Apeshit (21 page)

Crystal helps Des lift Kevin’s body. Kevin drifts in

and out of consciousness.

“I can’t believe they are only sending a fucking for-

est ranger,” Crystal says.

“It’s probably a law enforcement ranger,” Jason says.

He doesn’t help them, but leads the way as they bring Kevin

into the cabin. “Those guys are like cops, firefighters, and

paramedics all rolled into one. If they send a bunch of those

guys out here we’ll be good to go. If they only send one, at

least we’ll––”

Jason is cut off by a shrieking figure that jumps out

of the darkness behind them. It is the gray man. He comes

at them faster and fiercer than he had before. Riddled with

bullet holes, dead fetus limbs hanging floppy on the sides of

his head, he charges with metal lobster claws clacking.

The creature slams into Crystal, breaks Desdemona’s

grip on her boyfriend, and shoves them forward into the en-

tryway of the cabin. It doesn’t stop shoving until it drives

Kevin’s body hard against the wall.

Crystal falls on her butt. She looks up and her face

gets showered with blood.

“Kevin!” Desdemona cries.

Kevin’s body is limp and hanging from the wall.

One of the bronze hands has impaled him. It sticks out of

his chest, through his heart, hanging there like a coat on a

rack in the entryway.

Des runs at the creature. She drops her guts and lets

them slide out as she runs at the thing, ready to tear its eye-

balls out with her bare fingers. But the thing elbows her

square in the forehead, swatting her away like a fly. She

soars backwards, rolls across the ground, and gets tangled in

her own intestines. In half-consciousness, she can’t figure

out how to free herself from her flesh bondage.

The creature turns on Crystal. It picks her up off of

the ground by the throat. She can feel her larynx crushing in

on itself. The metal claw opens large gashes on the bottom

of her cheeks, cutting all the way up the jawbone. She stares

into the thing’s eyes. Its eyes are wild and filled with rage.

She realizes now that capturing the creature’s mate was the

worst possible thing they could have done.

Crystal looks over the its shoulder at her boyfriend.

Jason’s mouth is agape. He doesn’t know what to do.

“Help me . . .” Crystal is barely able to gurgle the

words out of her tightened throat.

With those words, Jason turns around and runs. He

staggers upstairs as quick as he can on one leg and doesn’t

look back.

Crystal stabs the thing in the stomach with her butch-

er knife and it drops her. She crawls past its knees into the

living room. It staggers after her and picks her up off of the

ground again, this time by her armpit. The metal claw cuts

deep into the side of her arm.

She stabs it in the stomach again, but it doesn’t let her go.

She stabs it in the chest. This doesn’t even phase the creature.

Crystal screams for Jason, but there is no sign of

Jason anywhere.

The creature in the basement howls again. At the

sound of the howling noise, the gray man cries out with an-

ger. With his free lobster claw, he cuts into one of Crystal’s

breasts. He squeezes and growls, cutting through the mound

of meat like his claw is a pair of scissors.

Crystal shrieks and stabs the thing repeatedly in the

chest. She stabs it in the face. She stabs it in the neck. But

the thing won’t stop cutting. Her white shirt becomes dark

red. Once the claw cuts all the way through, she expects

to feel a ball of flesh roll out of her shirt and plop onto the

carpet. But it doesn’t fall. The breast wasn’t completely

severed. It is still dangling by a flap of skin.

The creature takes the bloody claw from her chest

and brings it up to her throat. Crystal screams as the claws

squeeze together around her neck. It gurgles at Crystal as it

constricts its claws to cut her head off.

Crystal closes her eyes so that she doesn’t have to see

her own body after she is decapitated. She knows that your

brain survives for a little while after your head is cut off. She

knows you can look up and see your headless body standing

above you. This is not something she wants to experience.

It is just too gross.

After she went through puberty, Crystal started think-

ing everything was gross. She didn’t like the smells and

textures of things. She didn’t like to look at things that were

ugly. But when she was a kid, she was quite the opposite.

