this light, you look so much like him. Like my John. You’ve got his eyes.”
“John was your husband?”
She nodded, sobbing quietly. “True love never dies, you know.”
She took a ragged breath, then straightened up and faced him. “Have you ever been in love, Gordon?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“What would you do for the one you loved?” she asked, her expression unreadable.
“Why, I’d move the sun and the stars to be with her,” he replied smoothly. “I’d make sure nothing stood in the way of our love. I’d do anything I had to do to keep her by my side. Anything.”
Judy took another deep breath, and her sad smile returned.
“My … my John is buried over there, in the mausoleum,” she said, pointing toward the cemetery. “I know this seems weird, but … I just miss him so much, Gordon. Would you mind if we walked to his grave? I’d like to put one of these on his marker.”
She touched the rose bouquet.
“It’s not very far from here,” she added.
Gordon’s tools hummed. They liked the idea of the mausoleum. To fuck the girl on the cold marble floor, to harvest her in front of the sleeping dead … oh, that would be sweet.
“Certainly. If it would make you feel better, I’ll be glad to go there with you,” he said.
They walked in silence for a few minutes before he asked, “How did it happen? The fire, I mean.”
When she didn’t reply, he quickly added, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to—”
“No. No, it’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it. You have a right to know, since … since we’re going to his grave and all.” She gave him a quick, almost guilty smile.
Her teeth, Gordon thought. I definitely have to take her teeth. And maybe her lips, too. Such pretty lips.
“John was an anthropologist. He taught at the university before the fire. He specialized in comparative Afro-Carribean religions, and wrote a book about Santeria. He and one of the local Haitian priests he’d interviewed for the book, Hector Tambo, got to be really good friends. After John and I got married at St. Pete’s, Hector suggested that he hold a private ceremony for us so that our marriage could be sanctified in the eyes of Olorun and the orishas, the spirits that watch over us. It sounded like a neat idea to me, so after we got back from our honeymoon, the three of us gathered at Hector’s house for the ceremony.”
Judy paused, frowning. “I still don’t really remember what happened next. We were just starting the ritual when there was this incredible explosion. I woke up on the front lawn, surrounded by paramedics. Half the neighborhood was on fire. They said there was a gas leak in the basement, and when Hector lit some incense, most of the gas main ignited. John and Hector were dead. They said I was lucky to be alive.”
She shook her head. “But I wasn’t lucky. Not at all. When a ceremony like that goes unfinished, when true lovers are separated like that, the orishas take matters into their own hands.”
They passed under some cherry trees and walked up the path to the mausoleum, broadly square and gray in the moonlight. Wrought iron lamps with weak yellow bulbs lit the entrance and interior walkway. Gordon’s tools were humming louder and louder, and his cock was straining against his underwear.
Very soon, he thought. You’ll have her very soon.
She took his hand and led him into the mausoleum.
“I didn’t really think I’d take you here,” she said sadly. “I mean, you’re such a nice guy. This isn’t the place for you. I wish the orishas had brought me someone else. But I can’t help it. True love never dies, and you’ve got his eyes.”
There came the low rumble and scrape of stone sliding against stone, then a booming slam as a section of marble hit the floor. Startled, he stared toward the noises. One of the grave drawers was open. And something large and black was crawling out.
Gordon’s tools went silent, frigid. Judy gripped his wrist tightly, painfully. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast.
“John, I’ve brought you a visitor,” she called.
The black thing shambled up to them with alarming speed. It was the burned, skeletal corpse of a big man, well over six feet tall. Its charred tissues had been stitched over in a green-gray patchwork of newer dead flesh.
The thing leered down at him with its empty black eye sockets. The stench from it was unspeakable. Gordon wanted to scream, wanted to throw up, but nothing came out of his throat.
The thing picked
Gordon up and slammed him against the marble wall, holding him there fast, his feet dangling helplessly.
Judy stepped up beside them and caressed the thing’s arm. “True love,” she sighed. “John loves me, and I love him, and we’ll do what we must to make love tonight. The orishas have made this our blessing and our curse.”
She carefully set down the rose bouquet and opened up her purse. She pulled out a stainless steel pocketknife, a surgical needle and spool of suture. “We’ll be needing your skin, and your lips and tongue. And of course your dick.”
