Breeds 2 (5 page)

“How the hell do you know about that? About Muses?” Dale asked Johnny.

“Read about them.”

“You read about them.”

“Yeah.”

“For fun.”

“Yeah.”

“Like, in your spare time?”

“Yeah.”

“Goddamn,” Dale exclaimed in a whisper and dealt himself two cards.

“All right,” Cory exclaimed, inspecting his current hand. “All right, you bastards. Especially
you
, Blake. Let’s play some fuckin’ cards. Right here. Let’s throw down, goddamnit. Let’s fuckin’
roll
.”

“Thing is, them nine daughters
supposedly
…” Johnny emphasized with a lazy look around the table, “challenged the Muses to, like, a challenge.”

“They what who now?” Dale asked in confusion.

“I like women with hang,” Cyrus muttered, fumbling for a nacho and getting double-takes from both Cory and Dale.

“I thought the Muses were the pie bitches?” Cory asked, turning away from Cyrus and wanting clarification.

“Depends on who you ask,” Johnny replied.

“Well, I’m asking you.”

“I just said who the Muses were.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You weren’t listening.”

“Listen,” Cory smirked. “I know I’m high. And drunk. Whatever the word is that describes both of those together, well, I’m it. And just a little bit shit-faced
but
… I sure as hell was listening to you go on about Muses and daughters of some guy called Penis––”

“Pierus,” Johnny corrected while taking another drag.

“Like when she bends over for something,” Cyrus released into the mix, “and everything’s hangin’? Y’know? Just… swayin’.”

All talk about Muses and Pierus and such got placed on standby as Cyrus stole the floor. “Like… like in a tropical breeze, y’know, one that carries the scent of sweet illegal rum.”

“Stoned,” Johnny remarked without concern.

“Yup,” Cory agreed.

“Uh-huh,” Dale added.

“I like a girl with hang,” Blake said with a discerning nod. “My wife’s got hang.”

Dale felt his stomach rumble then, followed by an unsettling push toward the escape hatch of his colon.

“Whaddaya got there, black Blake?” Cory asked, choosing to get back to the game at hand.

“And I like fish,” Cyrus said thoughtfully.

“Anyway,” Johnny carried on, “these nine daughters, see, they wanted to be Muses. Musing was a pretty lucrative trade back then. Every parent wanted their daughters to be muses, right? They drove all the nice cars. And there were nine of these daughters to the muses’ regular three, so the girls were pretty sure they could kung fu their asses. So, anyway, they challenged the regular Muses to a
dance
off, right? To see who would be, like, the head bitches of musing. Who got to sit on the shoulders of hundreds, no, thousands… of taxpayers.”

Cory regarded his friend with stone-drunk bafflement.

“True story,” Johnny said, pointing his joint. “It was televised.”

“All across Greece?” Blake asked.

“Yup.”

“Think I saw that show.”

“They lost, too,” Johnny said. “And the whole works of them got transformed into urban hippos. And to this day, hippos are the most vicious bitches downtown.”

Cory leaned back and checked his hand as if holding a pocket watch. “Dunno where you come up with your shit.”

“Speaking of shit,” Dale stood and tossed down his cards, feeling the internal pressure build. “I’m out. Feel a caramel spritz coming on.”

“I like twist tops,” Johnny said, his face partially hidden in haze.

Cory rolled red eyes at Dale. “Don’t leave me.”

“Have to. At least five minutes.”

“You and me are the only sane ones left.”

Dale chuckled and headed for the can, a preventative hand placed across his bum.

“Hey, light a candle when you’re done in there,” Johnny yelled.

Dale closed the door just as Cory frowned at the others sitting around the table. “You bastards are
so
fucking high right now.”

“You think BC bud is better than east coast bud?” Johnny asked thoughtfully after the last hand, a hand where
Cyrus
had somehow won. That magical feat informed Cory that he had just departed Shit-faced Avenue and entered the realm of Mind Fucked.

“Ooooh yeah,” Cyrus chortled, teeth clamped.

“Hands down,” Blake added.

“Anything’s better than the government’s medicinal shit,” Cory muttered while shuffling.

Johnny stuck one then a second finger into his ear. He rooted around and grimly inspected the findings, before using the same two digits to dip and shovel a nacho into his bearded face.

