Broken Monsters

  She glances at the building through the trees. It’s squat and low, like an oversized Lego block. ‘Give me the phone, Layla. Jonno. If you’re listening, I’m here. Can you tell me anything about where you are?’ There’s nothing but crackling for a while, and then a man’s voice, sobbing.

  ‘Oh God. Oh God. Don’t kill me.’

  And that decides it. Like she had another choice. Gabi slides out the clip of her Smith & Wesson. Shit, she wishes she had more rounds with her. Next time.

  ‘Don’t you have to wait for back-up? Mom!’

  ‘They’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘So wait for them!’ Layla screams at her.

  Gabi takes her daughter by the shoulders and guides her toward the driver’s side, where the door is still open. ‘Marcus Jones might be in there. He might be alive. And someone else is hurt. Badly. I can’t wait. Do you understand? I need you to get back in the car and drive yourself somewhere safe. Home or Cas’s house or the nearest police station.’

  ‘Drive myself?’ Layla starts to cry.

  ‘You’ve got it down, Lay. Except for parallel parking, but you don’t have to do that today. Just get yourself home. You can do this.’

  ‘I don’t have a phone. You drowned it.’

  ‘You don’t need it. Drive somewhere safe.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. Please don’t make me,’ Layla sobs. Gabi pushes her down into the seat and puts her hands on the wheel.

  ‘You have to. I need you to get out of here right now. Put it in drive.’

  ‘Mom …’ she pleads, even while she’s doing what she’s told.

  ‘It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s Nyan. You want your cat to be safe, don’t you?’

  Layla glances into the back where NyanCat is crouched low in the cage, a miserable bundle of fur with big eyes, quiet for once. ‘Yes?’ she says, uncertainly.

  ‘So drive, Layla. I love you.’ It’s a heavy load for those three words. Because what she means is I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was busy and I’m sorry I have to go inside and I might not see you again and I didn’t tell you enough that I’m proud of you, even though you do stupid shit, because it comes from the right place and that’s rare and precious, and you’ll grow up to be a good woman, and you won’t make the same dumb mistakes I did, you’ll make your own, but hopefully only to get you on course, and the world is greater and richer with you in it, sugarbean.

  She shuts the door and slaps the top of the car, hard, as you might a horse’s rump. Layla gets such a fright that she puts her foot down, and the car leaps forward and swerves across the street. She pulls it back on course.

  ‘Carefully!’ Gabi shouts after her, watching her long enough to see Layla take a wide turn on the corner, tears streaming down her face as she glances back fearfully at her mother. She waves her on until she’s out of sight.

  Safe.

  The Inside Scoop

  One of the trash bags in the darkness moves. Not a bag. A man, crouching there all this time, watching him. He stands. His face is blank or peeling, and there is clotted blood on his neck, spattered down his shirt. ‘You came,’ he says.

  ‘Shit!’ Jonno scrambles back against the wall, waving the phone like it’s a magic wand that can keep the thing at bay. ‘No. Nonononono. Detective!’ he screams into the phone.

  Realization sinks in. ‘It’s you. The gallery guy. They had your picture on the news. But it didn’t look like you, your hair was shorter, you had a beard. Oh God, you were trying to show me something at the party….’

  The man keeps drifting toward him. Drifting, not walking. ‘You’re part of the infection,’ he says. ‘You’re the messenger. You’re going to help me.’

  ‘Fuck off, leave me alone. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s wrong with your face?’

  ‘Sorry. I forget. It’s easy to forget. I have to hold on to things so tightly.’ It shoves its hands up over its cheeks and his face takes shape. A half-remembered semblance of Clayton Broom. The eyes too deep, too small, too far apart, the nose a malformed lump. The scab on his neck is weeping blood. When he speaks, his jaw opens up too wide. Kermit the Frog, Jonno thinks. Like someone has his hand stuck up inside him.

  ‘Christ,’ Jonno screams. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, don’t kill me.’

  ‘No,’ Clayton says. The face looks amused. A semblance of what it thinks amused might be. ‘I won’t. I need you. You and your Internet to set it all loose.’

