Stories (2011) (8 page)

"I know," I said.

"You killed Rae."

"I know."

"You say you killed her, you bastard. Say it."

"I killed her," I said, and meant it.

Next day I asked for my tattoo. I told her of this dream
that came to me nightly. There would be darkness, and out of this darkness
would come a swirl of glowing clouds, and the clouds would melt into a mushroom
shape, and out of that-torpedo-shaped, nose pointing skyward, striding on
ridiculous cartoon legswould step The Bomb.

There was a face painted on The Bomb, and it was my face.
And suddenly the dream's point of view would change, and I would be looking out
of the eyes of that painted face. Before me was my daughter. Naked. Lying on
the ground. Her legs wide apart. Her sex glazed like a wet canyon.

And I/The Bomb, would dive into her, pulling those silly
feet after me, and she would scream. I could hear it echo as I plunged through
her belly, finally driving myself out of the top of her head, then blowing to
terminal orgasm. And the dream would end where it began. A mushroom cloud.
Darkness.

When I told Mary the dream and asked her to interpret it in
her art, she said,

"Bare your back," and that's how the design began.
An inch of work at a time--a painful inch. She made sure of that.

Never once did I complain. She'd send the needles home as
hard and deep as she could, and though I might moan or cry out, I never asked
her to stop. I could feel those fine hands touching my back and I loved it.

The needles. The hands.

The needles. The hands.

* * *

And if that was so much fun, you ask, why did I come
Topside?

You ask such probing questions, Mr. Journal. Really you do,
and I'm glad you asked that. My telling will be like a laxative, I hope. Maybe
if I just let the slut flow I'll wake up tomorrow and feel a lot better about
myself.

Sure. And it will be the dawning of a new Pepsi generation
as well. It will have all been a bad dream. The alarm clock will ring. I'll get
up, have my bowl of Rice Krispies and tie my tie.

Okay, Mr. Journal. The answer. Twenty years or so after we
went Down Under, a fistful of us decided it couldn't be any worse Topside than
it was below. We made plans to go see. Simple as that. Mary and I even talked a
little. We both entertained the crazed belief Rae might have survived. She
would be thirtyeight. We might have been hiding below like vermin for no
reason. It could be a brave new world up there.

I remember thinking these things, Mr. Journal, and
half-believing them.

We outfitted two sixty-foot crafts that were used as part of
our transportation system Down Under, plugged in the half-remembered codes that
opened the elevators, and drove the vehicles inside. The elevator lasers cut
through the debris above them and before long we were Topside. The doors opened
to sunlight muted by grey-green clouds and a desert-like landscape. Immediately
I knew there was no brave new world over the horizon. It had all gone to hell
in a fiery handbasket, and all that was left of man's millions of years of
development were a few pathetic humans living Down Under like worms, and a few
others crawling Topside like the same.

We cruised about a week and finally came to what had once
been the Pacific Ocean. Only there wasn't any water now, just that cracked
blackness.

We drove along the shore for another week and finally saw
life. A whale. Jacobs immediately got the idea to shoot one and taste its meat.

Using a high-powered rifle he killed it, and he and seven
others cut slabs off it, brought the meat back to cook. They invited all of us
to eat, but the meat looked greenish and there wasn't much blood and we warned
him against it. But Jacobs and the others ate it anyway. As Jacobs said,
"It's something to do."

A little later on Jacobs threw up blood and his intestines
boiled out of his mouth, and not long after those who had shared the meat had
the same thing happen to them. They died crawling on their bellies like gutted
dogs. There wasn't a thing we could do for them. We couldn't even bury them.
The ground was too hard. We stacked them like cordwood along the shoreline and
moved camp down a way, tried to remember how remorse felt.

And that night, while we slept as best we could, the roses
came.

* * *

Now, let me admit, Mr. Journal, I do not actually know how
the roses survived, but I have an idea. And since you've agreed to hear my
story-and even if you haven't, you're going to anyway-I'm going to put logic
and fantasy together and hope to arrive at the truth.

