Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (18 page)

"The thing in the air is very valuable to them?" the Queen asked.

"Yes," Olympia said.

The Queen inched forward. "Nothing I can do will stop them from coming--nothing will stand in the way of their greed?"

Olympia hung her head. "Nothing."

The Queen stabbed her pincers straight into Olympia's chest. She cut through Lucas's carefully designed suit like it was tissue paper.

Lucas screamed.

The Queen consumed Olympia from the inside, just like a spider eats a bug. The suit that he'd fitted only hours before deflated like a balloon.

The Queen turned to the monitor. "You need not fear, Lucas. You and your collectors are welcome."

"Why?" Lucas asked. "She was on your side. Why kill her?"

"I was hungry, and there was no cost. I want your kind to come here. We will not hunt all of them. Just a few. As I told you, I have learned wisdom. I know the value of conservation."

"She was your friend," Lucas whispered.

"I do not see the value of friendship."

*****

Captain Argus sat down next to him with a bottle of whisky. Lucas was grateful for the burn of it in his throat. It was good to feel something.

It woke something else, burning inside him.

"It's done."

Lucas nodded. "Good." Of course it was.

"I can put you in cold sleep and you can take the first shuttle back," the Captain said. "We should have enough material processed to fill it up in a few months."

Lucas shook his head and took another sip of whisky. He could go back home. He could build a new life, live like a king on his share of the profits. The rage in his belly simmered. He tried to ignore the regret--the horror at what he'd done. He tried not to hear Olympia's voice damning him--accusing him of breaking his last promise to her. But she'd broken her last promise, too. "No. I'm going to stay. I'm killing them. I have to watch them die."

Tim Waggoner

Tim Waggoner wrote his first story at the age of five, when he created a comic book version of
King Kong vs. Godzilla
on a stenographer's pad. It took him a few more years until he began selling professionally, though. Overall, he has published more than twenty novels and two short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in
Writer’s Digest
and
Writers’ Journal
, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. He hopes to continue writing and teaching until he keels over dead, after which he wants to be stuffed and mounted, and then placed in front of his computer terminal.

Laws of Thermodynamics:

1. You cannot win.

2. You cannot break even.

3. You cannot stop playing the game.

             
             
             
  – Anonymous

"What are you doing here? What are you
doing
here?"

The man's voice catches your attention as you walk into the coffee shop. He speaks too loud, like someone with a hearing problem, and there's a strident urgency to his tone that borders on alarm. The man sits alone at a corner table, his back to the rest of the room, an ancient laptop open in front of him. The man's body blocks the screen, and you can't see what he's looking at--and presumably, talking to. It almost sounds as if he's interrogating the machine, demanding an answer to his question.

The man wears a threadbare army jacket just like the kind your father had, along with faded jeans and scuffed work boots. Your father left that jacket to you when he died, but you can't remember where it's at now. Too bad. You always liked that jacket. The man's overlong hair and untrimmed beard are both whitish-gray, but given the angle he's sitting at compared to where you're standing, you can't make out any of his facial features.

You dismiss the man from your thoughts as you continue toward the serving counter. Ghostlight Coffee is located downtown, not far from the VA hospital, and the place attracts its share of colorful customers. Some more so than others.

Ghostlight is housed on the first floor of an old building, with bricks walls, a wooden floor, and exposed heating duct system. You enjoy coming in here because of the place's age. You love the sound and feel of wood giving slightly beneath your weight as you walk, love the smell of dust and mildew. This is a real place, an
authentic
place, built for practicality, as well-worn and comfortable as a favorite shoe. Not like the faux neighborhood business effect that pre-fab coffee houses like Starbucks strive for. This is a place that satisfies both parts of you: the environmental science major you'd been and the construction-company owner you've become. This is urban repurposing at its best. The original structure remains, and the only modern touches are the lighting, the serving counter, and of course the computer register, cappuccino and espresso machines behind it.

Take that, Entropy!
you think, and smile.

There's no one else in line, or in the shop, for that matter, except for you, the muttering man, and the kid behind the counter.

"Can I help you, sir?"

