Eat'em (17 page)

Chapter 37

The first few times I took a life it was in self-defense. Whether a court would see it that way was another story, as I had broken into the homes of those I was forced to kill. Still, I could hide behind the guise of self-preservation. That excuse could no longer defend my actions. I no longer cared to defend myself as much as I wanted to destroy the Grotesque infection. Needed to destroy it.

I became the plague’s blight.

The bane of the curse.

In acknowledging my role as the scourge of the infection, I accepted a bleak fate. To rid the world of the parasite, I would have to die.

Heroes live on because they have an enemy that opposes them. I wasn’t after an enemy. I was after a greater corruption. I stood for the eradication of a disease that threatened to strip people of their very essence. I was pesticide. At best a pesticide preserves the crops from the epidemic, which is certain to bring upon destruction if gone untreated. Things never workout for the pesticide though. Its fate is sacrifice.

As surely mine would be.

I’d killed six people since committing to the cause. After Schrekengost and his curly-haired roommate there was Trevor’s manager from the gas station, a security guard at the Parks Mall, a Juggalo with a hatchetman tattoo, a fry cook from a hole-in-the-wall western flair restaurant called Pico Mundo, a woman sinking her teeth into the throat of her husband who was pulling weeds in their pristine garden, and the husband whose indecision in eating either me or his deceased bride gave me the split second advantage needed to bring him a swift death with the sharp end of a gardening spade.

Val reluctantly picked me up from each excursion. He shared my pessimistic outlook. Searching for death, I would inevitably find it.

I found a hiding spot behind a three-foot wall of white stones, which enclosed a farmhouse amidst a large grove. At the southeastern most part of Arlington city limits, where Grand Prairie and Mansfield came to a head, much of the area was either rural farmland or untouched woods. This part of Arlington laid about a two-hour jog from our old apartment in the central part of the city, where the university, bars, and sports stadiums flooded the streets with surges of traffic on a daily basis. Here the dirt road lie deserted, surrounded by tall oak trees fenced with barbed wire meant more to keep in livestock than to keep out trespassers.

Unmanaged foliage and a barn in ruins provided evidence that the sagging fence hadn’t been necessary in some time. Further down the dirt road Interstate 360 was incomplete. Beyond that was the more affluent part of Mansfield, with million dollar houses equipped with fully stocked bars, personal movie theaters and grand swimming pools designed to look like natural lakes and private sanctuaries.

From my cover behind the dilapidated wall, I could neither see the freeway nor the hidden wealth beyond.

Eat’em and I followed a Grotesque to the abandoned farmhouse. He was a long-necked fellow with a pronounced Adam’s Apple, giving him a closer appearance to Ichabod Crane than to the Headless Horseman. Either fit suitably into the setting of the foreboding wood on the outskirts of society.

“This is the end for you,” Eat’em said. I watched him dig into a nostril with his tail. “No longer will you impose on my ability to breathe, yes! Vile. Corrupt. Blockage of my sinus cavity. Prepare to face your doom!”

A strand of snot followed the tip of his tail from his face as he cleaved it in my direction and plucked the trail with two lengthy fingers.

“You know,” he said as he slurped the strand of tyranny into the smiling mouth of justice, “if you jumped around like they do we wouldn’t waste so much time in disgusting nature.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said.

I peaked over the wall, seeking my quarry. Ichabod-Grotesque disappeared up ahead, traveling in the direction of the vacant farmhouse, which he more than likely squatted from. I’d made a habit of tracking the infected before confronting them. Our short conversations ended with the death of Trevor. I’d learned everything I figured I would learn from talking. My new tactic was to keep to the shadows. My latest target was the next link in the chain connecting to Parsons. Parsons had been infected via an ex-girlfriend that took a French kiss a little too far. However, she had been infected by Ichabod. Ichabod was a graduate assistant at the university that taught her lab class. Apparently she had stayed late for some extra credit.

“Seriously, yes,” Eat’em said. He followed me over a fallen branch I used to climb over a dip in the barbed fence. “You never train. Not once.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said.

