Oh, holy shit.
Justin looked mostly normal, skin pale under the moonlight, blond hair rustling in the stiff breeze, a pimple on his chin. Only now both of his eyes were protruding about six inches from his skull.
The pupils at the end of their new white-and-pink stalks twisted horribly in our direction, staring at us for a very long and terrible moment. We were so caught off guard by this that it killed our momentum, all of us frozen and expecting the person next to them to make the first move.
To Jennifer’s credit, she broke the paralysis by weakly tossing a flaming bottle at Justin. The Justin monster watched as it missed and bounced harmlessly to the ground, rolling to a stop. The wick flickered and went out. Shitload curled his twin optical skull-erections down and looked at the sad bottle draining its contents into the dirt. After a moment he turned back up to us and said, “Put that shit down and come with me, fools.”
He backed away from us, seeming to realize his eyes were dangling from his skull and in a series of sickening, jerky neck movements sucked them back in.
We stood there for a moment, looked at each other with a kind of deflated shame and defeat, then did what he said.
They were waiting for me, I realized, too late. They were waiting for me to push the attack, to lead them.
Welcome aboard the David Wong Disappointment Train, fuckers.
We weren’t in Vegas. A quick glance around showed we were squarely in the middle of rural nowhere. It was a windy night and in small-town Nevada that apparently means dust. Justin, the hybrid walking demon hive and Limp Bizkit fan, led us across a dusty yard onto a paint-peeled dusty porch where a pair of ancient and very dusty shoes sat mummifying in the dusty desert air.
The door was ajar and had only a perfectly round hole where the knob should have been.
Propped next to the door was a dust-covered but new FedEx box, which almost certainly was a delivery mistake since this place looked to be in its tenth year of vacancy.
Justin pushed in through the door, indifferently kicking the box inside as he passed.
As we moved inside I noticed for the first time that Justin had an old, mud-smeared glass jar in his hand and I vaguely remembered seeing it or one just like it in the Jamaican’s makeshift basement. He placed it on the floor and walked around to us one by one, arranging our bodies, seated, in a semicircle around it. I saw a speech coming and could only pray that I wouldn’t come out sounding like a white kid raised next to a cornfield trying to record interlude skits for a gang-sta rap album.
Shitload said, “This world is shit, yo.”
Oh, goddamnit.
“How do you people be gettin’ around in this, all in these bodies and shit? You act all scared that I’m gonna kill ya, when it’s the best thing I could do for you, yo. Deadworld, man, it’s alternate layers of rot and shit and rot and shit.”
I looked around the dim group, saw moonlight from the window cracks reflecting off of tears on Jennifer’s cheeks. Big Jim had his eyes closed, maybe in prayer. Fred Chu looked around as if uninterested, stroking his goatee with one hand and fidgeting with a strip of carpet foam with the other. John was staring vacantly at a spot on the other side of the room, already distracted into a dull stupor. Molly licked her crotch.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Undisclosed Hell-Conqueror Strike Force!
To at least feel like I was doing something, I said, “Deadworld? Is that where you’re from?”
“No, dude. That’s where you’re from. It’s where we are now. This place, it’s a horror show. If the guy next to you decides to knock you out of this world forever, he can do it with just a piece of metal or, hell, even his bare hand. You blobs, you sit there, chillin’ in this room and I can smell the rot of dead animals soaking in the acid of your guts. You suck the life from the innocent creatures of this world just so you can clock another day. You’re machines that run on the terror and pain and mutilation of other lives. You’ll scrape the world clean of every green and living thing until starvation goes one-eight-seven on every one of your sorry asses, your desperation to put off death leadin’ to the ultimate death of everybody and everything. Dude, I can’t believe you ain’t all paralyzed by the pure, naked horror of this place.”
After a long, long pause John said, “Uh, thank you.”
John’s eyes never moved as he spoke, and suddenly I saw a look there, a confidence. I followed his gaze, saw what he was seeing, and then quickly looked away again.
