What the Hell Did I Just Read

5. AMY’S BREAKFAST WITH EVIL

Amy

Amy Sullivan’s cubicle neighbor, Shawn, was taking her home from work in his new Mustang. She was in the passenger seat eating a single-serving box of Cocoa Pebbles by shaking them into her mouth, then washing it down with a bottle of Orange Crush (the selection in the break room vending machine at the office actually matched her preferred diet really well).

Shawn asked, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else to eat? You’re just downing handfuls of sugar there.”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t know how you stay that size on your diet. I wouldn’t be able to fit behind this steering wheel.”

“I have a painting of myself in my closet, it gets fatter every time I eat.”

“You have a what?”

She wondered if he was really just afraid she would spill something in his car, despite having told her it was fine every time she asked. Amy was trying to balance her meal with her one remaining hand and she knew it probably looked precarious. She had briefly experimented with a prosthetic left hand, to replace the one that had gotten lopped off in the car crash years ago. She and David had picked it out together from a catalog her doctor had given her—a metallic, Terminator-esque model that they both thought was hilarious. It kind of looked like she had gotten some of her fake human skin ripped off, revealing the robot underneath that had been there all along. Which, Amy had said, would actually make sense: if someone was going to create a cyborg intended to pass for human, it was more logical to disguise it as a hundred pounds of freckles and glasses than a muscular Austrian.

The hand had only lasted about a month, though, before she stopped strapping it on every morning. The reason, she told everyone, was that it just wasn’t convenient to use—it looked like a robot hand from the future, but in reality was just operated by a cable that ran around her other shoulder, and she had to open and close it by shrugging. It didn’t have little motors in it or anything, like Luke’s hand in Star Wars—those were for people with Cadillac health insurance. It didn’t have much in the way of grip strength, either, and she found herself just doing everything with her right hand anyway. It was just habit, she’d now lived without the other hand almost as long as she’d lived with it.

But the real problem was that, with the robot hand, it was like she suddenly had a PLEASE HIT ON ME sign draped over her neck written in a language that only the creepiest of guys could read. Those guys loved the robot hand, each and every one of them broaching the subject as if they were the first. She didn’t know if it was a fetish thing or if they just thought they could get her cheaper because she was a damaged floor model. All she knew was that whenever she entered the one remaining video game store in town, all four male employees would follow her from shelf to shelf, desperately trying to make conversation (“Hey, do you have a DotA account?”).

But the convention had been the final straw.

A group of former college friends had invited her to a gaming convention in Indianapolis and offered to pay her way (David would never have come within a five-mile radius of a gaming convention, even if he was bleeding profusely and just needed to pass it on the way to the emergency room). Everyone was going in costume, and Amy only needed a cheap pink wig and an afternoon modifying a white skirt and top to go as Ulala from Space Channel 5—a costume she had picked specifically because that character wore white elbow-length gloves. But she had accidentally left the gloves at home and everybody had thought the mecha hand was part of her costume, since to people unfamiliar with the game, the getup just registered as Generic Space Girl. Amy wondered if they thought she was so dedicated to the role that she had hacked off one of her limbs just to complete the ensemble.

Anyway, some pictures of her at the convention got posted on the Internet, and they went somewhat viral since Amy is kind of a minor celebrity in some circles. She had quickly gotten snowed under with messages from creepers, and at least three of them had dug up her phone number. Half the messages were asking why she didn’t go for the more revealing version of the costume with the bare midriff; the other half were informing her that she was too ugly to wear such a thing in public. She was never in any actual danger, as far as she knew, but the sheer volume of it freaked her out and, well, brought back some bad memories. From that point on, she had this feeling like all eyes were on her the moment she stepped outside with the metal hand—she even had a panic attack, once.

So, she put it away. She never told David why.

The Mustang passed a flooded cornfield and Amy wondered if the road itself wouldn’t be underwater a week from now. Or a day. She wondered if that would be a valid excuse to miss work, or if they’d just fire everybody who didn’t own a canoe. At this rate, the office itself would be under before too long—she imagined everyone sitting at their desks, neck deep in flood water, taking calls while fish swam in front of their monitors.

She asked, “What happens to the rabbits when it’s like this?”

“What rabbits?”

“Don’t rabbits live in tunnels? And moles and mice and such? Do they drown, when it floods?”

Thinking quickly, Shawn said, “Rabbits are fast, they can outrun the water.”

“But what if they’ve got babies? How would they get them out of there?”

“Baby rabbits are good swimmers. They’re not like humans where they have to take classes, they can do it coming out of the womb. They’re fine.”

