Midian Unmade (14 page)

“Who'd you play for?” I ask, the lilt of my voice showing genuine interest.

Bam. He's on the hook and moving two stools down to sit beside me. He wants it bad. I can taste his thoughts, the stench of his desire reeking like a bloated corpse. Middle age is making him weary, sad, putting the creak in his bones and a layer of fat on his belly. He wants to be young again, but even I can't do that. So he talks about it. And he talks about it. And beer after beer he keeps talking about it, reliving every glorious moment.

His name is Bill.

It's an hour in and he's recapping the final quarter of the big state championship. I know when he's lying, but I don't mention it. The embellishments are the only thing making the story listenable. Otherwise it's the standard claptrap that I try to choke down with as much alcohol as I can stomach, half a pack of smokes, and the hope that this headache will soon be gone. Every once in a while I break in to tell my own lies, stories I've lifted from a hundred other guys just like him, details that sound right because they actually happened to someone else.

But none of this is going to chase away the hunger. It's all just foreplay. I gotta get this guy out of the bar so we can get down to business.

“Man,” I say before killing the last few swigs of a beer. “I wish I weren't so far from home. I could really go for a round of shooting right now.”

“Shooting?” he asks.

“Yeah. Me and the boys like to go out after a game, get completely wrecked then line up our bottles and shoot shit until we pass out. All this talk about playing has me wanting to shoot.”

“I got a couple shotguns in the truck. Maybe fifty, sixty rounds.”

“Bullshit,” I say, pretending that I haven't been smelling the gunpowder on him for the last hour.

“Ain't no lie. You wanna shoot?”

“Yeah I wanna shoot.” I look up at the bartender. “How much for the rest of that bottle of whiskey?”

Bartender shakes her head. “I can't let you walk out with anything open. Not so much as a beer.”

“Then how much for an unopened bottle?”

“Ain't got a license to sell you that, neither.”

Bill waves a fat finger at me. “Let's do a few shots now and it'll hit us just in time to shoot. Trust me. I do this all the time.”

He was right. He does. The whiskey hits us just as we've lined up trash on a fence out in some disused field miles away. He's a good shot. I pretend not to be half bad. Truth is that I've spent an untold number of drunken nights getting hillbillies and rednecks to shoot at things that shouldn't be shot at. It's not all about college girls, struggling ex-addicts, and cheating husbands. I gotta dig deep to keep on keepin' on. Some nights it's getting spanked by a priest, others it's getting someone to cheat at cards, and yeah, others still are spent shooting cans out in the sticks, talking a drunk idiot into going down on his drunker sister or … putting some buckshot in his asshole neighbor.

So yeah, I've done this once or twice.

We shoot until we've almost run through his ammo. I get pretty close most of the time, but as the shells start running thin, I start nailing my shots one after another after another.

“Damn, son,” he says. “You're getting' the hang of it.”

“I'm getting sober is what I'm getting.”

“Young man like you can hold his liquor. I'm drunk as hell.”

“Well I ain't anymore. Let's go get some more to drink.”

He looks at his watch. “Bar's closed. Missed it by ten minutes.”

I make a pained face and look up at the wide dark sea of stars above. We really are out in the middle of nowhere. “There's a house along the road about a mile back. What do you say we raid their liquor cabinet?” I shoot him a playful smile, but cock my brows just so to tell him I'm serious.

“That's breaking and entering.”

“Yeah.”

“No way,” he says.

“What? Do you know 'em?”

“No.”

“Well, ain't you never raised hell, before? I thought you were cool.”

That hits him like a fist to the gut. He tries to hide it but his eyes give him away. He thought he was cool, too. For a while there he was feeling like a kid again, just one of the guys.

“We ain't gonna hurt nothin',” I say. “Just peek in their liquor cabinet and take some for the road. You never done that?”

He has. But not in a long time.

I can feel it in my bones, smell it on his breath. He hesitates, temptation gnawing a hole so big in his gut you could drive a truck through it.

He smiles. “Fuck it. Let's do it.”

