Mommy

Mommy
By Kurt Strouse
“Baby! Baby!! Mommy! I’m a mommy! It’s my baby now! I’m taking the baby!! I’m taking the goddamn baby you dirty, fucking crack-whore!!” Chrissy shrieked. Her shrill cries stabbed through the air. Her eyes stretched open wide- wet, bloodshot orbs, unblinking unyielding green eyes, pupils dilated and burning with emptiness.

Her eyes were a vacuum, a dark void absorbing life, a place where the fabric of the world changed to that of Chrissy’s world.
The muzzle of the Smith & Wesson .38 Special stared also, a third eye growing out of the shining steel piece in her clenched fist. Every part of Chrissy’s body seemed to shake except for the hand holding the revolver. It remained steady at the expense of its owner.
The subject of the stare sat in a kitchen chair, it’s back pressed against the wall. A pregnant woman, belly large with child. Her eyes were so different than Chrissy’s eyes. They darted around the room, running from the three staring eyes, afraid to cross their path. Big teardrops rolled from these eyes onto a sickly, pale face, the mouth contorted as the owner silently sobbed. The woman made a strange sound as she breathed, as though a tremendous weight pressed on her chest, forcing her to gasp for the breath to cry.
Milk dripped from a puddle on the table, down to the floor, where a broken glass lay shattered.
Chrissy gnashed her teeth, a vision of grinding white between rosy cheeks. She stared at the woman’s belly, as though if she tried hard enough, she could see through the brown fabric of the maternity dress.
“Give…me…the…baby,” Chrissy ground out each word between her teeth.
“Wha-what?” the woman said, still not looking at Chrissy’s face, wringing her hands in her lap. Her dark, frizzy hair hung over her face.
Chrissy made a grating sound of frustration. She grabbed a saltshaker from the counter and hurled it at her with her left hand. It struck her head and she began sobbing loudly, her face in her hands.
“I said-,” Chrissy walked around the kitchen table towards her. “I-said-.” She paused for a long moment, grabbed a handful of the woman’s hair, jerking her head back and forcing her to look at her. Chrissy pressed the gun’s muzzle against the woman’s neck. She began rasping out her words in a jagged whisper, enunciated with spittle. “I. Said. Crack-whore. Give. Me. The. Baby.” Another long pause. “OR I’LL FUCKING SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD!!” she screamed into her ear.
The woman began shaking violently as panic contorted her face. Her hands clenched and unclenched the fabric of her dress. Urine darkened the fabric on her lap.
“What-what-what do,” the woman struggled to get the words out, ”what do you want me to-to do?”
“Give birth. NOW!” Chrissy pulled the woman to her feet by her hair. The gun still pressed against her neck. “Come here!” The woman, taller than Chrissy by half a foot, had to bow her head down as she was led down the hall, whimpering.
“I-I-I don’t-understand. Please don’t hurt- my baby-please-please-“
Chrissy pulled her into the bedroom.
“Lay down. On the bed. Just lay there or so help me I’ll shoot you in the head.” Chrissy jerked open the nightstand too hard. The drawer fell out, spilling it’s rattling contents onto the floor.
“Don’t move!” Chrissy kept the gun pointed at the woman as she picked up the handcuffs from the floor. She clutched the steel against herself, eyes darting from the woman’s eyes to her belly.
“Now stay still. Or I will shoot you in the head. Now give me your hand.” She snapped a cuff tightly around her one wrist, pinching the skin. The woman whimpered in pain. Chrissy cuffed her to the headboard, then straddled her and used another pair on the other wrist.
When Chrissy picked up a chain and began wrapping it around the woman’s ankle, she set the gun down on the bed.
“NOOOO!!” The woman found her voice and began screaming and kicking her legs in a sudden flurry, her foot slamming into Chrissy’s ribs as she flailed on the bed. Chrissy fell backwards onto the floor, gasping.
“MY GOD-SOMEBODY-HELP ME!!!” The woman screamed, knocking the lamp off the nightstand with her movements.
Chrissy leaped up on her feet, her curly blonde hair falling loose from her ponytail. She let out a feral snarl and pounced on the bed. First open hands, then closed fists smacked repeatedly into the woman’s face. Her legs stopped flailing and the meaty sound of the blows gradually overpowered the screams. Soon the only sound was a quiet sobbing through bloodied lips and Chrissy’s panting.
Chrissy slid off the bed and walked to the dresser, returning with a sock. She picked up the gun and pressed it hard against the woman’s cheek.
“Open,” she hissed. The woman opened her mouth and Chrissy jammed the sock into her mouth. She tied a pair of pantyhose around her head, holding the sock in place. She picked up the chains and this time her victim made no effort to resist as she wrapped them around each ankle, and attached each chain to the bed frame.
Chrissy walked into the adjoining bathroom, washed her hands, and returned to the bedroom with an armload of white towels.
“Now,” she said. “You’re going to give me my baby.” She set the towels down on the nightstand and began pulling up the woman’s dress. The woman made a sound through the gag and tried to close her legs, held apart by the chains. Chrissy cut the urine-soaked panties with a pair of scissors and pulled them off of her. She climbed up on the bed, kneeling between the woman’s legs, looking down at her expectantly.
“Now. Push.” The woman’s wide eyes stared up at the ceiling, her fingernails digging into her palms.
“PUSH!! GODDAMMIT, PUSH YOU BITCH!!” She began slapping the woman’s thighs. Her face was red with rage.
“COME ON!! PUSH IT OUT!!” Chrissy reached up and pressed down above the woman’s belly, sliding her hand down against the swell.
“GIVE IT TO ME!! Give it to me or I swear to God I’ll rip it right out of you! “

Two hours later, Chrissy’s husband Jim walked into his house to find his wife cradling a crying newborn in her arms. She sat on the couch with the baby swaddled in pink. She was trying to give her a bottle.
“Jimmy…,” tears ran down her face as she smiled up at him. “Our baby Samantha…she’s finally here…our baby girl, just like my dream.”
Jim’s face paled as he slowly set down his briefcase.
“Chrissy. Whose baby is that?” He spoke softly and slowly. Chrissy ignored his question and smiled down at the baby, making cooing sounds. Jim stared at her for a moment, then slowly turned and began walking towards the kitchen. He stopped at the sight of the drying milk on the table and the floor. The broken glass. A cold sweat broke on his forehead and palms.
“Did Helen-,” his throat constricted as he spoke, ”did Helen come for lunch today, Chrissy?” Her name was a whisper.
“Yes, she did,” Chrissy answered pleasantly from the other room.
“What time did she leave?”
“Oh. Well. She’s still here.”
“She is?” Jim stared at the phone on the wall.
“Yes. She is”
Jim walked back into the living room. Helen’s jacket and purse sat on the rocking chair. Their friend Helen, who Chrissy had met at the rape-victim’s support group. Helen, who Jim and Chrissy put through re-hab for her crack habit. Helen, who was nine-months pregnant with a girl.
Jim felt a great weight pressing down upon him as he listened to his wife saying,
“Yes! Who’s my little girl? You are! Yes, you are! You’re my little baby Samantha…”
“Chrissy…where’s…where’s Helen?” His voice shook.
“Um…in the bedroom, last I checked.”
Jim lifted his heavy feet, slowly and deliberately walking down the hallway into the bedroom. For a moment, he stood paralyzed, staring at the carnage chained to the bed. Legs splayed open. The belly cut open. Flaps of skin folded back. The sheets stained crimson. The dress pulled up, covering the head. Bloody towels strewn around the floor and bed, one covering the nightstand, on top of which sat an X-acto knife and a pair of scissors, both encrusted with drying blood.
Then he turned around and stepped into the hallway as a ringing filled his ears. A spasm twisted his stomach and he bent over, hands on his knees, and vomited. Wedged in between the sounds of his own retching and the ringing, he heard,
“Who’s my little girl? Yes, you are! Yes, you are!”