She wondered how long he would keep making stuff up if she kept asking. She had asked David that same question the day before and his answer had been, “It started raining weeks ago, those lazy bastards have had plenty of time to get to the high ground. What are they waiting for, FEMA?”

Most of the people Amy worked with were cool, which is one of the biggest factors in determining your quality of life, if you think about it. She had parlayed her five semesters of programming classes into a job that involved no coding at all—a call center for an alarm company, in which virtually all of the calls involved sensors getting tripped by dogs. Business had been booming for the home alarm sector in the area; everybody in Undisclosed wanted a system even though not one home in twenty had anything worth stealing. It was mostly scared people, hoping to fend off monsters. Whether or not the kind of creatures that turned up around town would even trip a sensor or show up on camera was a mystery to Amy, but of course she knew that what people were really buying was the ability to get a good night’s sleep (which was ironic, considering Amy had applied for the eleven-to-eight shift specifically because she couldn’t sleep herself). She liked it well enough, even at nine bucks an hour. She felt like a policeman, guarding people in their beds. Well, at least the ones who could afford a home security system.

Shawn said, “You guys have a plan if you get flooded out?”

“David says we can get a bunch of those inflatable sex dolls from the shop downstairs and strap them together as a raft.”

Shawn laughed, but in a way that made it clear he didn’t approve. David made constant jokes about how he thought Shawn was trying to “get into her pants,” which meant that David did in fact think Shawn was trying to get into her pants. Amy had long ago learned the secret to reading people’s minds, a mystical two-step process that involved 1) shutting her mouth and 2) listening to what they say. People will scream their secrets if you just give them a chance. Even the liars can’t resist letting the truth ooze through the gaps.

So, David would make his snarky little remarks about Shawn and Amy would tell him that the guy was married. David would then say something to the effect of, “You have a lot to learn about guys, Amy.” But he was wrong—she was pretty sure she understood the game better than he did. If she were to tell Shawn to pull over right now, then rip open her shirt and ask him to ravage her, he’d flee the car and stammer an apology, maybe politely ask her where her boobs had gone (“Oh, sorry, that was mostly bra”). He doesn’t want to cheat on his wife; he wants girls to laugh at his jokes and be in awe of his car. He wants to feel the way he did back when he was a cool dude in high school and not a twenty-six-year-old slaving away in an office with a kid at home, watching his prime tick away one can of Red Bull at a time. It was all harmless.

They arrived at the apartment the sex shop wore as a hat and Amy saw David’s car was gone. So, he was still out working his missing girl case—without her. She juggled her umbrella and headed around toward the side entrance, the pink VENUS FLYTRAP neon buzzing overhead. She passed the one-armed concrete snowman at the bottom of the stairs, headed up, shook off her umbrella, and pushed her way through the door to the apartment. She glimpsed the kitchenette …

And, just for a moment, thought she saw something strange.

It was David, standing there with a mixing bowl in one hand and a whisk in the other. Like he was in the middle of cooking something. But—and she wasn’t even sure she really saw this—in that moment, he wasn’t moving. Like, at all. He was standing perfectly frozen, facing the window to Amy’s left. He wasn’t mixing, he wasn’t blinking, he wasn’t breathing. He was just standing, for a solid two seconds. Then Amy came through the door and all at once he popped into action, like a video that had been unpaused.

Weird.

“Were you transfixed by something outside?”

David said, “What’s that?”

“You were staring out the window.”

“Was I? Just looking at the rain, I guess.”

“Did you solve the thing with the little girl?”

“We did, she’s back home safe and sound. Turned out there was nothing clown dick about it, it was just a local creep. We got the cops to track his phone and found his van. Whatever he was going to do, he never got a chance.”

“Thanks to you!”

“Thanks to us.”

“Holy crap, David. You guys are heroes! This is amazing!”

Amy thought she heard something unusual, but couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she suddenly realized it was what she wasn’t hearing. She poked her head into the bathroom and confirmed it: no plink-plink-plink of the roof leak.

“Hey! They fixed the leak! This is the best day ever.”

“Actually, I did. Got tired of waiting on the landlord. I went up and it was pretty easy to see, there was just a gap in the flashing around an exhaust vent up there, all I had to do was squirt a bunch of silicone caulk in the crack. Took five bucks and fifteen minutes, should have done it months ago.”

“Still, I’m impressed. Didn’t know you even knew how to do that sort of thing.”

“I didn’t, I looked it up. It’s not brain surgery. I’m making you waffles. You hungry?”

She wasn’t, but said, “Starving!” David, it appeared, was having one of his Good Days.

He said, “Then have a seat. With what I’ve got planned, you’ll need your energy.”

She put on a devilish look. “Oh, really?”

