The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (26 page)

Then he jumped over the arm and
grabbed the cattle prod. The arm leapt when stung, flying into the ceiling and
bringing a rain of plaster. He hit it again and had to duck as it swept
sideways sending light fixtures and pictures to the floor. Pam scurried beneath
the table with Tommy and held a chair in front of her like a hysterical lion
tamer.

The house howled and leaned
forward, cracking more plaster, trying to get its arm through the door up to
the shoulder. Blood dripped everywhere. Dale shocked it half a dozen times,
then stabbed the prod right into the flesh like a spear.

The arm ripped out of the house
like a length of anchor chain.

“Pam.”

She sat on the edge of Tommy’s
bed, upstairs, staring straight ahead.

“Pam.”

He snapped his fingers in front
of her face.

“Please talk to me.”

He looked over his shoulder.
Something was moving over the exterior of the house. It whispered along the
skin like a vampire bat, then pressed against the house’s back like a face in a
cake. Knuckles. Pam’s face tightened and so did her grip on Tommy, who sucked
his thumb on her lap. Mother and son had become one, but not Dale; he seemed to
dance all around them.

“It can’t get to us up here. It
can’t come up the stairs. Not
all
the way up.”

Pam’s ragged new girl-face was
ghostly in the dim bedroom. The candles and portable lights had run out weeks
before.

Finally
her eyes fixed on his. “They’re all dead, Dale. No one’s coming.”

He sat and stroked Tommy’s
forehead with one finger, sensing the furious youthful rationalizing going on
in there.

They lay in darkness on Tommy’s
bed, listening to the thick sound of worms dropping from the ceiling like ripe
fruit, listening to them writhe beneath the acrid mist that clung to the floor,
giving a graveyard effect.

They could make all the worm
mush they wanted now but couldn’t feed the house: there could be no more going
outside with the arm free.

Dale considered a run in a hub
ship, and maybe they could find a friendly rock not too far away. But they’d
probably wind up starving just the same, only adrift and in mindless horror.

Dale gave up on sleep and went
to check the barrier blocking the front door. The boards with nails pounded
through them hadn’t been disturbed. Nevertheless, he looked over his shoulder
as he baked pies out of diseased matter and connective tissue, smoking them in
battered tins to cover a taste too vile even for real hunger.

He brought their breakfast
upstairs, hoping Pam didn’t notice how he had to duck into the room.

The house was getting smaller.

He set a
big reeking pie on a bed tray where Pam and Tommy sat with their legs under the
blanket, and that was when the house blasted through the barrier over the front
door, sending boards clattering all over the living room. It howled with rage
as the nails bit into its knuckles.

“No!” Pam snarled.

The house swayed drunkenly left
and forward, plaster dust rained, and there was a sound like a German shepherd
rampaging up the stairs.

In a corner of the doorway,
Dale saw the tip of a big red finger. He gaped at it. The house tilted further
over, and as the shrunken room canted, most of the hand came into view.

It wrapped around the doorframe
and ripped off a chunk of the wall. The fingers scuttled on the floor.

Dale pried Pam’s fingers from
his shoulders. He went stonily to the corner of the room and picked up the
twenty-pound sledgehammer he’d set against the nightstand. He raised it over
his shoulder and smashed in the last knuckle of the longest finger.

He heard Tommy crying,
distantly.

The hand flopped around like a
giant bird and then whipped away down the stairs.

While foraging, he sometimes
passed the unmarked closet where the house’s blackly gangrenous testicles hung,
hearing the faint creak of the metal ring that kept them locked in there,
softly pendulating. Soon they would simply lie on the floor, a symbol of his
lost control.

They moved Tommy’s bed to the
corner of the room to keep the maximum distance from the pattering fingers when
they came in the night.

After keeping a long silence,
Tommy said, “Why does the house hate us?”

“It doesn’t hate us, buddy.
It’s just hungry, like us.”

Tommy’s eyes widened in
expanding horror as he interpreted this, and Dale cursed himself. He stroked
his son’s hair until he fell asleep, Pam curled in his other arm and the
sledgehammer handle laid across them.

“What’s that sound?” asked Pam
in the darkness.

“What time is it?”

“What’s that? Listen.”

A woody scraping noise like
fingernails on a coffin lid.

Dale was grateful for the
darkness as he frowned. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“Dale,” she said, her voice
rising in hysterical crescendo, “The bed is moving across the floor!”

It was. Just a few millimeters
at a time as the house shrank and the walls compacted. The bed was edging
toward the doorway.

But what amazed him was the way
Pam had sprung up on all fours, covering not only his son but himself as well.

Dale’s lines of tape retreated
in concentric rings, day by day, until they reached the foot of the bed. But he
didn’t get angry or panicked.

He’d had a realization.

It was the house that mattered
first and foremost. Its skin was all that held in their precious scrap of
atmosphere, and it must be protected like one of them.

He was impressed by the flat
hate he encountered in Pam’s eyes as he shared this revelation.

Alone, he baked more worm pies
and tried throwing them out the front door, through the membrane, but they only
grew into a pile on the doorstep. Starved though it was, the incensed house
preferred to hunt his family.

It blew great hollow farts all
night, and its bloated, gassy belly seemed to be the only thing that kept it
from reaching them. The arm that reached inside grew thinner and harder until
it was all rage and bone.

They woke up one morning with
the comforter and bedspread gone, along with the footboard. They huddled in the
corner, where the ceiling was now too low to sit up straight.