I walked slowly across fallen leaves. Any chance of a stealthy approach was betrayed by the harsh whispers of Fall. Each step crinkled and each crinkle revealed my encroaching presence.

“No amount of training could enable me to do what they do.”

“So you’re not even going to try?” Eat’em walked beside me on a low branch, swinging to another as I moved from tree to tree.

“What do you suppose I do?”

“Best way,” Eat’em said, “climb to the top and jump.”

“Jump from the top?” I asked. “Do you know what a forty foot drop would do to me?”

“If there’s no chance of failure, you’ll never do it, yes.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I think I’ll stick to the ground.”

“Wuss.”

Situated in a clearing was a shack encircled by refuse and broken tools from the lot’s previous owners. From there I could see the house the Grotesque entered. There was no front door and most of the windows were smashed and boarded up. Before barging into the front unarmed, I decided my best bet was to check the back for any other ways in or out.

I crept around the side of the shed and was greeted by the business end of a double barrel shotgun.

Chapter 38

“Give me one good reason not to put a round of buckshot into your skull,” said a man as equally opposing as the shotgun he pointed at my face.

His sunburned arms were tattooed and matted with silver hair, trailing up toward a muscular physique scarred with what might have been crudely removed tattoos or possibly the result of a severe burn. His ashy cheek pressed tightly to the stock, squishing his face toward eyebrows that at any moment might erupt with the emergence of a majestic butterfly.

“I can’t think of one,” Eat’em said, always the optimist.

“Well,” the presence of the double barrel put my brain at a standstill, “with the looming economic decline, and the increasing cost of ammunition, it might be more financially sound to beat me to death.”

No parasite corrupted the old man. Aside from the cancerous cells built up in an angry looking scab on the bridge of his nose, and a yellow cataract in his non-shooting eye, he was healthy as an old man gets. Definitely not the possessed sort I sought in the farmhouse I assumed was abandoned.

“What’s your name, wiseass?” he said.

“No, sir,” I said, “that’s not it.”

“What’s not it?” he asked.

“Wiseass, sir. It’s a fair guess, though. Good as any.”

He shook the gun to remind me that in his index finger he controlled the fate of my head and all its contents.

“My name is Jacob,” I said.

“Well, Jacob, you’re trespassing on private property,” he said. His voice sounded like it was the result of a two-pack-a-day Marlboro diet for the last century. Picture Sam Elliot, but homelier, and far less Hollywood.

“I didn’t know it was private property,” I said.

“Does this look like the mall, pretty boy?”

As flattered as I might have been to receive such a compliment, it felt a bit blemished, as if the class dunce were to praise my intelligence.

“No sir,” I said.

“You going to tell me what you’re doing out here, boy?” he snorted and hacked up a glob of phlegm. “Or you going to ‘yes sir, no sir’ me till I grow tired and shoot ya?”

“My advice,” Eat’em whispered, “go with the latter, yes. Ten-to-one he doesn’t have the guts.”

“To be honest, um…” I held my hand out palm up, a gesture intended to ask for the old man’s name.

“Terry,” he said. He kept the weapon trained between my eyes, but his brow softened.

“To be honest, Terry,” I said, “I followed someone out here.”

“You followed someone?”

“A lanky fellow,” I said. “Maybe you’ve seen him? He’s sick and he forgot his medicine.”

“I don’t right care if you got a sick friend or not,” he lowered the shotgun to my abdomen. It was a start. He snorted and hacked up a black glob of chewing tobacco. “You and your friend can get off my property.”

“No sir, he’s not my friend.”

I considered grabbing the gun, but didn’t think I’d win a scrap for it even if one of his scarred arms were tied behind his back.

“What he’s got,” I said, “there’s no cure for.”

“Thought you said he forgot his medicine,” Terry said.

“Yes sir,” I flashed a glance at his gun, which he promptly brought back to eye-level. “The kind of medicine you undoubtedly mean to give me with that there buckshot of yours.”

