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North didn’t seem to notice me plotting my escape, but said, “I am at a loss. I have been watching you for some time, but there are great gaps in my knowledge. You know, I observed a man who masturbated until he bled. Did he want to do that? And you, when you are alone you-“

I yanked the lighter free, the coils orange with heat. I slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel with my left hand. With my right I jammed the lighter onto the lump in my shirt where I guessed the creature’s head would be with a sharp hiiiissssss.

The truck spun and tilted up on two tires for a sickening moment, just as the slug thing shrieked and thrashed wildly inside my shirt.

The lighter tumbled to the floor, a streak of orange in the darkness. The truck fell back down on four wheels with a thud. A small yellow flame danced around a hole in my shirt where I had singed it with the lighter. I grabbed around for the slug thing and for several terrible seconds I felt its teeth brushing against my skin, jaws working, struggling to grab on. I wrestled it free and suddenly had it tight in my hands, slimy and writhing, slipping under my fingers. I had the creature in front of me and saw it had a little circle of tiny teeth, each curled and needle-sharp, like fish hooks. There was a thin, straw-like appendage emerging from the center, about as long as my finger and whipping around, flecking little droplets of blood.

I took one hand off it and opened the driver’s side door. I flung the flopping thing out into the snowy middle of the street. I spun around in my seat and saw Mr. North pawing around the floorboard, the gun nowhere to be seen. I threw a wild punch at his face, missed. The man flung himself back in an effort to dodge it and gave me a shot at the gun, which was laying half under the seat. I threw my torso back there, my feet kicking around at the windshield. In a scramble of elbows and hands I grabbed the pistol and twisted my body around. I jammed the barrel under his chin.

We sat like that for a long moment, both of us breathing puffs of steam as the icy wind poured in the open door. I thought I could hear a soft thumping sound, our slug friend trying to deal with life in a world of ice.

“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay, okay. This thing I’ve got pointed at you, you know what it does?”

He nodded, said, “I believe I have an idea, yes.”

“And have you ever heard the old human saying, ‘I want to shoot you so bad, my dick’s hard?’”

“I don’t believe I-“

“-Shut up. Don’t move.”

I slowly took the gun off him and crawled back into the front seat, pushing back with my free hand. I kept the sights on him until I dropped my legs out of the driver’s side door and stood up into the wind. I turned and looked around the street for the squirming monster. I found it had crawled all the way to the sidewalk.

I crunched over toward the creature, lifted a boot and stomped on it. I grunted random curses under my breath as I pounded the thing, again and again, hammering with my boot heel. The slug exploded in a spray of brown and red. The red blood, I assumed with disgust, was mine. I kept stomping, little flecks of ice spraying with each impact, until the monster was a wet, twisted stain.

I kicked the shredded remains into a sewer grate nearby, then stomped back toward the truck. Sweat was freezing on my face, my nose running freely. My teeth were clenched, my hand squeezed on the gun so tight I could feel the pulse in my palm. From a few feet away I could see that the back door of the truck was open now and when I got there I was not surprised to see that North was gone. I slammed his door. I got in. I drove home.

Things are in motion.

I saw just one other vehicle while I was out, a snowplow. I saw a cop in a convenience store parking lot, messing with the chains on his tires. He shot me a look as I passed, like I was insane for even leaving the driveway in this mess. I had to pull over once and go over my windshield with my ice scraper, the wipers unable to keep up with the storm.

I pulled alongside the road by my house and left the engine running. I walked across the yard, the network of footprints now just soft craters under new snow and ice. I clasped the tool shed key in my left hand.

You have an alibi. You were at work, all day. Alllllll day. Right?

Sure. Yeah, that’s right.

But who knows when she actually went missing. It could have taken days for anyone to notice. Even if it was last night...

I was in bed last night. Eleven PM.

Were you? Can you account for every minute you think you were asleep? There’s one period when you distinctly remember being a pirate, raiding a cruise ship full of naked women. Could you have been up and prowling and imprisoning a girl in your tool shed?

No. No way.

Maybe you had her tied up out there all day and you came home and decided you finally had to get rid of your plaything? Or put it out of its misery? So you came in and got your gun and-

I suddenly pictured the answering machine, on the little table by my front door. John had called, the red light blinking, slowly.

Slowly.

The New Message light blinks fast, like a strobe. The machine tonight was signaling a saved message. One already played.

NO. I’d remember.

Would I? I thought of last summer, a month after Lopez and I broke up, she showed up at a bar where John’s band was playing. I had drunk, oh, probably seven hundred beers. I wound up back at her place, a rented house she shared with some other girl. The night was a lost blur. I remember sweat in my eyes, my own breath blowing back to me off her neck, damp sheets. And a fly. This fly that kept buzzing and landing on my back and my neck, tickling me, waking me up again and again through the night. The rest, is lost. Days later it gets back to me, through one of Jennifer’s friends that I had gone on a drunken, tear-filled rant about how Hell was waiting for me and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. I said it was bullshit, that Jen had made it up to make me look stupid. But had she? How would I know? Some memories bury themselves so, so deep...

And just like that, flashes of memory came pulsing in, like forgotten fragments of a dream.

You do remember. You remember rushing into the house and digging out the big book from the night stand. You yanked the gun free and plunged out into the cold-

The key clasped in my hand, I crossed the yard, continued around the house. The trail of prints that led back here were gone now, the space between the houses a wind tunnel that seemed to burn my ears right off my head. The Andersons lived next door, they were in Florida. The next house over was vacant, a realtor’s “For Sale” sign buried under snow in the front yard. A single gunshot, carried by the wind? Who would call the cops? You wake up and you’re not even sure you heard it.

In the back yard now, dimly lit by a dusk-to-dawn light off my back door. Just enough light to see the pool of pink slush right in the middle of the snow. A metal wire tightened around my gut.

Did you actually feel sorry for yourself a few minutes ago, having to live your life in an institution or jail? That’s an actual girl’s actual blood, Dave. She was warm in her home and ready to curl up in bed and next she was wrestled away or knocked cold. What do you remember? You remember the flare of light and the gun jumping in your hand, then digging around the snow for the brass casing and not finding it, night-blinded from the muzzle flash, ears ringing with the sound. And just like that night with Jennifer you knew it was the last thing you wanted to do but still you did it and did it and did it. You never stop, Dave.

I reached the door and tried to wedge the key into the frozen padlock, my fingers shaking. I dropped the key once, twice, then wrapped the frozen lock in my palm to warm it. Finally I got the key in and twisted it and popped the lock free. I opened the door.

A burst of fire in the darkness, the sharp crack of a gunshot, night blindness, panic, frozen breaths, blue canvas-

I pulled open the door, scraping it along the frozen ground. The piano wire around my gut tightened again and I thought I would have been sick, had I eaten anything.

I have this tarp, a blue one, one I always used to keep my firewood dry before I ran out of firewood. Right now it was in a loose roll along the gravel floor of my tool shed, above another frosted stain of cranberry-colored slush. There was something wrapped in the canvas, something the size of a body, something I knew was a body, rolled up like-

A murder burrito!

-a gutted deer in the bed of a pickup. I could have confused this for a slain young deer, in fact, had there not been three pale fingers extending just over the edge of the canvas.

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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.