Aberrations (14 page)

Wire Wool sighed and closed the doors.

It wasn’t a surprise to hear the bell again when the next stop came into view.  This time, Wire Wool ignored the request and carried on driving.

The same sequence of events happened at the following stop.  The only problem was the driver blew by the waiting passengers. 

Shit out of luck, people, Tommy thought.

“I’m hungry,” Mikey said.

“You’ll get fed soon,” said the old woman who had reprimanded Tommy earlier.

The driver didn’t stop again.  Tommy was worried.  He didn’t like what was happening.  He was surprised that the dereliction of duty wasn’t bothering his fellow passengers.  Several of them seemed agitated by the slightest irritation.  Studying them, he realized with a cancerous fear that they had more important things to preoccupy them. 

The old woman was eating out of her purse.  With growing intensity and speed, her hand dived in and out of her bag bringing a fistful of pink sticks to her mouth.  At first, he thought they were maggots, but maggots don’t have fingernails.  She was chomping tiny fingers—babies’ fingers. 

Tommy’s throat sphinctered at the abhorrence and he gagged, as if he was choking on each of the old woman’s swallows.  Revolted, he tore his gaze away.

It fell on the rank smelling bum at the head of the bus.  He was drinking from his jar filled with a cloudy liquid.  The paper bag hiding his lethal moonshine slipped off.  Three eyeballs bobbed at the bottom of the jar.  As the fluid slithered down the bum’s throat, the helpless eyes followed.  The bum swallowed, not even bothering to chew.

It wasn’t true.  Tommy’s eyes had lied to him.  The old woman wasn’t eating fingers.  The bum wasn’t drinking eyes in pickling juice.  But they were.  Looking at Hooknose, he knew he didn’t need to double-check.

Instead of broken veins, his nose exhibited a shell and he pecked at the liver spots on the back of his hand.  Blood trickled from the wounds and he lapped at the kidney-red fluid with a pointed tongue.

Their abomination was contagious, leaping from person to person.  One passenger after another was developing a repugnant eating fetish.  They either ate their own flesh or nibbled on something they had brought with them.  And they were mutating to meet their hunger.

Tommy had never sampled any of Casey’s coke but he wondered if he had inhaled some during handling.  He glanced at JB for confirmation that it was all some drug crazed trip and none of it was real.  But, JB didn’t seem to notice anything.  He was too wrapped up with his cave girl.  She was getting far too friendly.  She squeezed his knee.  He swatted her hand away.

“I’m very hungry,” Mikey said.

“Oh, yeah?”

Screw it, he thought.  The Broadway stop was next and he was getting off with JB.  He had to get his head straight.  He’d get a later bus.  If Casey didn’t like it, he could go fuck himself.

JB shoved away the girl’s unwanted attentions and pressed the button.  The bell chimed.

“I’m really hungry, Shit,” Mikey insisted.

“I’m getting off here,” Tommy said, standing.  He waited for Mikey to make room.  He didn’t.

“I don’t think so.”

“What?”

Mikey didn’t have to say anything.  His body spoke for him.  He was plasticizing.  His body stretched and oozed like he was a wax dummy left in the sun.  His arms were over four feet long and his chin stretched into a grotesque Leno caricature.  His twelve-inch fingers quivered at his slightest movement.

“Hey, that was my stop!” JB shouted at the driver.

There was a shoulder shrug from the driver’s seat. Tommy watched the Tower Theater recede in the distance.

“Get out of my way, bitch.  Oh, Christ!”

JB’s girl was turning out to be just as big a problem as Mikey.  The ugly girl’s belly swelled to impossible proportions, blocking JB’s access to the aisle.  Her jaw dropped.  It didn’t dislocate but melted down her throat and into her chest.  Her mouth grew in size and pliant flesh stretched to meet the demand.  Her swollen mass squeezed JB against the window.

“I need to eat,” Mikey said.

“Get me off, Mikey, and I’ll get you a burger or something.”

Mikey shook his head, his ridiculous jaw flopping.  “I need to eat you.”

Plastic Mikey lunged.  His elongated limbs strangled Tommy’s body, tightening around him like vines, crushing the breath from his chest.  Mikey’s puppet-like head hovered over Tommy’s.  His eyes dangled from their loose sockets.

“See where a bad attitude gets you?” the old woman berated.