John

John had been awake for twenty-two hours already and there was no sleep on the horizon, not when a girl could be getting molested/tortured/eaten or god knows what at the hands of god knows who. So, John swung by his house and changed out of his court appearance clothes, downed a mug of coffee, ate two Hostess CupCakes, and finished it off by smoking some crystal meth. Soon he was back behind the wheel of the Ezekiel Jeep and heading toward the church, feeling good as new.

Everybody likes to get preachy about drugs, John thought, because it’s a handy way to deflect from their own even worse vices. Dave drank every night and rarely ate a meal that didn’t leave a grease stain behind. Amy ran on sugar, caffeine, and pain pills, and would sacrifice an entire night of sleep to level up a character in one of her games. The people with health insurance get antidepressants and Adderall, the rich get cocaine, the clean-living Christians settle for mug after mug of coffee and all-you-can-eat buffets. The reality is that society had gotten too fast, noisy, and stressful for the human brain to process and everybody was ingesting something to either keep up or dull the shame of falling behind. For those few who truly live clean, well, it’s the self-righteousness that gets them high.

John headed for Mine’s Eye, a spot so scenic that couples actually hold their weddings there. Well, the ones who don’t know the backstory, anyway. The little church and several rental cabins sat up on a hill that encircled a small weirdly colored pond. At the base of the hill opposite the church was the entrance to what had been a coal mine back in the 1800s, before it collapsed in a horrific disaster. Nobody ever attempted to reopen it because, you guessed it, the circumstances of the disaster were creepy as shit. The miners had collapsed the shaft in on themselves with dynamite, supposedly in order to stop what was in there from getting out. They had sent out one guy—the youngest—to tell everyone else not to attempt a rescue. The town dealt with it in the usual way, which was to simply put up a sign warning people away and otherwise never think about it again.

The whole area in front of the mine had filled with water over the decades, the mouth now appearing to be frozen in the act of puking loose rocks into the new pond. The minerals in the rock would turn the water emerald green, teal, or cobalt, depending on the color of the sky. So, on a clear day, there’d be this vivid shimmering pool that stood out sharply from the landscape around it, like a magical eye had opened. The church up on the hillside had been built after the collapse, as if someone had planted it there as a safeguard.

John followed a narrow road around the hilltops, passing the cabins and arriving at the church, which had a sign out front with whimsical slogans they swapped out every week (today’s: CHOOSE YOUR AFTERLIFE: SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING). John thought the building itself did in fact look like someone had taken a “church” symbol on a map and blown it up to life size—tiny building, white painted wood, ornate doors on the front with a cross and steeple overhead. Two stained-glass windows on either side of the door. It also looked just like Maggie’s drawing, though if you grabbed a hundred children and made them draw you a church, they’d all look like that. Again: shitty artists.

John reached the parking lot and found that Dave hadn’t arrived yet, so he pulled up to wait for him, keeping an eye out for any horror that might be occurring. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. He realized he was clenching his jaw, and forced himself to stop. He grabbed the coins out of the center console. He polished them with his shirt, one by one, then placed them on the seat next to him in order of value and then date minted. He found he was clenching his jaw again—

There was a scream.

He was sure he had heard it. A little girl.

John jumped out of the Jeep. He reached into the back seat and pulled out the T-shirt cannon. He ran up to the front doors, found them locked, then asked the Lord for forgiveness a split second before he kicked his way through.

Thunder clapped as John stepped through the entryway, shirt cannon at the ready. A half-dozen doves flew past him out the door.

Standing at the pulpit was a thin, shirtless man holding a cigarette.

Ted had described Nymph as a creepy sexual deviant type, but John didn’t get that vibe from the guy at all. He had slicked-back hair and narrow, dismissive eyes—he struck John as a cutthroat stockbroker type, a guy who would sever a friendship over a lost game of racquetball. A small man, but wiry. Tight, compact muscles.

The wind picked up and the walls creaked under the strain. The rain went horizontal, spraying into the open door behind John. He slammed the door closed behind him with a backward kick.

John said, “Mister Nymph, I presume?”

The guy took a drag off his cigarette and said, “Congratulations on following a series of groaningly obvious clues. When you enter a room, do you see little equations flying around in front of your eyes?”

John brandished the gun. “WHERE IS SHE?!?”

“You tell me, John.”

“You’ve heard of us.”

“I have.”

“Is that why you took the girl? To lure us in? Well, you’ve got us. Let her go. There’s no reason to involve anyone else.”

