The Lost and the Damned (39 page)

Confession to a Friend

FREE SHORT STORY

"I think I killed somebody out there."

Two men went on a motorcycle journey across the American Southwest in search of adventure and spiritual liberation.  But something went wrong. Only one returned.

What happened out in the lonely deserts of New Mexico?

Balls

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"Tell me about your balls."

He's self obsessed - particularly with one part of his anatomy. He's an underwear model, an adjunct professor, and a ladies' man. Tonight he's got a problem with a fan who is a little too interested in what he's got under the hood.

Do you want to hear about his balls?

The Devil Takes His Cut

Two aging outlaws on the run after a botched robbery. They’re low on ammo and they’ve lost half their money. With a relentless federal marshal hot on their heels, they stumble across an old mountain fort where decades ago one of the outlaws made a deal that still haunts him. When his partner is wounded, the outlaw is confronted with his past and the bargain he made so long ago.

Excerpt from
I Kill Monsters

I Never Told You What I Do For A Living

It's not a glamorous job.

At the end of the day, you're covered with mud, grime, and blood. If you're lucky, the blood isn't yours; it's the dark blood of creatures you won't find in any zoological books. On bad days you come home bite wounds across your shoulder, hoping that you can have a quiet night with whiskey and antibiotics. And all of that assumes you didn't slip and fall into sewer sludge, so you come back covered in crap and smelling worse than anything you could puke up
^[1]
. That's an average day. An uncomplicated one.

My brother and I have a very dirty job. He's Mikkel and I'm Szandor. We're the Nowak brothers. We kill monsters. And we're actually damn good at it.

Despite our foreign sounding names, we are 100% American. Born and bred. Our father might have been an immigrant and gave us weird-sounding names, but we don't have any funny accents. We're two American kids from New Avalon doing our best and killing monsters. Yes, we're young - I'm twenty and Mikkel's twenty-two. We're probably a little young for this life, but it's where we ended up.

We don't work for a shadowy government agency. We're not associated with the police. We don't have any security clearance. We're not backed by a major corporation. We're not millionaire playboys with a dark need for justice. We don't have super powers, we're not from a family lineage of monster hunters, and we haven't been bestowed with any supernatural gifts... that we know of. We're just two guys who grew up on the poor side of town and run a website for people who need help.

If we're lucky, we even get paid for what we do.

Let me tell you about the time Gertrude Ferguson sent us a message on our website. She was experiencing a problem with some kind of a serpent in her apartment. She didn't know who to turn to and was afraid to take a bath for fear it would attack her or her cats. She needed help and we stepped up to help.

I'll admit we did so reluctantly.

Mikkel and I knew Mrs. Ferguson from the old neighborhood, so we had concerns about what she was telling us. First off, she was like 80 million years old, so what the hell was she doing on the internet? I was impressed that her message wasn't in all caps. Second, a serpent in her apartment? How was she finding time to read our website? Why isn't she, say, running in terror or just dead?

Ultimately, I went to check on with Mrs. Ferguson alone. I was unlucky. Mikkel tried to tap out first by claiming he had plans with Vanessa. I didn't have a hot date of my own to counter it, but that's not how we work. I demanded a coin toss for who was going. I still lost. So while Mikkel romanced his flavor of the month, I was stuck visiting the Widow Ferguson.

Of course you're wondering why we were bothering - excuse me, why
I
was bothering. There were a few reasons. We've known Mrs. Ferguson since we were kids, so we weren't about to blow her off despite her strange account. And we take all reports from the old neighborhood seriously - that's our main place for pro-bono work. But beyond all that, we had been getting odd reports from her block. A husband had gotten bitten by something no one had a good look at, an indoor cat was missing from a locked apartment, strange sounds were heard in the walls, and dogs were growling at the trash bins in the alley. Individually, it all sounded like crap, but put them together and it seemed a little suspicious. We had actually gone to check it out once already, but we had found nothing conclusive and nobody had gotten a good look at whatever it was. We had kept the investigation open, but had no new leads before Mrs. Ferguson.

