Bruce swung the sledgehammer with all the force and leverage his position allowed. Which wasn’t much. The hammer hit the dog-sized creature on the side of its neck and knocked loose a few of the scales, but it barely affected the thing’s trajectory. The PVC claws hit his naked stomach and sliced. Not deeply enough to do any serious damage (he didn’t think) but enough to send a wave of agonizing pain through his midsection.
The thing opened its mouth again and grinned.
It’s playing with me.
Clear saliva dripped from between its teeth. A single bubble rose out of the dark, featureless throat and popped against one of the bottom front fangs.
Jesus Christ.
The creature pulled back its arm, a thick appendage covered with the same kinds of uneven tiles that composed its head but underlined with lengths of copper piping, gaskets, more PVC, and other bits of torn rubber and plastic that might once have been plumbing supplies but had now become too organic to categorize.
The arm swung.
Bruce bucked the beast and managed to avoid what probably would have been a killing blow. He scooted back again, cutting his ass on more broken glass but barely noticing. When the thing jumped at him once more, Bruce swung the sledgehammer. He still didn’t get much more than half of his full force behind the swing, but he hit the thing on the chin and knocked back its head with an audible snap he could only pray was the sound of its neck cracking.
It squealed and scurried into the corner of the room like a kicked mutt. It hunkered beside the toilet for a moment, hissing.
No broken neck then. Damn.
Bruce took the chance to get to his feet. Glass shards fell from his butt, hips, and thighs and tinkled to the floor. Other shards stayed embedded in his skin and muscles. He could feel them in there, burning. The parallel scratches on his stomach oozed blood over his pubic region. Bruce took the sledgehammer in both hands and bared his teeth.
“Come on, you nasty son of a bitch.”
The creature stopped hissing but didn’t close its mouth. A bubbling, gurgling sound rose from somewhere in its throat or belly. It twitched, spasmed, and hacked up a wet, furry hunk of meat and bone. The mess slid halfway to Bruce, leaving a streak through the mixed liquids already on the floor.
Bruce spotted a single paw amid the half-digested wad, as well as a few whiskers and a bit of hide covered with calico fur.
“No.” He whispered it.
He looked back at the creature. The thing was grinning again.
“No,” he said, louder this time.
The creature rose on its hind legs, which were similar to its arms composition wise but thicker, stronger looking. It didn’t stand up fully but seemed to balance itself in that half-standing position, almost like a prairie dog. Maybe it wasn’t capable of standing erect; maybe it was just trying to make itself look bigger, more dangerous. Bruce didn’t know and didn’t care. He rushed the thing.
This time, when he swung the sledge, he put every last bit of his power into it. He swung sidearm. He felt his arms shake mid-swing; the muscles wanted to give out, but he willed his body to follow through with the motion. It did. The hammer crunched into the side of the creature’s face. One second, that Bruce’s eye of an eye was staring out at him. The next, it was gone, oozing down the side of the thing’s face from the crater the sledgehammer had created.
The beast gurgled and tried to catch the vitreous fluid spilling to the floor. The liquid streamed down its piped fingers and continued to descend. The creature turned its good eye to him and ground its fangs together. Small bits of tile broke loose and spilled down its face. Soapy drool leaked from the corner of its mouth and joined the stream of eye goo.
Bruce didn’t give the thing time to retaliate. He swung the hammer in reverse this time, uppercutting the creature and knocking its head back into the wall beside the toilet. The wall caved in beneath its skull, and a cloud of white plaster dust puffed into the air. Clear liquid spilled out of the jagged mouth. Drool? Blood? No way to tell. It could have been the thing’s goddam sperm for all he knew.
The creature dropped to its knees and brought its claws up to its face. It let go long enough to swipe at Bruce, but the attack was feeble and pathetic. He dodged it easily.
Before it could regain its composure, Bruce hit the thing again. He swung so hard this time his entire body ached with the movement. His penis—still sore from the earlier violation—slapped his thigh and throbbed. The sledge hit the top of the thing’s head, driving it to the ground and creating a dent large enough to put your fist in.
Which Bruce did. Too sore to swing the sledge again, he kneeled over the creature and punched at the hole in its head until he found the wet gunk inside that felt like used toilet paper but must have been brains. He grabbed a chunk of the wet matter and tossed it back over his shoulder. He heard it land somewhere in the vicinity of the sink—plop—but didn’t bother looking. Instead, he ripped out another handful of psuedo-brain. And another. He gutted the skull until it was jack-o-lantern hollow.
The creature made a final attempt to bite his hand and actually got its teeth around Bruce’s thumb, but when it bit down, it didn’t have enough life left in it to do anything except make a pair of barely visible punctures near the knuckle. Before it died, it looked at Bruce with its remaining eye and hissed its last hiss. Bruce watched the life drain from its pupil, watched it dull and become murky and unreflective.