Release. It's like that moment you stand up after drinking when it all hits you at once coupled with the tingling opening salvo of a full-force orgasm. The headache vanishes in an orgiastic rush, with even the itch banished to the back of my skull for another hour or so. If he goes through with this, I'll be good till sundown tomorrow. If not, I've got a few hours' reprieve to figure out my next move and find my next victim.

But this guy's gonna go through with it. I can tell. I can always tell.

But that ain't the worst of it, not for him.

This poor son of a bitch has no idea what he's walking into. You see, there are a couple of things I haven't told you yet. Firstly, I know exactly where we're going and I know who lives in that house. I smell 'em every time I end up here. Secondly, I didn't end up in this town by accident. Not this time. And lastly, we're not going there for booze. We're going there for peace.

Who lives in that house?

UHF and the FM Girl.

That's what we called them anyway, in Midian, behind their back. Their names are Humphrey B and Sylvia, but the first time you see them you can't think of them as anything but UHF and the FM Girl. UHF is a tall guy, six feet at the shoulder, with an old nineteen-inch black-and-white CRT television for a head. There's all this sinewy muscle wrapped around cables running up from his chest and neck into the TV, but the back of the set is blown out, like it was hollowed from the inside by a shotgun blast—jagged plastic surrounding a seven-inch hole. Inside there's nothing, nothing at all. But the TV screen is always lit, a disembodied head in fuzzy black and white, ever floating, reacting, just as you'd expect his head to react.

The FM Girl is different. She's lithe, willowy, easily five foot nothing, her skin wrinkled and desiccated, like she was mummified, her eyes and mouth sewn shut with ratty black thread. While she can't speak, she's always broadcasting her thoughts, and if you've got a radio nearby tuned to the right station—89.7! The screaming sounds of hell!—you can hear her just fine. So she carries around an old beat-up hand-cranked emergency radio that she'll wind to life if she ever has anything to say.

They're a fine couple, as married as us monsters can be. FM Girl needs flesh to feed; UHF just needs to watch. He can go a little longer than she can, but neither can go more than a year or two without a good, honest-to-God murder. I've been keeping track of them for a spell. They've been picking off truckers over the years, catching them overnight, murdering them in their cabs before driving their trucks off into oblivion. But it's been a while. And they must be getting hungry.

So I'm bringing takeout.

The windows of the house are blacked out for obvious reasons, but Bill doesn't notice. It's a run-down, single-story ranch-style affair with peeling blue paint and the rusted-out frame of a midseventies Oldsmobile oxidizing into nothingness out front. It is, as far as Panhandle homes go, entirely ordinary.

We slip in through the back door into a hallway that splits off to the living room and the kitchen. I point to Bill and then the kitchen, then myself and the living room. He enters the kitchen completely unaware that there's an open door to the cellar in there and that under this house there be monsters.

They hear him come in. He's about as silent as a raccoon in a trash can.

A pale blue light creeps up the stairs, but Bill's too busy picking through the cabinets to see it.

Behind him, not six feet away, is the FM Girl, her husband standing silently, ominously, behind her. Watching. The kitchen fills with the blue light of his flickering set and Bill turns slowly around.

His eyes go wide with fear. He's paralyzed, unable to process what he's seeing.

The FM Girl reaches up to her sewn-shut mouth and yanks at the thread, pulling it out in one slow, deliberate motion. Then her cheek splits, splaying her ear to ear, rows of needle-teeth glistening in slobber as her massive jaw unhinges. Her mouth is so wide it looks as if it could swallow Bill's head whole.

Behind her, UHF's head vanishes from inside the set, his display showing his view of his wife and her soon-to-be meal.

The FM Girl reaches down and cranks her radio, winding it up furiously. It crackles to life, thick static shrieking murderous thoughts along with the phrase “Wrong house, motherfucker.”

My machete cuts her in half from behind before UHF can speak up to warn her, his flickering screen showing every horrible second of his wife's demise. Her body topples to the floor with two wet slaps.