“Yes, we wouldn’t want to traumatize poor Ted any further, would we? Do you know why soldiers march in unison? Or why they are compelled to chant in groups? It’s a form of hypnosis, it overrides the brain’s critical thinking centers. It’s the same reason we make schoolchildren shout the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. But, so difficult to adjust after the programming wears off. Tragic, really. And no, John, it turns out that in fact there exist things in this universe that are not about you.”

Lightning flashed and brought a clap of thunder a half-second later. Close. The wind picked up again. Outside, a branch was wrenched off of a tree.

“What is it you want, then?”

“The same as all of us want. To feed and to breed. Do you wish to guess which I intend for little Margaret Knoll? Perhaps both.”

“She’s still alive.”

Nymph took a drag off his cigarette. “Tell me, John. Do you believe in the existence of the human soul?”

“Oh, Jesus, I do not have time for this shit.” Another blast of wind outside. Something heavy smacked into the wall. The ground shook with what John was certain was the impact of an entire tree collapsing nearby. The storm, bursting free of its restraints. “I don’t think you have a soul, how about that?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere! Why don’t you think I have a soul?”

“Because you’re a sick fuck who kills little girls.”

“That tree that just fell—did it have a soul?”

“You’re stalling. I’m not playing your game.”

Nymph didn’t answer, just stared and waited for John’s reply. His silence, of course, made the statement for him: You don’t have any choice but to play.

John growled, “No, a tree doesn’t have a soul that I know of, but I also don’t give a shit.”

“Of course it doesn’t. It’s just a series of chemical reactions. Sun, water, air. It cannot refuse sunlight on moral grounds, or share water with a more deserving tree. It’s just a machine that soaks up whatever sustenance it encounters.”

The wind had become a steady howl, a sustained assault that whistled around the corners of the structure. There was a noise like something tearing loose from the roof.

“I get it,” said John, now having to raise his voice to be heard over the maelstrom. “Trees are stupid. Where is the girl? Maggie, can you hear me?”

“Does a maggot have a soul?”

“Is this conversation going the way you planned it in your head? Do you sound clever, like an evil mastermind? Because if this was a video game cut scene I’d be skipping past all this shit.”

“Of course, a maggot is no more ensouled than a tree; put it on a piece of rotting flesh, and it will eat. The concept of not eating what is in front of it is utterly alien. So what about you? Do you have a soul?”

“Dave is going to be here any second. If I were you, I’d start cooperating before he walks through that door. See, I don’t think he cares about getting answers. I think he just wants to see you bleed. I think he gets off on it.”

Undeterred, Nymph said, “Did you know that you can do a simple test to detect if a child has a soul? They did the experiment in the 1960s—you simply set an Oreo cookie on the table in front of them, tell them not to eat it, then leave the room. Some will resist until you return, the rest will reach out and eat it within minutes, or seconds. Follow up with that latter group decades later and you’ll find they’re all drug addicts, or in jail, or bankrupt. Because they are maggots, you see. Tell me, John, would you have passed this test?”

John could barely hear the man—the storm was now an enormous animal frantically gnawing away at the wooden shell of the church to get to the soft meat inside. John edged toward Nymph. He would only get one shot at this—meaning his weapon literally only had one shot.

Nymph said, “We know the answer to that, don’t we? You undergo that test every single day. But I’ve wasted enough of your time. Why don’t we go somewhere and talk this over like reasonable men? We’re both reasonable men, aren’t we?”

Nymph stepped out from behind the podium. He was wearing nothing except for a tiny pair of little girls’ panties, which did nothing to conceal his massive erection.

The wind made the exact sound you hear when a freight train runs over your face.

John ran at Nymph.

With a hellish noise, the roof was ripped from the building.

Me

I wrestled with the decision for a few blocks but eventually decided to swing around and head for the apartment to get Amy. The wind was picking up and the storm was kind of getting scary—other cars had pulled off the road completely, the drivers such pussies that they refused to drive unless they could actually see the road. When I made it home and climbed to the top of the dildo store, I noticed that the neon sign had gone dark—the power must have gone out. I entered quietly and thought I’d find Amy asleep, but a quick search revealed she wasn’t home.

This wasn’t too alarming. She couldn’t drive, but she still had lots of options. She could have hung back at work so as not to get out into the storm, or the dude giving her a ride may have had to run an errand on the way. She could have walked over to the convenience store across the street to get some junk food …

I noticed there were dishes in the sink. Used and then washed. A mixing bowl, a whisk, two plates. Had she invited that guy from work in for breakfast? If you don’t know Amy, let me catch you up: that is absolutely not the kind of thing she does. Maybe the guy insisted? A box of Bisquick and a plastic bottle of pancake syrup were sitting on the counter. I tried to picture this dude insisting he come in—to our apartment—to make Amy pancakes, in our kitchen, and her agreeing to that …

My brain just froze up. I mean, if they had just succumbed to passion and banged in my bed, I could understand that. I wouldn’t even be mad, as long as Amy was happy and they cleaned up afterward. But coming into another man’s house and making breakfast for his girl in his own kitchen? That’s some serial killer shit. Maybe somebody else stopped by? That’s probably all it was. Hell, it’s the sort of thing that on a different day, wouldn’t have triggered a second thought.

