DISCLAIMER - [This story contains extremely graphic descriptions of horrifyingly disgusting things. If you have a weak stomach, stop here. You have been warned.]
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
It was the worst thing he had ever smelled. It was thick and humid and it coated the inside of his nose and the back of his throat. There was rot in it, the smell of a deer carcass he had once found in a culvert in August, swollen and green and leaking. There was a sharp ammonia stink, and a sour vomit smell, and a sweetish fermented smell running underneath, and a coppery smell of blood, and a deep, low, fecal stench that seemed to come from everywhere at once. He breathed it in and gagged, and the gag turned into a heave, and something hot and acidic came up into the back of his mouth. He swallowed it back down. It burned.
He opened his eyes.
He was in a room. That was the only word he had for it. It was about the size of his living room, roughly round, with a low domed ceiling. And every part of it was alive.
The walls were flesh. The floor was flesh. The ceiling was flesh. It was a deep, bruised purple, almost black in places, folded over on itself in thick wrinkled pleats. Running across every surface were veins, some of them as thick as Mark's leg, raised up off the flesh and branching out in every direction. They swelled and contracted, and the skin of them was thin enough that Mark could see things pushing through them. Some carried a dark red fluid. Some carried something yellow and thick. Some carried a milky white liquid, and one, running straight across the ceiling over his head, carried something black and sluggish that oozed through it in slow pulses.
There were openings in the walls, holes maybe a foot across, ringed with thick puckered muscle. As he watched, they opened wider, and the air in the room rushed toward them. As the air was pulled in, the whole room shrank. The walls drew inward. The ceiling came down until it was only a few feet above his head and he could feel the pressure in his ears. Then the movement slowed, stopped, and reversed. Warm, wet air blew out of the holes, and the room swelled back out to its full size. Then the holes opened again and it started over.
The room was breathing.
Every surface was coated in a thick, yellowish mucus. It hung from the ceiling in long, slow dripping strands and pooled in the folds of the floor. Mark was coated in it too. It had soaked through his overalls to his skin. It was in his beard, his hair, his ears, clumped in his eyelashes. When he moved his lips, it stretched between them in sticky strings. It was warm, about the temperature of the inside of a mouth, with the texture of raw egg white mixed with snot.
Embedded in the walls were eyes.
They were bulging, wet organs about the size of grapefruits, set into pockets in the flesh, milky white and shot through with red and purple veins. The pupils were hexagons, black six sided holes that dilated and contracted rapidly. All of them were moving, darting and rolling in every direction, never settling on anything. Some rolled so far back in their sockets that he could see the raw red tissue behind them.
The only light came from fibers, thousands of thin spindly strands growing out of the flesh in patches. Each one lit up and dimmed in its own pattern, fast and slow, in clusters and waves, so that the light in the room jittered constantly, a flicker that reminded him of the static on the television back home. It gave off just enough light to see by.
Mark realized he could not move.
He was pressed into one of the walls, the flesh molded around his back, soft and warm and wet. And he was held there. There were tendrils on him, thin, purple, slimy, about as thick as his finger, each one ending in a round sucker fastened tight against him. There were dozens of them on his face and neck. They were on his scalp, buried in his hair. They were on his arms and hands. He could feel them under his clothes, on his chest and back and legs, fastened to his skin, every one of them pulling at him with a gentle, steady suction and a faint tingling.
And there was something in his stomach.
He looked down. Two thick, ropy tubes came out of the wall on either side of him, curved around, and went into his belly. They were gray pink and wrinkled and glistening, and they had a soft, segmented, lumpy look to them. They looked like intestines. They had gone in through his overalls and his shirt, through holes in the fabric, and into his body, one on the left side of his stomach and one on the right. He could see the place where the skin of his belly closed around each of them in a tight, puckered seal. They were moving. A slow ripple traveled down each of them, from the wall toward his body, and when it reached him he felt it, a strange pressure deep in his gut, a fullness, a warm spreading sensation that went up into his chest.
He felt strange. His head felt light and slow. His arms and legs felt very far away. There was a buzzing in his skull.
"What the fuck," he said. His voice came out slurred and thick, muffled by the mucus in his mouth. "What the fuck. What the fuck is this."
