13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors (14 page)

“
Glock 17. It’s
live.”

He unwrapped the gun. His voice was
low and flat. “Forty-five Colt. Which one do you want?”

“
I don’t know how to use
this.” I handed him the gun.

Kenny holstered the Glock in his
waistband, and held the forty-five at his side as we took slow
steps toward the house.

Our headlamps swept across the
kitchen, revealing punctured drywall, and shattered light fixtures.
Shards of busted dishes covered the floor.

The basement door was cracked, and the
frame above was chunked away. The chupacabra had gotten too big for
the house. From his spiny black head to the last thorn on his tail,
he was as big as my Jeep. He tore through the house. That the
basement stairs remained usable was a miracle.

A light was on. I called out for
Strings.

I turned to Kenny. He was sweating. He
shook his head. “This is unreal.”

“
Strings,” I shouted.
“Yo!”

My heart raced with each slow footstep
and my nose and eyes started to burn. The odor and the heat nearly
caused me to pass out. I pulled my T-shirt over my nose.

Kenny gripped my shoulder.

“
What’s that?” he
whispered.

I stopped and tried to quiet my
thundering heart. I couldn’t hear over it. Kenny and I crouched low
and still.

When I heard it, I looked up at
Kenny.

He nodded grimly and urged me with a
chin motion to continue down the stairs. My heart beat louder and
faster when he raised the gun to his side.

Strings lay pitched across Pamber’s
twisted legs, holding her pale hands in his long red fingernails.
Her upper-body faced opposite her lower half. She slumped against
the wall, bleeding from empty eye sockets. Her jaw was gone.
Threads of saliva and blood, and splinters of white bone remained.
Strings gasped for air between fits and released a throaty
unnatural yowl on exhale.

Kenny stepped over me and pointed the
forty-five at Strings.

“
What the fuck,” he
said.

Tiny sharp spines, like quills,
pressed out of Strings’s skin below his neck, and down into his
shirt. A thick mat of wiry fur covered his arms, concealing his
tattoos. When he finally turned to us, his yellow eyes tearful and
swollen, he was nearly unrecognizable. He blinked and a white film
covered his eyes. He blinked again and the playful eyes of our
youth flashed back at me. For a moment I felt weightless. My heart
sank when the white returned to his eyes and stayed. That’s when I
knew he was gone for good.

Kenny and I moved to the far wall. He
held the gun in both hands and leveled it at Strings.

“
We have to kill him,”
Kenny said. His voice shook. “We gotta do it.”

“
I know.”

Kenny directed me to stand
back.

I turned and ran up the stairs and hid
behind the door.

I sat down and pressed my back against
it. I held my knees to my chest.

The first shot made me jump out of my
shoes. I fainted after the second shot fired.

● ● ●

TWO
weeks later, we had a service for Strings in Kenny’s backyard.
We gathered under a giant silver maple. Strings had fallen from its
bare branches one winter and broken his arms. Maria was there,
looking stylish in black with a touch of flair. She kept her hand
on my shoulder and rubbed my back whenever I teared up.

Shortly after his death, the spiny
quills along his back had fallen away almost immediately, and the
fur covering his body shed in clumps onto the basement floor. We
hoisted him onto the workbench. I touched his face. His snout
returned to the nose I remembered. When I lifted his arm, a long
red fingernail dropped onto the floor. I reached down to pick it up
and cut my hand. It was as sharp as glass. I carefully slid it into
the side pocket of my cargo shorts. Eventually everything that was
monstrous about him disappeared until all that remained was our old
friend.

Kenny and I sat near Strings for a
while with our hands on his chest. We said goodbye and sorry. And
then we set the house on fire.

At the service, Kenny’s uncle showed
up in vestments and spoke vaguely about Strings’s spirit, and about
how his work on earth was done, and that concluded the “formal”
service. The gathering soon morphed into a party; much like the one
Kenny arranged that night I caught up with Strings.

I walked Maria back to her
car.

“
I’m sorry about Strings,”
she said, as she leaned against the side of her car and brushed an
errant lock of hair away from her face. We’d been up all night
talking and crying, and yet she looked beautiful. I ran my hand
down her bare arm. She was headed home, but in less than a month,
she’d be moving to Boston, where she would live with her sister
while studying for nursing school.

I never told her what happened to
Strings or how he died. She, and everyone else, believed he died in
the fire. And I never mentioned the chupacabra to her again. I
didn’t want her to move to Boston, but our little section of Queens
was not safe. It was still out there.

Maria grabbed my shirt and pulled me
in close for a kiss.

“
You gonna be
okay?”

“
Eventually,” I
said.

She slid into the driver’s seat and
rolled down her window.

“
Call me if you need a
ride.”

“
I will.”

She studied my face. “Come over here,”
she said. “This has been driving me crazy all day.”

I leaned in toward her. She again took
a handful of my shirt and pulled me close to her.

“
What’s going on here?” she
said.

She licked her thumb and touched it to
my eyebrow and used it to tame an unruly wire of hair.

“
You can let yourself go
when I’m gone, okay?”

I took a moment to catch my
breath.

“
I promise,” I
said.

She smiled, touched my hand, and then
drove away.

Watching her leave was like watching
everything burn. I stood on the sidewalk, not sure what I was
waiting for. For some signal of the monster’s return or its death?
I would never be the same. After a while, I realized it was
pointless to stand there. Who knew how much time I had
left?

10.
ONE AND DONE

Scott Clark,
Scotland

HIT
me.
Those two exact words and it’s
always been like this. Same place every week, same tune, again and
again; hit me. I fucking dare you.
Hit
me,
a fist like a train.
Hit me,
a face like
nothing you’ve ever seen, all mashed and pink with scars.
Hit me,
I’m waiting for
that fist to push my teeth into my mouth, for the sweet, sweet
taste of red and the colour of blood on a white ring floor, like
roses thrown on a stage.

