Apeshit (14 page)

Jason opens another beer.

“That thing is for real, isn’t it?” Jason says.

“It’s real,” Rick says. He throws Jason a shirt from

his backpack so that his friend doesn’t have to run around in

his tighty-whitey’s anymore, but Jason just tosses it aside.

He doesn’t need any clothes.

“Is it Buddy the Lobster Boy, in the flesh?” Rick

asks, trying to make some kind of joke.

Neither of them think it is funny.

“It’s not Buddy,” Jason says. “Buddy was just a story

my dad made up. This fucker is something real.”

Rick nods. Then changes the subject. “I fucking

hope Desdemona went upstairs to bed and isn’t out there.”

“If she’s out there I’m sure she’s dead by now,” Jason

says. “You shouldn’t have left her.”

“She pissed me off,” Rick says. “How was I sup-

posed to know this would happen?”

“Let’s see if she’s upstairs,” Jason says. “Maybe

we’ll be lucky and find her asleep with her headphones on.”

Desdemona is hiding in the woods, creeping towards

the cabin one tree at a time. She heard the gunshots and the

yelling. She saw the whole thing. But she was too afraid to

reveal her position. She was too far away to reach them in time

before they ran back into the house. She didn’t get a good look

at the thing that chased after them. It was just a gray figure.

Something rushes past her as she leans against a tree to

blend in with the shadows. The thing darts through the woods

right past Des, heading back towards the dirt road where the

van used to be parked. She gets a quick look at the thing’s

back. He is a tall lanky man, completely naked, wiry with

muscle, no body hair, light gray skin, and a hard, flat ass.

Desdemona doesn’t know how long she will have

this opening. She steps out of the shadows and runs for the

cabin door. She charges into the clearing, cutting her bare

heels on rocks and pine cones. A rustling noise whips past

her and her vision becomes blurred.

The gray man moves like wind, passing her from be-

hind, and then stopping in her path. Desdemona falls back-

wards, standing face-to-face with the thing. The creature is

a man, but he is severely deformed. His eyes are low on his

face with pupils that are dilated to the size of quarters. His

mouth is filled with six small pointed teeth. On his head,

he has two baby arms growing out like horns. Below his

ears, he has baby legs growing out like sideburns snuggling

against his cheeks. And on top of his head, there is a tiny

baby head, staring squishy-faced at her. The limbs writhe

and stretch against his skull like medusa’s snake hair. The

tiny baby head cocks at the girl as she stares at it.

Desdemona realizes that this thing is the creature

from the ghost story Jason told at dinnertime. It wasn’t just

a stupid story. It was real. In the story, Jason said that this

creature will only kill you if you scream. Des clenches her

jaw. She will not scream.

The creature approaches her. It seems to be dazzled by

Desdemona’s tat oos and mohawk. It probably has never seen

these things before. Des tries not to scream, tries not to even

whisper, as the gray man sniffs the butterfly art on her skin.

She looks down and sees the man’s hand. His fingers

have been molded together, so each hand has a thumb and a

fat bubbly mass of fingers.

The lobster boy brings his claw up to Desdemona’s

bare tattooed stomach. On his deformed fingers, there are

curved metal blades. They look like metal crab claws. He

has attached metal claws to his lobster hands so they can be

used like real claws.

The claw cuts into Desdemona’s belly and opens up

her insides. Shock hits her before the pain. As she watches

her guts spill out of her belly, she wonders,
why did he do

it
? I didn’t scream.
He wasn’t supposed to kill me if I didn’t

scream
. . .

A voice in her head tells her,
but that was just a story
. . .

She screams in the gray man’s face, causing him to

recoil. She turns around and runs for the cabin, crying out

for help, her intestines unraveling out of her as she runs.

Rick and Jason hear Desdemona’s cries from up-

stairs. They quickly run down to the front door, and try to

open it. But the door won’t open.

“What’s wrong?” Rick asks.

“I can’t get it open,” Jason says. “The thing broke

the doorknob.”

“Desdemona, we’re coming,” Rick yells.

He hears her crying his name on the other side of the

door.

Jason kicks the door with the bottom of his foot. It

still won’t budge. He backs up as far as he can, then uses a

football maneuver. He charges shoulder first and tackles the

door off of its hinges, falling face-first down the steps into

the dirt.

Rick looks outside to see the massive gray creature

with a living fetus growing out of his head. Desdemona is

on the ground below the freak. She is being pulled closer

to the mutant by a dark slimy rope attached her midsection.

