By Gary Morton
The cruelty of his small world was captured, shivering on the sticky web of the
dream. Holes in the endless tumbled buildings and eroded faces in the concrete
revealed a mood of agony and loss. He heard something snarl, then the grind of
teeth became the squeal of radials spinning through greenish wisps of smog.
He saw his wife again. Janice was dead, gray and splashed with a violet shading
of wine, blood, and bruise. A derelict factory loomed over her like a squat
giant. Up in the gloom, he saw the city itself, what it had become … a soulless
monstrosity made of the smoke and thunder of tarnished commerce … a bone-grinder
shaking mechanisms, devouring purposeless humanity.
A wall was blocking him; a wall had always blocked him. It was stone, brick,
cement, and all the metal of derailed trains and freeway wrecks. Severed limbs
crowned the rubbish heaps at its base. Tar and blood bubbled in the cracks. It
made him think of every shallow thug he'd ever been up against, all of the nasty
bosses who'd fired him, and every bastard who'd ever insulted and underrated
him. It was nearly everyone. Their faces flashed, warped and ugly as fresh skin
grafts. They were the stopper, they'd beat him down and turned him into a broken
man. There was nothing left, and he thought that maybe his wife had been right
in riding out of it on the bottle.
Wind gusted, and he was a giant, carrying all of the rage and hate of mankind as
fury against the wall. Blood ran, and flesh tore as he hammered at it with his
fists, but it didn't come down. It couldn't come down when it had already
fallen. All it could do was boom and amplify the misery like a hollow drum.
Jeff awoke on the spit and instantly remembered getting smashed and walking out
of the city. The spit wasn't much better than the alleyways he'd been sleeping
in. It was a large chunk of land composed of garbage and fill, and it extended
into the lake. It had its share of stunted trees, wildlife, and mutant grass. It
also had groundwater so poisonous it would eat your flesh like battery acid.
Waking was nearly as bad as dreaming. He was in a hobo roost, and it was early
morning, the sun sailing up high and rust-tinted in the trailing greenhouse
exhaust of the nearby city. A number of bums were passed out in the dirt and
cardboard around him. On one side stood shabby huts of crate-board, corrugated
tin, and cardboard. Thorn bushes and stunted trees were to his left, and gulls
squawked directly overhead. Across from him was a pond of industrial waste. In
the distance, sailboats drifted on milky Lake Ontario.
Licks of sulfur and filaments of silver spun among green bubbles and strands of
foul brown smoke. As he tried to settle his swimming head, he unwittingly
focused on a blob of dark mud floating to shore. He was sure his life was over.
He wasn't physically finished like the bums around him, but he was fast on his
way. The binges were getting worse, and he had little to live for anyway. He'd
no property left and a tax debt compounding to mind-boggling numbers. His wife
was buried, and his daughter was a hooker … his son was armed and dangerous on
those rare days when he got out. For Jeff, the bottle of life was empty. Now it
was time to choke on the dregs at the bottom, and to be better than the rest. If
you knew you were dead, killed by fate, you were better than the others who were
too blind to know.
On the shore, the lump of mud began to crawl like a worm, and Jeff's negative
thoughts vanished as he studied it. Sometimes it shimmered like a bluebottle
fly, and at other times it was slime-green. It had a way of sliding forward that
was quicksilver smooth, and it moved right up to the closest wino - a guy with a
sherry face of popped veins - formed a gross sucker at its front and glued
itself to the man's forehead.
For a second, Jeff was sure he'd become a hallucinating wet brain already, but
when the worm oozed in the man's ear, the horror of it became the truth. It
wasn't long, and the bum's eyes opened. They were lifeless eyes, a
dead-as-maggots stare.
The shakes hit him; Jeff began to rise, but before he was halfway up, a muzzle
flash caught his eye. There was a crack and a heavy, dull thud as the head of
the derelict behind him became the leading edge of a slapping splash of blood
and brain matter.
Jeff threw himself to the side, rolled, and crawled off through Frisbee-sized
mushrooms. Crushed cans, rotted canvas, and heaps of cigarette butts marked the
edge of some thorn bushes, and while they screened him, a couple more shots
thundered into the roost.