I looked around for a note—Amy is big on leaving notes—and checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a message. Nothing.

I just stood in the middle of the kitchen for a moment, rain and wind crashing against the windows. I wasn’t worried, necessarily. What, like the bad guys came for her and made her breakfast first?

I pulled out my phone and tried to call.

I got a voice telling me the network was down.

John

John flinched at the cacophony overhead, then looked up to see only sky. The entire roof of the church had been raggedly peeled off like the top on a box of macaroni and cheese mix. The storm washed in and it was like he’d stuck his head into the water going seventy miles an hour on a Jet Ski.

Half blind, John stumbled forward and reached the pulpit, trying to shield his eyes. Nymph wasn’t there, but there was a door in the wall beyond. John reached it and found himself in a small break room. Another door to the outside was standing open. John pushed through, into the storm, in time to see taillights swimming into the distance.

John sprinted around to the Jeep and tore through the storm in pursuit. The visibility was so poor he had no idea if they were even on a road—all he could see were those blurry taillights on Nymph’s car, a tiny black convertible. John didn’t even consider backing off.

He didn’t know who or what Nymph was and didn’t particularly care. What John had learned was that anything and everything in this universe feels pain. It’s the universal constant, it’s what keeps us in check. In his time doing this job, John had learned how to inflict all types of pain, on all types of creatures. For some it was a blade, for others sunlight, or the sound of a wind chime on a summer day.

John would catch Nymph, and he would find out what caused Nymph pain.

The taillights swerved and jerked in John’s windshield and each time, John followed them. The car ran off the road and back on again, tires briefly spinning for traction on the muddy shoulder. Whatever Nymph was, John knew this: the guy had chosen the wrong vehicle for this pursuit. His little sports car lost speed in the muck and nearly hydroplaned when it hit standing water on the pavement, while John’s Jeep plowed ever forward.

Finally, Nymph made the mistake John had been waiting for. On a long stretch of clear road, Nymph had floored it, racing off into the distance for a few seconds before he hit a large puddle and lost traction completely—John just saw a wild spray of white water, the taillights whipping left and then right—

The crash was over before John’s brain could even register what was happening. First, the little black sports car swerved right into a utility pole head-on, the taillights bouncing on impact. A split second later, John smashed into the sports car, compressing it into the pole like a beer can. Between the two vehicles, it was no contest—the Jeep had crushed the fragile little convertible to half its size. It didn’t even bend the Jeep’s bumper guards.

For a moment, all was still. John’s fingers were locked in a death grip around his steering wheel. Steam hissed from an exploded radiator—Nymph’s, not his. The wind had calmed and once again it was just the steady rain, as if the gods’ lust for violence had been appeased with a sacrifice. John gathered himself, yanked off his seat belt, and stumbled up to the driver’s side door of the sports car. He reared back with an elbow and smashed the window.

Empty.

No Nymph in the driver’s side, or passenger side, or the floorboard. No break in the windshield where he could have flown through on impact. Nothing.

John stomped back toward the Jeep—

Blood.

Dripping from the rear bumper.

No.

A little sports car like that wouldn’t have much of a trunk in the best of times, but now it had been crumpled into a mangled space no more than a foot wide. The lid sat loosely on top, and under it John could see …

the little girl looking mangled and bloody

… something, but it was impossible to know, in the rain. If he never lifted the lid and got a closer look, maybe he could go the rest of his life never knowing what was in there. Like Schrödinger’s cat, only by seeing what was in the trunk would it become real.

John slowly lifted the lid and he saw bloody little hands bound at the wrists by duct tape and a round little face with its mouth taped shut. A tangle of blond hair. Terrified eyes, wide open.

Dead eyes.

Margaret “Maggie” Knoll. Her fragile body obliterated on impact.

John’s heart was hammering. He couldn’t breathe.

He gently lowered the trunk lid, then growled and slammed his fist into the roof of the car, again and again. He was screaming now. Somewhere, he thought he could hear Nymph laughing.

John was making so much noise, in fact, that he almost didn’t hear when a man said from behind him, “Did you get him? Did you get Nymph?”

John turned, and saw Ted Knoll.