It takes Rick a moment to realize that it is not a rope, but a

vine of her intestine. The gray man whisper-gurgles at them

and wiggles the baby arms on his head, as he tries to drag

Desdemona into the woods by her own entrails.

Jason gets up from the ground and rushes forward.

He shoots the revolver three times at the creature. Two of

the bullets hit it square in the chest. It falls backwards onto

the ground. It goes limp. Rick picks Desdemona off of the

ground and helps her coil up her loose intestines like spa-

ghetti and put them back inside of her.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” Rick says.

She grows faint in his arms.

He takes her inside the cabin. Jason stays behind.

“Come on, Jason,” Rick says. “I need your help.”

Jason puts another bullet in the creature’s head.

“What are you doing?” Rick yells.

“Just making sure,” Jason says.

“Forget it,” Rick says. “The thing is dead.”

Jason runs back into the cabin and gets a good look

at Des’s open wound. “What can we do?”

“We can at least make her more comfortable and help

her with the pain,” Rick says.

“There’s not that much pain, actually,” Desdemona says.

“You’re in shock,” Rick says.

Jason doesn’t realize the gray-skinned creature is

getting up from the ground, wiping the stream of blood from

its forehead to get a better view of his enemy.

By the time Jason notices the thing darting towards

him, he doesn’t have time to get the door closed. He fires the

rest of his bullets at it, but only one of them connects. The

creature doesn’t go down this time.

“Upstairs!” Jason says, grabbing the box of bullets

on his way up.

They go up to the second floor and out onto the deck.

They close the arcadia door and watch for the thing. It should

be right behind them.

“You shot it in the head,” Rick says. “Why didn’t it

die?”

“Maybe the baby head’s brain controls the body?”

Desdemona says. “Maybe you have to shoot that brain?”

Jason hides behind the barbeque to reload his gun.

He thinks that if the thing attacks before he finishes loading,

it will go after Rick or Des first, buying him enough time to

load the gun completely.

Desdemona sits down. She holds her spool of en-

trails tight to her body like she’s hugging a pillow.

“I’ll survive won’t I?” Desdemona asks Rick. “Even

though these fell out of my body, they can put them back in,

right? Sometimes they cut miles of this stuff out of people

and they live, don’t they? Maybe they can’t eat the same

food as they used to, but they still survive . . . right, Rick?”

Rick nods at her but he doesn’t look at her. He is

busy watching the arcadia door, waiting for the thing to

come towards it.

“Where is it?” Jason says, his hands shaking, drop-

ping bullets everywhere.

He hits himself in the head for shaking so much. He

shouldn’t be shaking. He’s not allowed to fear. His father

would disapprove.

Rick says, “It’s nowhere. It didn’t come after us.”

“Did it follow you upstairs?” Jason asks.

“I’m sure it did,” Rick says.

Rick looks up and sees the gray man crawling like a

spider along the side of the cabin. He is climbing with the

metal claws on his hands and feet.

“It’s up there,” Rick cries.

The thing looks down at them and jumps onto the

balcony. He goes for Rick first, lunging at him blades-first.

Rick dodges with his football reflexes. The creature turns

to Desdemona. She screeches and runs to the back of the

deck, but it charges at her like a hurricane. It seizes her in its

claws and then bites down on the center of her neck. Blood

splashes into Desdemona’s esophagus as the thing tries to rip

her throat out with its teeth.

Rick runs at the creature like it’s a football and kicks

it in the back of the leg as hard as he can. The creature

wobbles but it doesn’t loosen its grip. Rick punches it in

the kidneys, in the spine, in the ribcage, but the thing won’t

budge. Desdemona’s cries fill his ears. He can hear her

blood gurgling in her throat as she screams in agony.

“I’m sorry, Des,” Rick says. “I didn’t mean to break

up with you. I love you.”

He tries desperately to pull the thing off of her, but

he’s not strong enough. Des grabs Rick by the hand, stop-

ping him from struggling. She holds his hand tightly and

rubs one of his fingers with her thumb.

I love you, too
, Desdemona says with her eyes.

Her lungs are filled with too much blood to say the words

out loud.

Jason finishes loading his revolver. He steps out

from behind the barbeque and fires wildly at the gray man.

He doesn’t bother to aim. He doesn’t care who the bullets

hit, as long as they kill the creature. He just pulls the trigger

until there aren’t any bullets left.

Two of the bullets miss the creature, two of the bul-

lets hit the creature in the chest, one of the bullets hits Rick

in the side of his belly, and the last bullet blasts the tiny fetus