The Cage (12 page)

It replayed in his mind—the struggle, his hands around her throat, her nightgown open beneath him, and as she thrashed, he was both horrified and excited to find that he was aroused again.

After, he’d called Tony, frantic and almost speechless from exertion and shock.

“Don’t sweat it,” Tony had told him again. “We’ve got a guy down on Roosevelt Avenue that can take care of these things. But it’ll cost you. From now on, when Mr. Marano wants a new piece of equipment, we’ll expect it for more than the standard manager’s discount. And we’ll want to help ourselves to your warehouse from time to time.”

Now the dream shifted from memory to the surreal, because as the gangsters were rolling the trash bags over her, Cecelia opened her eyes and spoke to him.

“I’ll be back, lover.”

Harold screamed, and was still screaming when the phone awoke him. He sat up, bolts of pain going off behind his eyes. He felt funny. Weighted. He fumbled for the phone in the dark.

“Hello?”

“Harold? It’s Will.”

“What time is it?”

“Umm…nine o’clock. Did I wake you?”

“It’s okay. What’s up?”

“Well, there’re two guys down here. I’ve seen them in the store before—customers of yours. They say they want a fifty-six inch Magnavox and to put it on the Marano account, but I can’t find any record of financing or—”

Harold cut him off. “Give them what they want. Set up delivery. I’ll take care of it when I come back.”

Will said something in reply, but Harold didn’t hear it, because the words were drowned out by a voice in his ear.

“Horsy ride, Daddy. Give me a horsy ride.”

Harold gasped.

“Harold, what’s wrong?”

“I’m alright, Will. Sorry. A spider ran across the bed.”

Another voice whispered in the dark. “I have your heart, Harold. Isn’t that what you used to tell me?”

“Is there someone else there, Harold? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Will, I’ve gotta go.”

He hung up, cutting Will off in mid-sentence, and turned on the light.

His wife’s face stared back at him from his chest.

“I have your heart,” the face on the tumor repeated. The voice was squeaky, but undeniably Marcy’s. The tumor had grown to the size of an apple, and now protruded from the area directly above his heart.

Harold grabbed the sheets, noticing again how heavy his hand felt. He glanced down, and his son smiled back at him. The tumor on his hand wore his son’s face, and a second one, the size of a toothpick, had begun to sprout from between his fingers. It looked remarkably like a miniature arm. It’s tiny fingers waved at him.

“Want to toss the ball around in the backyard, Dad?”

Harold swung his feet to the floor and tried to get out of bed. The pressing weight on his back almost bore him to the floor, and he heard Danielle’s voice again, pleading insistently in his ear “Horsy ride, Daddy. Giddy up!”

He crawled on all fours, while his family chattered at him in their cartoon voices. His wife shook her head back and forth, and seemed to stretch. The tumor grew bigger, now covering his breast.

With a sudden terrible clarity, Harold paused, and with his good hand, lifted the waistband of his boxer shorts and peeked inside.

Cecelia grinned back at him from the head of his penis.

“How may I help you?”

The man on the other end of the line was shouting above the clamoring voices in the background.

“My name is Harold Newton! I need to speak to Doctor Rahn!”

“I’m sorry sir, this is Doctor Rahn’s answering service. He’s unavailable for the evening. Is this an emergency?”

In the background, a child laughed, and the caller screamed in pain.

“Yes, this is a fucking emergency! Tell him we have to cut the tumors out! We’ve got to remove them!”

“Please calm down, Mr. Newton. What seems to be the trouble?”

The only answer was a long, anguished howl, and more laughter.

“Please hold the line, Mr. Newton. I’ll get an emergency operator on the line for you and send help to your location.”

“No time! I’ll have to do it myself! Please hurry! Tell them—”

The line went dead.

When the paramedics and police arrived, they found Marcy Newton and her children watching television in the living room, along with a woman they identified as a friend of the family, a woman named Cecelia Ramirez. There was no sign of Harold, and when the police returned the next day for further questioning, the family and the Ramirez woman had vanished as well.

I wrote this for an anthology about murderous families. The editor requested a story in which one family member killed another. Unfortunately, the anthology project never came to pass, and, as I said in the story notes for
The Cage,
I instead published this in my long out-of-print short story collection
Fear of Gravity.
As an early tale, this was the first time I used the plot device of someone murdering their loved ones, but it’s a theme I returned to years later in a short story called
“Bunnies In August”
(which can be found in Deadite Press’s edition of
Tequila’s Sunrise
). Both stories were distinctly uncomfortable to write, which is one of the hazards of writing horror fiction for a living, I guess.

The characters of Tony and Vince, their mysterious boss Mr. Marano, and the “guy down on Roosevelt Avenue” have only a small walk-on roll in this tale, but they’ve had much bigger parts in several of my other works, particularly the novels
Clickers 2
and
Clickers 3
(both co-written with J.F. Gonzalez), and the short stories
“The Siqqusim Who Stole Christmas”
and
“Crazy For You”
(the latter of which was co-written with Mike Oliveri).

