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* * * * *

I was out of my chair before I knew it, half way to the door.

“Wha- how??!”

The cop stopped me cold with a stiff-arm to the chest, actually pushed me back a foot. A little rough, I thought.

“Now calm down,” Morgan said, not looking at all calm himself. “He went into a convulsion or somethin’ and his pulse stopped but—now listen to me here—we got ambulances, they’ll be here in thirty seconds. We got Vinny doin’ CPR on him. Vinny’s a lifeguard in his off hours. That boy’s in the hands of people who know what they’re doin’. That don’t include you, so you got no business fartin’ around out there, gettin’ all hysterical and what-not.”

I didn’t back down, knocked his hand away from my chest. The white cop dropped his arms and came toward us, though looking a little less shocked than what I would have expected, having had somebody just drop dead in their interrogation rooms. Apparently he wouldn’t have to fill out the paperwork.

Morgan’s lips peeled back slightly to reveal gritted teeth. He started to say something, stopped himself.

Oh, shit. This guy’s on the jagged edge...

“Here’s what you’re gonna do, son,” breathed Morgan. “You’re gonna wait here. I’ll be back in five minutes and you are gonna start telling me the truth. I am gonna get to the bottom of this and if you obstruct me you will live the rest of your days wishing you had not.”

He stepped back, made sure I wasn’t going to rush the door, then turned out of the room. What chilled me wasn’t the cop’s threats. It was the single, dark thought I could read pulsing through his head:

The dead are getting off lucky in this ordeal.

That didn’t seem like a normal cop thought to me.

I stood there, lost, listening to the confusion of shouts and controlled panic outside. I heard sirens out front. Ambulance.

My cell phone chirped. On any other day I would have shut the thing off, but that seemed unwise somehow. I looked toward Officer Liddy, now standing placidly in the middle of the room and gestured toward my pocket as if to ask if he minded. He said nothing, I answered my phone.

“Yeah.”

“Dave?  This is John.”

“What? Did you get out?”

“Yes and no. Are you still at the police station?”

“Yeah.  We were both-“

“Have I died yet?”

A long pause from my end.

“Dave?  Can you hear me?”

“Um, yeah. I—everybody ran out of the room. They said you had-“

“-No, there‘s no time to explain all this. Leave the police station. Right now, during the commotion. They’ll have EMT’s hauling my body out, lots of people will be standing around, looking. Just walk out. Don’t run, that’ll attract attention. Just calmly walk out, like your business is done there. Nobody will stop you.”

“But—I’ll be a fugitive. The cops know where I-”

“-Dave, you don’t wanna be in the same building with that guy. Trust me. Also, is there any way you can steal my body? No, probably not. Never mind. We’ll have to work around that. Okay, have you reached the sidewalk yet?”

“No, I’m still standing in the room. I can’t leave.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “There’s a guy still in here with me, another detective.”

“No, there’s not. Check the mirror.”

I hung there in utter confusion for a few seconds, then looked to my left.

It was just you and Morgan in the mirror, Dave. Even after the white cop stepped forward.

In the mirror, I was standing there talking on my cell, completely alone. I looked at the cop, then in the mirror, back to the cop. He moved my direction.

“I don’t get it.”

“He’s not real, Dave. Not in the, uh, traditional sense.”

“He’s coming toward me!”

“Just go. Just walk out. You’re gonna start seeing things like this from time to time. It’s important that you not freak out.”

The cop was one step away from me now. His mustache twitched, as if he was starting to grin underneath it.

“So he, uh, can’t hurt me?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he can.”

A hand clenched around my face. His fingers dug into my cheeks, squeezing, rigid as iron bars. I thought my teeth would crack into pieces. He pushed me back using my face and slammed me against the wall.

I clawed at his arm, my right hand still occupied with the cell phone. It was like trying to tear the limbs off a bronze statue. I smacked him across the nose with my phone and his mustache twitched again as if this amused him greatly.

The mustache kept twitching and twitching and then one end of it began to curl up and peel off, like a man’s disguise torn off by a hard wind. Finally the mustache detached completely, leaving a patch of pink, shredded skin behind. The thing flapped its halves like bat wings—no, it really did—and flew over and landed on my face.

G. Gordon Liddy’s mustache bit me above the right eyebrow. I slapped at the thing with my left hand, then worked my leg up and, with all my strength, shoved a knee into the detective’s guts just below the ribs.