The barista is a skinny kid in his early twenties, with short black hair and an eyebrow piercing. He wears a gray T-shirt with
Ghostlight Coffee
on the front, and a white apron wrapped around his waist, as if he's afraid of getting stains on his jeans. Maybe he's clumsy and prone to spillage. Or maybe he just thinks wearing the apron makes him look cool.

You want to tell the kid to skip the
sir
shit. You're only forty-six, for god's sake. But then again, forty-six probably looks ancient to someone as young as the Amazing Apron Lad.

"Just a medium coffee. Black." You hesitate, and then add, "Decaf."

The kid nods and turns away to fill your order. As he does, you pull out your smart phone and check the time. 3:21. You need to get a move on. Lizzie's school lets out at 3:40, and you don't want to be late to pick her up. You haven't seen her since Sunday, when you dropped her off at Beth's, and since you're only going to get two days with her this week--Wednesday and Thursday--you don't want to miss a single minute.

You start to slide your thumb across the screen, intending to open the phone's camera roll and look at a picture of Lizzie--one of your favorites, the one where she's grinning, tongue stuck out, eyes closed as if she's embarrassed by her pose, or perhaps trying to foil your attempt to capture her image by denying you her eyes. But your thumb encounters resistance as you try to unlock the screen. Instead of a smooth surface, the phone feels sticky, as if soda or jam has been spilled on it. For an instant, it seems as if your thumb actually sinks into the screen, and you imagine that if you press harder your thumb will penetrate all the way through and out the back. But then the sensation is gone, your flesh moves easily across the phone's surface, and the screen unlocks. But before you can open the camera roll, the barista returns with your coffee.

You tuck the phone back in your pants pocket and reach for your wallet.

"That'll be one ninety-five," Apron Lad says in a disengaged tone.

He sets the coffee down on the counter, the wood sagging beneath the cup's weight as if it's filled with lead. Soft cracking noises that remind you of breaking ice rise to your ears, only to be drowned out when the man in the army jacket shouts, "What are you
DOING
here?"

The barista doesn't look in his direction.

"Ignore him. He's in here a lot, and he knows that if he gets too loud, he'll get kicked out. He'll settle down."

True to the kid's prediction, the man quiets, his voice lowering to an unintelligible mutter.

You remove your debit card from your wallet and give it to the barista. The kid swipes the card and hands it back. "Do you want your receipt?"

You shake your head as you replace the debit card in your wallet and return it to your pants pocket. "No thanks."

You pick up your coffee and see a small depression in the counter's surface, tiny cracks fissuring outward from it, like a miniature blast crater. "Looks like you need to get a new counter."

You look up at Apron Lad and start to smile, but the expression dies before it can be born. The kid's right ear is sliding down the side of his face, as if he's a wax dummy in the first stages of melting.

"What?" The kid frowns and his right eyebrow sags, the skin drooping down to occlude the eye.

"Never mind," you say, taking a step back. The cup's cardboard surface is hot against the soft flesh of your palm, but you scarcely register this fact. A tightness spreads across your chest like constricting bands of iron, bringing with it a surge of ice-cold panic. You force yourself to walk slowly to the closest table, doing your best to ignore the cracking sounds beneath your feet.

You take a seat, set your coffee down, and then take your keys from your pants pocket. You unscrew the lid of the pill fob on your key ring and shake a single nitro tablet onto your trembling hand. You place it under your tongue, close your eyes, and wait. The tablet dissolves within twenty seconds. It's supposed to work fast, but if the pain doesn't go away after five minutes, your cardiologist has instructed you to take a second pill. If that doesn't work, then you're to take a third. And if
that
doesn't work, it's time to call 911 and start praying.

It takes almost a minute and a half for the bands around your chest to loosen, but they do, and you let out a slow sigh of relief. Your head starts throbbing--an unfortunate side-effect of the nitro--but you don't care. You'll take a migraine over a heart attack any day. You look toward the serving counter, expecting to see the barista staring at you with a concerned expression on his face, maybe even hear him ask,
You all right? Is there anything I can do?
But the kid's looking down at his phone, reading a text, maybe playing a game, his right ear and eyebrow back where they belong.

