Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (17 page)

The King went out. It was suddenly over, without ceremony or celebration. Out, once and for all. There was no cry.

Ron left the stone where it lay, half buried in the face of the beast. He stood up groggily, and felt his head. His scalp was loose, his fingertips touched his skull, blood came and came. But there were arms to support him, and nothing to fear if he slept.

It went unnoticed, but in death Rawhead’s bladder was emptying. A stream of urine pulsed from the corpse and ran down the road. The rivulet steamed in the chilling air, its scummy nose sniffing left and right as it looked for a place to drain. After a few feet it found the gutter and ran along it awhile to a crack in the tarmac; there it drained off into the welcoming earth.

Wishbones
Cherie Priest

At the Andersonville camp there is a great, stinking dread. The Confederates don’t have enough food of their own, so they sure as hell aren’t feeding their prisoners of war; and the prisoners who aren’t wasting away are dying of diseases faster than they can be replaced. Here, the world smells like bloody shit and coal smoke. It reeks of body odor and piss, and sweat.

South Georgia is nowhere to live by choice, and nowhere to die by starving.

The remains—the bodies of the ones who finally fell and couldn’t rise again—they lie in naked piles, leather over skeletons as thin as hat racks. They lie in stacks waiting to be put into the ground. They collect in the back buildings because no one is strong enough to dig anymore, not blue nor gray.

This does not explain why, at night and sometimes between the watches, the piles are shrinking.

Some of us thought, at first, how people were hungry enough that even the old meat-leather on the bones out back . . . it might be better than nothing. We talked amongst ourselves in riddles that rationalized unthinkable things. We wondered about our friends and fellow soldiers who were dead there, piled like cordwood. We said, of old Bill this—or old Frank that—how he’d wish we weren’t so hungry, if he were still here. We agreed, we nodded our heads, and we thought about how we’d make our secret ways back to the long, low shed.

But best as I know it, no one ever worked up the courage to do it. No one took any knives and crept back there, away from the guards who were half-starved themselves. How would we have cooked it, anyway? How do you smoke or carve a human being, an old friend?

Even so, the numbered dead began a backward count. One by one, the bodies went gone, and when fifteen or twenty had most definitely been taken, or lost, that’s when we began to hear the noise at night. It was hard to calculate, hard to pinpoint. Hard to explain, or indicate.

But it rattled like the bones of death himself, beneath a robe or within loose-hanging skin. It wobbled and clattered back behind the sheds where the dead were kept.

It walked. It crept.

It gathered.

“Pete’s Porno Palace, this is Scott, how can I help you?”

“Jesus,” Dean shook his head. “Pete is going to fire your ass one of these days.”

Scott wiggled the receiver next to his head and grinned. “Pizza Palace, ma’am. Of course that’s what I said. Best in Plains, don’t you know it? And what can I get for you today?”

“Jesus,” Dean mumbled again and walked away. He untied his apron and wadded it up around his hand, then left it on the counter. His cigarettes were in his jacket pocket, hanging by the back door.

He took the smokes and left the jacket. Dead of winter in south Georgia doesn’t usually call for anything heavier than a sweater, but sometimes when you own jackets, you just want to wear them—so you wait until it’s barely cold enough, and you drag them out anyway.

So the jacket stayed on the peg and Dean stepped outside.

Dark was coming, but not bad yet; and the backwoods pitch black would hold off for another hour at least. Even so, when he struck the wheel of the lighter the sparks were briefly blinding. Maybe it was darker already than he’d thought. Or maybe he should quit working double shifts, no matter how cute Lisa was, or how hard she swung her eyelashes at him when she asked him to cover for her.

He wrapped his lips around the cigarette and sucked it gently while the flame took hold. The bricks of the old pizza joint were almost warm against his back when he leaned there, beside the back door, facing the dumpster and the edge of the woods.

A crackling noise—small footsteps, or shuffling—rustled underneath the big metal trash container.

“Scram,” Dean commanded, but the soft crunching continued. He reached down by his feet and picked up the first thing he felt—an empty can that once held tomato sauce. He chucked it like a knuckleball and something squeaked, and scuttled.

“Stupid raccoons. Rats. Whatever.”

“One of these days,” Scott slipped through the doorway and shimmied sideways to stand next to him. “One of these days, it’s going to be a bear, and you’re going to get your face chewed off. Give me one?”