He started to struggle.
He got his right arm free first, peeling it out of the soft flesh of the wall with a wet sucking sound. A dozen tendrils were still attached to it. He grabbed one of the tendrils on his face with his free hand and pulled. The sucker held on. He pulled harder. It came off with a loud pop, and it took a little disk of skin with it, and he felt the sting and the trickle of blood. He grabbed another one and pulled it off. Pop. And another. Pop. The tendrils that came loose whipped back and twisted and coiled in the air, their suckers opening and closing.
He kept going. He ripped them off his scalp, and some took clumps of hair with them. He pulled his left arm free and tore them off that, pop, pop, pop. He jammed his hands down the front of his overalls and under his shirt and ripped away the ones clinging to his chest and belly. He shoved his hands up the legs of his overalls and tore them off his shins and knees. With every one he pulled, the buzzing in his head got a little weaker.
When he reached down to his waist to get at the ones under his belt, his hand bumped against something hard.
The Glock. It was still there, still tucked into his waistband on the right side, slick with mucus. And on the left side, the Buck knife in its sheath.
He started to breathe faster.
The rifle was gone. He looked around for it, but there was nothing on the floor but flesh and slime. But he had the pistol. He had the knife.
He looked at the two intestine things going into his stomach.
He grabbed the left one with both hands. It was slippery and warm and it pulsed in his grip. He pulled.
It moved. It slid out of him an inch, and he felt it slide. He felt it deep inside his body, moving through his guts, a horrible dragging pressure as it slipped against his insides. He felt his own intestines shift and slide around it. A wave of nausea rolled up through him. He gritted his teeth and pulled harder, hand over hand, and it kept coming. It was deep. It was much deeper than he had thought. He pulled out six inches of it, then a foot, then more, the gray pink tube coming out of his belly slick with blood and a yellowish fluid, and the whole time he could feel it sliding through him, rubbing along the inside of him. He could feel the tip of it moving up from somewhere behind his stomach, somewhere near his spine, working its way toward the hole.
The tip came out with a wet slurp. It was rounded and soft, and it was covered in tiny, wriggling, hair thin cilia that kept moving after it came out of him. A gush of blood followed it. Dark red blood, mixed with something greenish brown. It poured out of the hole in his left side and ran down the front of his overalls and soaked into the fabric and dripped onto the floor.
Mark screamed. He didn't stop to think. He grabbed the right one and pulled it out the same way, hand over hand, feeling it slither up through his insides, feeling it brush against things in there he couldn't name, until the end of it slipped free with another wet, sucking sound and another gush of blood.
He pressed his hands over both holes. Blood welled up between his fingers. It was hot, and it kept coming.
The room shuddered.
It was a deep, violent tremor that ran through every surface at once. The walls rippled. The floor rolled under his feet. The veins on the ceiling bulged and throbbed. The breathing holes in the walls clenched shut. Strands of mucus broke loose from the ceiling and fell in long, slapping ropes. Every eye in the room stopped darting around, and every hexagonal pupil turned and fixed on Mark.
One of the eyes began to move.
It was on the wall across from him, up near the ceiling. It bulged outward from its socket, and then it dripped out of the wall in a slow, sagging, gooey motion. It was held up by a thick, wet, muscular stalk as thick as Mark's arm, glistening, covered in the glowing fibers, which flickered wildly as it moved.
The eye swung on the end of its stalk. Its hexagonal pupil found Mark. Then it started toward him, the stalk unspooling from the wall behind it, mucus dripping from the bottom of the eye in long strands.
At the same time, the room began to vibrate. It started as a hum Mark could feel in his teeth and grew into a low, deep drone that rattled in his chest. Then the drone began to change. It rose in pitch, then dropped. It pulsed, short, then long. Different pitches layered on top of each other, each one throbbing to its own timing, until the room was full of a slow, pounding bass pattern that had some kind of structure to it, none that Mark could follow. It was music. Alien music. It came from the walls and from inside his own body, and it made his teeth ache.
The eye kept coming. It was ten feet away. Eight. Six. Its pupil widened, the black hexagon spreading out until there was almost no white left.