A jolt of pain shot up my thigh, like I had kneed over a pile of cinder blocks. But I felt him give, pushed back by the force. The mustache bat flittered over to my ear, clamped down, feeling like somebody doing five piercings at once. I slapped at it again, suddenly realized the cop had reeled back and fallen to a knee on the floor. I should have been be free of him but the hand was still around my face-

Ah, look at that. His arm came off.

The man had a six-inch bloody hole on one shoulder now. The detached arm, on its own, whipped around my neck and coiled up like a python. No hint of bone in there now, the arm making two loops around until the ragged stump hung under my chin like a meat scarf.

I thrashed around, tried to pry the thing off. The armsnake was all muscle, tensed and wiry, slowly squeezing off the breath from my windpipe. The mustache bat flitted around my head, taking stinging little bites here and there. Gordon got up from the floor, reached for me with his remaining arm. I flung myself out of the room-

-and it was over. I stumbled into the hall, saw that the thick bundle of armsnake had vanished from my neck, as had the flying mustache. I stood up, saw four guys hustling down the hall with an empty stretcher. I stuck my finger in my mouth, it came out bloody. I looked over my cell phone, saw it had the cracks and busted mouthpiece from its tour as a nose club seconds ago. I cursed at myself, sure that whatever freak-ass cellular conduit I just had with John was now cut off.

People rushed past me and I wanted to push my way through to see what was up with John, but I reminded myself that this was a day for doing the opposite of what made sense and that John and John’s body might not be in the same place. I instead followed John’s disembodied instructions and strolled back through the police station, finally walking right out the front door.

I hit the sidewalk, my heart pounding. What now?

A fat man in a shiny business suit strode by without a glance my way. I realized in an instant that he was going to die in just two weeks, a heart attack while trying to knock his cat out of a tree with a broomstick. A pretty 1998 Trans-Am gleamed past and I noticed from the posture of the driver that the car was stolen and that the owner was dead. The car’s fan belt was going to break in 26,931 miles.

Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.

Fine. I took a deep breath. Now what?

My car was two miles away at Wally’s and I didn’t have money to waste on a taxi, even if one of the town’s three cabs should happen by at this moment. To my surprise, my cell phone rang. I put the broken thing to my ear, realized I owed some props to the engineers at Motorola.

“Hello?”

“Dave?  It’s me.”

John.

“Where are you right now, Dave?”

“I’m on the sidewalk outside the cop shop, walking. Where are you? Heaven?”

“When you hear a song on the radio, where is the song?”

“What?”

“What?”

“John...”

“Just keep walking. Go toward the park. Don’t freak out. Are you freaking out?”

“I don’t know. I can’t believe this phone still works.”

“The hot dog guy should be just ahead, maybe half a block. See him?”

I walked a dozen steps, smelled it before I saw it. It was a cart plastered with right-wing slogan stickers, a yellow and orange umbrella hanging over it. The hot dog guy was painfully thin, looked about 160 years old. As much a landmark as this city has.

“Okay.”

“Buy a bratwurst from him.”

Questioning this seemed a waste of words, so I strode up and got a brat wrapped in a hot dog bun and a sheet of wax paper. I paid $3.15, hesitated, then drew two fat, neat lines of mustard along its length. It seemed like the right thing to do. I moved along the sidewalk toward the park, returned to my phone.

“Okay.  I have the bratwurst.”

“Put it up to your head.”

Pause.

“I’m going to have to ask you why, John.”

“I have to show you something.”

Glancing around, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I laid the sausage against my ear.

“Dave?  Can you hear me?”

John’s voice, coming clear as day through the tube of seasoned meat. I glanced down at the cell phone and got the point. The display was black, the glass busted out of it. A green circuit board was poking out the warped seam along one side.

“All right, all right. I’m hearing you through some kind of psychic vibration or whatever and not the phone. I get it. You could have just told me that.”

I lowered the sausage and replaced it with the cell.

“Okay, what’s next?”

Nothing.

I heard a faint sound coming from the bratwurst, put it back to my head.

“Dave?  Are you there?”

“Yeah.  I can’t get you through the cell now.”

“You have to talk through the bratwurst from now on. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would do that.”

I rubbed my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.

“Okay.  What do we do?”