This one’s not as clever as the rest.
His eyes are too close together, and he seems more involved in the
charade of a fight rather than the actual white flash, red taste,
thump down feel of it. Shame, mind, ‘cos he’s in good shape. I
mean, if I were a normal person and I met him at the end of a long
dark alley, then I’d probably shit myself.

WOOSH
! A fist flies by. Not a hair on my head quivers. I don’t bat
an eyelid. Come on, you useless bastard, do some damage. Do some
damage and hit me. Don’t think, don’t compute, let that shoddy wee
fist fall into orbit and take its natural course.

The crowds screams blue murder; they
want a piece of this guy, too. Ragged faces, polished old fighters,
big men in wee suits, the relics that get wheeled out once every
now and again for the old exhilaration game. Too much of this and
they’d conk out, wee hearts would just stop and never get back to
it. Girls, be them plastic wives, or wooden girlfriends, usually
big tits and thick waves of blonde hair, hang off the old bastards
like jewellery. Not to say all of them are taken, mind.

Loads of girls just come for the buzz.
Hundreds of them. Even if you lose, you’re sure of your hole. Small
consolation. So that’s the first thing you smell when you walk into
rooms like this; women. Perfume, clouds of the stuff, swirlin’
around the place getting everyone high but it doesn’t last long
‘cos then it’s the sweat in the air. The reek of adrenaline, of wet
fur and bared teeth. Smells like that don’t sting the nostrils,
they strip them bare so it’s someone else’s stink, all the salt and
that, and it’s on your nerves. It’s in your pores.

Fuck, all this nonsense and I lose the
ball for a moment. He just about has me, so I make a quick
recovery, let him know I’m back on form. Snap to the solar plexus,
then dart in for a jaw shot. The bastard dodges it and I’m below
his arm and the stink gets worse and the crowd hums like a thousand
bumblebees and then his eyes swing round to mine before anything
else.

Hit me. Hit me
now.

He does. The fist comes
round on circular trajectory, like a comet around Saturn, and all I
do is relax everything ready for the hit. Still, the old body
focuses all energies on the ribcage; protect the heart and all
that. But it’s ok ‘cos that’s not where he’s headed. It’s uptown
he’s after and he can have it. Flesh on flesh, but the sound
doesn’t arrive yet. Jaw shudders, clicks, and then cracks out of
place, eyes wave in their sockets, everything stops. The crowd lets
out a rasping rolling sound of disappointed hysteria. My legs give
way, the traumatized flesh still shaking around my bones. Sometimes
you drool with the jaw shot, sometimes you don’t. I taste blood.
There’ll be more of that. The sound catches up, the
CLAP
of flesh then the
sounds of my jaw breaking, and finally the crowd jeering and
booing.

People ask why someone would do this.
Fight, I mean. They think it’s so you can prove what a tough guy
you are. For the girls. Sometimes people say it’s for the feeling
of cold night air on their skin once they’ve left the ring. Me? I
think that’s a lot of shit. I like getting battered. I like looking
in the mirror and seeing a mess. I like the look of triumph on a
man’s face when he’s just planted a killer blow. The crowds are the
same. It’s about putting on a good show. You tell yourself that the
next will be the last, just one more venture out there to see all
the tiny faces smiling and crying and hooting and screaming and
laughing and dying right in front of you for God’s sake. One more
and I’m done.

Down, then slap, one…two…fucking get
over it, I’m not getting up. Things get worse fairly quickly. I’ve
not seen a reaction like this in ages. The guys at the front start
clambering out of the seats, pushing their broads off them, broads
who scream and cry murder in this dire sort of death rattle. The
old guys, suited and slicked, here they come to take a piece of the
young bastard with his hands in the air standing over me. Following
behind them, the men in the audience are scrabbling over the
chairs, falling and lumbering as the women grab at their coats and
sleeves. Him, the one up there with the red-raw fist, he winks at
me. Can you believe that shit? He fucking winks at me. Then he’s
down, all these tubby guys crawling over him tearing chunks out of
him. The guy is quiet through all this, mind. Silent as stone, and
there’s bits of him everywhere, red all over the old bastards’
coats. The women bury their heads in their hands and sob, some of
them beat fists on the ground.

I get up and crawl over to the poor
guy and push the crowd off.

“
Are ye
alright?”

“
Are ye ok?”

No answer. Yellowing teeth snap at him
again.

“
Fuck off!” I
shout.

No interest is shown in me. A hand on
my shoulder, the skin on the knuckles gone, he pats me and
chuckles, but his throat’s a mess of white and black and red so it
comes out all “GLURGLURGLAAAAARG!”

So there’s nothing left to do but sit
and watch as the rest of them catch up and start nibbling on my
ankles. And my shins. And everything. And even when there’s some
old git, who I used to come and watch here when I was a kid,
pulling chords of chest muscle out of me through my stomach, even
then I still take the time to look all these fuckers in the face
and say, “Hit me.”

11. BLACKENED FIREWORKS

Troy H. Gardner, United
States

“
THAT
fake ID is never going to work,” Hunter told Corey.

Two seventeen-year-olds sat on a curb
in the plaza, watching shoppers come and go.

“
I’ve been growing out this
beard for three days. I can pass for twenty-one,” Corey
said.

Hunter grimaced at the shadow of black
stubble on his friend’s lower jaw. “Good luck.”

Corey stood up, rolled his shoulders
back, and sauntered into the liquor store. Hunter prayed they could
score booze for Melissa’s Fourth of July party. If not, he’d have
to break into his parent’s liquor cabinet and they’d be pissed when
they got back from vacation.