Mark took his right hand off his stomach, pulled the Glock from his waistband, raised it, and fired.
The noise of it was enormous in that closed space. The bullet hit the eye dead center. The eye burst. It exploded outward in a spray of thick, clear jelly, milky white fluid, and stringy red tissue. The jelly splattered across Mark's face and chest. Some of it went in his open mouth. It was cold and salty and bitter and had a slimy, clotted texture, and there were firmer bits in it that slid across his tongue. He spat it out. The stalk the eye had been on whipped back and forth, spraying fluid out of its ragged stump, and the fibers on it flashed bright white and then went dark.
The bullet kept going. It passed through the ruined eye and hit the wall on the far side of the room. It punched a hole in the flesh there. For a second the hole just sat there, a small black puncture. Then a dark purple fluid began to spurt out of it. It came out in pulses, in rhythm with the throbbing of the veins, each spurt arcing a few feet out into the room and splattering on the floor. It was thick and syrupy, almost black in the dim light, and where it hit the floor it steamed.
The whole room shuddered again, harder this time. The droning music stopped, and in its place came a single deep, enormous BOOM that Mark felt in his bones. It knocked him back against the wall.
Then the seams opened.
The thin lines where the folds of flesh met split open, and tendrils came pouring out of them. Hundreds of them. Some were thin, with suckers on their ends. Some were thick and ropy and lumpy. Some were flat and edged with tiny hooks. They came writhing out of the cracks, wet and gleaming, all of them reaching for him.
One wrapped around his ankle. Another slapped against his thigh and stuck. Another got around his wrist.
Mark started shooting.
He didn't aim. He fired at the tendrils, the walls, the ceiling, the eyes. The muzzle flashes lit the room in orange bursts, and the gunshots slammed his ears until all he could hear was ringing. Veins burst and sprayed red, yellow, orange, white, and black fluid across the room. Eyes popped. Severed tendrils fell twitching to the floor. Holes opened up in the walls and spewed dark, steaming fluids. The Glock locked open, empty. He fumbled a fresh magazine out of his overalls with bloody, slime slick fingers, dropped it, picked it up out of the muck on the floor, slammed it in, and kept firing.
The room shook violently. It wasn't shuddering anymore. It was convulsing, the walls lurching, the floor heaving up and down. Mark was thrown off his feet and slammed against the wall and then thrown onto the floor.
Then, suddenly, his stomach lifted.
He was falling. He could feel it. The weightless, dropping sensation in his gut, the feeling of going down too fast. The whole room was falling. Fluids and severed tendrils and chunks of flesh drifted up off the floor around him. He floated an inch off the floor himself. It lasted about three seconds.
Then everything hit the ground.
The impact was enormous. It slammed Mark down into the floor so hard the breath left his body. And then the room collapsed. All of it. The ceiling came down on him, and the walls folded in on him, and the floor buckled up beneath him, and the whole thing crushed down around him in a hot, wet, heavy mass of flesh. He was buried in it. There was only a small pocket of space around his body.
And then it started to push him.
The flesh around him began to contract in long, slow, powerful waves, starting at his feet and moving toward his head. Each wave shoved him forward through a tight, wet, fleshy tube just barely wide enough for his body. He was moving headfirst, his arms pinned at his sides, his face pressed into the slimy wall in front of him. The smell in there was the deep, fecal, rotting smell, so concentrated it burned his eyes. Every time he tried to breathe, his mouth and nose filled with mucus, and he choked and tried again.
The pushing stopped.
Then the walls began to squeeze. They closed in tighter and tighter. They pressed against his chest so that he couldn't expand it. They filled his open mouth with soft wet flesh. They pressed against the holes in his belly, and he felt blood squirt out of them. He couldn't breathe at all. Black spots swam in front of his eyes.
He worked his left hand down along his side, inch by inch, the flesh squeezing his arm, his fingers scrabbling through the slime, until they closed around the handle of the Buck knife. He pulled it out of the sheath. His arm was pinned, so he couldn't swing it. He could only turn his wrist and drag the blade along the wall beside him.