Joe and Keith sat at the bar of the Hotel Elmida after work. At 7:30 in the morning, it was the only place open for the benefit of third shift workers. It still looked like night inside. They drank beer while the morning news ran its course. The bland, white-haired reporter read off a teleprompter, while the screen showed a photograph of an attractive, if somewhat wild-eyed, blonde woman in her thirties.
“Thirty-five year-old Christine Young is currently being reviewed by doctors at Woodtown State Hospital, in an effort to determine whether or not she may be released from the hospital for visits with friends and relatives. Young was found to be not mentally competent in 1991 for the murder of Helen Carfield. Ms. Carfield was pregnant at the time of her attack. The baby survived and was adopted by an anonymous couple. Young claims to have no memory of the murder. A local church, The Church of The Holy Nazarene, has been petitioning the state for her release-,”
“Oh, man, they ought a just put her to sleep,” Keith said, shaking his head. “You know? She’s gonna end up doing it again.”
The door of the bar opened and a hollow-eyed man walked in. His dark hair was disheveled and he wore a wrinkled, white oxford under his black raincoat. Keith continued talking,
“I say, you kill somebody, insane or not-“
“Hey, we’re missing the highlights show!” Joe cut him off. “Hey, Carol!” Joe called to the bartender. “Turn on 35!”
Carol, feigning annoyance, sighed and stopped washing the bar sink. She made an exaggerated effort to get the remote control. Suddenly noticing the newcomer to the bar, she grabbed the remote and quickly changed the channel to a sports show.
“Yeah, your boys lost…again!” she said, and laughed a little too hard.
“Oh, give me a fuckin’ break,” Joe protested. “You lose all season and then when you beat us once…”
“What can I get you?” Carol smiled at the stranger.
“Wild Turkey on the rocks,” he mumbled.
The conversation continued, friendly football banter exchanged between Keith, Joe, and Carol. The other customer finished his drink quickly, following it with two more. He left his money on the bar and quietly left.
“Damn! Did you see that guy? He had the fuckin’ shakes!” Keith said.
Joe and Carol exchanged a look. Joe lit up a cigarette and arched his eyebrows.
“Man, you know who that was?” He asked Keith.
“No. Who?”
“That was Christine Young’s fuckin’ husband!” Joe said.
“Ex-husband,” Carol said.
“No shit!” Keith looked like he was slapped.
“Yeah, man…you know, Cooper was the cop that arrested her.”
“So, why’d she kill that pregnant woman? Just went psycho?”
“She wanted her baby.”
“What?!”
“She fuckin’ cut the baby out of her! Cooper said that her husband- Jim Young- dude that was just here- came home and found his wife holding this baby and um, what’s-her-name-“
“Helen Carfield,” Carol said.
“Yeah, and she was all ripped open and tied up in the bedroom!”
“Oh, shit…” Keith scratched his moustache, “do you think he heard me talking?” The others shrugged. Carol said,
“You know when she went crazy though, don’t you? Well, I heard that she had been pregnant, and while she was pregnant, she got raped, and after that she started losing it. My boyfriend’s sister- and don’t either of you repeat this- worked at the hospital in the maternity ward, and she said that she gave the baby up for adoption because she thought it was the rapist’s baby. She said, ‘Get that fucking monster away from me!’ Then she went into Woodtown State for a little while. Guess they should’ve kept her there.” Carol ran her fingers through the dark roots of her hair and nodded sagely.
“But the baby lived?” Keith asked. “The one she cut out?”
“Yeah. I guess.”

“You said that your attacker…wasn’t human?” Dr. Boddington asked Chrissy. Dr. Boddington was a thin, shorthaired woman, somewhat androgynous, with a very relaxing manner about her.
“No. No, he wasn’t. I know he wasn’t.”
“Well…what was he?”
“He was a demon in the form of a fish dressed like a man,” Chrissy replied without expression. Dr. Boddington struggled to suppress a deep sigh.
Chrissy was her most difficult patient. Difficult because she showed so much promise in between her breaks with reality. She would seem wholly cognizant of the events in her life that led to Helen’s death and show no signs of illness for weeks.
And without warning she would lapse into nightmarish, pseudo-biblical and fantastic interpretations of her rape, her giving birth, and the killing of Helen.
“Everything began with the demon,” Chrissy had told the doctor. “I was walking to my car from my yoga class. I was-was pregnant- at the time- with Samantha. There was…a row of trees and hedges running along the park. It was summer. July. At night. And there was-um- on the news there were reports of a serial rapist that had attacked a half-dozen or so woman in the county. So Tina, the yoga teacher, bought everyone in class a thing of tear gas, or pepper spray or whatever, and we each had a buddy that we would walk to our car with.
“Well, we did this for, I don’t know-three weeks- a month, but sometimes you might just get tired of it and say oh, the heck with it. You can’t live in fear, you know? So the night it happened, I was walking by myself and it was a brightly lit street and my car was right around the corner, so I really- it wasn’t like a dark alley or anything, and I felt pretty safe.
“I remember…just being hit from the side and all the wind was knocked out of me, and I remember crashing through the bushes. And then there was somebody holding me from behind and-and I tried to scream but he put this disgusting rag over my mouth and it smelled like chemicals, and it was like I couldn’t move then. I lost all control of my body. Just went limp.
“No, I was still awake. I could still see. And feel everything.
“No, I never saw his face. He pushed me down- face first in the dirt, and raped me-and I couldn’t even turn around to see his face. I mean- I knew what he was doing but… I just lay there for, it must have been an hour- and then the feeling gradually came back and I was able to walk back to the car.”
Dr. Boddington had asked her,
“Why didn’t you go to the police? Or the hospital?”
“I’ve been through that before. When I was sixteen, um, there was a boy I was interested in. We had been friends, but you know, I thought that it might become more than that. I was dumb enough to go to a party with him and his friends. We all got drunk and, um, he and I went in one of the bedrooms and, well, had sex. At some point, I passed out. When I woke up, one of his friends was, um, on top of me. I screamed and tried to fight him off, but they took turns holding me down for the others…
“Later, they drove me home and basically pushed me out of the car onto my front lawn. I literally crawled up to my bedroom. Somehow, my mother never woke up.
“The next day, I couldn’t even walk. I pretended to be just hung over, and my mother grounded me.
“The day after that, without telling my mother, I went to the police. I could tell they didn’t believe me. Neither did my mother when she showed up after they called her. I guess the fact that the one boy was a judge’s son didn’t help things.
“So…I couldn’t go through all of that again. And I knew I couldn’t sit in a courtroom with strangers, even if they did catch him. But worst of all…worst of all they’d never believe me that the rapist wasn’t human! He just wasn’t! There was the most, the most nauseating smell of fish on him- it was on his skin, like an oil- a slime that he left on my skin, in my clothes, in my hair. When he was- inside of me- it wasn’t…like a man. It wasn’t a man! See, you don’t believe me either so how was I to tell a cop?! My God, I saved a scale from him! I can prove it!
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be attacked by something that nobody even believes in? To have something enter your body that- that you don’t even know what it is? No, you don’t…It changes your whole world. The first rape, as bad as it was- at least- I can understand it as the sin that is in man. Jesus helped me to understand that and He let me forgive those boys. But this time, it was sin and evil in the flesh. It shows you a reality that most people don’t even know exists. It puts you in a world that most people don’t understand, don’t want to understand.
“The devil took Samantha away from me twice. The first time, he sent a demon after me and that demon put his seed into me, and it devoured Samantha, because she was too pure, too good, and the Devil hated that. And that son of the demon is still alive, being taken care of by people who don’t even know that their son is from Hell.
“So, when God sent Samantha to me a second time, he sent her to me, carried by a whore, the Scarlet Whore, so that I would recognize her when she came. It’s hard to explain, but Samantha is so pure that God had to put her in a vessel of sin, so that I could see her. Helen was purified through her sacrifice. I helped her to achieve salvation by helping her accept Jesus in the weeks before her death.”

