Soft Apocalypses (5 page)

“Children…”

“Such a treat…”

“Baby-meat…”

Hook-Mouth held up one of its hands, silencing the others. “You summoned us, boy. What do you want?”

Lewis looked once more at Penny and Carl. This had been a terrible, horrible mistake, he knew that now, but maybe he could still save them.

“I called you,” he said to Hook-Mouth. “They had nothing to do with this.”

“Answer me. What do you want of us?”

“Help us get out of here.”

Hook-Mouth burst out laughing.
“Help
you? Boy, you have no idea what you’ve done.” It began moving closer and closer to Lewis as it spoke. “We help no one but the Order of the Gash. We are not in the business of saving bodies or souls. We are more interested in
feeding
on them. Slowly, with a dark delight you cannot even begin to imagine.”

“Then take
me
. Help them get out of here safe, and take me.”

“You don’t understand, boy. There is no bargaining here, no deals to be made, no compromises to be reached.
All
of you are coming with us. And knowing as I do how much grief you will feel over the fates of your friends—because their fates
will
be your fault—will only make consuming you more enchanting, and the taste of your suffering even more delectable.”

It was so close now that Lewis could feel its diseased breath on his face.

“Ah,” said hook-Mouth. “Behold, my brethren—the tears of defeat.”

“Defeat…”

“Sweet…”

“Baby meat…”

Hook-Mouth lifted a hand, reaching for Lewis’ throat. “You and your friends are going to know such glorious agony, boy. The things we have in store for you are such excruciating pleasures that a useless pile of walking meat like you can never
begin
to—” As soon as Hook-Mouth’s hand gripped Lewis’ neck, the creature froze.

Lewis felt as if the live end of a power cable had just been jammed into the top of his skull. Everything went white and became anguish—but why should this be any different than the life he and the others had been forced to live for…however long it had been?

Hook-Mouth released Lewis and he slammed back into the wall, then sank to the floor. Carl and Penny gripped each other even more tightly as their shuddering and whimpering intensified.

Hook-Mouth seemed to have lost its balance. It stepped back, its legs—or, rather, the things that had once been legs—shaking. When it pulled in its next breath, it was a ragged, stunned sound. It looked past Lewis to its companions in the shadows and began shouting in a language Lewis had never heard before, but he didn’t need to understand it to know the intention behind the words; the inflections were more than enough.

Hook-Mouth was angry, yes, but more than that, it was shaken and confused. After screaming for a few seconds more, it closed its mouth and eyes, regaining its composure.

Lewis struggled back to his feet, making a terrible decision. “Do whatever you need to do. Just … do it fast.”

Hook-Mouth, still a bit dazed-looking, shook its head. “We’ve always known humans like you existed, but I never imagined that we’d…”

It closed its eyes again, for just a moment, and slowly shook its head.

“No,” it said, nailing Lewis to the wall with its sickening yellow gaze. “Here you were, and here you’ll stay.” It moved quickly, placing its hands on Carl’s and Penny’s heads. The children shrieked and Hook-Mouth laughed—but this time it was not a laugh of mockery, no; this was the sound of a terminal cancer patient laughing at a tumor joke.

“We will go now,” it said, and began turning to walk away.

“You can’t just leave us here!”
screamed Lewis, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

Hook-Mouth whirled back to face him. “Oh, yes we can, boy, and that is precisely what we are going to do.”

“Why?”

“Because there is nothing we can do to you that hasn’t already been done, or that you haven’t already imagined!
You have
nothing
to offer us. You have wasted our time.”

“But—”

“Enough!”
Hook-Mouth stared at Lewis for a moment. “I do have to thank you, though, boy. For a moment there, as I shared your pain and your thoughts and memories, I nearly … envied your remaining here. That will disturb me for a long time to come. It may even pain me. Oh, how I hope it does just that.”

“Then if you really want to thank me, get us out of here!” Lewis was only vaguely aware of hearing the back door open upstairs, followed by the sounds of the Cold Ones stomping back inside.

“If you want to thank me, then get us—”

Hook-Mouth only grinned and shook its head once again. “You have nothing to offer us, nothing we want, nothing with which to bargain.”

From upstairs there came a loud crash, followed by more stomping, and then a male voice screaming, “If you hadn’t gunned the goddamn engine, she wouldn’t’ve run away from me like that! I almost
had her
, you stupid fuckin’ cow! She was a pretty little thing, too!”

Hook-Mouth, seemingly intrigued, looked up at the ceiling, listening, following the stomping and sounds of fists hitting flesh with his eyes.

“The box!” shouted the woman.
“Where’s the fuckin’ box?”

Lewis bent down and picked up the black box, staring at Hook-Mouth.

Upstairs, the Cold Ones continued to snarl accusations and strike one another.

Lewis held up the box, and began to push the pieces back into place. “Well, if we don’t have anything you want….”

“
You
don’t,” said Hook-Mouth, gazing at the ceiling.

And then, looking at Lewis and grinning broadly:
“However….”

Spare the Rod

Jake Blevins was finishing his third mug of Budweiser when he finally confessed to his brother: “I’m gettin’ real worried about Ricky. I found him in his ma’s makeup case the other day. He painted his toes pink.
Pink
.”

Sam set down his own mug and gave Jake a concerned frown. “Did you discipline him proper?”

“I ... I did my best.” He took another swig of brew to quench his suddenly-dry mouth. His hand shook, he hoped not so badly that Sam could see. “I yelled at him and slapped the box outta his hands—broke the hinge, I got an earful about that later from his ma—and made him take the paint off with turpentine in the garage.”

“But did you spank him?”