He dropped back on his bare ass and sat there with his face in his hands for a very long time. He ran the emotional gamut: sad, angry, doubtful about his own sanity, relieved, victorious. He cried a little, laughed a little, shook and wondered if he'd gone into shock. Finally he opened his eyes and faced what he’d done.
The creature lay on the floor surrounded by the battle’s spilled fluids. If you’d glanced at it, you might have thought it was a demolished toilet or a pile of construction debris. Unless you’d seen the eye, of course, that single bit of near-humanity buried in a mound of lifeless junk.
Bruce reached his hand behind his butt to push himself up but put his fingers down in the regurgitated mess that had been his cat instead. Selina. He groaned, jerked his hand away from the mushy mound, and fought the urge to vomit into his lap. Blood and strings of guts dripped down his fingers and over his wrist. He looked for something to wipe his hand on, but there was nothing within reach. He shook his hand and flung the gore at the dead creature.
He spent the next half-hour demolishing the tub and piling the pieces on the monster’s corpse. The bathtub hadn’t shown any further signs of life, but Bruce didn’t want to chance it. And it wasn’t as if he’d be able to use the thing again even if he’d wanted to. Not with a giant, gaping birthing canal in the center.
He tore it all out: the tub, the surround, the fixtures. When he'd finished, he went into the bedroom and put on a pair of old work clothes. They were too torn apart to wear in public, but they made a perfect outfit for this particular chore. He’d throw them away afterward. Or maybe burn them.
He went back to the shed, got out the wheelbarrow, the shovels, and a small tarp, and took it all back into the house. It took five trips to get everything out of the bathroom and into the backyard. By the time he was done, sweat had drenched every inch of his clothes.
He dug a hole just big enough for the debris (the remains?) and spent another hour shoveling in the broken bits and burying them. That single eye—so disturbingly similar to his own—stared at him for most of the job. When he finally covered it in dirt, his own eyes blinked sympathetically.
Don’t sympathize with that piece of shit.
He rubbed his eyelids with the backs of his hands and finished the job.
He was more ceremonious with Selina. He wrapped what was left of her in the tarp and placed the bundle into an old DVD player box. This he buried beneath a rose bush on the opposite side of the yard from the monster’s grave. When he’d finished that final chore, he sat beside the smaller mound of dirt for a long time, no
t wanting to return to the emptier-than-ever house.
In the morning, he’d try to lose himself in his work. And on his way home, he’d stop by the hardware store and see about a new tub.
SIX
Beneath the house, the creature listened to the father-thing destroy its brother, desecrate its mother’s corpse, and then cart off the bodies. It hunkered in the dark, waiting for the father-thing’s return. Its mother may have died bringing them into the world, and its brother trying to earn alpha dominance, but it would not join them in death.
When the father-thing came back, it would ascend from the darkness, claim its place in the world, and light out for the hunt.
PRAISE FOR DANIEL PYLE
DISMEMBER
Dismember’s a fast-paced grindhouse-movie of a book with plenty of unexpected twists and turns and a fresh new crazy for a villain. The late Richard Laymon would have been grinning ear to ear.
—Jack Ketchum
With Dismember, Daniel Pyle joins the select group of authors who can provide real chills and genuine surprises. Taut, weird, and intriguing.
—Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Dragon Factory and The Wolfman
The tourniquet-tight plot and constant suspense keeps the pages flying. A solid, suspenseful thriller that enables readers to envision the movie it could become.
—Publishers Weekly
DOWN THE DRAIN
Pyle's tight little monster tale packs a nasty wallop.
—Michael Louis Calvillo, author of I Will Rise and As Fate Would Have It
Horror should be fun. Scary, of course…but above all, it should be fun. Too many people seem to have forgotten that. Well, Daniel Pyle has not forgotten. With his novella, Down the Drain, Pyle has crafted a tale that evokes all the eye-popping strangeness and excitement that got me into horror in the first place. I loved it, and I can guarantee you’ll never look at your bathtub the same again.
—Joe McKinney, author of Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead
Daniel Pyle lives in Springfield, Missouri, with his wife and two daughters. Visit him online at www.danielpyle.com.
ALSO BY DANIEL PYLE
DISMEMBER
FREEZE
Down the Drain is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Pyle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechinical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Blood Brothers Publishing
www.bloodbrotherspublishing.com
ISBN: 978-0-9828691-0-9
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Artwork Copyright © 2010 by Enoch Pyle
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First Edition
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
BW Image
Freeze Ad
Praise
About the Author
Also by Daniel Pyle
Copyright Page
Daniel Pyle, Down the Drain
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