Young stared long and hard at the last finger of bourbon in the bottle, swirling it around, knowing that there would be no more after that. At least for a few hours. Four hours. Three hours and fifty minutes until the bar opened. He looked around the bedroom. He had ripped up the carpet and bought a single twin bed years ago. News clippings and photographs covered the walls. “Police Search for Serial Rapist.” “Cult Members Kill Three In Amberville.” “Christine Young Up for Psychiatric Review.” James looked at the photos interspersed between the articles. A night-vision shot of three figures in long coats and hats, collars turned up, hiding their faces, as they stood by the river. Another nocturnal shot of what might be a head of a swimmer in the river, despite the snow on the banks. A daytime shot, taken with a telephoto lens, of a very odd-looking, if not ugly child standing on a dock. It was a strange face, with bulging eyes, an almost non-existent chin, and very thin hair. There were photos of a minister eating in a restaurant, of fisherman standing by the water, and of other nondescript images. There was one of muddy boot-prints on a doorstep.
Jim slipped his hand in his pocket and found a .45 hollow-point round that he had forgotten about. He looked at it, thought about throwing it away, hiding it. Then he laughed and tossed it across the room, chuckling as it bounced off the wall.
Soon, he thought, the police will find the bodies. There were five of them altogether- two of them appeared to be normal people. The other three bore an aquatic countenance- a strange resemblance to fish that under different circumstances, James would have found comical. It was the two normal looking ones that he worried about. The freaks wouldn’t be missed at church or at the worksite. Wherever they lived and stayed, it was out of the town’s eye. The other two James recognized by sight if not name. One was a mole-faced waitress at a local diner. The other he recognized from passing him on the street, another hollow-faced passerby.
But they all had the stink on them. The stench of the river people clung to them. It was the smell of the dead carp rotting on the bank. The odor of the rodent that crawls inside a wall and dies. The rot only used their bodies as vehicles. After all these years, Jim could recognize it instantly. He couldn’t forget it because he smelled it in his nightmares still.
He waited, resigned to hear the knock on the door, to hear the front door broken in, to be cuffed and thrown in the cruiser. He waited and drank his bourbon. Dawn came and still nothing. Soon it was seven o’clock, and he had little choice but to walk a few blocks to the Hotel Elmida, the only bar open at this hour.

Outside of town, at a house up in the woods, two men pulled into the driveway. They left thirty minutes later, the back of the car sagging with the weight in the trunk.

Young walked out of the bar after finishing several drinks quickly. He turned the corner and walked down a street of old, brick houses and buildings. Some were aged enough that the bricks were pitted and slowly crumbling. There were a few faded signs. A corner deli. The houses with porches bore old furniture, rusted and faded. Some of the houses were abandoned and boarded up.
In the alleyway between a deserted house and a derelict factory, James saw two older men. Vagrants. Perhaps they came from the freight yard, tourists from the rail line. They talked loudly, one laughing and clapping the other on the back.
Young stopped and stared as he passed, swaying slightly from the alcohol. They stopped laughing and stared back at him. One wore a knit cap and a filthy sweatshirt under even filthier bib overalls. He turned away, muttering from within his massive gray beard. The other wore a long black coat and a shirt of indeterminate color. He looked slightly younger than the other one, perhaps in his fifties. Grey streaked his dark, unkempt hair. He appeared to have shaved in the past week, thick stubble covered the deep creases of his face.
Young staggered back in shock, for he noticed that this man had no nose, but only a band-aid stretched across this featureless spot on his face, as though unfinished.
This one did not turn away, but stood staring at Young. Neither of them moved for a long moment. James looked down at his hands and was surprised to see them clenched into fists. He looked up at the man again and found him grinning without a hint of humor. It was an odd grin, without the nose in place to accentuate the smile. It made him look unfinished, a bad replica, now discarded and aged in the morning sun.
As he turned and continued walking down the street, he thought not of the man’s deformity, but about his teeth. Instead of the toothless maw of a wino, or the rotten, gray mess of teeth that he expected to see, the man’s teeth were as white as snow. The image of those large, white teeth stayed in his mind as he walked on.

At home, there was a message on the answering machine.
“Hi Jim, this is Schmidt. Do me a favor and gimme a call as soon as you get in, OK? Thanks!”
Young stared at the phone for a long minute, then collapsed into a recliner and fell asleep, still wearing his coat.