Blake stood.

“Where you goin’?” Cory asked as he dealt cards.

“To open the door,” Blake reported, indicating Dale in the bathroom. “This place is gonna be rancid after he’s done in there.”

“Good idea,” Cory said. “That man deserves public recognition for what he does in there.”

Cyrus and Johnny surfaced from a mutual haze to mutter agreement. Blake disengaged himself from the table and stumbled.

“Watch yourself, man,” Johnny said.

Blake indicated he would do just that and went to the front door. He straightened upon reaching the door and turned the knob. Night air gushed into the cabin.

Cory shivered violently. “Jesus, don’t let too much air in here. Last thing I need to see are party darts on you guys.”

“You won’t see any on me,” Johnny said, inspecting his cards. “My chest hair pads everything out nicely.”

Cory convulsed again. “I didn’t need that. At all.”

He rose from the table and stumbled toward the woodstove. The fire needed another log. Cory lifted a forearm-sized chunk from a nearby pile, cracked the stove’s front lid, and idly glanced in the direction of the front door.

Blake stood there, holding a pose and gazing up at the night sky, the evening’s worth of smoke surrounding him like dreamy gauze.

Then a black streak blurred into him, yanking him from the picture and leaving a door slapping against the cabin. Just like that, Blake was gone, his dirty white-socked feet winking out of sight. An empty space framed by a rectangle remained.

Cory saw the whole scene and didn’t bat an eye. He calmly replayed the event in the hazy theater of his mind. He replayed it a second time, then a third just to be sure. He understood he was ridonkulously smashed, and knew that Blake could have simply stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Cory then considered the joint he left smoldering in an ashtray back at the table before the cabin door stole his attention once again.

“Hey,” Cory asked the others around the table. “You guys see that?”

The men sitting around the table looked back in stoned innocence while the fire before Cory demanded to be fed.

A flash of a second later, the wet sound of things being ripped free of the earth transformed their expressions to disbelief.

“The hell is––” Cory started.

A growl emanated from beyond the cabin’s interdimensional doorway. The men’s attention shifted at the sound, all except Johnny’s, who regarded his joint with suspicion. Cyrus blinked repeatedly, obviously sensing wrongness, and if his lids had been blinds, they would’ve been spinning at the top. He remained sitting, holding his cards like they were bulletproof bed sheets.

Cory headed for the door.

And soon stopped as the noise that emanated from beyond the open doorway made his heart hammer and his bladder tighten. Images of unwanted flowers––perhaps dandelions––being uprooted from a person’s front lawn by the fist-full sprang into Cory’s head, but whoever was doing the yanking was doing it right beside a microphone. His heart ready to rupture, he took three steps toward the commotion, unarmed, yet ready to lend any necessary aid to his friend.

A wolf appeared in the doorway, a
big
wolf, hunched over, the size of a freezer across the shoulders. Long, viscous lines stretched from its chin and puddled the front porch just as the raw septic smell of shit and blood flooded the cabin’s interior.

“Christ,” Cory croaked, stopping at the sight.

Jaws opened and the monster dropped a slab of meat onto the floor.

Meat that bled and wore clothing. The words dissolved in Cory’s throat, a half-fueled whimper.

The wolf lunged.

Inside the bathroom, Dale Hutchinson heard the crash-boom-bah and froze as if someone had superglued his hairy ass to the toilet seat. Outside the bathroom voices erupted into piglet squeals of terror, the most shocking belonging to Cyrus, who screamed
Oh Jesus!
just before a meaty thud hushed his voice. With an unused wad of toilet paper in hand, Dale tried to rise but the screams paralyzed him. Furniture crashed and splintered as if a centralized tornado had decided to renovate the inside of the cabin. Cloth shredded. Wood snapped. Metal groaned and clanged. The line of light marking the base of the bathroom door flickered and winked out entirely. One of Dale’s friends started sobbing, wailing, repeating
oh no, oh no
, until the voice was a wet gurgle, as if chugging an unending beer and unable to keep up with the flow. A bony snap straightened Dale’s back, staring eyes about to burst and arms braced against the bathroom’s enclosed walls.

