Brian Keene - Urban Gothic

His bladder ached. He needed to piss, but Javier was afraid that if he did, the sound or smell would give his location away.

The sound of shuffling footsteps caused him to hunker down. They were coming from a different direction than the hushed voices. A moment later, a third speaker joined the fray, but unlike the others, this new addition was understandable—if barely. His voice sounded like he had a throat full of barbed wire.

“What are you two doing? I thought I told you to hunt! Bad enough we lost them all earlier, in all the confusion. The longer they’re down here running loose, the worse it will be.”

This elicited a garbled, excited response. Then the new arrival spoke again.

“See, this is why you should have stayed put and helped make man-pudding or tended to the fires. I knew you two weren’t old enough to hunt yet. Get on back. Noigel and the others will handle this.”

More chatter. This time, they sounded dejected.

“I don’t care. You can’t hunt if you’re standing around playing with each other’s peckers and making the milk come out. Now go on. Tell Curd I sent you back to help him. He’s got one hung up now, freshly cleaned and skinned. I want you to take all the bones and smash them open and pull out the stuff inside. The eyeballs, too, and his poop tubes. We’ll make a good pudding with it all.”

Another unintelligible response.

“Don’t be stupid. You can’t milk a man once he’s dead. Now get going.”

Javier heard them scurrying away. A moment later, the third set of footsteps faded, as well. He waited another ten minutes, until he was absolutely certain that he was alone again. Then, unable to hold it anymore, he pulled down his zipper and pissed. He wanted to groan with relief, but he held his breath instead. Javier shuddered at the sensation. The stream was hot and heavy and splashed back against his legs. He forced himself not to gag as the piss wet his shoes and cuff s. Then his fear evaporated and the anger came back, a deep and abiding rage that nestled in the back of his skull and pulsated with a life all its own.

Although he couldn’t be sure, it sounded from the conversation he’d just eavesdropped on that one of his friends had been caught and killed. He wondered who it was. Then it occurred to him that maybe the speaker had been referring to Tyler or Stephanie—or maybe somebody they didn’t even know. Somebody from the neighborhood, perhaps? Some drug addict or homeless person.

Who it was didn’t really matter. He intended to kill every single one of these fucking things he came across just the same. No more hiding. No more pissing on himself. No more being a victim. Javier shook his feet one at a time, grimacing at the feel of his wet socks rubbing against his soles. Then he moved forward again, walking carefully and doing his best to be completely silent.

He wasn’t sure how far he’d gone or how many minutes had passed before he heard the voices again. They were muffled and distant. He slowed his pace and crept forward, summoning all the stealth he could manage. His hands trembled and his teeth chattered from the adrenaline and anger coursing through his body. Javier resisted the urge to charge blindly forward, shouting with rage and lashing out in the darkness.

As he progressed, he noticed a spark of light ahead, coming from the same direction as the voices. When he got nearer, he saw that it was a flashlight beam—weak, but still effective in this near total darkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust and then moved forward again. The conversations continued, the speakers oblivious to his presence. He tiptoed closer, until he could see their silhouettes. Then Javier paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the sudden light. He took slow, shallow breaths and tried to remain completely still.

There were three of them. He couldn’t see them clearly. They were too close together, but he could make out enough to disgust him. The only similarities he could see in them was their utter wrongness . Two were malformed. Their skin was slicked with greasy perspiration, and their brittle, matted hair was thin and long, as if it had never been cut. They wore no clothing, but they’d painted themselves with mud and wiped it away in strategic places to act as distinct markings. Both were decidedly female.

The third figure was a man. At first, Javier mistook him for a female, but when he looked closer, he saw that it was really a man wearing a woman’s tanned and preserved skin. He wondered if this was the same maniac Brett had encountered, or a different one with a similar fetish. The man seemed older than the females. He was taller and equipped with broad shoulders that bulged through his suit of skin with each small move he made. Horrified, Javier wondered how he’d fashioned the gruesome outfit to cling so tightly to his body. Skin tight , he thought, and had to bite his lip to keep from screaming.

He studied the man more intently. As far as Javier could see, there was no fat on his body. The woman-skin suit didn’t bulge from a potbelly or prodigious abdomen. Javier had little doubt that the thick fingers on the man’s hands could gouge through the hard-packed dirt around him with ease, and the length of his fingernails suggested that digging like a mole wouldn’t be anything new for him. Most surprisingly, Brett’s belt dangled from the man’s clenched fist. This was the same attacker that had ripped it from Javier’s grasp during the initial fight!

Javier turned his attention back to the women. The one holding the flashlight had hard muscles along her bare back. Her fingers, however, had fused together with thick knots of gray flesh that made her look as if she were wearing baseball gloves on each hand. The same excess skin covered the rest of her body, beneath the mud, from her face to her legs, like obscenely swollen scar tissue.

The other female looked very young, maybe a preteen, and while the hair on her body was fairly thin and plastered down with mud, it covered her entire frame. Her eyes seemed too large for her head, in much the same way as the Japanese cartoons seemed malformed, but without the same symmetry. One eye was oval shaped but oversized. The other was almost perfectly round and seemed to bulge from the socket.

“We haven’t seen anything, Scug,” the woman with the flashlight was saying to the man. Javier had to strain to understand her. The woman’s voice was slurred and slow, as if she were speaking with a wad of cotton balls inside her mouth. The man, Scug, leaned forward, also listening to her intently. Javier wondered if the scar tissue on her body was also present on her tongue or the roof of her mouth.

“I didn’t ask if you’d seen anything,” Scug said, and Javier recognized his voice as the one he’d heard earlier, chastising the other freaks. “I asked where you’ve been.”

She pointed around with the flashlight, and Javier ducked to avoid being seen as the beam swept overhead.

“All over down here. They couldn’t have come through here. Maybe Noigel got them all.”

Scug sighed. He sounded exasperated. He grabbed the belt with both hands and cracked it. The women jumped.

“Noigel couldn’t have killed them all,” he said. “Because when I left Noigel, he was still playing with the one he’d killed.”

The females giggled.

“Was he doing that thing with his pecker?” Scar-Face asked.

Scug nodded. “Yeah. He split the guy’s head open on the wall and then fucked the crack. Don’t know how he keeps from cutting himself on the skull fragments. Them things can be sharp. But he loves it. Maybe he’ll let you lick the brain juice off his pecker later on.”

“Un-uh,” Scar-Face protested, her eyes wide. “He’s too big for my mouth, and last time, there were fleas biting my face. He’s got a nest of them down there.”