Dean palmed the pack to the delivery driver. “Help yourself. Bears. Stop shitting me. You ever see a bear out here?”

“No. But I’ve never seen a submarine, either, and I believe they exist in the world, someplace.”

“You do, huh?”

“Yeah. Seen pictures. Anyway, I’m just saying, and shit, it’s dark. We need to put a lamp out here or something. Can’t see a damn thing.” He lit a cigarette for himself and passed the pack back to Dean, who set it down on top of a crate.

“You got somewhere to go?”

Scott nodded. “Two large sausage and mushrooms. Going towards no man’s land, out towards Andersonville. Fucking hate that, driving out there.”

“Why?”

He popped his neck and sighed, taking another drag. “I always figure that’s where I’ll get a flat tire, or that’s where the transmission will finally drop out of the Civic. It’s only a matter of time, man, and I know my luck. It’ll happen there.”

“So what if it does? You’ve got a cell. I’d come and get you, or Pete would.”

“I don’t like it, is all. My sister’s boyfriend, you know Ben, he used to live out that way, and he talked about it like it was weird. You know. Because of the camp.”

Dean leaned his head back. “Oh yeah. The camp. I guess, sure. That could be weird. I think it’d be worse to live up north, near the battlefields. You hear cannons and artillery and shit. The camp was just . . . I don’t know. Jail for POWs. And it’s a park now. You seen it? It’s all pretty and mowed.”

“Man, people
died
there.”

“People die everywhere.” Dean crushed the cigarette against the wall, even though it was only half smoked.

Henry saw it first. He said he saw it, anyway. He said it was there, back by the sheds where they stored up the dried out dead until they could be dumped into a pit. According to him, it was a man-sized thing with black hole eyes and no soul inside it. According to him and his starved-up brain, the thing moved all jerky, like it wasn’t used to having limbs. Like it wasn’t used to having legs, or feet, or nothing like that.

Like it was man-sized, but no man.

“It staggers,” Henry said. “It shuffles along and it takes them—it pulls them out the low windows, pulls them out in pieces and it, Jesus Lord, amen.”

“What’d you see, anyway?” we asked, all gathered around close.

“It had an arm or something. A leg maybe. We get so skinny you can’t tell, by looking in the dark. You can’t see if that’s a hand or a foot on the end of it, just that it’s long and there’s a joint in the middle. But the thing I saw, it had a limb of some kind, and it didn’t bite it, didn’t eat it or anything like that. It peeled it, just like a banana. It used these white, long fingers to pick the skin and just strip it on down until there was nothing there but bone.”

The rest of us gasped, and one or two of us gagged. “Why?” I asked him.

“I haven’t the foggiest. I haven’t any idea, but that’s how it happened. That’s what it did. And then, when it finished yanking the skin away, it hugged on the bones what were left. It pulled them against its chest, and it’s like they stuck there. It’s like it pulled them against himself and they stayed there, and became part of him.”

“Why would it do something like that—and better still, what would do something like that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and he was shaking. “But I’ll tell you this—I’d gotten to thinking, these days, that maybe dying wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. You know how it is, here. You know how sometimes you see another one drop and you almost feel, for a few minutes, a little envy for him.”

“But not now,” I said.

“No, not now.”

“Lisa called in again,” Scott said, putting the phone down and looking like he wanted to swear. “Third time in two weeks. Remind me again why she’s still on the payroll? She’s not
that
hot.”

Dean shrugged into his apron and kept one eye on the cash register, where Lisa usually worked. “She’s been sick, I think. Something wrong with her. She’s been throwing up; I heard her in the bathroom a couple of days ago. That means we’re short again, right?”

“You’re not going to cover for her this time?”

“Can’t.” Dean adjusted the temperature dial on the side of the big pizza oven and felt a kick of heat when the old motor sparked to life.

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Whichever. I’ve got things to do tonight. I covered her with a double the last two times. You take this one.”

“No. And you can’t make me.”

“Well then, I guess they’ll be short tonight. It can’t always be my problem,” he complained, even though he knew why everyone acted like it was. He and Lisa had gone on a couple of dates once, and everyone treated them like it had been a secret office romance or something.