You pick up your coffee, stand, and make your way toward the door. Your head feels like it's going to explode at any moment, but you do your best to ignore the pain. Headache or no headache, you're determined not to be late to get Lizzie. No matter what else happens, you're not going to let her stand there outside her school, alone, wondering where her daddy is. The floor is reassuringly solid beneath your feet as you walk, the wood barely creaking. Good.

As you reach the door, the man in the army jacket--still facing his laptop screen--once more asks, almost conversationally, "Why are you here?"

"I'm not," you say, and walk out.

*****

You get in your pick-up, the words Pinnacle Construction painted on the side. You put your coffee in the cup holder, although you doubt you're going to drink it. Even though it's decaf, you don't like the idea of putting even the minimal amount of caffeine it contains into your system right now. Not so soon after your heart hiccupped, and not with the way your head is throbbing. You turn the engine over, listen to its spastic rumble-knocking, and you know you need to get it serviced as soon as you can afford it. You put the engine in gear, pull away from the curb, and head in the direction of Oakgrove Middle School. The traffic is light this time of day, and you figure you'll make good time, but really, it never gets much heavier than this. Downtown is dead, has been for years. A collection of old, empty buildings, crumbling brick and rotting wood. There are a few signs of life. The Cannery District has a couple funky art galleries and some renovated loft apartments, and there's Ghostlight Coffee, of course. But there isn't much more. It's a small Midwestern city whose best days are long behind it. Kind of like you.

You think about what you saw in the coffee shop. The cracked depression in the counter, the kid's melting face...You don't remember the doctor saying anything about hallucinations being a potential side-effect of your surgery. Three months ago you started feeling tired, short of breath, and you went in for a check-up. A week later you were on an operating table, getting a triple bypass. You weren't really surprised. Heart disease runs in your family--both your father and grandfather had bypasses--but it hit you at a younger age than you expected. The surgery went well, and although the recovery wasn't fun, you were back at work three weeks later, feeling better than you had in years. You get angina every now and then, but it's nothing that a nitro tab can't handle. So far, anyway. You suppose it's possible that for some reason you're not getting enough blood flow to your brain. That could cause hallucinations, couldn't it? But then again, it might just be good old-fashioned stress. Heart surgery caused serious psychological repercussions--a newfound awareness of your own mortality, a sense that your body was fragile, that if you weren't careful, it could shatter like glass.

Or crack like rotten wood.

And there's plenty of non-health-related stress in your life. The divorce. Only getting to see your daughter part-time. And business hasn't been all that great. Right now, Pinnacle Construction has more creditors than clients, and the former have been after you like a pack of drooling hyenas circling a choice piece of carrion.

You have a good job. And you worked hard to get your degree. Why would you want to walk away from that--and to start a construction business, no less? In case you hadn't noticed, this isn't the best time to get into building houses.

Beth had been right on that last point. Given the state of the economy, the construction industry wasn't exactly booming. And while your job testing water quality for the county wasn't exciting, it did pay the bills. But you were burdened by a deep-seated dissatisfaction you hadn't been able to fully explain to your wife--which was one the reasons she's now your ex-wife. Even though this all happened long before your surgery, you sometimes wonder if on some level you were aware of what was coming, that your remaining years might number fewer than most, and you didn't want to waste whatever time you had left running test after boring test on water samples. Yes, it was necessary work, maybe even important work, but it hadn't felt as if you were truly contributing anything. You were testing, measuring, assessing, when what you really wanted to be doing was making, creating,
building
.

You think about when you received your first glimpse into the true nature of the universe. It was in eighth grade--one grade higher than Lizzie's in now--in Mr. Gillespie's science class. The man was better suited to teach college than middle school. Most of what he taught went over his students' heads, and his tests were a real bitch. But you'd loved the class. It was the first time you'd felt challenged in school, and there wasn't a day that didn't go by without Mr. Gillespie giving you at least one awesome insight into the way the world worked. But no day had been more mind-blowing than the day he introduced the laws of thermodynamics to the class.

It had all been fascinating, but the second law chilled you.

Put simply,
Mr. Gillespie had said,
the second law can be stated as
"
entropy increases
." He'd smiled then.
Or to phrase it another way, damned if you do, damned if you don't.