He found himself awake and on his feet with a ringing in his ears. The room gradually stopped spinning. He realized that it was the doorbell that he was hearing. His heart began pounding and he crouched behind the chair, waiting for the police to kick down the door. He was sweating freely. He stared at the handprint that he left on the chair with the sweat.
Realizing that he still wore his coat, he shrugged it off and threw it in a clump at the bottom of the hallway closet. He looked down at his shirt, now soaked with sweat.
He ran back to the front door, realizing the noise and abruptly stopping to tiptoe towards the door. He peered through the peephole. It was Schmidt.
Jim thought of ignoring him. The bell rang again. He reluctantly opened the door.
“Jim! Are you okay?” Schmidt peered at him through coke-bottle glasses. Schmidt was unnaturally thin with a large angular head. His very short hair was not the fashionable style, but was choppy and irregular. He wore clunky black shoe from Sears, gray work pants, and some kind of long, green army coat.
“Yeah. Yeah, Schmidt. I’m fine.” He waved Schmidt inside. Schmidt picked his way through the debris of the living room. He lifted a stack of military surplus catalogs off of a chair and sat down.
Schmidt looked around the room absently and cleared his throat.
“ So…how’d it go, Jim?” He drew a flask-size bottle from his voluminous pocket and tossed it to Jim. Jim caught the bottle with one hand and held up five of his fingers with the other. Schmidt’s mouth dropped open.
“You killed- you got five of them?! There were five of them?! Jesus Christ, Jim, I thought there were only three!”
“Well…three of them, two normal people, relatively speaking.”
“Two normal people- well- do you know who they are- were?”
“Yeah, well sort of. Not really. The woman I think used to waitress at the Norman Street Diner. The guy- I don’t know. I think I remember passing him on the sidewalk a few times.”
“I bet it’s the guy that drives for Hockan?”
“One of the drivers for Hockan- you know, the rendering plant?”
“No. What’s a rendering plant?”
It’s- Hockan is this plant where they make gelatin. You know what that’s made out of?”
“No. Oh, yeah. Don’t they make it out of cow horn’s or horse hooves?”
“Nope. Animal skins. They wash the collagen out of them with hot water. That’s what they make Jell-o out of.”
“So…I just killed the Jell-o truck driver?”
“Well, no. See, this guy drives a rendering truck. He gets dead animals or animal parts and either he drives them to Hockan or to the dump if they’re diseased. My brother used to work at Hockan and there’s this one driver and he’s- he’s got a lot of signs of being with them.”
“Really?” Young scratched his head.
“Yeah. As a matter of fact- matter of fact- I used to work with that guy’s brother. At Morgan’s.”
“The meat-packing plant?”
“Yeah. This guy- Nate Bickerman. He was weird too. I remember one time- we had to move these barrels of fucking ox bile, right? So these are 55-gallon drums of just ox bile. Each weighs about, I don’t know, maybe six hundred pounds? Well, we’re moving them on hand trucks along this walk way and Nate’s running, I mean he’s just running along with these barrels on the hand truck. Well, this asshole catches the edge of the walkway. The hand truck starts to tip over and he tries to catch it! So he’s holding on and the momentum just flips him over the barrel. So I’m watching this in, like slow motion, as the barrel just tips over on him, the fucking lid pops off and out comes 55 gallons of ox bile, pouring out on top of him. Funniest thing I ever saw. I will never forget that!”
“So what does-“
“And you know what’s the worst part of it? Old Nate walked around wearing that shit for the rest of the day. He smelled like every drunk on New Year’s puked on his shirt. My God. And he didn’t even seem to mind!”
“Did he always smell?”
“Oh I don’t know. You wouldn’t know at Morgan’s because of all the smells there, anyway. But you could smell that ox bile. Holy fuck, that was bad!”

As Schmidt talked, a memory crept back into Jim’s mind. It was the smell that clung to Chrissy after she was attacked that one night. It was the smell that hit him that one summer night he opened the car door.
He had walked into the garage that one summer night to find Chrissy sitting in the car, sobbing quietly. It was the smell that hit him when he opened the car door. The smell of something dead on a riverbank. A mad panic and nausea gripped his heart. The baby. Something’s happened to the baby.
He never told her about that smell, and he never acknowledged her claims that the rapist had this horrible stench. Nor would he examine the scale-like things that she claimed her attacker left on her clothing. Not even when the baby miscarried.
There was the horror of the emergency room visit, a sickening parody of everything they had expected when the baby would be born. The night was a mismatched jigsaw puzzle of nightmare memories. He remembered scenes, not sequence. Chrissy rolling out of bed onto the floor screaming in the middle of the night,
“It’s like knives inside of me!! Jim! Help me!!”
He remembered her lying across the backseat as he drove. He reached back to hold her hand, and found it wet with blood.
When they got to the hospital, he tried to help her out of the car.
“Jim…” she whimpered, “…I…I…can’t look-but…something came out…oh,god….”
The bottom half of her nightgown was blood-soaked. Something dark and wet lay on the seat between her legs.
Jim gasped for breath, paralyzed. Then he turned and sprinted for the emergency room entrance. He tore open the door and ran to the desk. The woman behind the glass stared blankly at him.
“Help-oh, god-help me. My wife is out in the car. Help me, please. She’s pregnant, and-“
She stared at him and frowned.
“Now, just calm down sir-“
“FUCKING HELP ME!! YOU-,” he grabbed a male nurse by the arm, “C’MON FUCKING HELP ME!!” The nurse pulled his arm free and walked away quickly.
Moments later Jim Young stood in the lobby carrying his wife in his arms, blood dripping onto the cold, white floor below.

There were strange questions from the quiet-speaking doctor. There were questions of injuries, self-inflicted or otherwise. Questions of disease or illness. Questions of medical history and allergies.
But the strangest question was asked in a low voice that Jim strained to hear.
“Did you know that there were twins, Mr. Young?”
“Oh my god, she miscarried twins?”
“One of them. The other appears to be fine.”
“But…we had an ultrasound in July. Right before- well, yeah, it was in July.”
“And they didn’t see twins?”
“No. No they didn’t.”
“Well…that’s interesting. But- well they do sometimes miss things. Obviously. I’ll be back to check on her in about an hour.”

“Jim…?” she was lying in the hospital bed with her eyes closed, eyes ringed by dark circles, almost bruises.
“Yeah?” he held her hand tightly.
“Jimmy…he said…that there’s a twin.”
“Yeah. Yeah that’s right, hon. We still have a baby.”
She gripped his hand tightly with both of her hands.
“Jimmy,” she said, her voice a tight whisper, ”Jimmy, listen to me. That’s not your baby in here,” she pointed to the swell of her belly, ”that’s not your baby.” She opened her eyes burning bloodshot and wet with tears. “This is that thing’s baby. I know it is. We- we lost your baby. No- listen! Listen- this baby- it- it killed your baby, Jimmy! I know it did! Did you hear the doctor- he was asking if I was in an accident or something. It did something to our baby, Jimmy! What are we gonna do?! What are we gonna do?!”
“No! No, just- you’re talking crazy right now Chrissy. This is a second chance. This is our baby-“
“Jimmy! There was only one baby on the ultrasound- before I was raped. That thing put it’s own devil into me. It killed our baby. It killed our baby…” she began sobbing, “No! Don’t touch it! There’s a monster inside. You know it, too. You know it, too.”