Gordon tried to kick at the thing, and found that his strength had evaporated like alcohol on a hot iron.
“But first things first.” Judy reached up and gently pulled up his left eyelid. The knife flicked open in her hand, the blade gleaming silvery sharp. “You’ve got his eyes ….”
Antumbra
I woke in the afternoon gloom to the sound of my 20-year-old stepsister Lily dragging something heavy and wet up the back patio steps through the kitchen door. The smell of blood and brine smothered me the moment I sat up.
I swore to myself and called down to her: “What did you do?”
“You’ll see,” she sing-songed.
“Pleasant mother pheasant plucker.” I lay back on the sweat-stained sheets for a moment to gather my focus. Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough to keep my head from spinning, but it was all I could seem to get these days. The cells in my body kept waiting for the moon to move, despite all my meditating to try to tell them that the big rock blotting the sun wasn’t going anywhere.
I kept having nightmares from everything I saw in the months after the Coronado Event. In the worst dream, I was sitting in my bedroom when an earthquake hit. The walls would crack, revealing not drywall and wood but rotten meat, and cold blood would pour in, flooding everything. The red tide would sweep me off my bed and press me up against the ceiling. My stuffed toys turned into real animal carcasses floating by my head. I’d be struggling to breathe in the two inches of air between the gore and the plaster when I felt something grab my ankle. And then I’d wake up.
I was a high school senior when it all happened. Back then I was so focused on prom and graduation and other such bullshit that I didn’t notice the first reports on CNN that an astronomer named Gabriel Coronado had spotted a large, dark object hurtling toward the earth at barely sublight speeds. But the science geeks at my school started talking about it, so the rest of us finally paid attention. Some of the religious kids said it was going to be the end of the world. But everyone else figured it would be like one of those big-budget movies where they send a heroic team of astronauts up with good old American nukes to blow the comet/asteroid to smithereens before it reaches the Earth.
I think NASA and the Pentagon tried to pull some kind of mission together. Or at least that’s what they told the media to try to calm people down. Their astrophysicists told them the big black object out there was going pass by, so they probably figured they just had to keep people from looting and committing mass suicide.
And it did miss us by half a million miles. But it was so huge and moving so fast it jerked the Earth and moon in its gravitational wake like a couple of hobos spun around in the wind from a speeding semi. When the storms and earthquakes and wildfires from meteor strikes passed, the Earth and moon were locked in a new static orbit.
Our city was in permanent lunar eclipse, which was far better than the relentless daylight some parts of the world suffered if you didn’t consider the massive flooding we got from being stuck at high tide. The ocean invaded our city, and Cat 5 hurricanes blasted us every spring because of all the hot air blowing in from the lightside. But at least we weren’t broiling.
After ten years of living in the antumbra, my body still hadn’t adjusted to the new normal. All my cycles were screwed up. Sometimes I’d bleed twice in a month, and then half a year would pass before I kicked another egg. At least I had my life, which was more than about four billion people could say. And I mostly had my health, even if I was turning into a bona fide lunatic.
Lily, on the other hand, was thriving like apocalypse was that special vitamin she’d been missing as a kid.
“Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, sister June? Sister June?” she sang off-key from the kitchen. “I got something for you, I got something for you, yum yum food! Yum yum food!”
“Okay, okay, I’m coming.” I crawled off the bed, pulled on a tee shirt, and stumbled downstairs.
Lily stood peacock-proud in gore-soaked clothes beside a massive hunk of something that she’d dragged in on a sled of black trash bags and flattened cardboard. The coppery smell of blood and the bay stink made my eyes water. It was cylindrical, maybe four feet long and two feet in diameter. I didn’t see any bones in the ruby-red flesh. The black skin of the thing was covered in fur, like that of a seal or otter, except for where it had a double row of naked purple suckers as big as saucers.
“Where did you get this?” I asked her, frowning down at the massive hunk of tentacle.
“It didn’t come from a people!” Lily exclaimed, as if that was the alpha and omega of all my possible questions. “Will you cook it? It’s all bitter raw.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t a person.” We’d had a long talk when she was nine about how it was wrong to eat people. I’d mostly done it to convince her to stop biting neighborhood kids she didn’t like. Later, she saw a TV show about dolphins and decided that anything that could communicate was a person. Cats and dogs became people to her, and that was just as well. She got hungry for meat and bones a whole lot during her growth spurts and I couldn’t watch her all the time. “But where did you get it?”
