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* * * * *

If you had asked me then, as I sat there in the snow and biting cold of my back yard, I would have said it was the worst moment of my life. And that would have been a ridiculous thing to say, since technically my “life” had only been a couple of days long at that point.

I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my bare foot and the symbol on my toe, with Amy standing a few feet away in a horrified paralysis. I saw John sit on a tree stump and pull out his cigarette rolling kit, watched him carefully roll one before patting around his pockets for a lighter and realizing he had left it in another universe. He threw the cigarette aside with a curse. That’s when Amy began crying, like a switch had been thrown. Softly at first, her head in her hand, her fingers clawing handfuls of copper hair. She leaned against the tool shed and then she was crying hard, a wretched, coughing sound as her body convulsed with sobs. Little kid-type crying. Jerking, unrestrained and terrible, terrible, terrible.

“Let’s, uh, all go inside...” John began, weakly. “Amy, come on.”

She didn’t hear him, her whole body spasming with sobs, a sound like her lungs were having a fistfight. It was truly awful. I closed my eyes and would have plugged my ears, too, but not even that would block it because the very air stank from the sheer awfulness of it all.

John looked long at Amy, then at me. Finally he nodded to himself as if coming to some conclusion and said, “Okay.” He stabbed a finger at Amy.

“Amy,” he said in a voice that was strong and abrupt. “Stand up straight.” She didn’t.

“HEY. Amy.” He strode over and grabbed the shoulder of her jacket, shaking her. “Man up. The night’s work ain’t done. You ready to man up?”

She wiped her face and looked at him.

“Okay,” John said, “you still got the gold cross? The one Dave gave you?”

She nodded. I noticed a snowflake landed on the lashes of one of her eyes.

“Okay,” John said. “Take the cross and touch Monster Dave with it. If he’s evil, he’ll explode.”

I pulled on my sock and shoe and said, almost too quiet to hear, “Leave her alone, John.”

“Human Dave wouldn’t have said that!” John shouted, loud enough for my neighbors to hear. “Now sit still while she touches you with the cross.” He turned to Amy and pulled on her arm. “Come on. Man up.”

He pulled her to her feet—roughly, I thought—and she mumbled something to him so I couldn’t hear. John answered with, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” She pulled her arm from him and he said, “Amy, I’m not asking you. This needs done.”

She dug into her shirt for the cross necklace and wrapped the thin chain around her fist. She glanced doubtfully at John, who urged her on with a gesture.

Holding the cross between thumb and finger like a key, she took a few cautious steps toward me, her face showing caution bordering on naked fear. I heard myself say, “Amy...”

“SHUT UP!” screamed John. “Don’t listen to his lies, Amy, for that is a crafty one there.”

She drew closer, holding the cross at arm’s length. I looked down at the powdering of snow on my pants. I looked up suddenly, the cross an inch away from my face. This movement seemed to startle Amy and she lunged forward with the necklace. The cross jabbed me right in the eye.

“OH, SON OF A BITCH!” I threw myself to my feet, clasping my stinging eye. “You jabbed that thing right in my-“

“-I KNEW IT!” screamed John, his face a picture of indignant monstralization. “AMY, BACK AWAY.”

John tore off his coat and flung it into the snow. Then he pulled his shirts over his head and stood there, bare-chested, snow landing on his naked shoulders like dandruff. I blinked my injured eye and was relieved to see I wasn’t blinded. I said, “John, don’t be a-“

“-SHUT UP. I hope you likes Chinese, Monster Dave.” John threw up his fists. “Because today the menu is Kung Fu Chicken. And it’s ALL YOU CAN EAT, BABY.”

John flung himself into a pseudo-Karate stance, one hand poised behind him and one in front, posed like a cartoon cactus. I thought for an odd moment he had moved his limbs so fast they had made that “whoosh” sound through the air but then I realized John was making that sound with his mouth.

“WAIT!” This was Amy. She ran over between us. “I got him in the eye with it! Don’t. John, don’t. Calm down.”

John let her stop him, of course. He reached around her and jabbed a finger at me.

“She just saved your life, my friend. I’d have been wearin’ you like a pair of pants.”

I sighed and said, “I’m going inside.”

