Psycho Save Us (53 page)

All at once,
Bonetta stood to her feet, and ran screaming up the steps.  The monster just
watched her go, a slightly bemused look on his face.

Kaley
swallowed.  She felt like she’d been standing there for a century, her knees
stiff and her spine made of stone.  She turned back to the door behind her and
pointed.  “I…I can’t open it.”

“Do ya still
have the hairpins ya used before?”

“The…?”  She
did.  They were on the floor, in an area that hadn’t been transformed into the
veiny throat of a monster.

The monster
knelt and picked them up, and made short work out of picking the lock.  He
opened the door, and stood to one side.  All at once, Kaley broke from her
trance and dashed in through the doorway, and went to her sister.  “She needs a
doctor.”

“No shit.”

“Help me with
her!”

“Listen, if the
police aren’t here yet, they gotta be close.  You can wait here for—”

“You and I both
know that this…
thing
, whatever it is all around us, it’s not just
our
making.  It’ll swallow us all if we stay here.  Now, move your
fucking ass
!” 
Kaley’s voice dropped an octave or two, or else she’d been speaking with
someone else’s voice. 
His
voice, perhaps?

Whatever the
case, it got his attention.  He smiled and nodded.  “All right, Carrie White. 
Let’s do it.  Teamwork, right?  Heh!  Go, go, Team Psycho!”  He moved into the
room and grabbed up the girl, who was unconscious.  She had her pants on, but
there was blood all around the crotch and legs.  Shan stirred, and Kaley held
one of her hands while the monster carried her from the room.  The Connection
was made, the Anchor, and this time they
both
recoiled from one
another.  It would mark the first of many intimacy changes for them throughout
their lives.

Then Shannon’s
eyes rolled over to look at the monster carrying her.

“Don’t worry,
Sleeping Beauty,” he said.  “Your prince has come.”  And Kaley thought she saw
something on his face, and, more importantly, in his heart.  Warmth.  Hope. 
Care.  It was there for the briefest of moments, and then gone as quickly as rain
from a desert floor.

They made for
the stairs.  Kaley took one last glance behind her, saw Olga there, her eyes
turned hopefully towards them.  Kaley turned away, leaving the woman to
whatever hell they had all created together.

They made it
into the hall, and here Kaley saw the many-chambered throats of the beast that
she, Shannon, the Russians and the Monster had all helped open.  “Step
carefully,” said the Monster.  “An’ don’t go near the walls.  They have hands.”

Burning saliva
dripped down from the ceiling, and Kaley jumped back from it.  There was a
deep, deep thrumming coming from the walls.  Kaley realized it was the
creature’s heartbeat, and she imagined this was what it sounded like in the
mouth of a blue whale.  Only, there was light here, and it came from plumes of
flame that jetted out of random flaps of flesh like exhaust ports.

Somewhere,
somebody screamed.  Lots of somebodies.

They made it
through the kitchen where the three men had been playing their game of cards
earlier.  Down the hallway and towards the back of the house, now at the back
door.  All at once, something fell from the ceiling.  It was a large,
pus-filled orb that suddenly shot out like a ruptured hemorrhoid and started
bleeding.  It split, and blood fell from its wet sack.  Inside the deflated
sack, there was a body, twisted and turning and writhing in pain.  It gagged on
a dozen barbed chains forcing their way into its mouth as four little
slithering fat imps moved up and down the body, checking and rechecking the
chains, as if ensuring their stability. 
Like maintenance men
, she
thought dumbly, following the Monster, who barely took a glance at the
grotesquery.

They made it to
the door, and the Monster’s hand was on the doorknob when they heard someone
say, “
Shhtop
.”

Kaley turned
quickly, saw the man first, and screamed.  The monster, he turned slowly, still
holding Shannon in his arms.  “Let’s see,” the Monster said.  “I handed Dmitry
over to the demons hands, and Olga’s downstairs gettin’ buttfucked by briars on
the ceiling, so that must mean that you’re…Mikhael?”