“It came up from the sea.” She shrugged. “Hungry. Tried to eat people. I helped the Robichaud guys kill it.”
I frowned at her. “And what were you doing with the Robichaud brothers?”
Lily crossed her sinewy arms behind her and rocked side to side like a guilty preschooler. She licked her lips with her impossibly long tongue, running it briefly over her chin. “Just helping.”
“Helping” my ass. Christ. Well, at least I’d gotten Doc Freeman to give her an IUD. I stared down at the tentacle. The doctor would give us good trade for organs from a creature like this. I didn’t know what the hell she did with them, but apparently monster parts were useful to someone’s research somewhere.
“It’s a shame you only got this,” I said. “Doc Freeman would have liked more.”
“I got more!” Lily smiled, her sharp teeth gleaming in the fluorescent light, and pointed behind me. “In there. An eye and a brain-thing. In ice, like she said.”
I followed her point to the dining room table, and saw a stained Styrofoam picnic cooler that had been duct-taped shut. “Oh. Sick. Good job, sis.”
The tentacle passed muster with the food safety scanner; it was a little radioactive, but so was every damn thing since the Coronado Event. The planet got hit with about a billion space rocks following in the big black’s wake, and they were loaded with uranium and God knew what. Maybe some of the rocks came from planets the big black smashed, worlds that had their own strange forms of life. That would explain a whole lot about what was happening to the Earth.
Doc Freeman had given us the scanner in exchange for a crate of scotch we salvaged from a drowned mansion. It had saved us from being poisoned probably a dozen times. Well, saved me, anyhow; nothing ever seemed to make Lily sick these days.
She helped me cut the tentacle into thick steaks. I wrapped half and put them in the freezer, threw two on our electric grill, and put the rest in the fridge. Thanks to good loot trades, we were pretty well fixed for hydrogen fuel cells, so we didn’t have to be too stingy with electricity. I could deal with all the humidity and mildew that came with giving up our air conditioning for the sake of the grow lights for our indoor herb garden, but the thought of drinking warm beer was just too much to bear.
The mystery meat grilled up nice and tender with some wine, soy sauce and what
was left of our scallions; if I closed my eyes I could pretend it was a filet mignon. But my memory of what beef really tasted like was hazy. The light from the corona around the moon screwed up my sleep, but it wasn’t enough to grow grass for cattle. We had to get corn and wheat from penumbra states like Nebraska, if we could get them at all.
“Watermelon.” Lily was gazing mournfully at her clean-licked plate. “I want watermelon.”
“Maybe soon,” I said. “Doc said the caravan should be back in a month or two.”
She stared down at her blood-crusted nails. “Dirty. I should wash?”
“Yes, you should.”
Lily gazed at me with her big orchid-purple eyes, looking every bit the changeling my stepfather claimed she was the day he walked out our door and stole my Mustang. I’d worked three summers straight to save up for that car. I borrowed a boyfriend’s van and ran after the bastard to get my property back, make him take responsibility for his daughter for just once in his lousy life. But he got himself killed trying to steal fuel before I could catch up to him.
My mom had already died in the epidemic after the meteorite storm; before her throat closed up, she’d made me promise to look after Lily. She probably knew her dad would bail on us sooner or later. I was fifteen when they met, and I knew right away what she saw in him. Dude needed an inseam zipper. They married before anyone knew about the big black, of course; otherwise she’d have found a guy with survival skills. Mom was never dumb on purpose. But she was making good money selling real estate, so what else did she need a man for back then?
Lily was eight when I met her, and already full of bad habits from her dad’s mix of spoiling and neglect. He was vague about who her mother was. I guess she must have been a hot mess for anyone to award custody to a slackerjack like him.
My stepsister never seemed exactly normal brain-wise, but she looked human enough when she was young. That all changed after her dad was gone. She got the same fever that killed my mom, but the worst it did was make her teeth fall out. A new set grew in, almost reptilian, and needle-sharp. Her eyes changed, and she started getting muscles that made some people mistake her for a boy.