Chrissy made her decision to give the baby up for adoption that night. For the remaining three months of the pregnancy, she thought and spoke of the remaining baby as a parasite and a cancer living within her. She became listless and monotonous with depression. She became obsessed with the dreams and nightmares that wallpapered her lethargy.
“Jimmy…I had this dream last night. There was a fire down by the river- this huge bonfire, burning up to the sky. Not like a normal fire either. It burned with a strange color. Greenish and it gave off this foul smoke. There was this circle of all these pregnant women lying in the mud around the fire. They were all naked and going in to labor together. There were all crying in pain, like it was some kind of big accident scene.
“Then one started shrieking, just shrieking, like she was being stabbed. The others tried to move away from her as much as they could. They were scared of her, terrified of her. One girl who was lying near her feet starting screaming, but, screaming because she was scared and couldn’t move away fast enough, not from the labor pains.
“The shrieking woman starts convulsing, lying on her back, every limb shaking like it was trying to break free and get away from its owner. Suddenly, this torrent of black blood just erupts from her, from between her legs, spraying over this girl and onto the fire. And when it sprayed onto the fire, the flames started burning purple and black. Slowly the woman stops convulsing, and the girl at her feet is just lying there covered with this black blood. She’s lying there whimpering.
“Suddenly, these little heads start falling out of the woman’s vagina- these little blood-red heads, smaller than my fist and hairless. There must have been a dozen of them that came out of her. Little heads- like newborns but with eyes wide open. Unblinking eyes, like fish. I thought that they were dead at first. Then I saw one move, and it was moving by extending this long, sickening tongue along the ground and dragging itself towards the girl. It was just a head without a body. Then another began dragging itself to her. Soon all dozen or so were moving. They moved quickly through the mud like that. They moved faster than she did.
“The girl was finally getting to her hands and knees when the first little head got close enough to wrap its tongue around her thigh. It pulled itself close with its tongue, but once it was close it pulled its tongue back in and latched on with its mouth. It was biting her. She fell down, trying to pull it off, but by that time, the others were attaching themselves to her biting her all over her body, her arms, her face. One was on each breast, as if they were nursing.
“She started to convulse, just like the other woman did, and the same thing happened. There was the black blood and the fire and more little heads attaching themselves like leeches to her body. More of them came out of her, and it continued like this, going from woman to woman, until there was just a circle of women lying in these black pools, covered with these red little heads draining them of blood.”
Jim Young starting drinking that afternoon and stayed drunk for a week. Chrissy’s dream struck him deeply because it showed him the depth of her anguish and suffering. It also was the exact same dream that he had dreamed.

“Ox bile. I couldn’t imagine,” Young replied to Schmidt. “So you think he’s on the river?”
“Who?”
“The Jell-O cow carcass driver. Or his brother.”
“Oh. Yeah. They might be.” Schmidt’s voice was flat, expressionless. “Do you want to see where they live?”
“Yeah. That would be good.”

They rode in Schmidt’s old, gray Cadillac Coupe de Ville. They drove by the alleyway where Jim had seen the two bums earlier.
“So…how long do you think you can stay here?” Schmidt asked, peering at him from behind his clip-on sunglasses.
“Well I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. Why?”
“Do you think they’ll ever catch up to you? They gotta know.”
“Why do they have to know?”
“Well, shit Jim, you killed eight of them, plus two normal people-“
“Normal people?”
“Whatever. The point is, Jim, you’ve seen footprints outside of your house. You’ve become what might be termed a threat to their community. And quite frankly, if you’re finding humans mixed in with them, then who knows who else might be involved with them? Shit, I used to eat at Norman Street. That woman might have handled my food.”
“Schmidt- Schmidt, I know where they are here now.”
“And they know where you are now.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should care. I care. I sure as shit care when I fall asleep at night if some freak’s gonna sneak into my house after me. I feel like they’re watching me.”
“I know, but- I’ll always be afraid of them, Schmidt. It doesn’t matter if I’m near the river or not. I’ll always have that fear. But more than that fear is the-,” Jim’s face tightened for a moment, paralyzed, “the overwhelming… hatred- that I have for them.”
Young had lived in Arizona for two years, after he could no longer stand to visit Chrissy in the state hospital. Arizona almost killed him. Two years in a totally different world, and every day of that time he thought about Wollsville. Everything about Arizona reminded him of Wollsville by contrast. In the sandy ground, he thought about the mud of the riverbank. In the dry air, he thought of the damp chill of spring. He thought of the serial rapes and missing person’s articles that he didn’t see in the paper, at least not in disproportionate numbers. When he opened his mailbox, he always dreaded seeing a letter from Chrissy. He never did, not in Arizona, but he knew that back east, one was arriving like clockwork in a dead letter office, every week. It wasn’t seeing them that bothered him so much as knowing that they existed. Just like the river people. They existed and that was what poisoned him.
They existed and had touched his life irrevocably. They were in him. He felt infected by their contact and the only way to continue to live without despising every cell in his body was to cleanse him-self of them.

In a corrugated steel building, Nate and Dan Bickerman unloaded five bodies from the back of a van. They laid them out in a neat row, near a drain. Nate set a box down next to the bodies, and from the box they removed a series of aluminum pipes which were assembled to form a large rectangular frame, about eight feet tall. Large, triangular sheets of transparent plastic were then fastened to the frame with steel clips so as to form an enclosed structure, and the whole unit was then placed so as to be over the floor-drain.
Nate and Dan were similarly covered in plastic. Each wore a yellow rain suit and yellow rubber boots. The hoods of their jackets were pulled tight around their heads, and plastic shields covered their faces. Heavy rubber gloves covered their hands.
A chain hung from a crossbeam and fed through a hoist. At the end of the chain was a nylon strap with a tightening mechanism. The chain hung down through an opening in the plastic covering the structure.
Nate grasped the ankles of the human woman and dragged her into the plastic room. Her body, still semi-rigid from the rigor mortis slowly fading from her limbs, seemed like a bloated mannequin. He held her leg up as Dan fastened the strap around her one ankle. Nate then left the tent and walked to the wall of the building, where the other end of the chain hung in its brackets. There was the sound of the ratchet as Nate raised the cadaver into the air. He raised it until her foot almost protruded from the ceiling of the tent. She spun slightly, slowly, naked, limbs akimbo, her clouded empty eyes staring at the floor. Her skin was tight with the bloat, covered with patches of purple and brown where the blood had settled. Buckshot wounds left an angry pattern of red punctures through her chest, and a few ragged tears through her back. Brownish fluid, uncongealed, dribbled from the open and shattered crown of her head onto the floor.
Dan left the tent and returned with a “demo-saw,” a gas powered circular saw with a 16-inch blade. He started the power cutter and the sound filled the steel building, the vibration rattling the air. Bluish smoke from the exhaust choked the air inside the tent, and Nate folded a flap open for ventilation. He then grasped the left wrist of the cadaver, and pulled the arm to the side so that the arm was pulled somewhat straight.
Dan revved the saw, the blade turning into a smooth disc. Nate nodded, his face expressionless behind the plastic shield. He brought the saw down slowly and deliberately through the corpse’s shoulder joint. The energy transferred into the flesh made the body convulse for a moment, but the blade severed the arm effortlessly, if not neatly.
The Bickerman brothers continued this process on the other arm, Nate holding and Dan cutting. Airborne particles and blood sprayed onto the plastic of Dan’s rain suit. They then moved on to the right leg, but allowed the armless body to dangle with only one remaining leg until the head was removed, which proved more challenging to remove neatly compared to the limbs. There was no safe way for one man to hold the head as the other brought the monstrous saw into play. Instead, Dan had to sweep the spinning blade through the neck, pushing against the weight of the body until the head fell to the floor. After that, the remaining leg was removed from the torso and all parts were placed on a plastic tarp.
They repeated the process for the other four bodies, until the floor grew slippery with blood and filth and the air thickened with the co-mingled stench of blood and exhaust. After the last head was severed, Nate turned off the saw and set it down. It would need an extensive cleaning, as it was not designed to deal with the quantity of wet, particulate matter now clinging to it. Dan pulled of his now semi-opaque face shield and sighed deeply. They sat down on a pair of metal shop-stools, staring silently at the pile of disfigurement before them. After a few minutes passed, Nate asked,
“Well…do you want to clean them or wrap them?”
Dan barely hesitated.
“I’ll wrap them.”
“Figured you’d say that!”
“I cleaned the last five!”
“Yeah, but…not all on the same day.”
“So what difference does that make!?”
“Get the fuck out of here…”
“Alright, fine. Where are the buckets?
“Storage room.”
Nate slowly got up and walked through the door. He returned carrying a stack of five-gallon buckets and a foam kneeling pad. He set a bucket on the floor next to the first torso and kneeled down in front of it. Taking a short, sharp knife, he cut around the anus, forming a ring. He then cut a line from the anus all the way up to the solar plexus. Reaching into the opened abdominal cavity with both hands, he began to strip the torso of its viscera, dumping the intestines and other organs into the bucket.
As Nate worked at eviscerating the torsos, Dan carried out a large roll of chicken wire fencing, a pair of wire-cutters, and a roll of heavy baling wire. Methodically, piece-by-piece, he began wrapping the various parts in the wire and binding them tightly.