These roses lived in the ocean bed, underground, and at
night they came out. Up until then they had survived as parasites of reptiles
and animals, but a new food had arrived from Down Under. Humans. Their creators
actually. Looking at it that way, you might say we were the gods who conceived
them, and their partaking of our flesh and blood was but a new version of wine
and wafer.

I can imagine the pulsating brains pushing up through the
sea bottom on thick stalks, extending feathery feelers and tasting the air out
there beneath the light of the moon-which through those odd clouds gave the impression
of a pusfilled boil-and I can imagine them uprooting and dragging their vines
across the ground toward the shore where the corpses lay.

Thick vines sprouted little, thorny vines, and these moved
up the bank and touched the corpses. Then, with a lashing motion, the thorns
tore into the flesh, and the vines, like snakes, slithered through the wounds
and inside.

Secreting a dissolving fluid that turned the innards to the
consistency of watery oatmeal, they slurped up the mess, and the vines grew and
grew at amazing speed, moved and coiled throughout the bodies, replacing nerves
and shaping into the symmetry of the muscles they had devoured, and lastly they
pushed up through the necks, into the skulls, ate tongues and eyeballs and
sucked up the mousegrey brains like soggy gruel. With an explosion of skull
shrapnel, the roses bloomed, their tooth-hard petals expanding into beautiful
red and yellow flowers, hunks of human heads dangling from them like shattered
watermelon rinds.

In the center of these blooms a fresh, black brain pulsed
and feathery feelers once again tasted air for food and breeding grounds.
Energy waves from the floral brains shot through the miles and miles of vines
that were knotted inside the bodies, and as they had replaced nerves, muscles
and vital organs, they made the bodies stand. Then those corpses turned their
flowered heads toward the tents where we slept, and the blooming corpses
(another little scientist joke there if you're into English idiom, Mr. Journal)
walked, eager to add the rest of us to their animated bouquet.

I saw my first rose-head while I was taking a leak.

I had left the tent and gone down by the shore line to
relieve myself, when I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. Because
of the bloom I first thought it was Susan Myers. She wore a thick, wooly Afro
that surrounded her head like a lion's mane, and the shape of the thing struck
me as her silhouette.

But when I zipped and turned, it wasn't an Afro. It was a
flower blooming out of Jacobs. I recognized him by his clothes and the hunk of
his face that hung off one of the petals like a worn-out hat on a peg.

In the center of the blood-red flower was a pulsating sack,
and all around it little wormy things squirmed. Directly below the brain was a
thin proboscis. It extended toward me like an erect penis. At its tip, just
inside the opening, were a number of large thorns.

A sound like a moan came out of that proboscis, and I
stumbled back. Jacobs' body quivered briefly, as if he had been besieged by a sudden
chill, and ripping through his flesh and clothes, from neck to foot, was a mass
of thorny, wagging vines that shot out to five feet in length.

With an almost invisible motion, they waved from west to
east, slashed my clothes, tore my hide, knocked my feet out from beneath me. It
was like being hit by a cat-o-nine-tails.

Dazed, I rolled onto my hands and knees, bear-walked away
from it. The vines whipped against my back and butt, cut deep.

Every time I got to my feet, they tripped me. The thorns not
only cut, they burned like hot ice picks. I finally twisted away from a net of
vines, slammed through one last shoot, and made a break for it.

Without realizing it, I was running back to the tent. My
body felt as if I had been lying on a bed of nails and razor blades. My forearm
hurt something terrible where I had used it to lash the thorns away from me. I
glanced down at it as I ran. It was covered in blood. A strand of vine about
two feet in length was coiled around it like a garter snake. A thorn had torn a
deep wound in my arm, and the vine was sliding an end into the wound.

Screaming, I held my forearm in front of me like I had just
discovered it. The flesh, where the vine had entered, rippled and made a bulge
that looked like a junkie's favorite vein. The pain was nauseating. I snatched
at the vine, ripped it free. The thorns turned against me like fishhooks.