I turned and walked toward my door. After a moment, John dropped his hands by his sides and said, “Yeah.” He picked his jacket and shirt from the snow and bundled them up in his hand. We strode in casually, like we were coming in after a tiring game of basketball. Amy stayed behind, standing there in the angry swarm of snowflakes. John turned to her, said, “Come in where it’s warm, Amy. We’ll hammer this out over a nice can of Leinenkugel’s.”

She looked at him and then at me, not quite sure what had just transpired. John went back to her and leaned down, whispering harshly but out of my hearing. Almost like he was scolding her. She said something back, casting nervous glances at me. They continued this covert argument for a few minutes, with me already inside and watching from my kitchen. I wasn’t completely sure what it was about and I still don’t know. Finally John stomped away from her, toward the house. He turned back to her one last time and said, just loud enough for me to hear, “You know fucking well what I mean. I mean you literally never knew him. When we showed up at your house that was Monster Dave and it was Monster Dave thereafter. And I’ll tell you what, whatever you think, he’s a lot nicer now than he was before. But you wouldn’t know.”

He stormed away from her, looking pissed, and brushed past me as he entered the kitchen. I said to his back, “John, we gotta move that body.”

“It can wait. You’ll still be dead tomorrow.”

I took one last look at Amy outside, snow gathering on her like a lawn ornament. I said, “You coming?”

She made no move and I waited at the door for a bit before finally turning and heading inside. I went to the living room and sat in my leather recliner. I stared into the cold, dead fireplace on the far wall. It was one of those gas fireplaces that would burn real logs so that it looked authentic, a modern heating source dressed up to look like an old-fashioned one. It was an idea I had always found ridiculous, wondering if in the future they wouldn’t have some kind of laser fireplace dressed up to look like a mere gas fireplace, with fake gas lines running from it.

I heard the kitchen door click open and I knew Amy had decided to come in. That shouldn’t have surprised me. Where else could she have gone? I thought for a moment and glanced at the notepad next to my phone, the one I used to leave myself messages (“GET MILK” it said in my hurried scrawl) and wondered if I drew up a quick Last Will and Testament would it be legally binding. John is a notary. I could write it up in a few sentences, leaving the house to Amy so she would have somewhere to live, sign it and then shoot myself in the temple. But then I felt my pockets and realized I had lost the Smith hours ago. I ditched the plan for the time being.

John popped out of the bathroom, fully clothed now, and turned to intercept Amy in the kitchen. They talked some more in those same low, rough tones before both of them entered the living room. Amy sat stiffly on the couch, her arms wrapped around her midsection as I had seen her do so often before. It suddenly occurred to me that when she sat that way the stump of her left wrist was hidden behind her right upper arm. To a passer-by, it wouldn’t immediately be apparent she was missing a hand so there would be no reason to do the double-take that Amy had grown to dread. Seeing her like that, they’d just think she was cold. John took a spot on the floor between us, sitting cross-legged. “Okay,” he said, as if he were the moderator of this panel. “How much do you remember, Monster Dave? What memories did they give you?&rdqu o;

I shrugged and said, “Everything, I guess. There’s that missing bit from when I first showed up here-“

“-When you came here and shot the real Dave?”

“Yeah. It happened out in the yard, I guess. There were tracks all over. But otherwise it’s the same as before. Or, you know. As far as I know.”

“But you don’t know anything of the real stuff? Like where you came from or why you’re here?”

I said, “Did you remember those things at the time of your birth?”

“But you remember your—I mean Dave’s—childhood and all that. School and your parents and friends?”

I waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah. You and I met in computer class. Mr. Gertz. You did the ASCII vagina, got kicked out, and so on.”

“And you know you got to be at work tomorrow? And you know where?”

“Video store. Wally’s. Sucks. Co-workers are retarded. Yeah, yeah.”

“And the five hundred dollars you borrowed from me last month.”

“Fuck you.”

John nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, then. I’m goin’ home. I gotta sleep in my own bed tonight because I got work tomorrow. And if I don’t leave right now, I’m gonna get snowed in here. Amy is going to stay here tonight.”

He raised a hand to silence my objection.

