Chris Holm - The Big Reap

It retreated some, and let me stew in the black a bit. I didn’t much enjoy it. Played Babe Ruth and swung for the cheap seats once or twice with my rebar, succeeded only in tiring myself out. So little air left in this still, dark tomb of a tunnel.

I fell to my knees, then onto my back. Felt consciousness bleeding away, the choking air a pillow against my face. My eyes fluttered shut. And then it struck.

Just as I’d been hoping.

I knew I hadn’t much time left, so I figured playing possum was my best bet. A bluff’s all the more believable when it’s half true. And I’d seen this fucker’s game once or twice already. I knew it liked to cover ground all lickety-split with a well-timed pounce.

Unfortunately for it, I was ready. Got the rebar up in time. Felt the thrum of electricity through the iron as it broke through the creature’s chest, traveling from my meat-suit’s hand up the bar like Lilith had suggested was the case. I pray the Lord its soul to take. Its one intact eye gleamed wet and wide in the near-dark. Its body slackened as the rebar broke through the ancient flesh of its back. Atop the rebar, stuck like iron filings to a magnet, was the gnarled, lifeless hunk that was this creature’s soul. I could feel the vibration of it through the three feet of rebar. Weak, but still alive, though the body I’d removed it from was nothing more than empty flesh.

I lay a moment, pinned beneath the impaled creature. Then I heaved it to one side and climbed out from underneath. “You know what?” I asked its corpse as I wrapped my hand around its soul and crushed it to dust like so much chalk. “That one was kinda personal.”

The ground rumbled all around me, swinging light bulbs on their naked cords and loosing dust from the ceiling, while the creature’s lifeless figure crumbled to bone and dust. My memory cast back unbidden to the collapsing Pemberton Baths, and I feared for a moment the tunnel was going to come down around me. But whatever mystical juice Magnusson had tapped into in the length of his unnatural existence proved weaker tea in this subhuman, feral beast, because almost as soon as it began, the rumbling quieted, and the swaying lights stilled. The cave still stood. And eventually, creakily, so did I.

Then, my task completed, I left the cave of cooling dead behind, and stumbled out into the half-lit predawn of the slowly waking desert alone.

“Nicky! Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”

As a point of fact, Nicky wasn’t effing seeing this, because Nicky wasn’t home right now. He hadn’t been for a while. When he and his cohorts stopped to film their live webcast Q&A in Boulder two days back, I took the opportunity to hitch a ride in ol’ Nicky, stuffing that poor, befuddled neo-hippie burnout into a metaphorical steamer trunk in the back of his mind next to some half-remembered Rusted Root lyrics, the abandoned mental blueprints for his pot-themed amusement park, and that awkward memory of seeing his not-yet-stepmom naked that one time by accident only really on purpose.

Not that Topher (pronounced Tow-fer, like we didn’t know his name was really Chris) or Zadie’d noticed. Firstly, because Nicky — the cameraman, equipment tech, weed supplier, and webmaster behind their all-the-sudden way-more popular web series Monster Mavens — who oh, by the way, really hated being called Nicky it’s Nicholas or at least just Nick you guys c’mon — was the quiet type, usually too baked and too absorbed in tinkering with his many gadgets to offer up more than a crooked half-smile or a grunt to register his happiness or displeasure (excepting those rare instances in which he felt he’d been Nicky-ed to excess). And secondly, they were too busy basking in the their newfound fame.

Until two weeks back, Monster Mavens was a modest internet success, with their blog generating a couple hundred unique hits per post, and their YouTube channel clocking in at somewhere around twenty-five hundred subscribers, half of whom were smartass college kids at least as baked as Nicholas-not-Nicky, who only tuned in to mock Topher and Zadie’s stubborn, moronic credulity in the face of no evidence whatsoever.

See, Topher and Zadie hunted monsters.

Badly.

Of course, they called them cryptids, and played them off as animals as-yet undiscovered. You know, Bigfoot and Nessie and the like, only they talked about them like they were a hair’s breadth away from coelacanths, those fish everybody thought were extinct until some fisherman netted a live one off the coast of South Africa. But if you ask me, finding a seven-foot ape in the Pacific Northwest or a dinosaur in a goddamn loch is a frick-ton less likely than a new fish in the sea. As anyone’ll tell you, there are plenty of them. Plus, these two patchouli-stinking, constantly bickering Deadheads (their shirts all said “Phish” or “Moe” or “Dave Matthews Band” on them, but I’ve been around a while, and I know the type) didn’t strike me as the scientific-method type — all the jargon-laced talk of fossil records and investigative methods in the world couldn’t convince me this gig of theirs was anything other than the two of them successfully forestalling their entrance into the real world, in favor of nights spent swigging jug wine around the campfire and boinking in tents while — and unfortunately, I know this part for absolute, if unscientific, fact — don’t-call-me-Nicky here surreptitiously recorded audio for his own, uh, personal use.

Then came Ada Swanson.

And then came fame and fortune.

And then came me.

You’ve heard of Ada Swanson. Hell, anyone who walked past a TV set in the summer of ’09 couldn’t have missed her. Those blond locks all twisted up in perfect ringlets, the tweezed eyebrows and bleached baby teeth that somehow so grotesquely aged her. Cheeks rouged rounder than round. Lips sculpted by cosmetics until their childlike fullness more resembled a grown woman’s. Every picture perfectly staged, her twirling a baton in the front yard of her family’s modest raised ranch in their quiet Colorado Springs suburb; playing piano at the local senior center; volunteering at a Denver soup kitchen. Always in sequins and a smile. And all of America wondering what kind of sick fucks did that to a six-year-old. Dolled her up. Pranced her about in front of crowds and cameras. Toured the pageant circuit like she was some kind of prize poodle: sit up, roll over, beg.

It was only a matter of time, the eager sad-faced viewing public told themselves, before someone went and took her. After all, that’s what happens in these twisted cycles of exploitation. They escalate, become self-feeding. Pageant-kids become targets for predators. And twenty-four-hour news networks make stars of murderers in their endless quest for new sets of bones to gnaw on.

The lack of irony with which we exploit the exploited to feed our endless need for misery-based entertainment is astonishing.

She was three days shy of her seventh birthday when she was taken. Straight out her bedroom window sometime between midnight and 6am, if her parents were to be believed. Not that anybody thought they were. They were creepshows, said America, and on that, at least, America probably wasn’t wrong. Mom was a pill-popping, big-haired, crispy-banged former cheerleader who ran the front desk at a local Chevy dealership and occasionally, after hours, lay atop it with the owner/manager. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship: his bad back kept her in Oxy, and the jungle-gym sex she treated him to in return kept him in a bad back. Dad was a general contractor with big hands and a big mouth who’d been between jobs for going on six years, which didn’t stop him from racking up a four-figure tab at the local watering hole, and low fives at the track. Then there was his best buddy, a local ski bum by the name of Dick Hartwell — five feet six of pure douchey smarm, always photographed in the same fleece vest and wraparound Oakleys, like he’d just stepped off the slopes. His picture was splashed across every news outlet the nation over for weeks when kiddie-porn was found on his computer. Never mind that it turned out to be a bunch of images downloaded from the sort of “barely legal” site where the chicks are all twenty-something behind their lip gloss, knee socks, and pigtails, by the time they cut him loose, his rep was ruined. Which was fine, I guess, since it turns out ol’ Dick Hartwell of Colorado Springs was once Richard Hartwell of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who just so happened to be thirty-two months in arrears on his child support payments for the three children by two women he’d left behind.