But Pete’s wasn’t an office, the dates hadn’t been secret, and there wasn’t anything much in the way of romance going on. Dean liked Lisa and he called her a friend, but it didn’t seem very mutual unless she couldn’t make it to work. He wondered if she was really sick and hiding it, like it was something worse than the flu.

The phone rang again as soon as Scott put it back on the hook.

“Christ,” he complained. “We don’t even open for another ten minutes. You answer it.”

“No. You get it. If it’s Lisa I don’t want to talk to her. She’ll try to rope me into covering for her, and I won’t do it.”

“Fine.” He lifted the phone and said, with his mouth too close to the receiver, “Pete’s Pizza Place, would you like to try two medium pizzas with two toppings for ten bucks?”

Dean walked away, back towards the refrigerator. He yanked the silvertone lever that opened the big walk-in; he stepped inside took the first two plastic cartons he found—green peppers, and onions, respectively. Both sliced. Whoever had closed had done a good job, he thought. Then he remembered that he hadn’t gone home until one in the morning, and that the handiwork was his own.

“I’m here too damn much,” he said to the olives. The olives didn’t answer, but they implied their agreement by floating merrily in their own juices.

He stacked the olives on top of the green peppers and onions so that the three containers fit beneath his chin. With his hip, he opened the door again and carried the toppings out to the set-up counter and began to lay them out.

“Fucking
A
,” Scott swore, still scribbling something down on the order pad kept next to the phone. “Another one.”

“Another one what?”

“Another delivery, all the way out in Andersonville.”

“That’s not that far.”

“Yeah, well. You know why I don’t like it.”

Dean cocked his head, dropping the olives into their usual spot with a sliding click. “Because you’re a superstitious bastard?”

“That is correct, sir. It’s the same house, I think. I told the guy he couldn’t have his order for another hour at least, but he didn’t care. So. Fine, I guess. I’ll drive it out once we finally get open, and at least it’s still daylight. Where’s Pete?”

“He’s not coming in until noon. He’ll be here then, though.”

“Okay. Cool. So it’s just us until then?”

“Yep.” Dean abandoned the conversation for the refrigerator again. This time he emerged with crumbly sausage balls and a fat sliced stack of pepperoni. He wasn’t concerned about the lack of help; they’d opened the store alone before, and it wasn’t too bad.

“I thought I heard someone out back, a few minutes ago. I thought maybe it was Lisa, but I don’t know why.”

“Lisa just called in, though.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t know why I thought it was her. It turned out to be nobody, I guess.” He stopped talking there, even though it sounded like he wanted to say more.

Dean dropped the pepperoni rounds into their appropriate spot and wiped a little bit of grease on his apron. “Out back? By the dumpster?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it was a bear.”

“You’re an asshole. It wasn’t a bear.”

“It wasn’t Lisa, either.”

“Smelled like her.”

Dean frowned. “What?”

“It smelled like her, I think that’s what it was.” Scott tweaked the pen and the order pad between his hands and leaned back against the counter. “She wears that rose perfume sometimes, she puts it in her hair.”

“How often do you get close enough to tell?”

Scott slapped the order pad against the counter and left it there. “You know what I mean—she wears it strong because she doesn’t want her mom to know she smokes. You can smell it in the back, in the kitchen, when she goes through there to take a break.”

“I know what you mean, yeah. Okay.”

“Well, that’s it. That’s what I smelled. But she wasn’t there.”

“Nobody was there.”

“That’s what I said. Nobody was there. But I felt like someone was watching me.”

Dean raised an eyebrow that didn’t care one way or another, and went back towards the refrigerator for another armload of toppings. “Must’ve been that goddamn mythical bear.”

The thing out back, behind the sheds, it’s getting bigger. Charles has seen it now, and the Sergeant too—they both say it’s bigger than a man, and either Henry’s been lying or the thing is getting bigger.

We talk about it more than we should, maybe. But there’s nothing else to talk about, except how we want to go home and how much we’d love a meal. So we tell each other about the thing like it’s a campfire story, as if we’re little boys trying to scare each other. Except we don’t want to anymore, really. We’re scared enough already, and now we’re just trying to understand what new, fresh horror has been imposed upon us.

As if this were not enough.

We are all so hungry, and we know there’s no prayer for food since our captors haven’t got any either, even for themselves. If the guards can’t feed themselves, then we prisoners are done for.