Mikhael, the
last survivor of the Oni family, stood with flesh still sloughing off his body,
but he was still capable of standing, and with a sawed-off shotgun in his
hands.  Parts of his clothes were still on him, though they had charred and
melted and merged with his peeling skin, which dangled from his glistening meat
and bones like strips of beef on a coat hanger.  “Eeeshh theshh you?” he
asked.  His lips had almost completely melted away, and Kaley thought he meant
to ask
Is this you?
  He wanted to know if all of this around them was
her doing.

“No,” said her
pet Monster.  “This isn’t her.  This is you an’ me, Mikhael.  All o’ this you
see around you, it’s just what happens to a mind like hers when people like you
an’ me come into her life.  We fuck up everything we touch.”  Then, Kaley
caught a glimpse of the monster’s eyes.  They flitted to the side, as if he’d
caught sight of something, and for a moment she saw that he was humored again,
though he hid it well.  “You can be at peace with that, like I am, an’ as far
as I can figure you’ll be left mostly untouched.  Or you can fight it, an’
well…”  He smiled, as if to say
You know the rest
.  And Mikhael did know
the rest.  He was living the rest.

“Churn it
offff,” he said.

“She can’t,” said
the Monster.  “She can’t turn it off anymore than you can turn off all o’
yer
fucked up thoughts.  This is
us
, man.  This is who we are.  Welcome to
the human race.”  Once more, the Monster’s eyes flitted, and he tilted his head
to one side.  “I’m sure ya think killin’ me an’ these girls would end this.”

Mikhael raised
his shotgun, pointing it at the Monster, and Shannon in his arms.

“No!” Kaley
screamed.

“Don’t worry,
little girl,” said her pet Monster, grinning so broad that his garish new smile
split even more and poured new blood down his face.  “It ain’t my day to die,
an’ neither is it yers or yer sister’s.”

No sooner had he
winked at Mikhael than Mikhael’s head exploded.  He pitched forward and fell
into the oozing earth.  Tenebrous hands reached up from the floor and pulled
him.  Mikhael came apart in pieces, and the hands fought over those bits until
he was consumed.

Kaley now stood
in front of the Monster.  Without knowing it, she had flung herself in front of
Little Sister.  After watching Mikhael’s grisly end, she looked up, and found
the police officer standing at the other end of the room.  His uniform was a
bit charred and smoking.  He’d come down the hallway, she supposed, and now stood
staring in wide-eyed terror at everything that was happening around him.  His
pistol was still locked in his hands, and he was still aiming at the spot where
Mikhael had been standing.

Then, all at
once, hands shot out from the wall and grabbed hold of the officer, who
screamed and fought to tear himself away.

The monster had
turned towards the door and opened it.  Outside, a torrential downpour was
drowning the world, and he was dashing out into it.  “Wait!” Kaley shouted. 
“We have to help him!  He saved us!”

“When’re you
gonna stop worryin’ about everybody else an’ save yer own fuckin’ skin?” the Monster
called over his shoulder as he ran into the night with Shannon clutched tight
to his chest.

Kaley turned to
see the officer being pulled into the wall.  She was torn in many different
directions.  Hands licked up from the floor around her, touching and groping at
her ankles.  She made a decision, and turned and bolted from the house, into
the purifying rain.  Behind her, she heard the bloodcurdling screams of the
officer, but they were lost in the rain and gunfire and helicopters swarming
all around Avery Street.

The world didn’t
make sense.  David had been sucked into a universe that made no sense, that
defied all reason and logic.  The flames billowing out from the meaty,
breathing walls licked at him, and his pants leg caught fire almost instantly. 
He did the classic stop-drop-and-roll, and during this time his right sleeve
also caught fire from another plume of flame.  He hacked and coughed against
the smell and smoke.

When he finally
stood up, he’d staggered back towards the door.  But he couldn’t find it now. 
Where the door had been there was now a wall of trembling muscle, or fat,
or…something.  An impression in the rough shape of a door was the only sign
that there had ever been a way in.