  Nowhere but Up

  Gabi circles round the building. The front door is sealed. So are all the windows, on the ground floor at least. But there must be a way in. No sign of Jonno and his friend. Jennifer, she thinks. No, Jen. Whose heart might be visible – an injury that sounds fatal, in her professional opinion.

  White pick-up truck parked out of sight. He’s here. Or was. She edges down along the wall, through an alleyway of trees with black squirrels skittering between them. There is one of those damn painted doorways on the wall, and she wonders if a simple rectangle has ever inspired so much dread. Coffins maybe.

  And there. A rusty fire-escape running up the side of the building. A door hanging off its hinges at the top. Somewhere she can get inside. She tries to radio it in, but gets only a burst of static. Her cell phone has no signal.

  She doesn’t think Clayton is sophisticated enough to have blockers in place. It could be the building, all the metal inside messing up the electronics.

  Someone screams inside. A man. Pure terror. Marcus, she thinks, although the rational part of her knows he’s dead. Has been dead since Monday morning when she rejected his phone call in the principal’s office. She knows this is true. Which means it’s Jonno. Or Thomas Keen. Or someone she might be able to save.

  Dammit. She has been hoping for sirens, for good men and women in uniform storming over the rubble with guns.

  ‘Dispatch, I’m going in,’ she tells the useless radio and starts running up the stairs.

  Nothing’s Accidental

  Layla is trying to concentrate. But she keeps looking back in the mirror, hoping to see her mom, who has gone now, disappeared into the terrible building with its blacked-out windows and broken glass. She can’t pull her eyes away from it. Her mom is going to die in there – they both know it. Isn’t that what she was saying? She’s sobbing so hard, she can barely see the road through the tears, but she has to get home. She has to get somewhere safe. She promised.

  She steers the car round the corner, not even knowing where she’s going. Back toward the highway, but that’s terrifying. She doesn’t know if she can handle it on her own. She should take the back streets. She presses the GPS. Home.

  ‘Turn left,’ the calm woman’s voice says, with mechanical confidence.

  But when she does, it’s to see the blunt ugly factory directly in front of her again. No. She glances fearfully in the rear-view mirror and sees that it is also behind her. Like an Escher loop.

  She panics and slams on the brakes, stabbing at the GPS screen with a frantic finger. ‘Home, goddammit!’ When she was a little kid, her mom told her that the GPS was a robot lady in the sky who watched down on them from her space station.

  ‘Like God?’ Layla said, innocently, which made both her parents laugh.

  But now no-one’s watching. Not the robot lady in the sky, not God. She’s on her own. With a hysterical cat mewling in the back. Calm down. Deep breaths. Cas’s mom took them to a yoga class once. She closes her eyes. Find your center. Feel the roots going deep down, anchoring you to the earth.

  It’s two similar but different buildings. Probably a bunch of them in this broke-down industrial hell. She opens her eyes and keeps her attention on the chunky little screen that will get her home, specifically avoiding looking up or behind her. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she’s wrong. If they’re the same place, and she’s caught in between.

  ‘Turn around,’ the computer voice says with implacable calm and authority. ‘Turn around.’ No shit. She guides the car into a U-turn
. NyanCat raises her voice to a howl. Like a siren or a blaring horn. But it is a blaring horn, an eighteen-wheeler MACK truck bearing down on her and she’s stuck in the middle of the road. Layla screams and hits the gas, yanking the steering wheel to the side as hard as she can, but the truck still clips her.

  There is a brittle crunch, the same sound NyanCat makes when she’s eating a grasshopper. The window shatters, a bright rain of glitter falling in on her. The Crown Vic spins across the road. She can’t control it. The car is full of moths suddenly. The steering wheel snaps off in her hand.

  The car turns, weightless. It hits the curb, and gravity reasserts itself and just before the airbag leaps up into her face, she sees a tunnel of trees opening up in front of her, the branches folding back with balletic grace, to grant her entry.

  But she knows it’s a trap, that they will close up behind her, like a fairytale, and no-one will ever see her again, and there will be no sign that she was ever here.

