Anything Can Be Dangerous (15 page)

Every nerve in his body seemed to
short circuit from the shock, and he stiffened in his seat, unable
to move. Then the finger did it again, squirming like a half-dead
worm trapped in a storm puddle, just as someone said, “Hey there,
Jimbo!”

Slapping him on the back—

Gulp!

—
causing him to
swallow!

He felt the finger slide down his
throat like a thick bite of licorice, pressing hard against his
insides.

Oh, shit!

He clutched the table with both hands,
tensing his neck muscles in a last ditch effort to stop the dead
man’s digit from reaching his stomach. But then he felt one last
squeeze deep inside his chest and knew it was already too
late.

“
Jimbo,” he heard Tom, the
foreman, say from behind. “You alright, man? Damn, I didn’t mean to
surprise you like that.”

The others set their food aside when
Jimmy failed to respond, Jeff leaning in close, asking him what was
wrong. Tom offered him a hand, but he pushed it away.

“
Outta my way, you
back-slapping asshole!” he cried.

Without another word, he leapt from
his seat and raced for the bathroom.

5.

He elbowed his way through a group of
teenage girls blocking the hall that accessed the restrooms, then
shouldered the door open, only to slam it shut again and slap the
lock into place. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he
did, and for a heart-stopping moment thought he’d come face-to-face
with an albino psychopath.

Without wasting another second, he
turned away from the mirror and crammed his own finger down his
throat in an effort to puke. He reached as far back as he could,
painfully stabbing tender flesh and poking his tonsils.

He gagged a few times, but nothing
came up.

“
Dammit,” he shrieked.
“This can’t be happening!”

He slammed his fists on the sink top
and punched a hole in the plastic cover of the paper towel
dispenser. He tried hitting himself in the stomach a few times, but
when that didn’t work to bring up the finger, he took his
frustration out on the waste basket in a flurry of
kicks.

Huffing out of exertion and fear, he
leaned against the sink and paused to collect himself.

“
Think, dipshit!
Think!”

His breathing had just begun to ease
when the door to one of the two toilet stalls clicked in its frame
and slowly swung open. Jimmy looked up. A moment later, a balding
middle-aged man wearing a business suit and wire-frame glasses
stepped out, clutching his unzipped pants at the waist. Without
making eye contact, he edged toward the exit like an overweight
tourist who’d fallen into the lion pit at the zoo.

Jimmy gaped at him. “Can’t you see I’m
having a moment here, pal?”

“
I don’t want any trouble,
Mister,” the man quickly replied.

A dull silver cell phone poked out of
the breast pocket of his shirt.

Jimmy saw it and lunged at
him.

The stunned patron blubbered out a
string of half-coherent pleas for release as Jimmy seized him by
the lapels of his jacket and plucked the phone from his pocket. His
pudgy hands flew up to ward off Jimmy’s attack, leaving his pants
and underwear to collapse at his feet.

“
Please, Mister, don’t hurt
me!”

But even as he said it, Jimmy unlocked
the bathroom, shoved the phone-owner into the hall, and yanked the
door shut again before his bare ass hit the floor.

Jimmy flipped the phone open and
dialed Stuart’s number.

“
Hello?”

“
Stu, it’s me—”

“
Jesus, Jim,” Stuart said.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all morning. Listen,
don’t—”

“
I swallowed it,
man!”

“
What?”

“
The finger! The fucking
thing’s in my guts!”

Stuart’s reply came out as one word.
“Wathefugitshididyoudothatfor?”

“
I was hungry!” Jimmy
bellowed back at him. “What do you think?”

“
Jesus, this figures!” Stu
moaned.

“
What the hell does that
mean?”

“
It means Sheriff Pickett
came by this morning and told Harrington not to ship the corpse
over to HCMC for cooking, that’s what! Some homicide detective
called about him last night, and he’s on his way here right now to
ID the body. If he’s right, our illegal amigo might actually be a
Navajo serial killer!”

“
I don’t give a damn!”
Jimmy replied. “I need you to pump my stomach!”

“
I don’t know how to do
that!”

“
You’re the goddamn
medical expert here, you gotta do
something
!”

“
Shit…I don’t know… Just
give it some time; it’ll pass through you.”

“
I don’t want it to pass
through me, you idiot! I want it OUT!”

Suddenly a fist pounded on the
bathroom door. “Open up!” a formidable voice ordered.

“
Jim, we’re in deep sewage
here,” Stuart said.

“
Yeah, thanks for the
tip!”

Jimmy snapped the phone shut and
shoved it into his jacket.

“
I said open up in there!”
the voice ordered.

Rather than go for the door, Jimmy
kicked through the window at the back of the room and jumped into
the alley, landing in a filthy puddle of dumpster runoff when he
dropped to the ground.

6.

That night Jimmy tossed and
turned.

He’d gone to a roadside motel off the
interstate rather than chance returning to his trailer, and he
spent the better half of the evening waiting for the police to show
up.

Finally, around two a.m., he lay down
on the bed. Sleep came in short spurts, but only out of exhaustion,
and during the times when he dozed, he dreamed of the finger
sloshing around in his stomach, refusing to digest.

Or trying to crawl out the way it went
in.

Jimmy moaned at the thought, not
wanting to recall it.

He’d chugged a whole bottle of
FiberAll for dinner in an attempt to be free of the thing, followed
by half a package of Exlax that he picked up at a small market
adjacent to his hideout. So far, neither had worked.