The question made bile and beer rise in Jake’s throat. For a moment he thought he might puke right there on the cigarette-burned Formica table. Maybe talking to Sam about this was a bad idea. But who else did he have to go to besides his brother? He knew what his father would say if the old man were still alive. He knew what the parish priest would say; hell, Father Walton would probably offer to punish the boy himself.

His wife had made it clear she didn’t approve of spankings, ever, but she was just a woman. It wasn’t her place to boss him, and it wasn’t his place to listen to her. He was the
paterfamilias
, and discipline was his responsibility.

“I yelled at him for a long time, and he seemed plenty scared when I was done,” Jake replied.

Sam shook his head, his frown deepening into a scowl. “That ain’t good enough.”

“I don’t think he’ll do it again—“

“Are you tryin’ to raise up a God-damned faggot?” Sam slammed down his mug, but the bar jukebox was too loud for anyone to pay any attention. He looked horrified and furious. “You want your boy’s soul to burn in everlastin’ hell because you didn’t have the stomach for good discipline?”

Jake felt as though he’d been slapped in the face. “No, of course I don’t.”

“You know as well as I do that a boy who plays around with makeup is well on the road to faggotry. You gotta nip that in the bud! Today it’s painted toes, tomorrow he’ll be into his mother’s unmentionables dressin’ up like a queer ... you gotta beat some man into him. Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

“But he’s only seven.”

“Seven?” Sam snorted. “That’s plenty old enough for a spanking. I was eight when Pa gave me my first. My boys were six. And you was seven, though I reckon you don’t remember too much ‘bout that.”

For just a moment, Jake felt as though he were back in his old room at the farmhouse, his father grabbing him by the back of his neck and throwing him down on the bed. It was all happening because Jake had cried and refused to help his father and uncles slaughter the calves. He’d been taking care of one calf since she was born, and he loved her like he loved his puppy Rufus. He couldn’t bear to put the knife to her throat.

“If you ain’t willin’ to do man’s work, that makes you a goddamn
girl
, and I ain’t raisin’ no girls in this house,” his father had thundered as he pulled Jake’s jeans and underwear down around his ankles. “You wanna be a girl, boy? I’ll show you what’s it’s like to be a girl!”

His own blood was a freight train in Jake’s ears, the remembered agony and terror and his shame at not being able to take his punishment like a man almost overwhelming, and he wished for the ten thousandth time since he was seven that the Earth would open up and swallow him and leave no trace behind.

“Pa spanked the devil out of you.” Sam paused to drain his own mug in a single gulp. “I reckon Ma was sure you’d bleed to death, and she finally got Uncle Eustace to take you to the county hospital. Sheriff Andy came by and gave Pa a talking-to. Almost hauled him in. You recollect any of that?”

Jake shook his head numbly. Bits and pieces of the spanking and his hospital stay circled like sharks through his nightmares, but he couldn’t be sure what was a real memory and what was just a figment of his imagination.

Sam laughed with a good-times humor that didn’t match the darkness in his eyes and slapped Jake on the shoulder. “Don’t matter if you remember it ... the important thing is you butched right up and flew straight! Wasn’t a boy in the whole state more eager to help with the slaughters than you! Pa didn’t have to spank you but a few times after that to keep you in line, did he?”

“Three,” Jake replied.

He seldom dared to remember his Pa’s fourth attempt. He was fifteen. Sam was off in the Army by then. Jake had crashed the tractor when he hit an unseen sinkhole; after he got himself out from under the hulk he’d run to the barn to escape the old man’s wrath. When his Pa came after him, he grabbed a rusty scythe ... and he didn’t remember much more after that but coming to and seeing the blood and entrails dark against the straw and the whitewashed walls. His Ma found him out there, and she held him for a while and helped him clean everything up. Nobody ever found the place by the creek where they planted his Pa.

Jake still blacked out sometimes, and came awake in his car or standing in an alley someplace with blood on his clothes and hands. He never went looking to see where it had come from. Once he found a severed finger in his pocket. He threw away all his knives after that. Still, sometimes he’d find blood under his fingernails or in the treads of his work boots and have no idea what had happened.

“He spanked me three times in my whole life,” Jake said.

“Three times, and you turned out just fine!” Sam gave him another shoulder-slap.

Then he leaned forward across the baskets of chewed-up gristle and discarded chicken bones and spoke to Jake more softly: “Look, I know you don’t want to hurt your boy, but pain is good for a young man. It builds character. Pa spanked me twice, and yeah, I hated him for it.

“But he was preparin’ me for the world, Jake. If he hadn’t given me proper discipline, I’d have never survived what the Serbs did to me when they captured my squad. The pain Pa put me through was a gift that kept me strong, kept my mind clear, and when I had my chance I got free and killed every last one of those sonsabitches with my bare hands. And then me and my boys went down to the nearest village and gave ‘em all a taste of good ol’ American payback. I kept some baby teeth as souvenirs; I knew Sarge would have confiscated anything else once we were back on base.”

Sam paused, looking as serious as Jake had ever seen him. “Do right by your son, brother. Don’t let him grow up to be some God-forsaken faggot. Make sure he grows up strong like us.”

Jake poured the rest of their pitcher into his mug. Maybe Sam’s advice was solid. Maybe spankings were like vitamins: too much or too little made you sick and weak. Maybe if he just spanked his son once, and didn’t do it so hard or for so long that the boy passed out and couldn’t remember it clearly afterward, he’d never have to do it again.

“Okay,” Jake said. “You’re right.”

“I’m glad you’re seein’ things more clearly.” Sam nodded grimly and raised his mug in a salute. “Sometimes it’s hard to spank a boy the first time, and there ain’t no shame in that; I got some little blue pills that’ll help if you think ya need ‘em. And make sure you use some lard. Not too much, or it won’t hurt enough.”

“I will,” Jake promised. “I will.”