Blood Lite II: Overbite (7 page)

My stomach clenched.

There were four glass-fronted freezer cases, two on my left, two on my right, and a long, narrow table in the center of the room. The freezers were the kind you see in grocery stores except that these didn’t contain pizzas and frozen peas and ice cream. One was filled with arms, one with legs, one had four torsos lying flat on racks, and the last contained about a dozen heads. The heads all looked exactly alike and they were all Edgar Parmenter.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, almost as frozen as the contents of the freezers, before the door opened behind me.

“Oh, dear. You shouldn’t have come down here, my dear sir.”

I turned slowly. Edgar Parmenter stood in the doorway and he was holding a handgun in his left hand. His right arm hung at his side, two of the fingers obviously broken.

“What the hell is all this?” My voice was a quavering croak.

Parmenter seemed perfectly relaxed. “None of your business, actually. You should have picked another house to burglarize.” He frowned. “That was you posing as the messenger the other day, wasn’t it? I thought there was something odd about you.”

I didn’t correct him, hoping he’d underestimate me. “You’re right. Look, whatever you’re doing is no skin off my nose. I’ll just get out of your way.” I took a step forward and the handgun came up smartly.

“I think not. Please walk to the other end of the room, turn and place both hands on the wall while I think about this.”

I did as I was told and for a few minutes we were both lost in thought. Parmenter found himself first. “You’ve chosen a very awkward time to intrude in my affairs. I have an appointment that I really can’t skip. Turn around please.”

I thought he might shoot me right there and then, but he had other plans. “Be so kind as to take one of those torsos out and place it on the table for me.”

Although I was still convinced that these were artificial body parts, I flinched when I touched the torso. It wasn’t as cold as I expected, more like a refrigerator than a freezer, and not particularly heavy. But it did feel like human flesh and I couldn’t completely suppress my revulsion.

“Now a pair each of arms and legs. And make sure you get a left and a right for both sets.”

Parmenter then directed me to insert each severed limb into the appropriate place on the torso. I gaped at him in astonishment but when I tried I found that the truncated bones sort of locked into place and when they did so, flaps of skin folded over to conceal the seams.

“And finally a head. Any one will do.”

This was the worst part of all. The head was so lifelike that I almost dropped it. It also fit into a socket and snapped into place. The result was a perfect imitation of a dead human body. But it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t dead. The eyes popped open almost as soon as the head was attached.

“Damn, it’s cold!” It was Parmenter who spoke, but not the Parmenter who held the gun. The figure I’d assembled on the table sat up abruptly and looked around. “What’s going on?”

The first Parmenter gestured toward me with his weapon. “I have a problem.”

The second gave me a quick look. “So I do. What am I going to do about it?”

The first sighed. “That’s up to me. I have to meet with my case manager this afternoon and I don’t have time to deal with this, so I’m going to have to do it for me.”

The new Parmenter slid down off the table. “Why do I always have to solve the problems? Why can’t I think of something for a change?” There was a cabinet under the table from which the naked Parmenter took out a set of clothes and began dressing.

“I do my part. I all do. Just take him someplace and kill him in an hour or so. I’ll have a perfect alibi.”

“If I say so.”

Once the second Parmenter was dressed, the gun went from one to the other, but remained pointed at me. “If I take the car, how do I take him anywhere?”

“I’ll call a cab. But be careful that no one sees the car. They’ll trace it back here.”

The first Parmenter vanished upstairs and the second eyed me dourly. He was still shaking with the cold, but not as much as before. “Look,” I said. “Why not let me go? I won’t say anything. No one would believe me and I’d have to admit that I was trying to rob the place.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take that chance. Upstairs now, and slowly. I’d rather not make a mess down here.”

The first Parmenter threw me a set of car keys when we reached the top of the stairs. “I’ll see me when I get back. Be careful.”

I had to cooperate, play for time, watch for a chance to take him by surprise, so I climbed behind the wheel of Parmenter’s station wagon while he took the passenger seat. “Where to?”

“Take Route 13 north.”