“The only reason you can hear me is because you got some of the Soy Sauce into your system, from the syringe. But it’s not very much and it won’t last long.”

“What is it, John? The sauce, it was alive, I swear it-”

“-Listen. You gotta get over to Robert’s place. There aren’t any cops there now, but there will be. We have sort of a narrow window here. Take a cab to Wally’s and get your car, then go to Shire Village on Lathrop Avenue. It’s a trailer park, south of town past that one candy place. You should be able to get there in twenty minutes with any luck.”

“I don’t have any cash. I had five bucks and I just spent three of it on the bratwurst.”

“That bratwurst was three bucks? Holy crap. Okay. Give me a second. Alright. Check between the sausage and the bun. You’ll find a hundred dollar bill folded up in there.”

I fingered around under the sausage for a few seconds, found nothing.

“Nothing here, John.”

“Okay. Do you have your ATM card?”

Two hours later I pulled my Hyundai into Shire Village. The now-cold bratwurst sat on the dash, little smears of mustard on the windshield where the sloppy wax paper contacted it. I put it to my head.

“John?”

I was greeted with a burst of static, but then John’s voice came in, fainter than before.

“Dave?”

“Yeah.”

“What, did you drive under a bridge just now?”

“No.  We’re at the trailer park. Finally. Which one is Robert’s?”

Static again. Then:

“It’s wearing off. Don’t talk, just listen. Go inside and-“

Static.

“-and as long as you absolutely remember not to do that, you’ll be fine. Good luck.”

“What?  John, I didn’t catch the-“

Dead. The voice was gone, the static was gone. It was just a sausage again. I tried for several minutes, then resigned myself that whatever I had to do next would be apparent from a look at Robert’s place.

Finding it wasn’t hard after all. It was one of only two trailers with yellow police tape all around it and the other one looked like it had been abandoned months ago. Meth lab.

I parked off in the grass across the lot and walked toward Robert’s abode. Nobody was there, or at least nobody who came in a car. I knocked, for some reason, then went in.

They had cleaned up the blood and guts. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, since I should have known they wouldn’t just let the entrails collect flies for twelve hours. Still, I recognized the room from the photos the cop showed me, the scene of Robert’s wet explosion. The carpet was still a few shades off from its original color and the walls were forever stained a faded reddish-brown. And there was a smell, awful and organic. Mildew and rotten milk and shit.

The walls were stripped bare, no family photos or framed landscapes from Wal-Mart or movie posters. Did the cops do that? No television. A sofa, a chair pocked with cigarette burns. I glanced into the open kitchenette at one end of the trailer, then turned and walked to the other end. I pushed through a closed door leading to what had to be a bedroom-

-and stopped. I was suddenly looking out over a snow-dusted field, a range of mountains spiking into a stunning violet sky from the horizon. Not a picture, that’s not how it struck me. It was like that end of the trailer had been chainsawed off to reveal the outdoors, only if that had really happened I would’ve only seen the neighbor’s rusty trailer and an abandoned Oldsmobile floating among the weeds. What I saw instead took my breath away.

I stepped backward into the hallway, dizzy, disoriented, afraid I would be sucked into, I don’t know, another reality or something. It took almost a minute to realize what I was looking at.

It was a painting. A floor-to-walls-to-ceiling mural. I mean, this Jamaican was apparently some kind of artist savant, painting the walls, the trim on the windows, the damned glass in the window. He painted over the curtains, painted the carpet, painted the damned sheets and wrinkled comforter on the unmade bed so that, when viewed from the doorway, the effect was beyond photographic. There was a half-full water glass on the nightstand, and a sprout of ice-coated weeds painted on the wall continued on the nightstand and onto the glass. There was a little crack in the glass and the artist incorporated it into the painting, the fracture becoming a glint of sunlight off an ice-covered leaf.

The effect was too much. It gave me a heaviness in my gut like the first time I saw a skyscraper when I was a kid. Picasso could not have done this, not if he had a lifetime to devote to it. Step on that carpet and disturb the texture or brush against the comforter and the effect would be ruined.

Whoa. Just...whoa.

I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbing it, overwhelmed by the details.

There’s a deer, complete with little hoofprints in the snow. A happy little cabin, the family in the yard...

But it was as I started noticing those little details that my amazement began to sour, congealing into a cold dread.

