Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Are you going to treat me like you did fat Mikey?” he said, giggling and drooling on my wrist. “Go ahead!” he said, and now his hands were on my wrists, gently spasming as though encouraging me to twist his head. “When I count three, you twist as hard as you can and pop goes my head, isn’t that how it works?”

The conductor saw us now, started blaring his horn, but he would never have time to stop.

“One!”

I tried to let go, meaning to jump clear and find a niche to flatten out in, but he had my wrists in his hands, his hands like little pliers.

He’s stronger than me!

“Two!” he said. I tried picking him up, but I couldn’t; he had his feet tangled up in the running rails.

Oh fuck it’s coming and if my head comes off I’m dead and if I hit the third rail I’m dead and even if not it’s going to hurt like a cunt let go let go LET GO.

“THREE!”

The light on the train was as big as a sun, the horn blew up my ears, the face of the conductor was a Halloween mask of disbelief and horror. It all became unreal to me, like it didn’t matter, the sun of the train’s light a sun over Tatooine. This letting go at the last second, this was how people died. And deer, I guess. Only I snapped to. Almost in time. I saw Sammy go flat, squeeze himself down between the tracks, taking the only place I knew to go. I remember one of his disjointed eyes looking up at me like a flounder’s eye. I took my chances and jumped up, jumped hard and tried to grab on to the roof of the tunnel, only I couldn’t get purchase. Worse, I had jumped so hard I bounced, spun in the air, and my legs swung down, breaking my heels on the windshield and knocking my shoes off. Did you ever break your heel? I don’t recommend it. I tried to get small, cling to the top of the train, but it was too late, I couldn’t get small enough not to take the worst beating of my life between the train and the tunnel’s ceiling. I screamed like a girl. I remember seeing a flash of a red letter, like a P , where some tagger had climbed the train in the yard. It was like being chewed up in a giant mouth, but fast ; I broke my teeth, I broke my shoulders and ribs, my sock came off, I was half-scalped, the fucking can of hair spray dislocated my hip and tore the bejesus out of my coat pocket but somehow didn’t pop and got so twisted up in my shirt it didn’t come loose.

I hit the tracks blind in one eye, my nose about an inch from the third rail. I literally peeled myself up enough to roll away from it. The most solid thing on my person was the hair spray can, and I was so dazed I stuck that can down the front of my pants like I was shoplifting it. I tried to stand up but my broken legs wouldn’t hold me. Everything hurt and itched at once as my insulted bones already tried knitting themselves together. I heard a plap as the skin of my scalp stuck itself back to the top of my skull. Sammy had gathered himself now, and he ambled over, laughing.

Then he licked me. No shit, he licked my face and scalp, not like a pervert, but like a dog licking a bone. He was tasting my blood. I tried to push him away, only my arm wasn’t ready for pushes and I rebroke it.

“Oooo, that was nasty,” I heard another one saying. Manu. No trace of sarcasm like Sammy might have delivered; he said it like he really felt bad for me. No surprise there, I felt bad for me, I might have felt bad for Manson watching him take the up-against-the-tunnel-roof train-grind. Duncan lurked behind Manu holding an adult’s bloody sweater against his cheek as if for comfort. I thought of Linus in Peanuts . I tried to stand but still wasn’t up for it. Sammy straddled me and licked me again.

“Knock it off,” I tried to say, but the sound I made was all vowels. He understood anyway.

“Or what?” he said, and I didn’t have a good answer.

“Leave him be,” said Manu.

“I’m older, I don’t have to listen to you,” the smaller Sammy said.

That was when it hit me. Margaret was right. These kids weren’t kids at all. And I was completely at their mercy.

My mouth had formed up enough to speak.

“What now?” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to hit your pipe so the others will come. We’d very much like the others to come,” Sammy said, showing fangs and drooling. Remember, vampires drool when they want to bite, which means when they want to attack. I imagined Billy Bang walking up on them, or Luna. I shook my head.

“Good,” said Manu. “The First Three want to see you.”

The First Three.

My legs were strong enough for me to stand. I could see out of my left eye again and my headache was getting better.

Just as I began to contemplate making a run for it, bastard Sammy picked up a brick and broke my legs again. He took a pencil out of his pocket and blinded me. I screamed, so he jammed gravel in my mouth.

The two of them picked me up and ran off with me.

Fast.

Everything in me hurt when they set me down.

I didn’t know where I was, but it stank like hell. Maybe it was hell. Except it was cold.

I felt something crawl over my face.

“Joey-Joey-Joey!” I heard. Peter.

“Joey,” a little mouse-voice echoed. Camilla.

“He still can’t see,” Duncan said. “But look, the right one’s almost whole.”

“That’s the left,” Camilla said.

“Oh, right. The left, then. He’ll be able to see us in no time at all. When his peepers heal.”

“Had you to hurt him so badly?” Camilla mewed.

“He tried to twist my head off.”

“I want to twist your head off sometimes, Sammy,” Peter said.

Manu said, “You should have seen it! It was brilliant! That was the worst I’ve seen someone hurt who still lived after.”

“You’re forgetting the British officer and the elephant.”

“It was very much the same sort of thing, only topsy-turvy. Instead of an elephant mushing him groundwise, the train mushed him roofwise. Anyway, that officer never lived.”

“Did so! My pretend-father spoke to him after, they joked about the fat in the bullets.”

“Anyway, he never got out of bed.”

“That’s true.”

“And they shouldn’t have made them bite the bullets.”

“That’s also true.”

“Shh, he’s about to see us.”

I became aware of music in the background: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”

My left eye fuzzed in, everything bleary. The room around me was unfamiliar. I heard someone blowing bubbles, like in the bath, but it was thick and sloppy-sounding. Duncan was closest, inches from me, looking down at me like I was a schoolyard bug dying in an interesting way. His big, blue eyes shone faintly in the dim light, somehow innocent. Sammy behind him, not innocent at all. Manu passive, observing. I heard the bubbling again. I looked over and saw a big, industrial trash barrel with two little heads poking out of it. Make it three. Alfie surfaced now, blowing out horsy-lips and spraying a fine mist. You know what the trash barrel was full of. Sure you do. If you don’t, allow me to point out the meat hook hanging still but wicked about six feet over the barrel, the rusty old chain leading up from it, the anchor hook someone nailed into the concrete roof and the little brown hand- and footprints up there, the stack of naked dead in the corner with their throats cut and their feet bound together with straps. The three kids in the trash barrel had their hair slicked back with it, they were slathered in it, they all looked like they had just been born.

Sammy came up to the trash barrel, cupped his hand, and slurped from it. Peter, a very healthy and robust Peter, splashed at him, laughing.