She didn’t think anything was gross.

As a kid, Crystal loved to play with bugs and rep-

tiles. She liked to collect them and hide them in her room

in little jars under her bed. There were dozens of them.

Snakes, frogs, lizards, spiders, beetles, cockroaches, June

bugs. Sometimes, at night when everyone else was asleep,

she would let her little creatures out of their jars. She would

bring them all under the covers with her and let them crawl

all over her body. She liked how it felt to be tickled and

touched by all of the little things.

As she grew a little older, Crystal started swallowing

the animals alive so that she could feel them tickle the inside

of her body. She started with little spiders, then tadpoles,

and then salamanders. She liked the idea of something liv-

ing and then dying inside of her. She especially liked the

idea of things dying.

After that, Crystal’s favorite activity was to kill things

that were smaller than her. Following a rainstorm, her fam-

ily’s porch used to be crawling with dozens and dozens of

snails. She loved the sound it made when she would step on

the snails and crush them. After that, she would collect baby

frogs by the pond in her backyard. She would come up with

imaginative new ways to kill each of the frogs. Sometimes

she would even invent a story to go along with each death

or create names and character traits for each of them. When

it came to the part of the story where one of the amphibians

had to die, she would step on it, smash it with a rock, throw

it against the side of her house, bite its head off, swallow it

alive, sit on it, burn it on a stake, stab it with a pencil, cover

it in melted candle wax, drop it down the garbage disposal,

or cut it in half with her paper-cutter.

She didn’t realize what a gruesome game it was that

she was playing, but she enjoyed it. Eventually, Crystal

moved on to bigger things. She liked to throw rocks at birds

and snakes until they died. She liked to catch the neigh-

borhood cats and suffocate them in a green garbage bag or

strangle them with an old television cord.

She never regretted killing any of the animals. It was

just a thing she did for fun. She didn’t even regret the time

she took her neighbor’s pet golden retriever out of their back-

yard. The dog was excited to see her, wagging its tail, carry-

ing a chewed up red Frisbee in its mouth. She stabbed it in

the neck four times with a rusty screwdriver and then sawed

its head off while it was still partially alive. The neighbors

found their dog’s headless body later that day. Crystal could

hear them screaming and crying through the fence, but she

didn’t understand why.

As the gray man cuts into her neck, Crystal thinks

about the dog that she killed that day. She wonders if this is

what it felt like.

Before the metal claw hits a major artery, Jason comes

down the stairs. He has one of the bowling balls attached to

a chain that had been hanging in the attic. He swings it over

his head, and then releases it at the creature’s legs.

The gray creature’s knee makes a loud cracking

sound and it goes down. The thing screams in agony. Jason

lifts the bowling ball and slams it into the thing’s leg again

with all of his strength. The leg breaks. Jason can see the

bones separate under the flesh.

Crystal holds her neck and tumbles backwards,

crawling away from the thing on the ground. The creature

in the basement scratches furiously on the basement door,

trying to get out to save her mate.

“You think you’re tough, bitch?” Jason says to the

creature. “I’ll show you tough.”

He swings the ball and chain at the thing’s head. It

hits with a loud thump and the freak stops screaming. Its

eyes sag and it becomes dizzy. Jason grabs one of the crea-

ture’s fetus legs and rips it off of the side of his head like an

earring. The creature cries out again. Jason slams the bowl-

ing ball into its mouth, shattering its three front teeth.

“You think you can fucking kill me?” Jason yells,

as he strikes the creature again with the bowling ball. “You

can’t kill me, bitch. I will fucking kill you.”

Jason smashes the ball and chain into the creature

repeatedly, breaking his bones into splinters, pounding his

face into pulp.

The thing on the ground whimpers at Jason’s feet but

it just won’t die.

“Why won’t you die, bitch?” Jason says.

He stops bludgeoning the creature and pulls its head

into his face.

Only an inch away from the creature’s ear, Jason says,

“I’ll show you that there are things far worse than death.”

Jason bends the broken creature over, pulls down his