John Shirley: Wetbones

A vast thing, up there, at first looking like a partly-filled hot air balloon, then a tapering head, its nearer end bifurcated into a worm-edged mouth opening to show a terrified remnant of face – its tendrils reaching out to puppet the starfish of smashed human flesh that closed around Jeff Teitelbaum and broke his neck -

Reaching out with other tendrils to embrace the six men and two women who stood naked and blood-spattered around the body of a woman near the back of the main house -

Reaching out to Prentice – it must be Prentice – who was running open mouthed and glaze-eyed to pull the girl from the fire; stretching out to the boy Lonny who'd nearly shot Teitelbaum and Garner two minutes earlier. Lonny now reflexively shooting at the More Man who had one hand in his own guts and another on his purplish, exposed dick, as a worm grew arm-thick from his mouth, the worm reaching for Lonny…

As the thing over the pool reached for them all. Reached for Garner.

Three seconds were up. The cable on the spool unfeeling behind it, the truck roared up to the pool. The crazy old hippie in the driver's seat, screaming triumphantly at the top of his lungs, drove the truck deliberately head-on into the water. The exposed strip of wire on the spool-attached end of the cable struck the water with all the voltage that could be stolen from a high power line as the truck broke through the waxy protective skin over the pool and nosed down, crackling with sparks. It sank into the surging, boiling, green-black waters. Watching, Garner understood. He could see the colony of tens of thousands of tiny astral worms outlined in violet fire, deep-frying in the pool, as electricity arced and crackled in small lightning bolts across its tortured surface. Like randomly aimed particle accelerators, the seething electrons shattered the plasmic; Astral skeins of the Akishra – and travelled along the circuits of etheric relationship, conducting up through the tendrils of the Lord of Akishra hovering over the pool, passing into the Magnus and through it into the others on the terrace and in the house.

Violent streams of electricity roared down from the Akishra Magnus and into the More Man; into the wreckage of Jeff and his murderer by the doorway to the back house; into the weave of rose bushes up the outer walls of the guest house. The rose bushes writhed like a nest of neon snakes, wailing in despair. The vast currents of electricity crackled into the eight Followers and Feasters standing back of the fireplace, and into two worm-driven corpses – the ragged remains of Lissa and Arthwright – crawling along the stone flags. Fingers of electricity dabbed like the fingers of a blind man at Garner, and seemed to find him not to their taste; they moved on to Constance, pausing over her so that she went momentarily rigid, and glowed faintly in his arms as a starburst of worms fled from her, disintegrating in the air. The charge left her, and passed over Lonny and Prentice and the black girl; and went on.

The electricity crackled more powerfully yet into the More Man, into the worm-haunted hamburger that had taken Jeff Teitelbaum, into the More Man's followers – and they shook and screamed, electrocuting physically and spiritually, each surrounded by a spark-spitting corona of brilliant blue-white discharge, human fireworks displays; they ran spasmodically to one another and, as if galvanized to act out the archetypes of their compulsions, they lunged at whoever was nearest. The Handy Man tearing into the body of the More Man with his bare hand – the rest crowding together, doing the same to each other, a crowd of about ten of them closely clumped, tearing one another to pieces with teeth and bare hands, so that rags and gobbets of flesh flew through the halos of sparks, each flying handful of bloody flesh itself flaring with electrical discharge and exploding in sparks; the More Man and companions bodily burrowing into one another, a woman thrusting her head into her partner's guts and emerging beside the shattered spine as someone else, electrified into superhuman strength, ripped her leg out of its socket and then thrust his hand into the wound to yank out her intestines, and someone else sank teeth into the side of the face of the one who'd torn the leg away and someone else popped out the eyes and then the brains of the one who bit the woman who…

It took five seconds, as the old red truck boiled like a lobster in the pool. The human hosts of the Akishra tore one another to pieces, faster and faster till it was too fast for the eye to follow and then they – and the worms that motivated them – were lost in a seething cloud of exploding flesh -

Garner turned away to see a raging ball of electricity double back from this hand-made Wetbones and up the connective tendrils into the Akishra Magnus, which detonated like a sobbing and suffering roman candle, expelling a hundred thousand trapped spirits that spiral-led away into void and…

The Akishra burned in the air, ten thousand thousand worms fluttered up and burned out. Or burned out of this world, Garner supposed. There was no exterminating them, not completely.

And then the fog dispersed. Sunlight expanded around the pool. The apparitions vanished from the sky. The Magnus was no more. The More Man and compan ions were steaming heaps of burnt flesh, without the Akishra to animate them. Lonny was helping Prentice carry the poor, charred, black girl away.

Garner was abruptly aware that he was dizzy, in danger of falling over with Constance in his arms. His heart was playing a drum roll, his mouth as dry and foul as a road kill. But he had to see one more thing. He turned to glance into the pool…

In the pool, Drax was, of course, quite dead. The pool had lost its colour, was now crystal clear, illuminated with an inner glow. The truck was glowing with violet fire; and inside it, like a filament in a bulb, Drax glowed with a psychedelic coruscation all his own, his shining corpse grinning in triumph.

Berkeley, California… One Year Later

Garner was glad he'd thought to bring flowers. There were none in Constance's room. She was wearing shorts and a rather old The Simpsons t-shirt and no shoes. She'd put on weight, a little too much. Earlier in the year, in the months after the Ranch, she'd barely eaten at all. Now she was eating too much. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

She sat by the window, at her desk, with a copy of Cosmopolitan open in front of her. She was looking at the pictures. Next to her was a broad window looking out on the hospital's Activities Lawn, a sort of commons where sports were played and picnics held and catatonics wheeled about. The sky was overcast; the light that came in through the window was muted. The trees sheltering the sanitarium from the world were beginning to streak with russet and yellow.

He stood looking at her a moment, readying himself. She was better, he told himself. She'd really gotten better. The months of withdrawal symptoms were over. She had stopped trying to slash her arms up; she'd long since stopped attacking people.

"Hey dudette," he said, putting the flowers on the table across from her bed. He put the sack of cookies down next to them. "Smell anything good? Not me and not the food around here. Not even the cookies. I mean the flowers. You like carnations?"

"Sure." She looked out the window. "You gonna watch TV with us again tonight?"

Something about the question hinted a gray continuum of hopelessness. It dug a hole through him. But he said, "That's the plan. I brought cookies for the whole floor."

"Next time bring candy for Marcia. She doesn't like cookies. She's weird about cookies. Somebody choked her by forcing 'em down her once. Her mom said she was over-eating so she tried to teach her a lesson and she almost died. From cookies."