I glanced back at the Justin monster, wondering if he had caught on. But he was busy. He twisted the lid off the old pickle jar, and a small, shriveled thing, like a dried-up earthworm, dropped out and landed quietly on the floor.
Shitload went to the kitchen and I heard him messing around with the sink in there. No water. He came back, studied our faces, and pointed to Fred.
“Piss on it,” he commanded.
I was so baffled by this that I wasn’t even sure I had heard him right. But Fred, having perfected going with the flow to a degree that philosophers could study for centuries, shrugged and said, “Okay.”
He stood, unzipped, urinated on the floor, zipped up and sat back down. The little black dried-worm sliver sat in the middle of the bubbling puddle. Nothing for a long time, maybe a minute.
And then, the worm twitched.
Jennifer screamed, everybody jumped.
The shriveled nothing grew. And grew. And grew.
Just add water!
A hand formed. A human hand, pink and the size of a baby’s. Stretching out from behind it, instead of an arm, was something like an insect leg. It was a foot long, springing out to length before our eyes like a radio antenna. Something like a shell took shape. I saw an eye, red and clustered like a fly’s. Another eye, this one with a round pupil, like a mammal, grew in next to it. Then another eye, yellow with a black slit down the center. Reptilian.
The thing grew and grew some more. It grew to the size of a rabbit, then a small dog, then stopped when it was about a foot-and-a-half high and maybe three feet wide, probably the same overall mass as Molly.
The finished creature seemed to be assembled from spare parts. It had a tail like a scorpion curling up off its back. It walked on seven—yes, seven—legs, each ending in one of those small, pink infantile hands. It had a head that was sort of an inverted heart shape, a bank of mismatched eyes in an arc over a hooked, black beak, like a parrot’s. On its head, no kidding, it had a tuft of neatly groomed blond hair that I swear on my mother’s grave was a wig, held on with a rubber band chinstrap.
What was strange about it, or rather, what was stranger about it was that the two sections of its body—the hindquarters and the abdomen—were not connected. There was a good two inches of space between them and when it turned sideways you could see right through the thing. But it moved in unison, as if they were connected by invisible tissue.
The little monster stood twitching there on the floor like a newborn calf, still dripping with urine.
John said, “Huh.”
Fred said, “Guys, can you all see that fuckin’ thing, or is it just me?”
The beast moved in circles, looking around the room. Justin said to us, “Don’t move. If I ask it to, it’ll kill you, yo. You don’t know what that thing’s capable of. Shit, lookin’ at the thing, I don’t even think it knows. But that ain’t my goal, I coulda capped you all back home if that was the plan. It ain’t.”
The thing turned and turned, staring down each of us, its dozen eyes blinking at different intervals. It finally stopped, looking my direction. Molly stirred behind me, a low growl rising from her.
“All I need you to do is hold still, yo. In a minute ain’t none of you gonna remember why you got all worked up and shit.”
The creature crouched, then vanished in a blur. I threw myself back, expected the monster to suddenly be on me, but it wasn’t. I heard a horrible, high-pitched yelp behind me and turned to find the monster on Molly’s back, its legs wrapped around her body, dug into her fur
like steel cables.
Jennifer screamed, everyone stirred. Justin shouted at us to stay down, stay down. I watched as the thing whipped back that scorpion tail (Did I say it was like a scorpion? The freaking tail had hair on it.) and with a flick, the end was buried in the dog’s hide. The length of the tail started pulsing and twitching. It was pumping something into her.
Molly whimpered.
And then it was over. The beast jumped off. Molly looked terrorized but kept her feet. I saw the tip of the monster’s scorpion tail and noticed a drip of thick, black fluid trickling out.
Soy sauce.
Wait. What? That’s where it comes from?
A burst of movement, behind me. Shuffling feet and shouts.
John was making his move, diving in the direction we had been looking earlier. He skidded on the floor and seized the white FedEx box.
