Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

The cop’s head was in front of me; I had him by the nape now, I butted off his cap. “Sorry,” I said, and used my left tooth like a letter opener, cutting him from forehead to temple. He put his hands on my face, tried to push me away, but now Alfie was on him, unable to control himself as the curtain of blood washed down the man’s face. He licked him with the flat of his tongue, licked his face like a dog lapping up gravy. Duncan, unsure of what to do, let go of me and joined Alfie. I pulled the nightstick out of the cop’s belt and launched myself backward, nearly falling on my ass. Manu went to grab me, but I wasn’t about to let him. He was clearly used to getting help from his older, stronger playmates, but all three of them were too busy dragging the cop into the alley so they could poke fresh holes in him, peel him, get their strength back while less-hungry Duncan played monkey-see, monkey-do.

It was just me and Manu; he was stronger, but I was bigger and I was fighting for my life. Plus, I had a nightstick. I gave it to him, too; I beat him for all I was worth.

“Ah,” Manu said, and “Ow,” and, incredibly, “Please,” and I would have said, Did you go easy when Chinchilla said please, or Edgar, or Malachi? but I was too busy swinging like John Henry, breaking his arms, busting the teeth out of his face. “Hey!” somebody yelled at me from a window, “Hey,” and a beer bottle broke on the street near me. I broke the wooden nightstick on the ground now, made a jagged point, braced myself to drive it into Manu’s chest, but he took a step back from me, tried to protect his chest with his wrecked arms, like a praying mantis I had seen in a picture. A van was coming up the street, one headlight out. I moved toward Manu, knocked one of his arms out of my way, but before I could strike he leapt back into the path of the van, on purpose. It hit him with a sick noise, turned him end over end. The driver got out immediately, left his door swinging open. A bottle hit my head. Somebody said, “Get that kid,” and for a split second I thought they meant Manu, that they knew what a vicious little killer he was, but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I punched somebody’s beery gut and he went Whooof! and I ran into the blackest alley I could find. I easily outran the citizens, windmilling my limbs, getting tired now, the Johnny Horton song about the British fleeing the battle of New Orleans looping in my head with an idiot’s voice, over and over again. I could outrun people all night long. But I knew that if the kids spotted me it was all over; they were freshly fed, mighty little engines banging away with all pistons. I, on the other hand, was running out of gas almost as fast as I was running out of luck.

That’s why I went down the cellar doors.

There they were, right on 2nd Street, under some kind of Russian or Ukrainian diner advertising FRESH-SQUEEZE O. JUICE . I popped the rusty, brown chain and opened the rusty, brown doors, shutting them behind me. I found myself crawling between cardboard boxes, cans of tomatoes, mesh sacks of potatoes, and more mesh sacks of small brown oranges. I hadn’t used my lungs in a while, so I sniffed. I picked up the floor’s bouquet of bleach undercut with recently swabbed-up rat shit. Just a hint of live rat, too. I followed that smell on my hands and knees, hoping to find a way out, even if it led back underground. I moved a dead mini-refrigerator aside and found a panel that didn’t match the rest of the wall. Hiding place or crawl space? Only one way to find out. At just that moment, I heard the cellar door swing open.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I fumbled around at the edges of the panel.

“Hullo?” a British voice asked playfully.

I found purchase, pulled the panel out, smelled a wash of fresher rat shit, saw a hiding space, crawled in, replaced the panel, all as quietly as I could manage. I crawled toward the back of the space, saw the round, black mouth of a pipe.

“Jo-eeey?” Manu said. “Our game was not finished. You played rough and didn’t give me my turn.”

I reached into the pipe, felt stacks of paper. Figures, the one day in my life I found a jackpot and it was just in the way. I pulled out the rubber-banded bricks of hundreds and fifties as fast as I could.

A little hand knocked at the other side of the panel. Someone giggled.

I took off the shirt, the droopy-ass jeans. The panel came off. I jumped into the pipe, getting small. They’re smaller, I thought, I’m done , but still I slithered and grunted and made my way through. I was maybe ten feet in when the pipe opened up into a larger space. I poked my head through, got one arm in. That was when I felt the hand on my ankle.

“Whither runst thou?” Camilla whispered. “Becalm thee.”

I pulled with the arm that was through, but I couldn’t break her grip. She pulled, too, but couldn’t yank me free. This went on for I don’t know how long. It felt like an hour. I grunted, I yelled, I snorted. “Shhhh,” she said. She said something in French, I think. Behind her, Peter laughed.

We fell into a kind of truce where I didn’t pull forward and she didn’t pull back. Time wasn’t on her side, though, not with that appetite. She let go. I scrambled forward, into the larger space, and here she came after. Her arm came out first. I kicked at it, wrenched it, broke it, but more of her just kept coming out. I lay on my back and stamped with both feet like a donkey, but her second arm was out now and her first arm had already healed and she caught my foot and twisted. I pulled my foot away and yelled.

The horrible mouth in the pipe hissed again.

Shhhlshhhl

I crawled on my hands and knees now; I was in a sort of natural fissure or something in the rock. It was getting smaller. Becoming a dead end.

I heard her come out of the pipe and start crawling behind me.

I ran out of crawl space. It just ended in a sort of wedge. I backed into it, crying, trying to kick at her. She got on top of my legs, wrestled my arms down. She had gotten small around me, flowed into the space with me.

“Please don’t,” I said.

I saw one eye, shut as tight as a puppy’s, I saw her roll her football-shaped head, felt a tooth drag my skin. She was working her way toward my neck. I breathed in, puffed up, tried to fill the space and keep her out of it, but she slipped her arms around me, squeezed me down, pushed the air out of my lungs. Got a little farther. I tried with all my might to push her down, but couldn’t budge her. When I rested from this exertion, she wriggled a little farther up, and then we did it all again. This went on for five minutes, ten, till she had folded my arms all the way down, filled the space around my neck. I know this sounds weird, but I smelled how old she was, smelled time pouring out of her like a bag of moths. I heard the sucking sound of her forming and re-forming her mouth around her teeth, felt her cold lips probing my neck, trying to get the right angle.

There came a point when I realized it was hopeless and relaxed. Let her do it. You would have, too. A long time before I did. She fed in hungry, spastic gulps. I could hear my blood trickling out of her; she wasn’t even trying to hold it in. She couldn’t feed efficiently like this. But she could bleed me out. I caved in like a jellyfish. I couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. I don’t think I dreamed.

When I came to, I was sitting on a ledge in a bricked-up room I recognized only too well, except that it was brighter than normal. Chloë sat to my right, holding fresh flowers in one skeletal hand. The other hand was in mine, our fingers interlaced, our hands bound together with human hair.