I showed up at the Widow Ferguson's apartment dressed for hunting. I was wearing thick boots, jeans, and a canvas jacket.  I didn't bring my
entire
kit. I didn't think she needed me showing up with my full arsenal until there was a problem. I carried only a sheathed machete on my belt. I wanted to be respectful to Mrs. Ferguson - I had even cleaned
most
of the dirt off my boots before showing up.

When she opened the door, I expected her to launch into some sort of old person nostalgia banter like, "Oh, look at you! I remember when you were so small that your mother needed to carry you up stairs, and look at you now, gutting malicious creatures with a machete!" But there was none of that. Her eyes were haunted. She was afraid. It's the type of look that makes you start taking everything
very
seriously.

The only comment she made was that I smelled like cigarettes.

The apartment was the size of a postage stamp. I grew up in a small apartment, but this one was somehow tinier due to all the furniture stuffed into it, probably collected over many years. Or maybe not that many years, since the way it was decorated it seemed like it was in a stasis bubble. Somehow this apartment had frozen in the 1970s and had never progressed. The shag carpet, the corduroy couch and the peeling avocado green wallpaper all gave me a sense of vertigo, like déjà vu for a decade I wasn't even alive for.

She half-heartedly suggested making me tea, but I shook my head. "Mrs. Ferguson, tell me about the serpent."
Serpent
was the word she had used. I doubted it was actually a serpent, but I wanted her to open up, not feel like I was telling her she was wrong.

Sighing heavily, she practically collapsed into an armchair. A gray longhair cat instantly jumped into her lap and began rubbing up against her hand.

"I don't know what to do," she said, starting a speech I had heard too many times. "It's a crazy thing. I mean, who would have believed -" If I didn't stop her, she'd go on with this. People feel uncomfortable admitting they think they encountered a creature science doesn't acknowledge. So they have a long preamble of how they're not crazy or delusional
but
they did see something. As much as I had affection for this little old woman, listening to it again after she contacted us on our very explicit website would make my skin crawl and my blood pressure spike.

"Mrs. Ferguson," I said, "with all due respect, I've seen monsters before, you knew that already. You don't need to convince me. You don't need to convince me you're not crazy, nor do you need to convince yourself. You clearly believe it enough to have contacted me."

She sighed again, but nodded her head. I think a weight lifted from her, though she stared off at the walls, not at me.

"So what did it look like?" I prompted.

"It was scaly," she said, then trailed off.

"Okay, what else?" I said, reaching in my pocket to pull out a pad and pen.

"That's all I remember," she said. "It was so quick. I was turned the other way but I heard a hiss behind me. The cats sometimes fight, so I didn't think much of it. But then Gypsum ran into the room and I heard her make a growl that she doesn't usually make. I thought there was a problem, so I turned my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark flash of something. I remember scales. For some reason I remember that."

"So you barely saw it at all?" I said.

"Right. Gypsum saw it, though," she said, nodding to the cat in her lap. "I don't think Shecky did."

"And that's all you saw?"

"Right."

I scratched the back of my head. There wasn't really a lot here.

"Have you had any strange occurrence before or since then?" I said. "Weird sounds? Strange marks? Anything unusual?"

"The super hasn't fixed anything in a long time," she said and I nodded. In South Egan, your superintendant was neglectful at best, in worst cases he was criminally negligent. "The pipes rumble when anyone else turns on the water," she continued, "and the oven makes a pinging noise when it's on. But nothing new."

"What color were the scales?" I said.

"Green? Gray? Something like that," she said. "I'm sorry I can't remember more. I'm not sure why I remember scales."

That's always a problem. Sometimes people have good information. Other times they have bad information - sometimes so bad it could be dangerous. I didn't think she was lying, but sometimes people
think
they saw something, then fixate on that fact so much that it becomes even more true in their minds. If she barely saw a dark shape and can't remember the color, how could she have seen enough detail to see scales? It was possible, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe she just saw her cats up to strange antics or maybe there was a rat in the apartment.