The pain was so much I fell to my knees, but I had the vine
out of me. It squirmed in my hand, and I felt a thorn gouge my palm. I threw
the vine into the dark. Then I was up and running for the tent again.

The roses must have been at work for quite some time before
I saw Jacobs, because when I broke back into camp yelling, I saw Susan, Ralph,
Casey and some others, and already their heads were blooming, skulls cracking
away like broken model kits.

Jane Calloway was facing a rose-possessed corpse, and the
dead body had its hands on her shoulders, and the vines were jetting out of the
corpse, weaving around her like a web, tearing, sliding inside her, breaking
off. The proboscis poked into her mouth and extended down her throat, forced
her head back. The scream she started came out a gurgle.

I tried to help her, but when I got close, the vines whipped
at me and I had to jump back. I looked for something to grab, to hit the damn
thing with, but there was nothing. When next I looked at Jane, vines were
stabbing out of her eyes and her tongue, now nothing more than lava-thick
blood, was dripping out of her mouth onto her breasts, which like the rest of
her body, were riddled with stabbing vines.

I ran away then. There was nothing I could do for Jane. I
saw others embraced by corpse hands and tangles of vines, but now my only
thought was Mary. Our tent was to the rear of the campsite, and I ran there as
fast as I could.

She was lumbering out of our tent when I arrived. The sound
of screams had awakened her. When she saw me running she froze. By the time I
got to her, two vine-riddled corpses were coming up on the tent from the left
side. Grabbing her hand I half-pulled, half-dragged her away from there. I got
to one of the vehicles and pushed her inside.

* * *

I locked the doors just as Jacobs, Susan, Jane, and others
appeared at the windshield, leaning over the rocket-nose hood, the feelers
around the brain sacks vibrating like streamers in a high wind. Hands slid
greasily down the windshield. Vines flopped and scratched and cracked against
it like thin bicycle chains.

I got the vehicle started, stomped the accelerator, and the
rose-heads went flying. One of them, Jacobs, bounced over the hood and
splattered into a spray of flesh, ichor and petals.

I had never driven the vehicle, so my maneuvering was rusty.
But it didn't matter. There wasn't exactly a traffic rush to worry about.

After an hour or so, I turned to look at Mary. She was
staring at me, her eyes like the twin barrels of a double-barreled shotgun.
They seemed to say, "More of your doing," and in a way she was right.
I drove on.

Daybreak we came to the lighthouse. I don't know how it
survived. One of those quirks. Even the glass was uubroken. It looked like a
great stone finger shooting us the bird.

The vehicle's tank was near empty, so I assumed here was as
good a place to stop as any. At least there was shelter, something we could
fortify. Going on until the vehicle was empty of fuel didn't make much sense.
There wouldn't be any more fill-ups, and there might not be any more shelter
like this.

Mary and I (in our usual silence) unloaded the supplies from
the vehicle and put them in the lighthouse. There was enough food, water,
chemicals for the chemical toilet, odds and ends, extra clothes, to last us a
year. There were also some guns. A Colt .45 revolver, two twelve-gauge shotguns
and a .38, and enough shells to fight a small war.

When everything was unloaded, I found some old furniture
downstairs, and using tools from the vehicle, tried to barricade the bottom
door and the one at the top of the stairs. When I finished, I thought of a line
from a story I had once read, a line that always disturbed me. It went
something like, "Now we're shut in for the night."

Days. Nights. All the same. Shut in with one another, our
memories and the fine tattoo.

A few days later I spotted the roses. It was as if they had
smelled us out. And maybe they had. From a distance, through the binoculars,
they reminded me of old women in bright sun hats.

It took them the rest of the day to reach the lighthouse,
and they immediately surrounded it, and when I appeared at the railing they
would lift their heads and moan.

And that, Mr. Journal, brings us up to now.

* * *

I thought I had written myself out, Mr. Journal. Told the
only part of my life story I would ever tell, but now I'm back. You can't keep
a good world destroyer down.

I saw my daughter last night and she's been dead for years.
But I saw her, I did, naked, smiling at me, calling to ride piggyback.