  And then she cracks her head on the side window and a womb-red darkness roars up around her.

  Mechanical Animals

  It’s too dark to see, so TK feels his way into the tunnel of trees that has turned into a corridor that clangs metallically under every step. He has to crouch so he doesn’t hit his head on the ceiling, waddling forward, bandy-legged like a cowboy. His shoulders are cramped, his knees aching, but there are tinny voices reverberating from somewhere ahead, and warmth and light.

  He emerges into a bright room with floral curtains and a fire in the fireplace and a dining table piled with food for Thanksgiving – turkey and barbecue ribs and sweet-potato mash and grits and plastic cups of Kool-Aid – and all his friends are here, waiting for him. Ramón, with his big teddy-bear head, leaning jauntily with one elbow propped on the fireplace, and Diyana, braiding her hair, which is so long it trails on the floor. Even Lanny is there, wearing an apron that says ‘World’s Best Cook’. And there’s his sister Florence, perched on the edge of the table, reading a book, her fingers scrabbling over the raised bumps of the words like spiders.

  They’re all so happy to see him.

  ‘Welcome home,’ Lanny says and slaps him on the shoulder.

  ‘Do you like it, Thomas?’ Diyana says, smiling a blazing smile of white teeth, while her hands knot and twist, braiding, braiding, braiding.

  ‘Happy Thanksgiving!’ Ramón says, his voice distorted by his big piñata head.

  ‘There are no chairs,’ TK laughs. ‘Where’s a man gonna sit down?’

  ‘Who has time to sit?’ Lanny complains. ‘We’ve been getting everything ready for you.’

  ‘We’ve got a surprise for you,’ Florrie says, looking up from her Braille.

  The doorbell rings, a somber church-bell tune, like a wedding or a funeral.

  Ding-dong-ding-dong. Ding-dong-ding-dong.

  ‘You won’t even believe it,’ Florence says. She has coins on her eyes. Old pennies, not even one-dollar coins. His sister deserves one-dollar coins, you can’t tell him otherwise.

  ‘This like some reality show?’ TK says, smiling as they surround him, tugging him toward the front door. He can’t remember why he didn’t come in that way. Diyana puts a playful hand over his eyes.

  ‘No peeking!’ she says.

  Ding-dong-dong-ding. Ding-dong-dong-ding

  But he knows with sudden dread what’s going to be on the other side, just like he did that Halloween night, with the door slightly ajar and the light coming out into the street.

  ‘No,’ he says, pushing back against them, ‘I don’t want to.’ Fourteen again, and the dry burn of fear in his throat and the pitcher of ice water running down his spine. He can smell the blood. The rich iron of it.

  Ding-dong-dong-ding.

  ‘Don’t spoil it,’ Diyana pouts. ‘We all came specially for this.’

  ‘Come on, you big baby,’ Ramón urges. ‘You should see what I been through!’

  ‘Open the door, Thomas,’ Florrie says.

  Dig-god-dog-dig.

  But he doesn’t want to see his momma. He buried that woman, and he ain’t gonna do it again.

  ‘Get off me,’ he says, wrenching himself free from their grabbing hands, and he pushes too hard, because he knocks his sister to the ground and she lands like a trash bag of old clothes thrown out the window.

  She lies crumpled, making a shrieking wounded animal sound that makes him think she’s broken something.

  ‘Florrie, I’m sorry.’ TK is appalled, falling to his knees beside her. ‘I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Are you all right? Let me see.’ In all his life, he’s never hit a woman.

  He realizes the sobbing is familiar. Not a woman’s crying at all, but a teenage boy’s. His voice. The sound that came up out of his throat, standing over the body of Ricky Furman shot to death and the gun dangling from his hand. A keening moan that didn’t belong in anyone’s mouth, a sound straight out of hell. The devil’s own. Which is all he’s ever been. Whoreson. Murderer.

  He takes his sister’s shoulder, ‘Please, Florrie.’ Her bones twist under her dress and she turns to snap her teeth at him, dirty yellow canines in a long snout. The keening is now a growling whine. She is crawling out of her skin, emerging from an amniotic sac, her paws scrabbling on the floorboards, her coat matted red. She stands on spindly mongrel legs and shakes out her fur, spattering the room with blood.