Speaking of old stories, here’s one from the vaults…

There was something wrong with the back of her head.

The screams were distant now, buzzing in the back of Jack’s conscious like mosquitoes. The ringing in his ears drowned out the world. Behind the ringing, his pulse pounded out an erratic beat. The echo of the shotgun still reverberated around the classroom.

Again and again. Two more times in quick succession.

That’s not an echo
, Jack thought.
Nick is still shooting.

Something was wrong with the back of Gina’s head. Cradling her in his arms, Jack tried to fight the safe, comforting confusion settling over him and figure it out. Her long, honey-blonde hair was crimson now. He didn’t like what she’d done with it. Why would she change it without letting him know? They were married. Shouldn’t she want his opinion? He winced when he touched it. His hand came away sticky, like tree sap.

Another shot from behind him, then one more.

On Gina’s desk, was a picture of the two of them at Niagara Falls. There was his proof. Her hair wasn’t red in their honeymoon picture. Just two smiling people. Happy. In love. Next to the picture frame was a half-eaten stick of celery and a ceramic salt shaker with “World’s Greatest Teacher” emblazoned on it. Fragments of a shattered coffee mug lay scattered across the desk, marking the passage of a shotgun slug on its way to meet his wife.

Jack gazed back down at Gina, shaking her lightly in his arms.
Not too hard,
he cautioned himself.
After all, she is pregnant.
He desperately wanted her to wake up so they could escape. He needed to get her and the baby both to safety.

There were sirens outside now, and somebody moaned from the hallway. Through the ceiling, he heard the heavy thrum of a helicopter.

Jack turned his attention back to his wife. Greenish-gray pulpy things were splattered across the chalkboard where she’d been standing when he’d chased Nick into the classroom. He didn’t want to look at those. He was afraid that they might belong to…

Jack howled, remembering.

Jack gently laid Gina on the floor and turned, timidly peering out from behind the desk. Nick was near the back of the room, walking down the next row. Only a few of the kids were actually screaming. Many more sat in an emotionless state of calm, gazing at Nick with cold, unfeeling eyes. Peggy Lemon glared at him from the floor. Nick placed the barrel of the shotgun against her head and pulled the trigger.

Jack winced, shutting his eyes again as bits of Peggy ran down the wall. The image burned itself into his brain. Blood and more of that same greenish-gray material.

Could that be right?
He wondered.
Brains aren’t green, are they?

Glenn Rutherford chose that moment to make a dash for the door. In one fluid movement, Nick spun and fired into his back. Glenn stumbled a few more feet before crashing to the floor. The screaming continued.

“Shit,” Nick said to the room, walking on down the aisle. “He wasn’t one of you. See what you things made me do?”

He paused, glancing at Teri Johnson, and then moved on to Justin Miller. Justin, who had won every fist fight he’d ever been in since the second grade, sobbed loudly and held his copy of
MOBY DICK
up in front of his face with trembling hands.

“Don’t even front, mother-fucker,” Nick said. “You’re not Justin.”

Immediately, the frightened pleas ceased. Lowering the book, Justin glared at him from over the top of the cover, and then threw back his head and emitted a high-pitched, shrill cry, full of anger and contempt. Another blast, and both the book and the flesh behind it disintegrated.

Jack stepped out from behind Gina’s desk as Nick poked Eddie Blumenthal with the barrel of the shotgun. A dark stain appeared on the front of Eddie’s jeans and he began to whimper.

“Nick,” Jack pleaded. “Don’t do this! Just don’t…”

“Are those real tears?” Nick spoke softly, as if to himself.

Using the shotgun, Nick motioned for Eddie to leave. At that moment, star quarterback Ryan Hadley emitted a horrible shriek identical to the one Justin had made, and bore down on Nick. The young man pulled the trigger and a hole erupted in the football player’s mid-section. Ryan stared down at it calmly, his expression passive. Then he grasped for the weapon while Eddie dashed into the hall.

“They’re not human,” Nick shouted. “But bullets kill them. Salt and bullets.”

Nick wrested the shotgun away from Ryan and fired. Ryan’s head exploded.

Nick glanced back at Jack. “Salt and bullets, Mr. Madison. You’ve gotta believe me.”

“I believe you, Nick.” Jack crept toward the gunman. “I believe you. They hurt you, picked on you. Just put the gun down.”

“This isn’t about them fucking with me,” Nick yelled. “They aren’t us! Listen, Mr. Madison. Peggy, Justin, Ryan, my parents, your wife,
none of them are who we think they are
!”

Nick placed the shotgun on an empty desk and cocked his head as if listening for something. Then he looked out the window. The room was quiet now. Jack followed his gaze and frowned at what he saw. There should have been panicked kids streaming out the doors to the safety of the police barricade. Instead, they walked calmly in a slow, straight line. There were no news vans or hordes of reporters and camera crews milling about. Even the police and S.W.A.T. team behaved irrationally, going about their business with an almost lackadaisical demeanor, as if it was a normal day.