Shitload was on him fast, Bruce Lee–fast. He delivered a kick to John’s gut that actually knocked him back a couple of feet. He then wrenched the box from John’s arms. Shitload looked baffled, moved to throw the box aside but stopped cold.
He looked at the label, then at John, then at me, then at the label again. I stood and moved slowly toward them.
Shitload stared at John and said, “What’s in here?”
John said nothing, looked like he wasn’t too sure himself. I moved closer still, not understanding. Shitload stiffened his arm toward John in a “Heil Hitler” motion. This confused us for a second—before a slit appeared in his palm and something like a mouth puckered there. A thin stream of thick, yellow liquid dripped onto the floor, gathering in a small, smoking puddle that quickly ate through the floorboards with a soft hiss.
“Tell me,” Justin demanded.
I looked down at the label on the box. The package was addressed to John’s real name, to this house in this Nevada town. It was dated yesterday, sent via overnight delivery, with John’s own small, neat handwriting.
“Tell me, or I’ll melt your face, yo. What is it, like, a bomb?”
John shrugged, said, “Why don’t you open it and we’ll both find out?”
Shitload sat the box on the floor, said, “Take it outside.”
“Okay.” John bent over to pick it up.
“Stop! Leave it where it is.”
“Okay.”
He pointed to the wig monster and said, “Open the box.”
The thing apparently understood, because it trundled over and started tearing at the flap with its beak. After several long, clumsy minutes of this, during which I tried to show it the little tear strip all FedEx boxes have, it finally stuck its snout inside and pulled out a sheet of wrinkled notebook paper.
Shitload picked it up, saw scrawled on it in big ink pen letters: “JOHN LOOK BY THE BUSH IN THE FRONT YARD.”
The Justin monster turned to John and said, “What’s out there? A weapon? You tryin’ to gank me?”
John didn’t answer. Shitload pointed to the wig beast and said, “If any of you try to move, that thing will rip off all of your limbs, leave you alive and plant five hundred eggs in your belly. You down with that?”
We were. Shitload tossed aside the note and strode out the front door.
We could indeed see a bush out there, shivering in the breeze. Had John, under the influence of the sauce, somehow planted something out there ahead of time? How? And what? A gun? A pipe bomb? A trained badger? Nothing would have surprised me.
The creature formerly known as Justin White walked out to the bush and looked down, kicking around at the base of it. I glanced over at John, who waited with the same anticipation, apparently having completely forgotten the plan once the sauce wore off. The wig monster prowled around between us and I wondered if we should all try sprinting out the back door.
Outside, Justin had found nothing. He turned to walk back—
And was blown off his feet.
A thunderous boom echoed in the desert air, followed by a faint mechanical ka-chunk of a pump shotgun. A second shot sounded, then a third.
The wig beast in front of us hissed, bearing its teeth (yes, it had both teeth and a beak), seeming to know that something was amiss and that we should all be ripped to shreds immediately. We were frozen by the thing, all of us desperate to jump up and watch our salvation, but any slight shift of a limb would cause the wig thing to spin in that direction.
A figure moved toward the open door out in the darkness. The creature spun toward it and when I saw who came through, I found myself rooting for the wig monster.
SAY WHAT YOU want about Shitload and his disjointed pet, but neither of them either tried to shoot me or set me on fire. The same cannot be said for Detective Lawrence “Morgan Freeman” Appleton, who strode into the house loading shells into a pistol-grip riot gun.
His eyes caught the jumbled creature on the floor. He raised the gun.
The thing turned toward him and meowed like a cat. It crouched, leaned his direction and vanished right as John screamed, “MOVE!”
Morgan spun and ducked off to his right.
The wig monster appeared in midair in the spot where Morgan was standing a half second earlier, flailing its limbs in his direction. The thing tumbled to the carpet. Morgan lowered the shotgun.
A blast thundered in the room. Bits of monster flew.
Morgan racked the shotgun, ejecting a blue plastic shell. “There any more of ’em?”
Jim said, “No, but that guy out there ain’t dead.”