Tammi Posnoski remembered being angry. She was supposed to meet friends at some bar called Hotel Elmida in Wollsville. She was with her friend Anne. Where was Anne, now? She remembered that she fought with her boyfriend, Ray, earlier that afternoon. He had left to do something with his frat brothers, but she couldn’t remember what.
She remembered flashes of the bar- a dump. Filthy bathroom. Why did they want to meet here? A dark-haired guy buying them drinks. Very good-looking. She remembered getting very, very drunk. Anne falling into a van. An image of the bar’s crappy-looking sign in the night sky.
Now it was dark. There was something over her face, over her eyes, blinding her. She was vaguely aware of her jaw hurting from whatever was stuck in her mouth, pulled tight by a pressure around the back of her head. Her arms- she couldn’t move her arms or legs. Bands of pressure around wrists, elbow, ankle, and knees. She could feel movement and hear the sound and vibration of a vehicle. A smell. A stench. Rot. She thought of the bait her father used to use when cat-fishing. She still felt drunk, but with a different feeling on top of the alcohol. Slightly sick. Hard to think.
She rolled slightly with the movement of the vehicle. The chill of fear began to break openings in her stupor. And then her mind cleared.
Queasiness crystallized into nausea. Her stomach began to spasm. A movement swept her vision with the realization that she was choking on the vomit crowding her throat, blocked from egress by the gag in her mouth. Her body writhed, trying to get into a sitting position. She couldn’t breathe. White patches flashed in the black of her sight. The patches grew larger, and a ringing filled her ears.
Then the gag fell from her mouth and she could see through holes in the white field. She saw her vomit in the dim light, spattering the floor and also her legs. She was aware of being held upright in a kneeling position. Her stomach contracted violently, as though pushed up into her ribs by an invisible hand. She continued to retch, until only thick bile was produced, hanging from her lip.
Free from the blinding cloth, she looked down to see the course hands holding her shoulders. She looked up. She was in a van, on the floor. Two people, indistinguishable in the darkness, sat in driver and passenger seats. Someone, Anne maybe, lied bound on the floor with a dark cloth covering her head. Tammi tried to turn and see who was behind her, but immediately the cloth fell over her head again and the hands dropped her once again to the floor. Dimly aware that she was laying in her own vomit, she faded into unconsciousness.

Dr. Megan Boddington stared mutely at the members of the review board, her jaw slack.
“She’s-,” she struggled to speak, her hands shaking, “she’s being released when?”
“The first of next month,” Dr. Rooney said quietly. Rooney was somewhat portly, his red hair and beard graying.
“I-I-I do not believe that this is an- appropriate time for Ms. Young to be released.” Boddington’s widened eyes darted from one doctor to the next.
“Why not, Megan?” asked a small, birdlike woman. “We’ve had absolutely no problems with her. She’s expressed a great deal of remorse for what happened years and years ago. And she fully comprehends the nature of the post-partum depression that was the problem in the first place.”
“Sometimes. She understands it sometimes, Jane, not always. I know that- that she may go for months and months understanding it, but sooner or later she always lapses into these states in which she builds these bizarre explanations for everything that happened- and while in these states she most definitely does not show remorse for her actions.”
The other doctors fidgeted in their chairs and looked down at their notes. Dr. Jane Henry pursed her lips and then spoke.
“Megan- I’d like you to try and empathize with me here. Now…we’ve witnessed none of- rather, we’ve heard none of these fantasy stories that you’ve mentioned. Nor have you provided any tapes with any such content.”
“I’ve tried but- it’s almost as though she knows when she’s being recorded. I-“
“Maybe you’re trying too hard to see something,” Rooney said, eyebrows raised.

“That car’s slowing down,” Nate said, nodding towards the gray Cadillac past the property. They were loading fishing gear into a truck already packed with a different cargo. They had a nineteen-foot boat docked at Lake Salter and were packing all of the equipment needed to go night fishing. The car slowed, then returned to a normal speed as the brothers turned to look at it.

Tammi woke up to blinding white light. She closed her eyes against the glare. She tried to cover her eyes to block out the glare, but found her arms again restrained. This time they were bound not behind her back, but to either side. Her head throbbed with pain. Her ankles were also restrained, though this time in stirrups. Gynecological stirrups, she thought.
She screamed, a deep, wrenching howl from deep inside her lungs. Looking down, Tammi saw that she was naked beneath a bright spot light- her legs spread apart, a thick, greenish-brown slime drying on her thighs and stomach. She was sitting partially upright on a gynecological table, she realized. She screamed again, shaking violently.
Looking up, she saw another light, and another table about ten feet away. For a long moment, she stared at the moving figure without comprehension.
Her friend Anne was strapped to the exam table. She was unconscious. Between her legs stood a greenish-gray thing, inhuman though it stood on two legs, and as tall as a man. It’s skin, slimy, glistened under the light. It’s back was bent so that it’s head hung almost lower than its shoulders. It’s body looked soft, not fat like an obese person, but nauseatingly smooth. There was no hair anywhere on its body or head, only dark-green patches irregularly placed over its skin. Its expressionless face stared down at Anne, its eyes unblinking, huge and pale green. It’s fishlike mouth silently opened and closed, and its earless head projected neck-less from its body.
Tammi could no longer scream, as she was gasping for breath. She had first thought that this thing was raping her unconscious friend, but it was standing still and looking down at Anne. Then, slowly and very awkwardly, the creature climbed up and straddled Anne, so as to sit across her hips, its soft flesh almost oozing across the human body underneath it. Tammi thought it was male, but as it climbed up, it appeared to be sexless. There was a wet sound, and Tammi felt her skin crawl as something dark and eel-like slithered out of Anne’s body and wrapped itself around her thigh. The creature on top of Anne discharged a greenish-brown spray from somewhere in its groin, then the eel-thing unwrapped itself from Anne’s leg and slid between the creature’s legs, disappearing inside.
Tammi wanted to crawl away from herself, wanted to scrape the very skin from her flesh, but she could only stare up at the light and shriek endlessly, staring into the white light.