Neither of us said much for the next twenty minutes. Parmenter turned on the radio and it was Patsy Cline singing “I Fall to Pieces,” which I thought appropriate. We headed north out of Providence and then took the exit for Managansett. Parmenter directed me onto a back road that bypassed the town center and looped out toward the reservoir at the far end of town. The road didn’t lead to much of anyplace else and we saw no traffic at all toward the end of the trip. Following instructions, I pulled over into a lightly wooded area and stopped.

“Get out.”

I let my shoulders slump and dropped my chin, trying to project resignation as I opened the door. Parmenter was already turning to do the same when I slammed my right elbow back hard, taking him right under the chin.

I had hoped to knock him out. The result was not quite that. His head literally popped out of its socket, struck the roof of the car, and bounced into the backseat. I was too relieved to be shocked, or perhaps I was just inured to shock, but I expected that to end the struggle. Unfortunately, now that Parmenter’s body—this body—was warm, it apparently no longer needed the head to function. But it did need the eyes to see with. Two bullets smashed through the windshield and a third through the roof.

I opened the door and half fell, half slid out onto the ground. Two more shots sounded and I made my way on all fours into the shelter of a small copse of trees. When I looked back I saw a rather foreshortened version of Parmenter. He had managed to get out of the car and was now groping around in the backseat, presumably searching for his head. I suppressed a hysterical laugh and tried to assess my options.

I could run, of course, but if I tried the road, Parmenter could chase me down in the car. I hadn’t had the foresight to take the keys out of the ignition. Assuming he got himself reassembled, that is. The alternative was to hide until he gave up and went away. But Parmenter seemed to be having a great deal of difficulty reclaiming his head, and I decided to go on the offensive.

I stood up and sprinted toward the car.

Parmenter was bigger than me, even without his head, but an organized minority can always overcome a disorganized majority. I knocked him to the ground with my initial charge and then kept kicking and punching until his body stopped trying to get up. Then I knelt on his back and took one arm in both hands. Since the head had disengaged so easily, I figured, maybe the limbs would as well. I exerted pressure and torque and there was a slight pop. Parmenter was one armed again.

The other three limbs were even easier now that I had the hang of it.

I bundled the body parts into the trunk and drove back to Providence, intending to go to the police until I realized how my story would sound. An examination would certainly prove that Parmenter was not human, but if I drove up to a police station with what appeared to be a disassembled human body, I’d be behind bars really fast. I finally decided to park the car at Parmenter’s house and place an anonymous call to the police. They’d conduct a thorough search, find the basement, and what happened after that was anyone’s guess.

But it didn’t quite work out that way. When I arrived, I decided to take one last look, still not quite convinced that this wasn’t all some elaborate hallucination. As soon as I turned the key, the trunk popped open, forced from within. Two arms tumbled out onto the ground and one snagged my pants cuff and held on until I kicked it with the other foot. I backed away, decided discretion was the better part, and went to retrieve my own car. I never called the cops.

There’s not much more to tell. I delivered the photographs to Brenda, along with an invoice, but did not tell her what else I’d discovered. She called me back a few days later to say that Parmenter had vanished, his house had burned to the ground, and the company had no place to send its checks.

That was almost a year ago and no one has seen Parmenter since. But over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling increasingly uneasy. Private detectives often develop a kind of sixth sense and I was sure I was being watched. I spent a lot of time looking into my rearview mirror, installed a security camera at my house, and paid attention to my surroundings when I walked on the street, but I never spotted anything out of the ordinary.

Until this morning. In among today’s various bills and junk mail was a small package with no return address. Curious, I found a knife and cut through the tape. Inside was a small, rather fancy cardboard box. I opened it and discovered that it contained a single, ordinary looking replica of a human eye.

That was startling enough in itself, but then the most unexpected thing happened.

It winked at me.

Good Breeding

LUCIEN SOULBAN

This was the face of Armageddon, the calculated end of the world: Towering piles of human bodies strewn about in enormous, crushing heaps; corpses hung from skeins of veins suspended between gutted skyscrapers; cadavers entombed inside burnt-out husks of vehicles on melted freeways.