She, along with others, had morphed into a hideous abomination of her former self.  The old woman had rat-like features.  She was out of fingers to gnaw on and needed something else to move onto.  And, by the look she was giving Tommy, she’d decided what was next on the menu.  Hooknose had a complete beak and claws to match.  He could only squawk his opinions.  The bum with the eyeball hooch grinned an eye-studded smile.  The bus people gathered around their victims, while the bus sped through the city.

JB screamed.  Tommy turned to see the bloated girl stuff JB into her gullet.  It took three swallows and Tommy’s rookie was gone.  He was her max load as she gagged twice before closing her mammoth mouth.  The girl smiled.

Tommy’s stomach tightened and his bowels loosened.  He’d witnessed a fate, which was only seconds away for himself.  He wrestled with his Mikey-clad bonds.  Mikey’s mouth closed over Tommy’s head.

The choking halted Mikey from his meal.  Everyone turned towards the bloated girl.  She held a beefy hand to her mouth and coughed.  White foam fizzed between her fingers.  Confused, she brought her hand away and stared dumbly at the effervescing spittle.  She snorted and white snot poured from her nose, which sparked convulsions.

The bus people panicked.  Hooknose squawked hysterically, rat woman ground her teeth together and the eyeball bum’s sneer hid his extra eyes.  No one understood what was happening.  Obviously, this wasn’t normal, even for them.

As Mikey loosened his grip, Tommy realized what had happened.  The bitch was exploding like pop rocks and soda because of the cocaine.  She was overdosing on the kilo of coke in JB’s pocket.

“What’s going on?” Wire Wool demanded.

“Keep driving.  Keep driving,” the rat woman instructed.

The girl retched and JB’s feet and ankles poked from her mouth.  She retched twice more before vomiting.  JB splatted in the aisle, white froth covering his corpse.  His Raiders’ jacket was dissolving, as was JB.  His flesh peeled from his skull and melted before it hit the ground.  Black oil filled the grooves in the walkway and ran towards the front of the bus.  The bus people leapt back from the approaching ooze.  Finally, JB lost integrity and his body reduced to a fluid.

The girl sucked in a gurgling breath, then another before spasming.  Her legs kicked the seat in front of her.  She belched blood-tainted froth and pink drizzled from her nose.  Her loose features tightened and blood vessels burst in her eyes.  She exhaled, relaxing, and deflated like she had a puncture.  Her eyes rolled back and she became still.

Tommy took his chance.  He wriggled out of Mikey’s grasp.  The simpleton lacked the wits to counteract.  He shoved the rubber man aside.  He flopped into the arms of two other bus people, bowling them over.

The bus people were eager to reclaim him but Tommy yanked out his weapon—the coke.  He clawed at the plastic coating, tearing it.  White powder puffed out.

“This is what killed your friend.”  Tommy threw a handful of coke at the two closest bus people.  They recoiled like he had squirted acid at them.  “This stuff is lethal.  Stop this bus and you’ll live to kill another day.  Don’t, and you know what will happen.”  Tommy jerked his head at the girl’s flaccid corpse.

No one moved.  The bus roared into downtown.

Tommy dug for another few hundred dollars of cocaine. If it got him off the bus alive, it was worth its weight in gold.

“Stop the bus.”

The bus lurched under heavy braking.  The doors clattered open. 

Tommy eased into the aisle.  He threw the coke at the bus people and bolted for the rear exit.  He didn’t care that he had to run over the remnants of JB.  He slithered on the ooze before hurling himself off the bus.  The bus people flooded the exit, eager for revenge, but none ventured from their safe haven.  The doors crashed shut.

* * * * *

They had just finished disposing of the remains when the backpacker rapped on the door.  The driver checked to see that everyone had returned to their street selves.  She opened the doors.

“Do you go to the terminus?” he asked, climbing aboard.

English or Australian from his accent, the driver thought.  “Oh, we go all the way.”

Watching him take his seat, the driver licked her lips, her forked-tongue smacking against her chin.

Beggars at Dawn

by Elizabeth Massie

With my Mauser pistol in my canvas satchel, biscuits in my coat pocket, and my shotgun over my shoulder, I left home in the blue shadows of pre-dawn before Janet and the children had begun to stir. I thought I heard Janet mutter, “Stowe?” as I stepped out to the porch but realized it was only the squeal of the door closing and the groan of the planks beneath my cracked leather boots.