“Well, Jim, what do you think? Do we hit them?” Schmidt said, turning off the car in his driveway.
“Naah…we don’t even know anything about them,” Jim answered.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Schmidt scratched his chin, “You’re right.”
Jim sighed deeply, staring into the darkness of the sky.
“You know, I heard-,” he cleared his throat,”-I heard that, uh, they might release Chrissy.”
Schmidt’s head turned slowly to face Jim, his countenance expressionless. Jim continued,
“They seem to feel that she was suffering from, uh, post-partum depression when she killed Helen. But now…now they’ve decided that she is all better. She’s all better now!” Jim chuckled bitterly,” ‘Hey, I cut a baby out of my friend’s womb, but I’m all better now!” He shook his head convulsively. “I wonder what will happen. Jesus fucking Christ…I know she’ll come looking for me. She knows my address because she still writes me. Once in a while she manages to call me. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Anyone else who comes after me… I know how to get rid of them,” again the tired laugh, ”but her…shit-I just don’t know.
“He’s around, too, Schmidtey.” Schmidt fidgeted in his seat as Jim continued. “He’s around, too.”
“Where did you see him?” Schmidt asked quietly.
“At the park. I didn’t see him at first. I had gone for a walk and…I just sort of ended up there without realizing where I was heading. I was thinking about something…staring at the water. I looked around and I saw a shape standing next to a tree. I knew right away that it was him. He stared at me for a minute and I stared back. I swear Schmidt, if I had my gun right then,” he shook his head, “I would have had him. Cold. I would have got him, no question. Even with the people around the park, I didn’t care. I felt so fucking sick right then- and he knew it, too, because he smiled. He smiled at me with that weird mouth of his, laughing at me, taunting me.
“I started towards him. Not running just walking straight for him to see what he would do. I was gonna snap his neck if I got close enough. He just stood there, in the tree line, smiling, laughing at me. Then, when I was about twenty feet away, he turned and ran. He sprinted…incredibly fast. Ran into the woods and all I could do was watch him go.
“He’s waiting for her.”
“For who?” Schmidt said, failing in his attempt to sound inquisitive.
“For Chrissy. He’s waiting for his mother.”

The boat traveled moderately fast under the blackness of a new moon. The noise from the motor masked the sound of weighted objects breaking the surface. It was the deepest part of the lake, with ninety feet of water beneath the boat.
Nate and Dan continued to troll for several hours, though they did not check their lures or bait a hook the entire time. The lights on the boat cast green and red reflections on the surface as they traveled in slow, lazy circles.

Schmidt’s headlights lit up the doorway as Young walked into his house. Immediately the stench filled his nostrils. He could taste it. He clawed at the light switch with one hand and drew his .45 with the other. The room remained in darkness as he flipped the switch up and down. His gun up, he backed towards the open door. His knees buckled and the wind pressed from his lungs as a heavy mass slammed into him from the darkness. Off-balance, he fell to the floor. He felt an arm wrap around his legs. His gun was pinned under the weight of his attacker. Young pressed the muzzle into flesh and squeezed the trigger. The muffled thud filled the room. The automatic jammed, the weight preventing the slide from moving. His shoulders against the wall, Young kicked out with his legs and watched the shape fall into the illumination of the headlights.
It crumpled into a heap on the floor, whitewashed with light. The head hung limply on the neck, a mass of dark brown.
Young frantically worked the slide of the .45, ejecting the spent shell casing. A silhouette appeared in the doorway. He spun, aiming the gun at it, and the shape receded into the darkness.
“JIM!! Jim, it’s Schmidt!! Don’t shoot!!”
“Schmidt! I’m coming out!”

Young and Schmidt stood behind the gray Cadillac and stared at the house.
“They attacked you?” Schmidt asked.
“Yeah. But I got him.”
“You’re sure?”
Young hesitated.
“Yeah…yeah, I hit him, but…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you killed him?” Schmidt asked.
“No- yeah, I’m pretty sure I got him.”
“You’re pretty sure?”
“Yeah.”
Schmidt opened the trunk of the Cadillac.

Moments later, they re-entered the house with bright flashlights mounted on shotguns. Young entered first, the light beam cutting through the shadows. Schmidt stopped at the body fallen on the floor. Drying blood caked the entire head. Remnants of a gray beard fringed the broken remains of the face. It wore bib overalls saturated with filth and blood. It lay on its side, its neck bent at a strange angle. Schmidt nudged the corpse with the toe of his boot, and it rolled onto its back. One arm was missing. Stretched tendon hung out from the tatters of sweatshirt.
Young and Schmidt spun at the dragging sound coming from the kitchen, a dragging and the sound of something slipping on the linoleum. Schmidt tapped Young on the shoulder, pointing to himself and the far kitchen doorway. The both turned off their flashlights and crept forward. When Jim reached the doorway, he turned his light on and aimed at the thing on the floor. A moment later and Schmidt did the same. The two beams illuminated something dragging itself across the floor, a red smear leading to the dining room. It was a man, belly-crawling his way to the back door. A black raincoat covered his lower body, but no legs protruded from beneath.
“Fuck!!” the man barked in a gavel-laden voice. Slowly, he pushed himself up to rest on his forearms, then reached back and lifted the trench coat. His legs ended in shredded stumps of thigh-meat. A broken femur extended from one stump.
“Fuck!!” he rasped out. He turned, exposing white, gleaming teeth and a half of a dirty band-aid dangling next to a hole where his nose should have been. He squinted under the white light.
“It’s a cunt of a world! Isn’t it! A cunt of a world!!” He made a sharp barking noise and scrunched up his face. He continued to gnash out the sound, undistinguishable as laughter or aggression but indicating both.
“A CUNT…of a WORLD!!” Again the barking noise.
Schmidt and Young stood and stared at the crawling man for a long moment. Young finally turned away and walked down the hall to the bedroom, followed by Schmidt.
The flashlights revealed the overturned, slashed mattress. The articles and photos were gone from the walls. The dresser drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor.
They walked back out to the kitchen. The nose-less man was lying on his back, his face white with blood loss. The door hung open, leading to the yard in back.
“He was here,” Young said.
He stared out the back door into the night.
“You see something, Jim?” Schmidt asked. “Jim. Jim!”
Young stared outside intently. He stepped over the form on the floor and crossed to the door. Slowly, he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and stepped out. Schmidt watched him walk and stared into the yard at the end of the light. He followed him out, keeping a distance between them.
He was there, standing at the edge of the lights range. Small, like an adolescent, but vaguely misshapen. He backed up slowly into the field as Young walked forward, matching his pace, remaining visible and taunting his pursuers. The thunderclap of Schmidt’s shotgun cut into the night. The child dropped from sight into the field grass. Both of the men ran towards the field with raised muzzles.
Young reached the edge first.
“Did I get him?!” Schmidt called out as he ran.
“What!?” Young frantically searched through the waist-high grass.
“Did I hit him? Is there blood or anything?” as he came up beside him.
“No! No! Fuck…” he stared down at the crumpled grass and began to cry.