“I don’t wanna hear it,” he said. “She’s gonna stay here and watch you. Now we don’t know what exactly you metamorphize into, but if it’s like those things we saw before we know one weakness is fire. Amy, if you see Dave turn into any kind monster, set him on fire. Dave, show Amy where the flammables are in this house. Get her a lighter and one of those huge cans of hairspray that old ladies use, if you have any. Got it?”

John climbed to his feet, Amy looking at him with an incredulous, squinted look, like he had broken some new bounds of human idiocy that she previously had not thought possible. John said to her, “Remember what we talked about.” And with that, he pulled open the front door and vanished into the white swirl of the storm.

On the David Wong Social Awkwardness Scale, with “1” being going to the “Pickup” instead of “Order” counter at a restaurant and “10” being a guy getting caught on national TV having sex with a dead baboon, I’d have to say that the following minutes alone with Amy rated about a 9.6. A while into this wordless meeting, ten minutes or an hour, I don’t know, the phone rang. We both jumped out of our skin. I picked up, glancing out of my window to see sheets of ice bits raining down in the night.

“Hello?”

“It’s me. I made it home. Slick as hell, did a 360 going around a corner at Lex and Main. Have you turned into a monster yet?”

“No, John.”

“Get this. Molly is here.”

“At your place? John, how does she even know where you live?”

“It’s even better than that. She wasn’t standing outside the building when I got here. She was in my apartment.”

“She broke in?”

“Don’t know. She’s eating a package of hot dogs right now.”

I sensed Amy walking past behind me and a moment later my bathroom door closed. I said, “You gave her the whole pack?”

“Yeah, they’re expired. She’ll stop eating when she gets full, won’t she? Hey, is your power out?”

“No, lights are still on.”

And with that, the lights went out.

“Fuck. They’re out now, John.”

“Yeah, mine were off when I got in. I thought it was the bad guys maybe, making their move. But I turned on the radio and it’s down in several parts of town. I guess they’re working on it. They got the storm on every station, talking like it’s a natural disaster. The ice is knocking down trees and power lines and they said at the state prison the snow drifted up against the fences so high that inmates were able to just walk over it. The guards couldn’t shoot ‘em because they were afraid of the ACLU.”

I hadn’t occurred to me that the winter storm had been a huge event for practically every person in town except for the three of us, who had bigger fish to fry. I got off the phone with John, blinked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and then dug around my cabinets for candles. Amy emerged from the bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder and pawing around the wall to find her way. She put her glasses on, as if they would help her see in the dark. She asked, “Will your heat go off with the power out?”

“Oh, I’m sure it won’t.”

I wasn’t sure, though. Can people really just freeze to death in their homes in times like this? I hunted around for a book of matches, found none in the kitchen and tried the bathroom as the only other likely place. I pulled open the drawer on the vanity and found my matches. I opened the medicine cabinet-

Someone had been here. I normally have three prescription bottles of medication and all of it was gone. Hell, even the Aspirin was gone. All of it had been here after we came home to find the house ransacked. I had checked.

I shuffled around in the drawers to see if anything else was missing and I saw my scissors were gone, too. I could have just misplaced them, though. I suddenly flashed on Amy leaving the bathroom, her purse with her, and figured out what a smarter person would have figured out the minute John told Amy to stay with me.

It turned out I was wrong about the furnace. The house started losing heat rapidly the moment the lights went down. I guess the gas stays on but the electric fans that blow the heat around don’t operate without electricity. An hour later, me and Amy were huddled in front of my fake fireplace, sitting on the floor and wrapped in blankets like Bugs Bunny Indians. I got the fireplace lit and turned up as high as it would go. There were no logs in it but they were just for visual effect anyway, the blue flames licking the air and putting out their own heat. We sat there like that, a flickering pool of amber light around us, with no sound but the hiss of the gas and the creak of the wind leaning on exterior walls. The silence was driving me nuts and finally I said to Amy, “You have my medication in your purse?”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “So I’m on suicide watch? Do you have my scissors, too?”

She said, “I’m sorry that I freaked out before, in the yard. That wasn’t fair. You have to accept people for what they are-“

“-No, no. Amy, you were right. You were right then, when you freaked out. You’re wrong now, that you’re calmed down and telling yourself everything’s gonna be okay. It’s not.”

“You did fine today. Yesterday too.”