“You mean to kill him?”

I nodded.

“Ain’t nobody killing nobody unless it’s me,” he spit another wad of tobacco.

Eat’em yanked on my collar. He said, “Ask him if he has more of that black stuff, yes!”

“Well, sir, I wouldn’t have any objections to you curing the guy yourself,” I said, “but if it isn’t too much to ask, I’d prefer not to succumb to the same treatment.”

He kept the weapon trained on me as he rummaged through the pocket of a shredded pair of jeans that might have gone for a hundred-fifty dollars if sold at the right outlet. It suited the gray-haired, one-eyed, tattooed monstrosity more so than the adolescents that seemed to think pre-worn outfits were more-or-less in vogue.

“Probably the best treatment for you’d be an institution,” he said without so many consonants and an added word, which seemed to suggest the institution he referred to consisted of gratuitous sexual acts. He pulled out a cell phone – the kind that flips and couldn’t be purchased anywhere in the last ten or so years. It actually had buttons, which he had to press to dial. “We’ll see what the boys in blue gotta say about a couple trespassers wantin’ to kill each other on my land.”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said, holding my hand up for him to put the fossil back in his pocket.

“Boy, you take one more step forward and I’ll be calling a coroner instead.” The type of coroner he mentioned was of the spiritually forsaken sort.

“I bet you wish you’d listened to my advice on training now,” Eat’em said. “Yes? Then we wouldn’t have to listen to this stupid human’s vocalizations anymore. He’d said, ‘blah blah blah.’ And you’d been
ZIP!
Running on leaves. Now you’re going to have to go to prison. You know what Val says is in prison, don’t you, yes? That stuff you do with Dixie, but with dudes! Ugh… My suggestion, yes. Plug those cavities with a couple phalanges, bob and weave. I’ve only ever seen you use much of one hand anyway, yes. Waste for the other to even be there.”

“Hello, police,” Terry spoke into the phone.

I didn’t think the old man would do too much shooting if I cut tail, but I still needed to get a look in the house. I could outrun him and be hidden in the shadows of the woods before he could get a clean shot. No need to sacrifice a hand.

Before I could turn away or heed the demon’s advice, my opportunity was lost. He dropped the cell phone and the gun all at once. Blood oozed down his dirty tank top. Ichabod Grotesque had rounded the corner of the shed faster than I could react. He sank his teeth into the old man’s neck.

Chapter 39

On further inspection, Ichabod didn’t look much like Ichabod at all. Other than the defined Adam’s Apple, his hair, which I earlier mistook for the dark brown locks of the hero of Sleepy Hollow, was actually a sandy blond coloration. He was also a good foot too short to play Crane, who, if I recalled, stood quite higher than six feet and some odd inches.

Still, I’d much rather have faced off with a horseman than an acrobatic cannibal. For one, headless horsemen in particular, tend not to have spectacular eyesight. Horses themselves have a decent blind spot directly in front of them. And headless people don’t seem to see much of anything at all.

If what I knew of Grotesques was true, they managed to see through the eyes of many, and weren’t at all limited to the same nearsightedness disembodiment often came with.

This Crane looked more like a beach boy. His brightly colored outfit reflected the apparel of a Californian youth. I’d never been to the state myself, but I imagined them wearing the same floral patterned board shorts and three-sizes-too-loose T-shirts as the almond-eyed man-eater.

He winked at me as he dropped Terry to the ground with a thump. Then he wiped a trickle of blood from his lip and licked it off his palm for effect. I assumed it was for effect anyway, as he had a whole body still at his disposal if he was still feeling famished.

“Jacob,” he smiled. “It is so good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” I said, in spite of never having seen nor talked to him prior to the night. A tremor climbed up my legs, which I fought to subdue.

“One of you is lying,” Eat’em said.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” Crane said, popping a squat next to his victim, who writhed in a violent spasm before letting out a horrid breath that should have been, but wasn’t, his last.

“I think you’re the one lying, yes, Jacob?” Eat’em said.