One week later, in a tar-papered cabin, Schmidt and Young stood by a table and chair. A man sat in the chair. He could have been called deformed, if his abnormalities did not follow a symmetrical pattern.
But for random tufts of hair on his head, he was bald. His scalp exhibited peeling, waxen skin flaked with scabs. An almost non-existent forehead sloped down to meet bulging and unblinking pale eyes. Bulbous lips rested above a receding chin. His skin had a dry, scaly quality to it. He wore filth-encrusted work shirt and pants, the original color of which was indistinct.
He breathed heavily in jagged gasps, each exhalation polluting the room with the smell of decay. He breathed heavily because he was being tortured, chained to the chair.
Two propane lanterns hung from hooks in the ceiling, casting a sickly yellow glow around the room. Schmidt leaned in the corner, his long, gray jacket buttoned to his chin. Young stood before the thing in the chair, a cattle prod in his hand. The blue arc of electricity raced between the contacts. A crisp sound cut into the wheezing of the prisoner.
“Where is he?” The prod crackled and Young touched it to the thing’s neck. It twisted and made a croaking sound, squirming to avoid the shock. Schmidt stared, his lips curled downward. His thick glasses reflected the light.
The thing made an unintelligible statement.
“Do better than that,” and again the shock.
“By-“ it strained to produce words, ”by Kamen Rud…”
“By what?”
“Kafman… Rud…”
“Kaufman Road?”
The thing made a nodding movement with its neck-less body. Young waved his hand towards the thing in the chair.
“He’s all yours Schmidty.”
Schmidt produced a short-handled sledgehammer. He stepped into the swing. There was a wet, muffled impact.
They took their two lamps from the ceiling and left the shack in darkness.

They found the house on Kaufman Road without much difficulty- a rotting heap of sagging walls, broken windows, and mold.
There was a new moon that night, allowing Schmidt and Young to hide in a rusting tool shed. The traffic of shuffling footsteps through the wet leaves occurred sporadically throughout the night. The smell of gasoline filled their nostrils, and they awaited discovery at any moment, their hands white-knuckled on their weapons. They held their breath each time another set of footsteps disturbed the silent chill of night.
They moved quickly in the pre-dawn light, sacrificing stealth for speed. Schmidt lit his torch as they reached the house. Young saw a broken basement window at ground level, lit his firebomb off of Schmidt’s torch, and tossed it through the window. It broke on the window frame, splashing the Styrofoam-thickened gasoline on the ground and wall outside.
The two ran around to the other side of the house, throwing firebombs through the first-floor windows.
“Take the front door!” Young said to Schmidt. His voice shook. Schmidt was wild-eyed, and sweat poured off of his shaven head. He spun on his heel and dashed for the front of the house. As Young approached the back, the door slammed open and three of the deformed river people lurched into the open. In the shadowy morning light, he watched as one bolted with an inhuman gait towards the river. Young lobbed his Molotov cocktail at the other two, realizing too late that it was unlit. He quickly un-shouldered his shotgun and fired three rounds at the fleeing figure. The other two were nearly upon him, their mouths making wet, crushing sounds. Their weapons were crude. One held a hatchet and the other a club of scrap metal. Their clothing displayed the rot of countless days wear.
Young fired on them at point-blank range, hitting the first one in the chest. The second one tripped over a root and sprawled on the ground. Young stepped forward and fired into its countenance, oozing from multiple boils.
He ran to the back door, firing at the approaching figures silhouetted in the doorway. He clawed for a road flare in his pack and lit it, using it to light another firebomb. He hurled the bottle into the darkness of the house.
An explosion of flame. Thick, acrid smoke. The stench of burning flesh, wood and plastics. Burning figures poured out of doorways. Out of windows. In the back of his mind, Young wondered where Schmidt was. He stood, frozen, as he watched the river people run past him, skin and clothing hanging from their bodies. There were children too. Young and old, they ran past him towards the river. Impossible, he thought, that so many should be in the house. He watched them run down the bank into the river to sink beneath the surface.
He was on the ground suddenly, feeling heat and coughing on smoke. One of them had run into him on the way out, knocking him down and falling on top of him. Young panicked, afraid that his firebombs would ignite from the thing’s burning clothes. He kicked it away as it mewled in pain. His hand clawed for his .45, then he fired three shots into its head.
He convulsed with pain. Flames licked along the sleeve of his jacket. He threw off the straps of his pack, loaded with ammo and firebombs. He tore off his burning jacket and threw it into the wet leaves on the ground. The fabric of the pack was burning. He grabbed it with both hands and ran towards the house.
The detonation sent a tremor through the ground. Young’s armless body flew backwards through the air and was stopped by the trunk of an oak. The back porch, already weakened from the fire, collapsed with the impact.
Schmidt ran to the back of the house to find a burning blast radius. A dozen or more corpses lay scattered and burning on the ground.
“Jim! Jim!” Schmidt ran from body to body, trying to see through the flames, stopping to look around and call out for him. He looked at the burning mass that was Young, unable to distinguish features as the flesh burned.
He squinted through the smoke into the distance. He could see someone standing. It was the size of a small man, but too small to be Young. Schmidt raised his shotgun, put his sights on it, and walked forward. It did not run or retreat but stood facing him. As he came closer, he could see that it was horribly burnt. Smoke rose from its reddened, peeling skin. Its body was sexless, but a swollen mass of fist-sized lumps covered its abdomen. Its belly hung down, huge and pendulous. One good eye stared into Schmidt’s face. It made a gasping sound and dropped to his knees in front of him. With gnarled hands, it dug its fingers into the skin of its belly. The fingers pushed and clawed at the skin. It tore jagged, bleeding rows into the skin, finally getting enough purchase to slip a hand under the skin.
Schmidt watched with his mouth wide open as it picked up a small, broken stick with palsied hands and slid it under the skin. It made low growling noises as it pulled on the stick, stretching the skin taut. With its free hand, it searched the ground, finally finding a rough rock. Schmidt stepped back as it began to frantically scrape at the skin with the rock, splitting the skin apart between rock and wood.
He looked around the wooded lot. Nothing else moved. The house was engulfed by flame. Dazed, Schmidt pulled a small knife from his belt and dropped it in front of the creature. It dropped the rock and tore out the stick. Picking up the knife, it turned it towards its belly, slicing a cross into the skin. Blood poured down its lower body into the leaves.
The skin expanded outwards, pressure released. The contents spilled onto the ground- bloody, fist-sized masses. The creature made shrill grunts as it emptied its belly, pressing in from the sides to slide the lumps out.
Schmidt felt his knees weaken as he saw that the lumps moved about on their own. He screamed a high-pitch, shrill cry. He fired into this mother and into the convulsing things on the ground. As the mother fell forward, he watched – as he reloaded- the things move. They looked like little heads, pulling themselves with a protruding appendage. They were latching onto the mother, dragging themselves onto her with what Schmidt could only think of as tongues. They fastened about her like obscene frui