“That’s not the point. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, we know one thing—that I won’t be able to control it. Amy, you have to get out of town. Away from this place.”

“We all do. Let’s all move away. Bring John if you want.”

Bring John, she says. Like he’s my pet...

I said, “Yes, I know. I agree. But it’ll take time for us, John and I. We got jobs, we got to get things in order. John’s got family here. But you, you can go now and I say we do it tomorrow. Is there anywhere you can go? You got friends far away? Anywhere? Somebody with a couch you can crash on?”

“I don’t know. I guess. I know a girl on the internet, she lives in Utah with another girl. They’re lesbians.”

“Good. That’s good. You’ll call them or send them something on your computer and ask if you can crash there. We’ll buy a plane ticket and fly your ass to Utah.”

She said nothing. She scooted over and leaned her head on my shoulder, ribbons of firelight dancing on the lenses of her glasses. Eventually she said, “And then I’ll never, ever see you again.”

I couldn’t think of a way to answer that without telling an outright lie, so I just mumbled something that sounded reassuring. She said, “I’ll go, but I’ll call when I’m out there. And you have to take my calls. If you don’t I’ll just come right back. If I don’t get an answer from you I’ll be on a flight the next day.”

“Okay. Um, sure.”

She rearranged herself so that she was laying down, her head on my lap. I listened to her breathing as it slowed and softened as she drifted off. She mumbled, “It’s, like, so cool that it’s snowing out there but not in here. It can’t snow on us. That’s so cool...”

She started snoring softly.

And that was that. I formulated a plan that if she got out there and away from the Hell that is this town, got a job and went to bars with her lesbian roommates, she’d settle in. Forget all about this, all about me. Out there the guys would figure out how hot she was, even without both hands, and she’d meet somebody and she’d stop calling and then all the loose ends would be tied up. I could shoot myself or take a bunch of pills and that would clean up the situation once and for all. I could do a real Will, even have a lawyer draw it up, complete with a stipulation that John had to deliver my eulogy in the form of a 17 minute-long guitar solo, performed with a dual-necked guitar shaped like a naked woman. As for the property, I could sign it over to-

I saw a light to my left. I slowly turned my head to see that, with power still out all over the city, the television had clicked on.

Hands. That’s what I saw, a pair of hands, palms pressed against the screen. Then another pair, fingers clawing at the glass as if trying to escape. For a moment I thought it was snowing in the background but then my mind registered the worms, the white flying worms that poured through the air behind them. I thought I heard a scream, or felt it somehow, and a spray of red splattered the hands on the screen. A pair of hands fell away and just two were left, grabbing at the glass in desperation. One hand formed a fist and smashed against the glass, as if trying to break it. It pounded again and again, and I thought I could see blooms of blood opening on the knuckles. The fist reared way back this time and swung and-

Thump

-the TV shook. I almost pissed my pants. The fist pulled back, blood trickling down between the fingers now, and smashed against the screen once more. Again, the TV rattled on the shelf of my entertainment center, the whole set edging forward an inch with the impact. The fist drew back one last time-

-The set clicked off. Blackness. Those transmissions, the ones from Shit Narnia, never returned. It took me four hours to fall asleep.

* * * * *

It actually wasn’t for another couple of days that we were able to get Amy on a plane. The storm broke that next day but the weather had still messed up the flight schedules. It took a day to hear back from her lesbians. They were thrilled to the point of giddiness to have her, though, and after an hour-long, giggly phone conversation they made arrangements to meet her at the airport in Salt Lake City. The two girls lived in Millcreek, which I guess was just outside of the city.

We kept busy during those two days before Amy left for presumably forever and I successfully avoided any real conversation with her. I had lots of snow to clear off the sidewalk and even made paths around the side of the house for Molly. We took Amy shopping and she bought luggage and a bunch of sweaters because we couldn’t convince her that Utah wasn’t a frozen, mountainous wasteland year round. I went back to Wally’s and finished a long-delayed project of placing anti-theft stickers on all of our DVD’s. It was the kind of tedious, dreaded task that I wouldn’t want to dump in someone else’s lap after I committed suicide. On Wednesday Amy packed up and I drove her the three hours to Undisclosed International Airport in my Bronco. I had begged John to come along to act as a buffer against the awkwardness but he had work, his crew fixing a wall on a local diner that had collapsed under the weight of a fallen tree. Several times during the drive Amy would ask me if I was okay and I would say, “Sure!” and turn up the radio.