The cabin on the mountainside, that’s not a little tree out front. It’s a makeshift cross, with a man hanging from it. His legs have been cut off. The woman standing next to it... look at the infant in her arms. It has as single, curved horn coming out of its skull. And unfortunately for the old man, the baby still looks hungry. The frozen pond in back, those aren’t reeds sticking up through the ice all across the surface. Those are hands. And that deer? It has a huge cock, making a little trench in the snow behind it...

I closed the door, deciding to never open it again. I walked back toward the living room, passed a bathroom, then did a double-take, leaning back to look inside. Nothing unusual.

The toilet is askew.

“So?” I said, out loud.

Damn my curiosity. I stepped into the bathroom, saw that the back of the toilet was indeed sitting a good foot away from the wall, where it ought to be. I walked over toward it, saw that it was bolted to a square piece of floor that was no longer neatly covering the square hatch it had been hiding. I scooted the stool out to the middle of the floor, looked down the hatch. Basement access?

This is a trailer, dumbass. Probably just a dope hidey-hole down there. The question is whether he kept pooping in this toilet after he disconnected the drain...

Two feet below the hatch was the gravel and dirt surface under the trailer, interrupted by a hole that had been dug into the ground wide enough for a man to drop through.

An old well? Wait a second... there’s light down there. Did this man get his shovel and just dig himself a trailer basement some weekend?

I noticed a roll-up ladder leading down the hole, the kind some people keep by their bedroom windows in case of fires. I looked at it for several seconds, trying to understand why I was even still here.

Yeah, climb right down there, dumbass. It’s not like a man spontaneously exploded just feet from this spot or anything. Go down and be a meal for the infamous Midwestern Tunneling Explodebear.

I thought about John, and spending the rest of my life without him. A moment later I sat on the linoleum floor, dropped my legs down through the hatch. I tried to look down the hole, could only see that, as I thought, there was an open, lit space down there. I grabbed the floor and dropped my body down the mouth of the hole, finding the ladder with my feet. I started climbing down.

The rungs were slippery with mud, the dirt stank like mold all around me. As I went down, I was hit with a another smell so strong it seemed to generate its own warmth. Sharp and rotten and fecal.

The hole went down about twice the length of my body, before my feet were hanging in a dim, earthy chamber that seemed big enough to stand up in. The stench got stronger and when I dropped down my feet splashed in a slimy puddle of Robert Marley poop.

I stood straight, kicking crap off my shoes. My head brushed a surprisingly smooth ceiling. The room was almost perfectly round, a diameter about the width of the trailer. The light was coming from one of those camping lanterns, on the floor next to the curved wall on my left. An odd, low rumbly sound emerged from somewhere, seemingly from every direction at once in the round room.

I looked around quickly. I was alone.

I stepped over and picked up the lantern, scanned the room, fully expecting to find at least three corpses. All I saw was a pile of junk off to one side, including a broken television and what looked like yard compost with something like twigs sticking out here and there. There were a couple of empty jars along the wall near it, faded pickle labels on each. There was something that looked like a long duffel bag laying against the wall on the opposite side.

I stepped slowly toward the duffel bag thing, saw with horror that it was something like a huge, fat caterpillar, leathery and probably five feet long. It was segmented like an earthworm, the end a puckered circle of tiny teeth. I would have run away shrieking like a banshee at that point, but the thing was so over-the-top gross that I was sure it was something he made. A sculpture or whatever. And it wasn’t moving, obviously. I would have mentioned that by now.

Just to be sure, I stepped forward very slowly and nudged the worm thing with my foot. Nothing. Maybe a novelty pillow of some kind. I watched it for a moment longer and then carefully backed off toward the junk pile. On the way I took a glance at the walls, wondering if this dirt chamber was going to collapse in on me without supports. Covering the strangely smooth dirt was a clear, wavy substance like glass or ice. I can’t tell you what it felt like because I didn’t even consider touching it.

I glanced nervously at the worm pillow one last time, then stepped back and slipped in something slimy again. I saw down there a little, wet pile of what I thought were sausages. On closer inspection, I saw they were fingers. Four severed digits, along with strips of flesh and bare bone. They all had an odd, misshapen look, like they were somewhat melted.

Panic closed my windpipe and my mouth went dry.

I took two steps backward, covered my hand with my mouth and tried to calm myself.