Earlier, he tried to call Stuart but
the bastard never picked up. On the contrary, his stolen cell phone
rang about two dozen times, its display glowing with the names and
numbers of callers he didn’t dare answer.

He finally drifted off to sleep as the
first red rays of sunlight bled over the horizon.

7.

When Jimmy awoke he went straight to
the bathroom.

The day had come and gone while he
slept, and he felt confident that the long rest had given the meds
time to generate some results. Much to his disappointment, however,
he spent nearly twenty minutes on the toilet straining/praying to
shit out the finger, all the while secretly fearing that he’d crap
a whole hand.

Back in the bedroom, the television
droned. He’d left it on last night to escape the burbling sounds
produced from his gut, and now some sitcom gave way to the ten
o’clock news.

“
Our top story: a morbid
case of burglary at the Hewitt County morgue—”

Jimmy bound back into the main room
with his pants trailing behind him.

“—
involving the theft of an
unidentified corpse.”

He watched the report in a state of
stupefied captivity as the newscaster went on to explain how the
county’s medical examiner had found the morgue’s autopsy room in
disarray earlier that evening, a discovery that led him to a second
scene of destruction inside the cooler. There, the perpetrator(s)
had stolen the decapitated remains of a body that was being held
for forensic testing as part of a murder investigation by
authorities upstate. According to sources, the room’s stainless
steel door had been torn off its hinges in order to get at the
body.

Jimmy dropped down on the end of the
bed as he listened.

The events of the last few days
spiraled through his head, chased by the dread of whatever new
miseries the future might hold, and all at once, he thought his
wish to be rid of the thing in his stomach was about to come
true.

He clutched his midsection and ran for
the bathroom.

The lurching started even as he leaned
over the sink. He seized the faucet handles to stabilize himself
while the tremors passed through him, then sagged in despair when
the convulsions concluded with nothing more than a foul-smelling
belch.

He rinsed out his mouth, and was about
to leave when he glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision. He
glanced to the left, facing the room’s tiny window.

And saw a dog staring back at
him.

Two yellow eyes glinted in the dark
air outside the motel, reflecting the light from the bathroom, and
Jimmy leapt backward in shock even as his over-stressed brain
realized that the eyes had to be at least six feet off the
ground.

The window exploded in a hailstorm of
glass.

Blood-splattered arms reached through
the frame.

Jimmy shrieked as the attacker
clutched fistfuls of his shirt, each hand a skeletal mess of torn
flesh and exposed bone, as if the person outside had recently
clawed his way out of a grave—or through a stainless steel door.
Then, in a split-second moment of hyper-awareness he saw that the
assailant’s smallest left-hand finger ended in a clean, circular
stump.

The missing stiff from the
morgue
, he thought.
Oh, Jesus,
it can’t be!

He punched at the restraining limbs,
struggling to break free. Several of the meatless fingers tore
through his shirt, and he mewed in disgust when the cold bones
touched his skin.

Then the man leaned through the
window, into the light.

And Jimmy’s shouts of repulsion died
in his throat.

Somewhere in his brain the information
being sent from his eyes failed to find a rational point of
emotional reference, and terror, bewilderment, humor, and awe
collided together with a paralytic affect.

Unlike before, the corpse was no
longer headless.

At the point where the man’s neck
should’ve started, a railroad of thick stitches connected the
severed head of a coyote to the human skin of his torso.

Jimmy shook his head in denial, unable
to escape the glare of the animal’s yellow gaze as it stared down
at him over a lipless snout filled with jagged white fangs. It
pulled him to the edge of the window, inches from its reeking
flesh, where a legion of maggots explored the bare patches of skin
that dotted its fur.

“
It was an accident!” Jimmy
heard himself repeating again and again.

The chemical stink of formaldehyde
wafted out from the thing’s dripping maw when it opened its jaws,
and a new degree of terror pushed Jimmy’s mind to the edge of
insanity as the monster started to laugh.

“
Yee-nadlooshii!” the
undead nightmare declared, speaking each syllable with perfect
clarity despite the mouth that produced them.

Its putrid breath gusted into Jimmy’s
face, but the ghastly state of the creature’s physical composition
no longer compared to the terror of facing an intelligent being
with supernatural strength and a malevolent spirit.

Suddenly the back of his head crashed
into the wall.

A swarm of fireflies swirled across
his vision, but when they cleared he saw the monster towering
before him, still only halfway through the window, holding two
equally shredded halves of his tee-shirt in its boney
hands.

Jimmy patted his bare chest, just then
realizing that he’d braced both feet against the sink in an effort
to escape the creature’s grasp and must have torn clear through his
clothes!

The coyote-headed horror roared,
spraying spittle through the air.

It gripped the edges of the window
frame and with the gunshot noise of cracking timbers it yanked a
five-foot section of the wall into the night.

Sparks hissed from a severed
electrical line and the bathroom lights went out.

A ruptured pipe shot water at the
ceiling.

But Jimmy was already through the door
and across the bedroom, fleeing from the building wearing nothing
but his boxer shorts.

Behind him came another thunderclap of
destruction. Another downpour of rubble.

Outside, in the parking lot, a blue
convertible sat idling in the space reserved for the room next to
Jimmy’s, trunk open, front end facing away from the
building.

Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat
without even touching the door and left twenty feet of burnt rubber
smoking on the asphalt as he peeled away from the motel with the
accelerator mashed to the floorboards.