Upright Beasts (21 page)

“I'm going to check on Dolan,” Iris said. “Thanks for the dinner, it was very, uh, well-balanced.” When she stood up, Feather grabbed her hand.

“You haven't had dessert,” she said. “I make a completely organic berry pie.”

“Hey, don't grab me,” Iris said and yanked at Feather's gloved hand. When she did, the glove came off, and Feather and Iris both gasped.

“What the fuck did you do to your hand?”

Feather's hand alighted back on Iris's. It wasn't a normal hand. It was swollen and bright pink, with rows of tiny spikes running down the middle of four fingers. Only the pinky had remained unchanged. Her fingernails on the other four fingers had fallen off, but the skin underneath looked odd. Each finger ended in the same watery, pupil-less eye.

“Oh dearie,” she said, pulling her hand back and covering it with a napkin. “I guess the cat's out of the bag now.”

We managed to get the family room door locked and began propping up furniture. Even from behind the shut door, I could hear the parents shouting at each other in my mind. Clover was laughing. My head was swimming in sound and adrenaline, and I could only hear fragments.
Does the woman have it
too? . . .
Will he want to join the circle?
. . .
This is serious, Clover . . . signal with burnt skin
. . . and so on.

“Dolan, we have to go. Wake up!” Tears ran down her face.

I went over to her, and she grabbed my hand. Her grip was so tight her fingernails dug into my skin, and I started bleeding.

“What did they do to him? What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

Dolan, if he was still Dolan, was lying engorged on the couch. His skin had turned even darker. It looked as if his entire body was one huge bruise. His stomach cavity was swelling outward, spilling over his jeans and remaining rib cage. You could see that several off the ribs had cracked where bits of bone had ripped
through his shirt. Rivulets of pus dripped from little holes in his skin where tiny translucent bulbs had emerged. His eyes were closed and crusted with dark gunk.

Iris kept yelling “no” and pinching her face as if she was trying to wake up from a dream. I'd never been a big fan of Dolan, but even I didn't like seeing him like this. I wished we could all be back in that car, driving through the woods in our angry silence back to the city.

The Scintleys were knocking politely on the door. “Brother, sister, open the door and commune with us. You don't know the joy your friend has in store!”

“We need to get out of here,” I said, trying to pull Iris up.

“Fuck you,” Iris said quietly. She was weeping. “Do you even know what Dolan did for me? I had a life before we dated, you know. And it was a shitty life until Dolan helped me out. I'm not leaving him to die on a couch.”

“We'll get help. We'll go get help and come back and save him.”

She was trying to lift Dolan and wouldn't move. I tried to help her, and we got him almost standing. His skin was covered in sweat and goo. He slipped out of our arms and onto the rug. He let out a deep inhuman groan as he fell.

Iris balled her hands into fists and snarled, “Oh, we're coming back all right. We're coming back to fuck those fuckers up.”

There was a side door that opened to the backyard. Iris and I sprinted toward the shack, holding hands. My heart was pulsing like a strobe light.

It was pretty dark out, and we ducked into the space between the shack and the covered cage to catch our breath. Iris leaned against the cage. “Those cocksuckers, those motherfuckers,” she was saying between huffs.

I peeked over the edge of the cage and saw Feather in the light of the kitchen window. She was pointing out toward something behind their house with her deformed hand. It wasn't in our direction.

“We'll sneak down that slope and make our way back to the road,” Iris said. “Then we'll come back with police and guns and fucking rapid dogs.”

“Do you mean rabid dogs?”

“Both!”

“Sure,” I said. “Okay. That's a plan.” I was distracted though. My head was starting to buzz again, and the noise seemed to somehow be emanating from the cage. There was a presence in there cooing to me, like a mother to a child, without words. It wanted me to reach inside.

Iris slapped my hand. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “We need to go. We need to help Dolan.”

The buzzing in my head made me close my eyes. I couldn't help it. It felt as if my insides were brittle, cracking glass. It was originating from the beesting on my neck. I reached back to rub it. When my fingertip touched the swollen sting on my neck, everything in front of me dissolved from black to white to black again.

I wasn't seeing Iris or any woods or house or tarp-covered cage. I was in a cyclopean pink cave at least as large as a football stadium. It was lit from undulating yellow orbs that sank from the ceilings, stretching out like drool from sleeping lips, until they snapped and splattered on the floor. When they splattered, their light disappeared. The cave itself was scaly, but pulsing. The floor surged and waned.

When I crawled forward, the scales of the floor opened up around my hands and feet. I sank in, and then the scales closed
back. The toothless mouths of the floor gummed my elbows and knees. I could feel my skin being rubbed off. I cried out in pain.

There was a presence that was trying to speak to me, but it didn't know how. It was assaulting me, yelling things at me that weren't words or human feelings. I tried to say, “I don't understand,” but when I did, a fissure opened between my bottom front teeth.

The fissure crept down my chest. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it splitting open down my stomach and all the way around. I could feel myself opening. I was sliding to each side. I tried to scream again, and my teeth fell out, replaced by small, stunted spikes that hurt my tongue. Then my eyes dripped away, running down my checks and hanging over the floor.

When they hit the cave floor, everything went black again.

Welcome back to this realm.

George was standing over me. He'd taken his scarf off, and I could see the swollen mound of spikes on his neck. He was holding a lantern with a bare, deformed hand. His other held the cattle prod at his side.