The ground was frozen, slick with the previous night’s sleet. Blackened arms of naked oaks scratched the pewter sky, searching for the sun. I took the rutted road that led from our cabin toward the mining town of Blue Peak, past our empty pig barn and dead vegetable garden, on by the hut in which Mattie McAllister and her four children lived. The door to the McAllisters’ hut was hung with the bit of Christmas cheer Mattie could afford—a swatch of cedar tied with one of her daughter’s red hair ribbons. Mattie lived alone with her children now, her Joe having died of the black lung last February.

On down the road a ways I veered off onto one of the vine-choked footpaths into the forest. My body was stiff with the cold; my bones ached with life. I listed heavily to my right to keep most of my weight off my bad leg.

It was mid-December, frigid in the way only the Appalachian ridges could be. There would be little to hunt. Once fall passed, deer became gaunt, ghost-like, their thin bodies blending in among the barren trees, their breaths vague on the air. I would be lucky to find one. I’d also keep my eyes open for just about anything else with meat on it. Turkeys, rabbits, squirrels, woodchucks. Creatures that hadn’t been driven underground or away by the brutal winter. My family needed the meat. We wouldn’t make it through Christmas and into the New Year on just a can of flour and some softening potatoes. And I was not one to shirk my duties.

I always did my duties. As a boy, a miner, a husband, a father. A soldier.

Always, duties came first.

The terrain was rough, with ice-downed sycamores strewn across the path and sudden surges in the ground where heavy rains had tried to force the land into some kind of jagged moonscape. I tripped several times as pale light from the low-seated moon appeared and disappeared behind clouds. I twitched at sounds that I knew were little more than creaking wood and falling water drops. Stray dead leaves, still clinging to the walnut trees, chattered like tiny teeth.

I’d come home from Europe four weeks earlier, having joined the army in May. Taking a train from the mountainside town of Grundy east to Roanoke, I’d signed up with other doughboys to fight the Germans for our country. To do my duty. I was sure nothing about war would frighten me. I’d lived through two mine collapses, bear attacks, pneumonia, and a fire that destroyed my parents’ cabin, taking my grandfather with it.

How much we think we know. How much we really don’t.

My time over there was cut short. I shot a few Germans from a distance and killed two up close, one with my blade and a second with my hands down in the mud of St Mihiel, France. The German had stared up at me, his lips curled and his pupils tiny with the thrill of the fight. I wrenched the Mauser off him when I was done and then stood, shaking uncontrollably, to rejoin my fellows. In that moment a bullet slammed into my shoulder, a second into my thigh. I dropped, hard.

They hustled me back stateside to Camp Devens outside Boston, where I discovered men who weren’t dying from war injuries but from the Spanish flu.

Where was my duty then? The army had no more need of me. I didn’t want to lie there and die the way many of those poor boys did, strangling from muck in their lungs and begging for mercy with their eyes. I left with my discharge against the advice of doctors, who were no longer my superiors, and bummed a ride on a southbound train. I hitched a ride from Grundy up to Harman Junction, and then hiked the rest of the way home. It took a long time. My leg oozed blood much of the way.

Janet was shocked to see me trudging toward our cabin, my face streaked with soot, bleeding, limping. She raced to me, squeezed me until I thought I couldn’t breathe, sobbing that she’d heard reports of the flu and how many had died. Knowing I was in Camp Devens, she had prayed every night that I would be spared.

She bound my wound and fed me well that evening. The last of the ham from the summer hog. Biscuits. Fried apples and squash. The children—eight-year-old Stead, six-year-old Sally, and five-year-old Sid—watched in awe as I ate, their gazes flickering between my mouth and the deep pit in my shoulder. I told them a German had taken a bite out of me, but I’d taken an even bigger bite out of him. Stead and Sally giggled; Sid continued to stare.

I was among my own again, not in a soggy, foul trench with New Yorkers or Californians or Texans. I was ready to return to the mine even with my stiffened arm and ravaged leg, ready to do my duty as a miner.

A mottled turkey fluttered across the path ahead of me, startled from its roost. I aimed my shotgun, fired, missed. Cedar bark sprayed the air. I cursed, loaded, and aimed again but the bird was long gone.

Overhead a crow called, “Uh-oh, uh-oh.”

Up an incline then down the other side, losing my balance and grabbing thorny saplings to stay upright. My chapped hands were gouged, the sleeves of my jacket ripped.