Things quickly died down, enough for Dale to catch the distinct crack of vertebrae, then the vicious ripping of carpet off the cabin floor.
That
sound disturbed Dale the most.

The cabin didn’t
have
carpeting.

His jaws ached and he realized his mouth had been opened at its widest, as if at the end of a very long scream. He closed his trap and focused on the bathroom door, ignoring the fir planks and the mangy robe hanging from a hook.

A slow squawk got his attention as a chair was shoved aside.

Oh Jesus
.

Oh Jesus Christ our Savior
, Dale thought, eyes pinging inside his skull as if he’d caught every one of his toes under a ravenous lawnmower and watched the shreds being spat out the side.

Something
whuffed
.

Floorboards squeaked.

It was
still
inside the cabin. Dale clamped two hands over his mouth as his nose fired a double-barreled blast of snot over his fingers. He sat like that, the odd bubble bursting in his nostrils, crouched and strained to hear more.

Nothing could be heard, however.

A litany of curses streamed through Dale’s mind like an overloaded teleprompter, an uninterrupted line banged out by his supercharged heart. His lungs begged for more oxygen. His muscles thrummed with tension, poised to slingshot him out the bathroom door if, in the next few crucial seconds, something yanked it open. He leaned forward, meaning to hold on to the doorknob, and realized his jeans and boxer briefs remained puddled around his ankles. Dale yanked everything up without cleaning himself, eying the door and distrusting the silence beyond.

Another floorboard squeaked. A heavy
whump
made Dale crouch and flatten his palms against the walls. He waited, guessing that the last noise might have been close to the front door. The barest of moans straightened Dale’s spine and he ceased breathing. Blood thumped in his ears while, out there, he heard teeth crunching, smacking, that turned his protesting knees to soft butter. Against better judgement, Dale took a step to the door and pressed an ear against the smooth surface, his hand poised to grab the shining knob if needed.

He listened.

The moaning had stopped but he heard,
sensed
a monstrous presence, inside the cabin. An evil manifestation of flesh and bone and teeth, probably a lot of teeth, stalking the interior, and that thought brought an eye-bulging Dale to a gulp and a click as he realized his friends were all dead, killed while playing cards like any bunch of guys would when away from civilization. No more than what? Two or three minutes since he left for a meditative moment aboard the porcelain dunk tank. And now they were all gone. Most certainly all gone.

With his ear pressed against the wood, Dale winced in misery.

The doorknob was no more than a finger’s width from his hand and he felt a supernatural current buzzing through its metal, daring him to grab and twist and behold what was what. As self-destructively tempting as it seemed, Dale set his jaw and forced himself to wait, just wait, while every other cell in his body wanted nothing better than to flee for the hills and not look back.

Nothing moved outside. The disturbing snare of his heart filled his ears, which had to be one of the most unsettling noises ever in Dale’s panicked mind.

Then he remembered his shotgun. In his room. Hung lengthwise on a rack, right under a hunting rifle. Right across the hallway. Not even five feet. Five
inches
didn’t even seem like a safe bet with that thing out there. But the gun was there. Waiting. If he could get to it, he could speed-load a fistful of shells into the magazine and then… he’d face the nightmare. Or at least avenge his friends not so long gone from this earth.

Five feet to the room, followed by a hop and roll across the bed, and then a race to load the boomstick.

Hooked fingers loomed closer to the doorknob. Dale took a series of deep breaths that failed to calm him.

A low rumbling matched the mad drumroll of Dale’s heart, one that prompted him to flatten his head against the wood. His eyes squeezed shut and when he opened them, he cracked open the door and peeked outside.

And gasped.

Thick smoke flooded the interior, hiding its secrets in a dreamy, sepia haze. Fire flicked at the edge of the short hallway, where Dale knew a three-seater sofa lay against the wall. Smoke screened the center of the room but still he saw.

And moaned.

Limbs––forearms and legs––were strewn about in thick slicks that glistened, garnished with meat and tubing best left inside a person’s body. Pools thickened. A moory fog rolled across the floor, revealing what appeared to be a hairy coconut half, just for a second, before being cloaked once again. So shocking was the scene that Dale inhaled with reflexive fright, sucking down two lungfuls of near-corrosive vapor belonging to a ruptured septic tank. The stink choked him.