Yet for some, the gaiety carried a depressing undertone. And not for the reasons most people expected.

A long, deep sigh—smelling vaguely of rotted fish—escaped from Ka’thulu the Gorger. The ring of tentacles around his puckered, alien mouth fluttered briefly, like so many party favors, before growing still.

“What’s the matter?” Shebboth asked. The antennae atop his carapace-covered head twitched, more this way than that.

“They’re all gone.” Ka’thulu poked the corpses in the street with an uprooted lamppost for emphasis. Nothing stirred in the way that dead bodies are best at.

“But we won, right?” Shebboth asked. “That’s what He-Who-Really-Shouldn’t-Be-Named said.”

“Who? Hastur?”

A flash and a pop filled the air, and a handful of winged Byakhee appeared; a dash of bird, a dab of insect, and a pinch of bat thrown in as though Hastur made them during a pique of indecision. The creatures searched for whoever dared utter their master’s name, then (puzzled) they vanished.

“You shouldn’t say
His
name.”

“Who, Hastur?”

Byakhee appeared again, this time eyeing the two great giants in displeasure. They disappeared once more.

“Yes!” Shebboth hissed. “He doesn’t like it when—”

“You say Hastur?”

Byakhee appeared and promptly vanished.

“Stop it, will you?!”

“Yeah, yeah . . . so old Nameless said that, huh?” Gorger asked. He picked up a blackened SUV between two spike-like fingers and studied the corpses inside. Head shaking, regret, perhaps, he tossed it away. The crash drew up a few faces from the rubble, sharp-toothed beasts studying them with the curiosity of startled groundhogs; then their fish eyes went glassy with disinterest and their heads popped back down. “And what did we win?”

“The war!”

“Some war.”

“Wasn’t it, though? We set the trap, then bam!”

“Bam? After eons, waiting ‘For the Stars to Align’?” he asked.

“That’s what I said . . . bam!”

“Meanwhile, there we sat, bored, playing Pin-the-Insanity-on-the-Cultists.”

“It’s tradition. First we create a mythology. Then, bam!”

“Will you stop saying ‘bam!’ There was no bam. There wasn’t even a mythos until I groomed Lovecraft. And then he gets my name wrong. It’s Ka’thulu, not Cthulhu.”

“I thought it was Cuthulu,” Shebboth said, shrugging.

“So, of course, Cthulhu gets called up to the big office and Cthulhu gets promoted to Elder status while I’m stuck in middle management.”

“What about Abdul Alhazred? Didn’t he spread your message?”

“The Mad Arab? Sure, lunatics make for fantastic prophets and are great at parties but—I think one of his screams is still lodged in my teeth. No, wait,” he said, picking at something among the rows of jagged thorns lining his mouth. “It’s just a piece of hope.”

“And it wasn’t only waiting,” Shebboth offered, oblivious in the way of children and car accidents. “We started cults—”

“You mean the idiots who kept invoking us too early. Learn to read an astrolabe! It’s ‘When the stars are right,’ not ‘When the stars are right now.’ And what in the name of He-Who-Prefers-You-Don’t-Name-Him is Cthulhu Fhtagn. It’s Ka’thulu Fh’tagn! Fh’tagn!”

“Fh’tagn?”

“Mom’s maiden name. Thought she’d appreciate it.”

“Oh, very sweet. I wish I knew my mom.”

“That’s what you get for bursting out of her chest at birth.”

“The other broodlings dared me to. Oh . . . didn’t we also inspire messiahs—?”

“And who was responsible for that hippie with the two stone tablets?”

“Well, um—”

“Who?”

“That was my fault,” Shebboth admitted, raising his claw.

“Right. So instead of drowning all those slaves, you closed the Red Sea late and killed our worshippers. And their screaming chariots of madness. I loved those things. They could babble for hours. And how you missed with the boils and the frogs—”

“I have a fear of success—”

“Which created one religion—”

“—and Mi-Go. They scare me, too. Are they crustaceans or are they fungi?”

“—and then another.”

“I mean, make up your collective minds, right? But those humans, we really got ’em good.”