I almost made it. I carried her bags in and we waded through the airport bullshit that seemed to take forever. She picked up her boarding pass and we checked her bags and there the security guys made it clear that only the one with a boarding pass could go any further. I said goodbye and wished her a pleasant flight. And that’s where Amy lost it. She threw her arms around my neck and started crying into my shirt, telling me I had saved her life and she didn’t know what she would do if something happened to me and a whole lot of other ridiculous things. The she made me promise that I would take care of myself. I did, before I could catch it.

She stepped back and wiped her eyes and said, “You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember that. Remember you promised.”

I pointed at her and said, “Hey, say what you want about me but I keep my promises.”

“And you guys will come see me out in Utah? I’m serious about this now. I’m gonna be mad if you don’t.”

“Sure, Amy. You and me can share a room, John can sleep with the lesb-“

“-and you’ll look after Molly? And take care of my house?”

By “take care of” she meant “destroy.” We had talked about that, decided to burn the place down. Our only point of disagreement is I wanted to make it look like an accident to collect the insurance money. She wanted to do the opposite, let the insurance lapse and just blatantly torch the place.

We kissed and said some gooey things to each other that would sound silly if you weren’t there. I stood around and waited for her to board, passing through security and letting them check her shoes and all that shit, watched her walk away and kept watching out of a terminal window as her plane climbed and turned into a speck in the sky. I didn’t cry. And if you think I did, good luck proving it, asshole.

I started to wander back toward the exits when I noticed a little girl following me. She couldn’t have been more than five years old, chubby, blonde hair down to her waist. I walked, she kept up, I stopped, she stopped. Her eyes never left mine. I finally turned and was about to ask if she was lost, when she got down on her hands and knees and then laid flat on her stomach. Confused, I considered just turning and walking away when she started slithering along the floor like a snake, legs clasped together and swishing back and forth behind her like a tail. She slithered across the floor like this all the way to the nearest wall, pushing her way into the men’s restroom, opening the swinging door with the crown of her head.

Of course, I followed. I stepped into the room and saw the little girl melt into a puddle of black oil. The blackness rose and took shape and I began to consider that I had made a mistake.

I started to back out of the room, realizing the two guys pissing at the urinals nearby didn’t even acknowledge any of this. Suddenly the black shape sprung at me and for a second, all I could see was darkness.

* * * * *

The air stank. My ankles were submerged in cold liquid that sloshed when I moved my feet. I blinked and could almost see I was in a doorless room. I reached out a hand and touched a metal wall. I could see only by two small spots of orange light and I realized with horror that it was the shadow creature’s eyes. There was a steady rumbling sound from all around us and I had to brace myself as the floor seemed to shift and tilt under me. The black thing stood at the end of the room and stared.

More to see if it would respond than anything, I said, “Where are we?”

The answer did not come in the form of an audible voice, but a picture. In a blink I had a perfect, mental image of an airliner and of a spot under the passenger compartment where a large center fuel tank was housed. I was standing inside the center fuel tank of a passenger jet. The liquid at my feet was jet fuel. I also knew with some certainty that this was Amy’s plane, that I was standing just a few feet under the spot where she was sitting and likely striking up a conversation with whoever she was seated with.

Strangely, the first thought that came to me—even before “Am I really here?”—was that they had forgotten to fill up this tank. Then the answer came to me that they often leave it empty depending on the distance and load of the flight. Then I realized how creepy it was that I was having this telepathic conversation with this thing and I made an effort to close my mind to it.

The shadow thing moved. It drifted like a puff of smoke in a mild breeze, stopping near a bulky apparatus that emerged from the ceiling and dangled to the floor, probably an instrument for measuring how much fuel was left. The fumes were burning my eyes and nose and lungs. I was getting light-headed from it, a heavy fuel stench that made me think of airborne cancer. The black thing drifted to the apparatus, swirled a black appendage over and around a conduit, a jointed line that probably housed an electrical wire. The black thing caressed the line, almost sensually. Sparks flew from the conduit.

I screamed.

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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.