I looked around and didn't see Iris. Iris was always threatening to leave me, but I hadn't thought it would happen like this.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” George said. “You can understand why we're wary of strangers. If the government found us, who knows what experiments their sick scientists would do. We have to protect it. We're all it has.”
Plus you and me are brothers now, aren't we?

“Brothers?”

“Let me show you something. Can you get on your feet?” He helped me up and motioned toward the cage. “Take a look and prepare to be amazed by what this universe contains,” he
said. His smile was gigantic. I couldn't tell if his teeth were real or covering something else.

I could feel that presence again, humming something to me. It was vibrating my spine. I didn't know what the hell it was trying to say. I pulled the tarp off the cage and immediately gasped and stepped backwards.

I don't know what kind of horror I was expecting, but my stomach was instantly filled with sadness.

The creature was about the size of a Great Dane and rested on its side on the bottom of the cage. It wasn't shaped quite like a dog though. The body was a distorted orb, wider at one end than the other. It looked almost like an elongated apple, except covered in cracked, pink flesh. Rows of translucent spikes ran down its body in five columns. They met up at a wrinkled sphincter at the top. The creature's body didn't move, but its spikes undulated up and down in a sad rhythm. Between the rows of spikes there were sets of large watery ovals that seemed to be eyes. A bit of yellow-green liquid, like pea soup, dripped out of one or two of them.

“Incredible, isn't it?” George said. “We found this wonder in the cornfield back there, flopping around on the ground like a fish yanked out of water.” He held his hands together and bowed toward the cage.

“Where did it come from?”

“It fell here from another glorious world. We found a thick round rubber vessel nearby.” He motioned off into the woods. “Its house, I guess. If you want proof of how mysterious the cosmos are, watch this.”

George flicked on the cattle prod and jammed it inside.

The creature began convulsing, its spikes flailing in all directions. A sweet stench, like burnt garlic, surrounded us.

The message the creature was sending me was very clear now. Pain. Its hurt rained through my body, and by the scrunched-up look on George's face, his too. Then there was a thick ripping sound, like someone pulling apart an enormous steak with their hands.

“I can always feel its life force when I do that,” he said.

When I looked back down, there were two creatures in the cage, identical in size and shape. They were both smaller than the one before.

“This creature doesn't even consume plants, much less animals. It sustains itself on electricity and makes love with it. It's how it reproduces. We've been eating its bounty, using every part like the Indians. We always keep one half of it alive and strong. If it wasn't for our care, it would have surely died already.” George hung the lantern on a hook on the wall of the nearby shack. “It's been rewarding us too, transferring its aura to us and allowing our life forces to merge.”
But you already know that, don't you?

He pulled a small black pistol from the back of his pants. He used the gun to scratch the underside of his chin.

“I didn't eat any of it,” I said.

“No, but I suppose those bees must have communed with it before stinging you. The crow put something different in your fellow traveler though. He isn't like you and me. Feather and I don't even know exactly what he will birth, but I think you can understand why we couldn't let you leave.”

He pressed the side of the gun into his cheek, as if he was making a motion to fall asleep. “Well, I abhor guns, but I have to keep the forces in balance.” He lowered the gun and fired. The new creature trembled once, and then was still.

The first creature's eyes turned dark. The spikes drooped downward, and a cloud of rank gas whiffed out of its wrinkly hole.

George scratched his beard with the barrel again. It must have still been hot, because I smelled a bit of singed hair. He smiled and put the gun back in his pants.

“Can't you feel how connected we are? I wasn't sure at first, but after you spoke at dinner I knew. This wonderful being has touched both of us and joined our chis.”

He leaned his head back so he was facing the stars and let out a whoop.

I didn't even see Iris coming, but she whacked George pretty good in the back of the head. When he fell forward, his chin hit the cage, and his teeth smacked together with a wet crunch.

“You sick hippie hick!” She was on top of him now and gashing his back with a hatchet she'd found god knows where. His blood turned the dirt under him into mud. The mixture was dotted with broken bits of teeth. “You aren't nice people! You're sicko pervert assholes!”

Finally she stopped and stood over him, breathing rapidly. When she looked at me, I saw her face was splattered with blood. Some had gotten in her left eye, making her wink.

“Where did you learn to do that?” I said.

“It's not hard, you just swing,” she said. “Are you okay?”

I said I thought I was and she smiled.

“Then let's get Dolan and get the hell back to the city.”

“What about that thing? I don't want to leave it like that.”

Iris looked in the cage and groaned.

“What kind of shit is that? A diseased walrus? I can't deal with this right now. I'm getting Dolan, and you're coming with me, and we're never coming out to this shit hole again.”

Feather broke down in tears when she saw us walk by splattered in blood.

“Run, run to your room!” she said to Clover, shielding her with her body. She moaned George's name and started chanting in a language I didn't understand.

Iris walked right past her though, and I followed.

“Dolan,” Iris said quietly. The thing she was talking to didn't look like Dolan to me. His flesh had sloughed off. His face was bunched up like a rubber mask on the floor.

In the cavity of Dolan, a thick black orb was expanding. It was half in, half out of Dolan. Bits of him clung to its curved sides. The stench of the room made me pinch my nose shut. A few dark strands extended out of the orb, writhing on the floor. Another strand had made its way out of Dolan's ear and slithered into the wall socket.

Iris was throbbing with tears. I pulled her away and hugged her. “Hey, it'll be all right. We're gonna be all right.”

Iris pushed her hands up my chest in what I took to be a tender way. But when her hands reached my neck, she shoved me back violently.

“My fucking best friend is dead! It's not going to be all right, you dick! How did I ever even date you? What is wrong with your fucking brain?”