“After waiting for the stars to align like a chorus line of the legless. Then it’s over in a fortnight. Even the dinosaurs had more fight in them—the way those iguanodons marshaled their forces,” he said wistfully. “Pretty savage for a bunch of leaf-eating philosophers.”

Shebboth sat down, the building groaning as he pressed his back against it. “Yeah . . . humans were kinda lame. Y’know, I think they actually killed more of each other in the end. I mean, what were those things they kept throwing at us?”

“Cats?”

“No.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“Nuclear bombs?”

“Them! I barely killed a thousand, but those bombs killed way more. Cthulhu is still brooding over it.”

“He should be. All this talk about ‘The Great Day’ and what does he do? Trips on the shores of Europe and drowns France in a tidal wave. Schmuck.”

“My scales are starting to shed from that radiation stuff. Look,” he said, opening the mucous flap in his chest. His nostrils stood revealed and wept the salty tears of defiled virgins. “I think I’m bleeding.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m not bleeding?”

“You don’t think.”

“Well. Look at what happened to Shub-Niggurath with all that radiation,” he whispered with a knowing nod.

“She always looked like that.”

“She?! I’ve been calling her ‘sir’ all these eons.”

“Yeah. It was good for a laugh. Why do you think she’s been trying to kill you since forever?”

“I blamed it on bad hygiene. But when it comes to thinking, I leave that to our great generals.”

“And now that we’ve killed everyone, what’s left?” Gorger asked, pushing the rubble of civilization around with his feet. “Ask your generals what’re we supposed to do now that no humans are left? We should have saved some for later.”

Gorger spent the afternoon skipping cars across the Atlantic. Underfoot, Deep Ones with fish heads ran about on webbed feet, chasing brethren wearing human skins. But the charm died fast, and Gorger stepped on a few to the cheering delight of the others.

Bored again, he wandered away from the city, into the countryside, past fields of humans petrified into still-burning charcoal. Finally, when the others had finished drinking the sun and darkness fell upon the planets, Gorger watched the ruins of a small town. It was a few hours into his contemplation that Shebboth found him.

“What?” Gorger asked, not bothering to look up.

“I, uh. I got you a gift.”

“What sort of gift?” he asked, disinterested in the conversation already.

“I wasn’t gonna share it with anyone, but seeing how you’re my best friend—”

“We’re not friends.”

“—beat me less often than the others, I thought you should have them.”

“Them?”

Shebboth lifted his plated rib. From beneath, he pulled out a city bus covered in black ooze. “Ta-dah!” he said with a chirp that shattered the town’s last windows.

“Ta-dah what?” Gorger asked, staring at the mucus-covered bus.

“Oh, sorry,” he said. He licked the windows with his massive gray tongue and presented it again.

“Still not getting it.”

“Well,” Shebboth said, shaking the bus. “They’re in there.”

“Humans?”

“Found some hiding and caught ’em,” Shebboth said, shaking the bus some more.

Gorger snatched the vehicle from Shebboth and peered inside. “They’re not moving.”

“Maybe they’re scared? Or maybe they’re playing dead?”

“Or maybe you forgot to punch holes in the lid and they’re not playing,” Gorger said.

“Oh, no,” Shebboth replied. “And I collected them carefully even though I squished a—”

“Squished?”

“—ate a few.”

“Yeah,” Gorger said, brightening slowly. “But if you found some, maybe we missed more.”

“But Cthulhu said we won . . . in his speech.”

“Cthulhu wrote a speech?”

“Well, Yog-Sothoth helped. The speech kinda rambled for a bit before the end when a thousand Mi-Go spontaneously burst into flames, but we got the point.”

“Right. Well, this makes things easier.”

“For what?”

“To find more humans.”

“And eat them?”

“Nope. Raise them. And maybe, just maybe, start over.”

The sky was black with snow. More buildings fell as the great beasts took to scratching their backs, and more laid about, staring up at the dark heavens and asking, “How crazy do you think
that
cloud is?”