Get out get out get the fuck out-

I took long, slow breaths. I tore my eyes off the mess on the floor and walked to the other side of the room.

I arrived at the large pile of random junk, including the gutted television. I was startled to see the TV was on. There was a shot of what looked like a view through somebody’s intestines, like when doctors send those little cameras in there. The shot changed, to a picture of a twenty-something guy with long blonde hair who looked vaguely familiar. He was sitting casually in a living room chair, talking to someone off-camera who was referring to him as “Todd.” The scene flicked again, showing a blurred, uneven first-person shot of a car moving down a residential street.

The rumbling stopped. I stood straight, looked around, looked over my shoulder at the worm thing. Wasn’t it closer to the wall before? Nah.

I turned back to the TV setup. I couldn’t see a power cord leading up and out of the chamber but figured maybe there was a car battery or something hidden in there somewhere. I looked closer at the pile of what I had mistaken for twigs and saw it was a sticky collection of some unknown, uh, something. The back of the television had been removed and there was a strip of what looked like red seaweed leading out of it and into a large, dead fish. The gut of the fish had been slit open and bulging out of it was a pink, wet mass of something the size of a basketball, like its innards had swollen to 50 times normal size. Close to it was an aquarium tank filled with a thick, yellowish substance that could have been slug slime and at the bottom was a wrinkled greyish mass that could have been a human brain or possibly a meatloaf.

It was all connected, everything in the pile. There were parts that looked like cactus, parts that looked like moss, parts that looked like tendons, a series of light bulbs that looked to have been filled with peanut butter. I had the awful realization that I was looking at a machine of some kind and just when I thought nothing here could surprise me, I looked into the television screen and was proven wrong.

A trailer—this trailer—was on the screen. It was small but getting bigger, the viewer moving closer. Somebody’s point of view, heading this direction, just a minute away if the feed was live.

I turned, stepped forward, fell flat on my face, let the lantern crash to the ground. The lantern stayed lit but rolled, sending light and shadow dancing over every surface. It gave me a quick, strobe light view of the huge slug thing I had tripped over, which was now resting under my splayed legs. It had moved out to the center of the room with startling speed.

I could feel the thing warmly pulsing and quivering under me, its soft mass giving under my legs. I kicked back off of it, pushing backward on my ass, saw the thing squish its way after me. The lantern went out, casting me into a darkness broken only by the soft glow of the mutant television and a shaft of yellow light from the bathroom above.

I could hear the thing sliming around me, felt it near my face. I stumbled to my feet, slipped in the huge pool of shit in the center of the room, back onto my ass and banging my head off the hard floor. I laid there for a moment, blinking away the little spots of light floating in front of my vision. I got up on my hands just as a heavy weight like a canvas bag filled with meat landed on my lap.

The fucking thing had jumped on me. I froze. I mean, I totally seized up in absolute bodily panic. The thing had pinned me down, at least 100 pounds. I waited for it to bite my face off, but it just laid there. A few seconds later, the low, rattly sound resumed.

After a long moment I realized that it had gone to sleep. I gently rolled the snoring creature off onto the floor, careful not to wake it. I very quietly stood and jumped half way up the ladder. In ten seconds I had my palms down on the sticky bathroom floor, shoulders brown with what was hopefully mud, pants stained with shit. I decided right then I would leave and go home and watch some TV and drink a-

Thump. 

I almost pissed myself. It was a faint sound, from the other end of the trailer. The kitchen end. I stepped into the hall, expecting to see a flame-shooting vampire, a hybrid squid/clown, the devil himself.

Nothing. Probably just wind. A micro-earthquake. Sudden termite migration.

THUMP. 

A heavy sound, violent. Adrenaline set my muscles on fire and, like a dumbass, I moved toward the sound. Definitely from the kitchen. In seven steps I crossed the Robert Marley estate. My shoes hit linoleum, I looked around the counter, floor and appliances. No elves, no gremlins, no nothing. Not yet.

Dead silence. I realized I was holding my breath. I realized I was not holding a weapon. I glanced around for something like a knife-

THUMP. 

The refrigerator.

THUMP. 

No. The freezer section at the top. The little door up there rattled with the sound, like it was bumped-

THUMP. 

-from the inside.

Get out. Get out, David. Go. Go. Go. Go. GO. GO. GO!

With one last thump, the freezer door flew open.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.