“The set of
Friday the Thirteenth
seems like as good a place as any, right?” I said, failing to conceal my shudder.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t always look like this,” he held Terry’s head as a fierce convulsion wracked the old man’s body. “I used to live here. Long time ago. It was nice then.”

“I bet,” I said.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked. His nostrils flared in casual bewilderment. He acted as if we weren’t having this conversation over the twitching body of the current owner.

“I believe you just fine,” I said, “but when you say you lived here…”

“No, no, not…” he pressed a hand to his chest. “I did, however. The me you seek, I presume. I lived here with my wife and two children.”

His eyes dropped and his face grew more somber.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “This place looked quite different then. Not like the dump it is today. My wife kept a very clean home. She was a great homemaker. You look at it now, though. This…” he gave Terry a smack on the cheek. The old man had fallen unconscious once again. He looked dead. The Grotesque continued, “I’ll just say the house isn’t up to my wife’s standards.”

“What happened to your family?” I asked.

“They died.”

I didn’t care to press the surrogate infected for further information because I felt sorry for him, but I hoped some small detail would provide insight to where I should go if I happened to survive the encounter. I was hopeful that I was getting close to the top of the hierarchy.

“They couldn’t live with what you’d become, I’m guessing,” I said, hoping against hope he wouldn’t take my jest as enough reason to end the conversation prematurely.

“What I’d become?” he shook his head. “I couldn’t live seeing the world through their eyes.”

“That’s some scary stuff, Jacob,” Eat’em tugged at my ear. “Spoiler alert in case you didn’t catch that, yes. Ugly here just articulated he exterminated his family. No less, after turning them into uglies. He’s going to do so much worse to you, yes. My guess? Some sort of impalement.” Despite the elementary lesson from Eat’em, I had gathered that at this point I was not speaking to Ichabod; rather, he was some sort of conduit from whom I spoke to whatever self-proclaimed deity existed at the top of his hierarchy.

“I would like,” the Grotesque carried on, “if this wasn’t necessary for everyone, you know. But this world, Jacob, this world needs fixing. You see it. You see it too, I know you do. You think you’re so much different than me, but really we’re not. We’re one in the same. That’s why I want to keep you around, but sonofabitch if you don’t stop killing me. You could be there in the end if you just leave it alone.”

“The end?” I asked.

“Yes, Jacob,” he said, “the end of humanity’s madness.”

He stroked Terry’s hair. The old man’s body was twisted in much the same way I remembered Schrek’s roommate just weeks ago. His limbs contorted in impossible directions. The wound on the man’s neck had begun healing. The cataract faded from his bad eye. The scars on his arms and neck faded into the rest of his skin. He began looking younger and more vibrant.

“You take what I’m doing as the breaking of some sort of ethic law,” the Grotesque said as he continued to run his hand through the old man’s hair, which peppered with more black as it had before. The silver remained, but I swore he lost ten or fifteen years of age. Ichabod went on, “I have never killed anyone, Jacob. Can you say the same? I give life. You take it. Such is the balance of things. But I’m not mad at your misunderstanding, see, because you also just want the madness to end. And it will. Give it time and you’ll see. I want you to see. I want you to be there when I have created peace. People are capable of utopia. They just need the right guide.”

“Guide?” I asked. My eyes fell to the gleaming stock of the discarded shotgun. It lay under the old man’s mangled legs. “Is that the right word?
Control
sounds more fitting.”

“What’s the difference?” the blond looked up, a subtle grin at the edge of his lips. “God said give your hearts and minds to he who gives you life. Matthew knew he wasn’t the one living in his own flesh. I’m no different. Neither is he.”

He shook Terry, who blinked and shifted both of his perfect eyes in my direction.

“I am the giver of life,” they said together.

I dropped to the ground and grabbed the shotgun from under Terry. I scrambled on my back, rolled and held the shotgun like I’d seen done in the movies a hundred times. I didn’t know whether to pump it or if there was a safety nor where to find it if there was one. So I held my breath and pulled the trigger.

I am the giver of death.