Gorger and Shebboth, however, set about rebuilding humanity. And for that, they needed more humans. They peered inside basements and sent Gorger’s tentacles probing, searching through corridors and rooms. After a week, all they had for their efforts were an army of mannequins that Shebboth called “keepers.” Why they earned that distinction, Gorger thought it best not to ask. The only thing that trumped insanity was stupidity, and Shebboth’s deck was well stacked in that regard.

As Gorger searched, his arm shoulder deep inside an underground garage, a swath of strange lights fell across him, touching his gray skin like spiderwebs soaked in tar. He looked up. Sometimes a rainbow and sometimes a cloud of indescribable colors shifted and scintillated. Well, indescribable to humans, but to Gorger they were rather kitschy.

“What?” Gorger asked.

“! . ! ?” the Color-from-out-of-Space responded.

“Who says we’re looking for humans?” Gorger replied, straightening.

“. ! . . .”

“He did, did he?” Gorger asked, looking for a strangely absent Shebboth. “And if we are?”

“. . .”

“You kept some humans? Why?”

“. . ., . . .”

“No, I didn’t know they made good hair curlers. But, you don’t have—never mind. You have humans—?”

“!”

“Hair curlers. My mistake. What do you want for them?”

“, . . !?”

“Real hair . . . riiiight,” Gorger said. “Show me your humans first.”

The cloud shivered and stretched, parts of it vanishing from different spectrums. A gap formed, an orifice in the marrow of the universe; a lightless place where colors screamed. From it tumbled a shivering human. He was white-haired despite his youth and well-pruned from the green gel covering his naked body; he shuddered and heaved, before vomiting a stream of green gunk.

And then he began shrieking. Not in any way that suggested sanity, but in that moment of cognitive flight when the near-mad realize that “race car” spelled backward is “race car.”

Gorger watched the human for a few seconds, and then glanced at the Color-from-out-of-Space. “Any that aren’t lunatics?” he asked.

“! ! !”

“Yes, well, I suppose that would drive someone insane. So all of them? Stark raving?”

“, , . ?”

“Fine,” Gorger sighed. “I guess they’ll have to do.”

If any of the Elder Ones had noticed the Color-from-out-of-Space floating around with a dozen wigs in orbit, none commented.

Gorger, in Shebboth’s company, crouched inside a domed stadium . . . their new human colony with a dozen people in all—each of them a chorus of dissonant screams and moans, each very much insane in ways that went beyond such clever palindromes as “race car” and “pickle.”

“I like it,” Shebboth said. “Think we could charge for a concert?”

Gorger grunted noncommittally and watched as the humans flailed about on the Astroturf and tore at their hair and faces. Some were still trying to claw out their eyes, but Gorger had anticipated that problem. That’s why they all wore giant foam fingers uncovered in the stadium store, duct-taped at the wrists. That, perhaps, was the hardest skill to master, and one Gorger eventually had to entrust to the smaller arms lining his thorax.

“What do we feed them?” Gorger wondered aloud as he watched them.

“The dreams of the slaughtered?” Shebboth suggested.

“No.”

“The souls of mountains?”

“No!”

“Other humans?”

Gorger eyed Shebboth. “In all the eons we spent waiting to shatter the veils, you didn’t spend much time studying them, did you?”

“I was . . . busy.”

“And suddenly Pompeii makes sense.”

“I said I’m sorry!”

“And just when we’d gotten them to the brain-insemination stage,” Gorger said. “Look, to breed humans, you need to understand them better. Humans eat meat—”

“Oh! Feed ’em Mi-Go.”

“—and plants—”

“Mi-Go are both meat and plants.”

“—and fish.”

“Mi-Go are also—”

Gorger sighed deliberately loud enough to interrupt him. “Mi-Go are not the universe’s answer to the buffet. But we might as well try something. Hastur.”

Before Shebboth could protest, five Byakhee appeared, flapping their batlike wings and shrieking their insect heads off. That sent the humans into greater despair, as they pointed their giant foam fingers at the winged servitors of Hastu—He-Who-Should-Probably-Stop-Being-Named. In turn, the Byakhee noticed the humans and tried to sweep down upon them.