Reaching a mound of iron ore pellets, Jeff moved out of the brush and tried to
spot the gunman. A small dump was beyond the mound, and the killer was on the
far side of it, reloading in a patch of crabgrass. He was blond, Nordic, a
bodybuilder wearing brown slacks and a checked hunting jacket. From his angle,
he wouldn't have seen the pond worm in the man's ear, and it was some of the
others he'd shot. That meant he was a pure killer, an off-duty cop or a
vagrant-hater out shooting bums on the spit for Saturday morning sport; maybe
even a Neo-Nazi out for practice.
Jeff felt anger convulse, close like a claw in his stomach. The killer took a
new form. He became the embodiment of everything Jeff hated - the lucky,
sophisticated guy who had nothing better to do than exterminate the unfortunate.
A new breed of man that had emerged a few years back, when kicking the
downtrodden became politically popular. Jeff swore under his breath. He intended
to get even. It would be a final strike at the authority he'd always hated. It
was the one thing he had left: his belief that all authority, every man, every
system had to be challenged. If the enemy had taken shape as a killer, then
maybe it was because it had killed his life already.
Moving from behind the ore heap, Jeff dashed through the dump, dodging decaying
furniture, rusted drums, and spikes of broken glass and metal. He got halfway
across before a huge spring caught his foot and threw him into the rusted-out
hulk of a pickup truck.
Hearing Jeff fall, the gunman spun around and fired. The slug hit the wreck with
the wham of a heavy metal fist and opened up the hood like it was the lid of a
sardine can.
Jeff kept moving, ducking behind wet heaps of cardboard and newspaper,
continuing his advance on the gunman. Two slugs pounded at his heels, then he
saw the gunman move to reload. Favoring his weak leg, Jeff rushed into some
bushes, finding cover before the gunman could trigger again.
Rays from the swollen sun glossed the sweat on the gunman's brow. His expression
was intense, and he seemed about to lose his cool. It was obvious that he hadn't
expected one of the bums to fight a war with him. He shuffled around nervously
in the crab grass, looking for his target.
Jeff had taken note that his weapon was a three-shooter, and he began by tossing
an empty Five Star sherry bottle. The gunman fired and shattered it where it
landed, and then he scratched his head and moved over into the dump.
Positions were now reversed, with the gunman behind a mound of crushed bricks
and Jeff near the patch of grass. It was time to take a risk; Jeff emerged from
the bushes and dived at the edge of the grass, getting behind a weedy mound as a
slug kicked up sod.
Risking it again, Jeff popped his head out. A slug whistled by and sawed a limb
off a dead maple. And that was the three. He'd have to load another clip.
Litter, wind, and dust flew through every alleyway, through the hard years of
Jeff's life. His teeth and jaws were locked bands of iron. Limping, beaten man
that he was, he pulled up strength from discarded dreams, crumpled steel, and
rust. Jeff was a gaunt man, a half-crippled man; his face was scarred and
creased and dark with stubble. But it was the eyes that told his story; they
weren't wino dead, they were white embers, hot with fire from a life too
terrible to think about.
It was too late to shoot, so the gunman tried to bash Jeff down with the barrel,
and he found it was too late for that, too. Jeff plowed into him like a train,
thrusting rusted metal into his belly. It penetrated like the jagged fender of a
wreck, then a hot river poured between his legs, and flame was in his eyes as
his intestines spilled out on the spit.
Jeff picked up the gun and found it was a TAR-HUNT Slug Rifle. Only a monster
would hunt with such a weapon. It was like killing ants with boulders. Yet it
was loaded, and Jeff figured he might need the three shots. He was going back
for the poor guy with the worm eating his brain, to put him out of his misery.
There was little to contemplate other than the screech of gulls and the
birthmark-colored clouds slipping over the sun. He was thirsty, and he knew
there was no clean water on the spit. He would have to find a bottle. He needed
a bit to prevent the hallucinations from withdrawal, not just thirst. Then, as
he came off the earth path leading to the roost, he forgot his thirst.