I dive in like a rabid beast, razor claws rending her flesh into fistfuls of meat that I greedily shove into my mouth. Blood coats me in seconds, the floor growing slick with it.

I look up at UHF and smile. He's feeding. He's feeding watching his own wife devoured handful by delicious handful. He feels awful about it, can't decide whether to run for safety or stay a few seconds longer to taste the end of the love of his life. The thrill of his sin is the cream gravy on the chicken fried steak of my meal.

“You should go, Humphrey,” I say through a mouthful of his wife.

His head reappears on the screen and his voice crackles through his tinny mono speaker. “Are you going to kill me next?”

“Do I have to?”

He shakes his head back and forth, the television remaining perfectly still. “No.”

“Then go. Run. Before I change my mind.”

He thinks for a second, knowing he should probably fight, should stay and defend the last remains of his beloved Sylvia. But he doesn't. He runs.

And I turn back to my meal, savoring every last bit of murderous sin that remains of the FM Girl.

Bill is slumped on the floor, staring at me slack-jawed, eyes as wide, unblinking.

So I turn to him. “You're not going to say a word about this, are you Bill?”

He shakes his head, terrified, a few seconds shy of pissing himself right there on the floor.

“Good. Now get the fuck out of here.”

He stands up and scampers out the door without looking back. Frankly, I don't give a shit if he tells anyone. Who's going to believe him? He walked out of a bar drunk with a stranger and the next time anyone sees it, this house is going to be on fire. Telling stories about monsters in the basement will get him branded either a crackpot or an arsonist.

He'll choose neither. He's going to spend the rest of his life trying to forget what he saw tonight and maybe, just maybe, he'll stop trying to live in the past.

I don't have anything against humans, really. I don't ever make anyone do anything they don't want to do in the first place. Not really. I just give them a nudge. The interesting thing about doing this is seeing what comes after. My gift to them is they get to find out who they really are, deep down. And what they do with that knowledge defines them from that point on. Some folks can't handle the memories of their night with me, but others come out all right on the other side. They make peace with themselves. They become better people. But it's their choice. Everything is their choice.

So in case you were wondering, that's how I sleep at night.

And I'm going to be sleeping a lot better now knowing I won't have to be that guy for quite some time, that I won't wake up with an itch in my head that turns into a rumble that turns into a scream. All my drinking I can do for myself now, all my sins will be my own. At least for a while.

But now that my head's clear and I've got the taste of monster on my tongue, I'm wondering. Just how much more time can I buy myself if I run ole Humphrey down as well? I think I might do just that. He smells delicious.

 

THE DEVIL UNTIL THE CREDITS ROLL

Weston Ochse

(Written while deployed to Afghanistan)

The silence was extraordinary as I stared into the darkness, waiting, knowing it would come for us. Like a nightmare scrambling across the desert floor, it would seethe into our midst. One or more of us would die tonight. I knew this better than the others. This was the second time I'd come to the monster. After the first time, I'd promised myself I'd never do it again and not just because the monster said the next time I'd die. There was something about the unworldly creature that brought out the primordial within me, cellular memories that evoked things in the darkness that needed to stay outside the fire, creatures whose existence preceded the idea of evil but nonetheless influenced humanity's idea of it.

“And you're sure it's up there?” Watson's dark shape next to me whispered. The sound of his boots scooting on the grit sliced at the Afghanistan night.

I tried to control my breathing. Each sound was like a rifle shot to my nerves. The monster would come when it wanted, but Watson couldn't wait. We were all Special Forces, but Watson had also been a Ranger, deploying six times in support of the advanced infantry force, and he was incapable of acknowledging that there was something he couldn't defeat with technique, courage, and steel. So he kept scanning the cave entrance with his night-vision, even though he'd been told the monster wouldn't show up in them.

To be honest, none of them really believed in the existence of monsters. I could tell they were reconciled that the entire mission was a lark and we'd be drinking scotch back on FOB Salerno in six hours. But I knew better and I felt more than a little guilt in bringing these five men to this otherwise nondescript cave in the Tora Bora Mountains.