I looked around the tiny apartment, looking behind furniture and keeping my ears open for out of the ordinary sounds. But besides an orange cat paw poking at my boot from under the couch, I didn't notice anything. Of course, she had so many little knickknacks and statuettes on everything, I didn't want to try moving anything for fear they'd fall off and break. I had never known my grandmothers, but I imagine their homes would have looked exactly like this.

"What room did you see it in?" I said.

Mrs. Ferguson nodded to a door. "The bathroom," she said ominously. That explained why she was sitting out here semi-relaxed and not sitting in the corner brandishing a frying pan.

"I guess I should check it out," I said.

"Be careful," she said, ominously again. Okay, maybe her tone was getting to me a bit.

I moved toward the door slowly. I drew my machete and held it in front of me, in case something burst out at me. I had a sudden thought. "Are the cats accounted for?" I said. The last thing I wanted was to go in there and mistake a cat defending its territory for a ravenous beast, leading to a bloody and tragic accident. I mean, I
was
holding a machete.

"No, they're accounted for," she said, holding one cat in her lap and gazing at a long haired tabby that was eyeing me from under the coffee table.

I nodded. Alright, it was show time. With a quick step forward, I pushed the door open, machete held at the ready in my other hand.

The bathroom was empty.

Well, that wasn't the
first
thing I thought. The first thing I thought was,
This is the pinkest bathroom known to man
. Despite her color choices in the rest of the apartment, Mrs. Ferguson had let out her inner thirteen year old girl when decorating the bathroom. Pink shower curtain, pink rugs, pink wallpaper. It was a welcome relief from the Pepto-Bismol colored vertigo to see that the bathroom tiles that poked out from behind the closed shower curtain were an average white porcelain.

Looking left and right, I saw nothing threatening. I stepped away from the door and it swung shut behind me. I opened the cabinet under the sink, but found nothing of interest to me. I tactfully poked at the laundry basket, not wanting to see Mrs. Ferguson's unmentionables even accidentally. I checked the corners of the toilet, but found nothing. The toilet was a generic white, though it had a furry seat cover that was pink.

Since those all seemed fine, that left just our old friend the mysteriously closed shower curtain. I'm not sure about you, but the only time I ever have the shower curtain closed is when I'm actually taking a shower. I'm sure some people like to put on good appearances for guests and close it when they exit, but it always makes me suspicious. Like, if I were just some average joe, I'd wonder if someone was hiding behind it or if there was a dead body in the tub. But with my line of work, I instead usually wonder if there is some horrible many limbed beast waiting to claw my eyes out as soon as I sit down on the toilet for number two.

Some part of me considered just whacking away at the shower curtain with the machete. If there was a ravenous beast in here, the only place left for it was behind the shower curtain. I'd be a fool to not try and get the jump on it. But no, instead of hacking up Mrs. Ferguson's nauseatingly pink shower curtain, I slowly reached out. With two fingers, I delicately grabbed the edge of the shower curtain and with one quick motion I threw it open...

...and there was nothing hiding behind it. Despite all my worry, all I had done was reveal that Mrs. Ferguson really enjoyed scented bath products, that she didn't use a mesh filter to stop hair from going down the gaping hole of the drain, and that one of the cats had dropped a dookie in the tub.

I let out the breath I was holding. Well, this was a waste of time. I sat down on the closed toilet and reflected on my evening. So far I had found nothing at all. I guess I should have suspected this from the "serpent" report, but I really had hoped there was some real work here. I pulled out my phone and called Mikkel.

"Don't tell me you're in trouble," said Mikkel in a hushed voice, probably walking away from the table his date sat at. "I'm
this
close to getting Vanessa home, I'm not interrupting this to back your ass up. I'm not putting up with blue balls again." Ladies and gentlemen, my brother.