  TK screams and scrambles away from her, getting tangled in the braids coiled round and round the room. Cockroaches skitter into the depths of the hair.

  ‘Don’t go yet, you haven’t opened the door,’ Ramón says, his voice plaintive through the giant paper head. He is the only one who is not changing. The rest of his friends are spasming, falling onto all fours, pushing their haunches up into the air. Their bones crack and their skulls stretch out as they give birth to the wild dogs that have always lived inside them, wriggling out of their humanity.

  The bloody yellow dog that was his sister stands her ground, hackles up, her lips peeled back to reveal black gums and thick gray slobber dripping from sharp teeth.

  TK gets to his feet, slowly, one hand out to stop her, the other fishing in his pocket for the pepper spray. The other newborn dogs are up on their feet, snarling and yipping. Florrie lunges for his ankle, a pre-emptive nip, and TK turns and runs.

  ‘You have to open the door,’ Ramón says sadly.

  He runs faster than his heart can take. His chest hurts, like someone has driven a spike into it, but he keeps going, because the dogs are after him on their skinny legs, baying and howling and tearing at his pants, driving him toward a dark lake that stretches out ahead.

  He trips in the coils of hair and falls into the implacable black water. He smacks his knee into something under the surface, and bursts up, flailing and gasping from the shock of the cold. It’s like a baptism, and for one instant he sees clearly. It is not hair that has tangled his feet, but coils of electrical cable. He is waist-deep in filthy rainwater clogged with trash on a flooded factory floor in a basement. Shafts of sunlight from broken windows play on the water, casting ripples across the walls – and a metal stairwell on the far side.

  But then he turns back and sees the dogs pacing the water’s edge, whining and working themselves up to plunge in after him, and high above them, mounted on the crossbeams above, Jesus is looking down from above – and urging them on.

  Assembling You

  Layla clutches the pet carrier to her chest. It’s dark and she trips on the uneven floor. Blood pours down the side of her face. She has tried to feel the wound on her temple, but even brushing her fingers against it threatens to bring the darkness swarming up again.

  If she stands still, the blood runs down her arm and drip-drip-drips on the floor. It freaks her out, so she keeps moving, even though she doesn’t know where she’s going. Story of her life, she thinks and chokes down a sob. If she starts crying again, she won’t be able to stop, and it will knock her to the ground and she won’t be able to get up.

&n
bsp; She doesn’t remember how she got here or even where here is, but the pet carrier is something she can hold on to, a prop to prop her up. She is a fierce young woman protecting her cat. Never mind that the wire door is open and NyanCat is not inside. She is on a quest to find her cat, then. And her mother.

  Like a video game.

  There is a sign on the wall, but the words keep moving when she tries to read them. They’re naughty words. They’re not even trying to look like words any more. They have ambitions beyond their abilities. This is definitely going to be in the exam. The words rearrange themselves. EMBSLSYA. BEMSALYS. MBYSSAEL. SESYLAMB. LESSYBAM. YSLASBEM.

  Inside, someone is waiting for her, a huge lumpen man, sitting in front of a massive control panel, complete with screens, jabbing at dials and gauges. It’s VelvetBoy, she realizes, swollen into morbid obesity, his skin yellow and waxy, but she recognizes his features under the fat, the nice-guy face he doesn’t deserve. He squints at her and then looks pointedly at the cage.

  ‘You want to lock someone up?’ he says, turning back to his panel. ‘Or you want to play games?’

  ‘It’s for my cat,’ Layla says. ‘Have you seen her?’

  VelvetBoy cackles. ‘Oh I’ve seen a shit-ton of pussy. All the pussy you can gobble. Pussy buffet.’ The screens are all playing videos of little girls. Little girls jumping rope, trying to walk in Mommy’s oversized shoes, running with a kite, sitting on a fence, playing guitar, blowing a dandelion, licking an ice cream, licking other things. Layla looks away.