Screams.

David had turned
to find a young man, probably under twenty years old, writhing on the floor and
being dragged by chains looped through his flesh.  Four or five…creatures had
hold of those chains.  David aimed his pistol and shouted, “S-stop!”  It
sounded so feeble and so stupid, probably because it was, and was altogether
absurd in this world.

Flames covered
the young man, and he disappeared around the corner of a hallway, his hands
reaching out as soon as he spotted David.

Smoke filled
much of the air.  He gagged.  Through the smoke, shadowy figures shambled this
way and that, some of them limned in the orange of flames, others not so
clear.  More screams.  Something nipped at his ear, and then at his mind.

I died
, he thought. 
I
died and went to hell
.

The feeling came
and went within a second, and then Officer David Emerson’s logical mind came
back to him, and he rationalized it all.  The meat on the walls…it was just
that,
meat
.  It didn’t make any sense why someone would wish to line the
inside of their house with meat, but fuck it, he had to save his sanity and
move on somehow.  As for the flames…bad air conditioning.  An electrical fire
somewhere in the walls.  Whatever.  Just go with it.

And what about
the little creatures pulling the young man?
he thought.  Yes, what about
that young man?

He was halfway
down the hallway when he spotted the aberration.  The man with his skin
sloughing off of him, all of his flesh slowly pooling around his ankles like
the slow crawl of lava down a mountainside.  He had a shotgun in his hands, and
he was aiming it at…

The jackalope. 
Pelletier!
 
And there was a girl in his arms, and another one standing in front of him. 
The aberration losing its flesh raised its shotgun.  Without thinking, he’d
adopted a Weaver stance just like he was trained at the academy, and raised his
Glock.  He took a breath, let it out slowly as he squeezed the trigger, and all
at once the aberration’s head popped and the body pitched forward.  He stood
there for a moment, just staring at the Spencer Pelletier and the two girls. 
For a second, David was caught between commanding Pelletier to freeze and
asking the girls if they were okay.  And that’s when the hands seized him.

“David!” one of
them hissed at him.  He thought he knew that voice. 
Dad?
  The thought
was too brief to sit with, as the hands yanked at his head, snapping it back
against the meaty wall.  “David!  C’mere to me, boy!”  He struggled in vain. 
He knew it was vain because his father was there.  There was no other way
around it.

The hands burned
and dug into him.  He felt something crawl up his spine, and then burrowed
into
his spine.  He fought against screaming, he wanted to accept his death like a
man.  Just like his father had always told him to.  “Be a man, David!  Be a
man
!”

Then, something
changed inside of him.  David suddenly fought against the hands, tearing and
scrambling.  He then recalled that he still had his Glock in his hand.  He
fired backwards into the wall.  On the floor in front of him, he spotted the
young man crawling.  The little creatures were pulling around and around the
house, it seemed, taking him on a parade that never ended.

David had no
time to really think on this.  He twisted around and faced the hands pulling at
him.  He fired three more shots, and to his surprise one of the hands actually
released him.  But two more popped out in its place, snatching at his clothing,
ripping it free and digging into his flesh.  He fired five more shots, then one
of the hands seized his gun and wrenched it free.  Then the wall opened up.  A
gaping maw awaited him.  Inside he saw the faces that he imagined were shown to
all of the damned before they were absorbed, the faces of the ones you’d
judged, the faces of the ones you’d turned your back on when you could’ve
helped.

Now, those
pitiless faces stood judgment on him as he was swallowed into the great,
enveloping maw.  He now accepted that this was hell, or at least as close as
was ever constructed.

“But…I saved
her!  I didn’t do anything wrong!  I did what was
right
!”

Hell didn’t
care.  It had him in its clutches and it intended to enjoy every savory
morsel.  After all, how often did they get to dine on the genuinely good? 
After eons of eating only the wicked, he must’ve been a tender treat.