Three men had been decapitated by the TAR-HUNT slugs, and the corpses were
mounds of raw flesh, crawling with ants and horseflies. The premature carrion
stink was so vile that the roost was impossible to enter. The other derelicts
had fled, four or five of them, and the guy with the pond worm in his brain was
also gone.
Scouting for them, he doubled around to the far side of the makeshift huts. Fat
drops of blood led up to the ramshackle construction. A huge peeling Pepsi sign
served as a door. It had once been electric; now it shone with traces of blood.
Jeff's hunter instinct made him hesitate. He picked up a stone and heaved it at
the side of the hut. There was shuffling on cardboard and a moan of pain inside.
The door began to creak open. Something felt wrong, so Jeff raised his weapon. A
man came out slowly. He was dragging his feet, his arms hung limp, and his
entire body was alive with bloodsucking worms. Only his mouth was clear, and it
poured with blood and moaning.
As the door blew shut, Jeff squeezed the trigger, the kick of the gun hitting
him like a horse's hoof. He saw the man's middle disappear in a whirlpool of
violet as he was thrown against the Pepsi sign. It crumpled easily as tinfoil,
and the wall fell apart, a spray of gore and worms shooting in to coat the
interior.
Gray light washed in, and Jeff saw the other bodies, all of them crawling with
worms, except the original one. And he knew it only by the shoes, because the
body was now wrapped in a milky web.
Shooting would be pointless. Fire was a better idea. He fumbled for his lighter,
and as the silver flashed from his pocket, the webbing on the man's head began
to split.
A green-purple tentacle waggled out. Blister-like suckers lined its underside.
It got a hold of the wall and pushed out two more tentacles, and then it pulled
itself the rest of the way out. Chunks of skull fell away and hung on hinges of
webbing as it oozed up the wall. There were six tentacles in all; the man's
brain made the body. It pulsed with several colors of ghastly liquid and had
knobs of varicose veins at the bases of the tentacles. A huge blister in the
center appeared to be a morbid eye.
Jeff's teeth chattered. He decided to shoot, but when he raised the rifle, he
found that he couldn't will his trembling finger to pull the trigger. Throwing
the gun down, he went back to the lighter and had the same problem again when he
tried to start a fire.
The brain worm was now moving toward him in the same easy way it'd moved when it
had been tiny. Hate was another set of tentacles emanating from it. Paralyzing
hate. Jeff could feel its loathing of him, and it was a tangible thing, as real
as the green wisps of poison over the place of its birth. It invaded his mind,
screaming with a power of murderous extermination. Blistered tentacles shot like
lightning to the roots of his soul. Razor ribbons of pain twisted in his bowels.
Burrowing down, the creature found the umbilicus it needed to sever to end his
existence.
And then a dam burst. Another kind of hate - fire-bright - emerged. Jeff's hate,
his loathing of a world that had robbed, poisoned, and deadened him. All of the
angry faces flooded up like a grotesque bubbling of blood; their hunger an inner
rain of glass splinters and knives.
Jeff heard the creature scream from the pain of it. It was about to put a
tentacle on his foot. He kicked it away violently and watched it retreat to the
fallen hut.
Jeff's heart was thumping; its beat strengthened. The creature had crawled to
the bottom of him, and he'd refused to die. Just like that, he could refuse to
die for everyone else.
Running to the farthest hut, he set fire to it with his lighter and watched as
the flames licked up fast. Moving around the huts, he created a circle of flame
that quickly grew to a roaring column of crimson and soot. And he didn't wait
around; he turned and dashed across the spit wasteland, getting a hundred yards
before the screaming of the burning brain worm began. The sounds were psychic
emanations, sharp bone fragments exploding in his head.
He stumbled and began to crawl on the lumpy earth, and in time, his mind
cleared. The city was ahead, like another monster, with tentacles of smog. He
could see that it lived out of death, greed, envy, and hate. Yet his own hate
was gone, burned to ashes with the brain worm. Somehow, the creature had saved
him, exorcised him, and his thirst for life had returned. He knew he would go on
to a new life. He would still limp, but he'd no longer be crippled by self-pity
and hate.
--the end--