We all got to our feet, everyone relieved at their rescue.
Everyone but me.
I still had a puncture in the middle of my chest like a third nipple, where the good detective here had shot me before trying to roast me alive. I wondered if they noticed Morgan didn’t exactly read Justin his rights before blowing a hole in him. I mean, I did the same thing but that’s why society doesn’t let me carry a badge.
Morgan started to speak, maybe to say, “I blew a hole in his chest the size of a football, jackass, I’m pretty sure he’s freaking dead,” but then his eyes locked on mine, realizing the other guy he’d shot in the heart this weekend was now standing and breathing in front of him.
There was a moment, when my eyes met Morgan’s, when once more I got a flash of his thoughts. Nothing coherent, just fear and exhaustion and cold, deadly purpose.
In that two seconds we shared, I knew the detective’s mind was working full time to crush any remaining doubts about what he had to do. He had a mission, and had traveled across the country to carry it out. He was saving the world, and in his mind that meant that anyone dumb enough, unlucky enough, or crazy enough to take the sauce, to risk becoming a conduit for whatever otherworldly invasion was waiting to use them as a doormat, needed to die.
Morgan had a decision to make. He glanced over his shoulder, squinting into the darkness for Justin. But he didn’t turn, and he still had the shotgun pointing in our direction.
Six of us, maybe we were hostages and maybe we were hives. Maybe he had thought he’d burst in and we’d all be in Alien-style cocoons and he could just torch the place and declare it mission accomplished. But here we were, exhausted and filthy and wounded. To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.
John leaned over and picked up the FedEx box. He peered inside, turned it over. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter slid out into his hand. He plucked one cigarette out, and lit it. He reached into the waistband of his hospital pants and pulled out a little bottle of some kind of brown liquor he had lifted from the truck, took a drink. I was surprised he hadn’t mailed himself a burrito, too.
I said to Morgan, “It’s a long fucking story but we’re on your side. John totally lured Justin out there for you, just now.”
Just don’t fucking ask me how.
Morgan turned, pushing back through the door, leading with the shotgun. I followed, careful not to step in the wig mon
ster chunks scattered on the floor underfoot.
The cop was a lot more surprised than I was to see Shitload was no longer on the desert floor. He poised the gun in front of him, turning like a turret, then spun on the beer truck as it rumbled to life and rolled onto the road.
Morgan ran, ripped off three shots as the red taillights shrank into the distance. He stomped back toward us, said, “Shit!”
“I know where he’s going,” I said. “And I’ll tell you if you promise to take us with you. And not to shoot me again.”
He sucked in a breath, scanning the faces of our group. Finally he said, “Okay.”
“Luxor Hotel. Don’t ask me how I know.”
THIRTY SECONDS LATER we were all crammed into Morgan’s rental SUV like it was a clown car, pealing down the blacktop.
From the passenger seat I watched the headlights swallowing up the road and said, “There’s something like a massive séance planned. It’s a guy named Marconi. Apparently Shitload—er, Justin, has business there.”
All ten of Morgan’s fingers were clamped around the steering wheel as the speedometer crept upward.
“I know.”
“You do? How?”
Everyone in the truck lurched first right, then left as Morgan swerved to pass a car.
“Brock Wholesale reported the liquor truck missing yesterday. I happened to catch word of a gas station attendant in Missouri who said a beer-truck driver told him he needed directions to Las Vegas, then punched him in the balls and told him his daughters would be live meat cocoons for the leech pool. Man thought that was strange, phoned it in. I just followed the same directions he gave Justin, drove balls to the wall. Then I came up on this exit and just had a feelin’, you know, like an intuition.”
The mention of “intuition” gave me a cold feeling in my gut. I glanced back at John. It got his attention, too.
“I followed my gut and there was the truck, parked by that old house.”
Morgan scratched the side of his cheek, two-day stubble sounding like sandpaper. The engine growled, the scenery sprayed past my window.
I asked, “If this thing makes it to the Luxor, what happens?”