Dale had a sense of being in a
creature’s body as he ventured out for food now, could trace the T lines of the
torso and the sprocketed shoulders. He could hear a racing heartbeat through
the thin walls in the stair. By the bedside, he now kept an electric saw.

When she did not experience one
of her bursts of protectiveness, Pam seemed shell-shocked; the repetitive
horror of hungry snatching fingers left her looking like a gawping, saucer-eyed
rabbit, scratching against the sheets with rabbit feet as she tried to back
away.

During an afternoon raid,
although they had lain in a shivering bunch in the corner, Dale had felt the
reaching fingers brush the hairs on his leg.

That night he woke to Tommy
screaming right in his ear.

The title bout had come.

Dale flew to a crouch on the
bed and felt a great shifting beside him in the darkness. He grabbed the nearest
human limb and out of blind instinct pulled it toward the far corner of the
bed, away from the threat.

To maximize his friction
against the bed, Dale lay flat as he pulled. He found the slick-wood-feeling
finger of the house that had curled around his son’s leg and with both hands
began to pry it off.

He’d forgotten that the
footboard was gone and tried to brace his feet against it, and a great wrench
from the house brought him and Tommy flopping to the floor, their legs sticking
out into the hall.

The savage girl-Pam, the
rabbit-Pam, rushed forward and threw herself across Tommy, bracing her hands on
the walls. The fingers grabbed her ankle, and she lunged grunting back toward
the bed.

Dale moved numbly toward the
electric saw.

Pam had grabbed a leg of the
bed and was being dragged with it back into the hall.

Kneeling, Dale brought the
electric saw whining to life over his head. The house’s arm pulsed against his
thighs. His eyes grew and shrank with uncertainty.

“Dale!” Pam screamed. Tommy,
his thumb in his mouth, walked white-faced toward him like a child zombie.

He could bring down the saw and
end this nightmare, but a new one would begin.

With no way to stop the blood,
the house would almost certainly die.

Yet if he didn’t do it, the
probing arm could now reach them everywhere.

He also couldn’t sledge the
fingers without shattering Pam’s leg. She would probably get an infection in
the worm-ridden house and die.

That left option number three.

He stole a moment to watch his
family, imagined them calm and loving, and stored the picture away.

Then he knelt beside the
entangling fingers like a doctor. He calmly pried off one finger—it took all
his strength—and replaced it around his own ankle, where it took hold with
insane strength.

He pried off another, smaller
finger and did the same thing.

After three fingers, he heard
Pam grunt and drop to the floor. She’d been racked between the tug of the house
and her grip on the bed, wedged in the doorway. “Oh!” she cried, revolted, and
sacked Tommy to the floor.

Dale began sliding across the
landing on his bottom. He took hold of the doorframe as he passed it, knowing
it would do no good. The fingers of the house seemed to know whom they grasped.

Pam turned to him with Tommy’s
face clamped against her breast, and Dale tried to smile. Her eyes went wide.

He studied her with a stunning
clarity of vision as the big hot palm pressed against his back and two fingers
clamped over his shoulders like a safety restraint. He watched her expression
change from shock to horror to soul-wrenching loss as he floated backwards
above the stairs, Tommy dripping into the crook of her arm, her small breasts
hanging over him.

The boy only briefly turned,
the stoicism of his ruined childhood and his mother’s care already in his face.

Dale’s hands were wrenched from
the doorframe with an unstoppable ease. He supposed he screamed, and maybe it
was long and loud, as the great arm lifted him through the air, but a
sequestered part of his mind watched passively. The stairs and carpet passed beneath
his dangling legs.

Then Pam was chasing him, her
eyes so wild they looked slanted and cartoonish in her face. They grew with
nearness until the back of his head collided with the transom, leaving him
lolling.

The last thing he saw before
the vacuum snuffed out his consciousness entirely was like a single slanted
frame out of an ancient movie reel.

He saw the house’s face. The
crazed, bloodshot eyes, slanted downward with fury and hunger, the nose still
belted down on one side with his ratchet cable, and finally the jaw, hanging
and dislocated where the quarter ton spring had slid out of true and shot the
joint apart. The swollen gums and missing teeth, the black gullet.

Dale barely heard the roar, not
of hunger, but of outrage and ultimate triumph.

He had once lain beside Pam on
a soft evening before making love. For a moment they had breathed into each
other’s mouths, quaking little breaths. As he entered the squishing cave of the
house’s mouth, it was her breath he smelled. Once his flesh mingled with the
house’s, and Pam put her knife to the walls, it would be her devouring him. He
was quite aware of that.

On the Shadow Side of the Beast

Ruth Nestvold

Timo and I live on the shadow
side of the Beast. It’s a good place to live, because there are many hidden
corners where the Hunters won’t see you. Besides, the Beast protects us.

An older girl, Karla, explained
to me once that in the times Before, the Beast was a statue of a woman and four
horses. They called her Quadriga and she was on top of the Brandenburger
Tor—the ruined columns where Timo and I have made our home.

I asked her what a horse was.

“It was a big animal people
would ride, with hooves and a mane,” she said, getting that dreamy look that
comes over the faces of the older ones when they think about Before.

I looked more closely at the
Beast, seeing now the bent figure of a woman with wings twisted with the hooves
and heads of the creatures called horses.

“Are there still horses?” I
asked.

Karla shrugged. “There never
were many in Berlin. The only time I ever saw them was in a parade.”

“What’s a parade?” I asked.