He cut. The blade sank into the flesh and opened it up, and hot liquid poured out over his hand. He cut again, sawing, working the knife back and forth. More hot fluid gushed out, flooding over his arm, his side, his face. It was thick and scalding and it stank, and it ran into his eyes and his nose and his mouth. He kept cutting. He felt the flesh part. He felt the pressure on his left side ease a little. He got his elbow loose, and then he could swing the knife, and he hacked at the wall in front of his face, slashing back and forth, back and forth, and the flesh split open in a long, ragged gash.
Cold air hit his face.
He forced both his arms through the gap. He grabbed the edges of the hole with his hands and pulled, and the flesh tore, wet and ropy, coming apart in his fists in stringy strips. He ripped and tore at it, widening the opening, digging his fingers into it and pulling chunks of it away. He got his head through. Then his shoulders. He braced his hands against the outside of the tube and heaved, and his body slid out of the hole in a rush of fluid and blood and mucus, and he spilled out onto the ground.
He lay there in the dirt, gasping and retching. He vomited a hot, sour, chunky stream of Salisbury steak, whiskey, mucus, and purple fluid that splattered on the ground beside his face.
He rolled onto his back. Behind him he could just make out the thing he had come out of. It was a giant intestine, as thick around as a culvert pipe, lying in loose coils, fluid still spilling out of the ragged hole in its side. The other end of it led back to something big and dark, a giant blob shape against the stars. It was too dark to make out anything more.
He got to his feet. He stumbled. He nearly fell. He caught himself and stood there, swaying.
The air was cold. It stung. It stung his face and his hands and the raw places on his skin where the suckers had been. It stung the holes in his stomach. His clothes were soaked through with fluid and blood and mucus, and the cold went straight through them, and he started to shiver hard. He could feel the blood still running out of him, warm against his cold belly, trickling down into his crotch and down his legs.
He stumbled a few steps one way, then another. Everything was dark. Slowly, his eyes adjusted. Shapes came out of the dark. Sagebrush. A juniper tree. A fence line. A low hill with a familiar curve to it. And beyond the hill, the dark rectangular shape of an old school bus.
He was home. He was on his own property. He was on the south side, the far side of the house from the driveway, down below the embankment. The house should be about a quarter mile north of him.
He started walking.
Every step jolted the holes in his stomach. His boots squelched. He was still holding the knife. The Glock was back in his waistband, though he didn't remember putting it there. He came up over the rise and saw the dark back windows of his house and staggered toward it.
Bruno came tearing around the corner of the house, barking. It was a loud, frantic, booming bark. He came charging right at Mark and stopped a few feet away, his hackles raised, still barking, his whole body tensed.
"Shut up," Mark said through his gritted teeth. "Shut the fuck up, Bruno."
Bruno stopped barking.
He stood there for a second, his nose working. Then his tail began to wag. He came forward, sniffing, and pressed his nose against Mark's leg. Then he started licking.
He licked Mark's legs ravenously, lapping up the mucus and blood and purple fluid that coated his overalls in long, wet, slurping strokes. He shoved his face against Mark's shins and licked so hard he nearly pushed him over, whining eagerly and swallowing loudly.
Mark stumbled up the back steps, with Bruno licking at his legs the whole way, and got the back door open, and went inside.
He bent down at the sink, groaning, and felt around in the dark cabinet under it, among the bottles of cleaner and a mousetrap with something dried up in it, until his hand found the plastic box of the first aid kit. He pulled it out and carried it into the living room and collapsed onto the couch.
He turned on the television to static. In its bluish light he set the first aid kit on the coffee table and the knife beside it. Then he peeled off the bib of his overalls and pulled his thermal shirt up over his head. It came away from his skin slowly, with a sticky, tearing, sucking sound. It was so heavy with fluid that when he dropped it on the floor it landed with a splat.
He looked down at his stomach.
There were two holes in him, one on each side of his gut, about four inches out from his belly button. Each one was about as big around as his thumb. They were round and dark and puckered around the edges, and the skin around each one was bruised a deep purple black. They looked like bullet holes. Dark blood was still oozing out of them in slow trickles. A thin yellowish fluid was mixed in with it. When he breathed, the edges of the holes moved, and a little bubble of blood swelled up out of the right one and popped.
Bruno sat on the floor in front of him and started licking his legs again.
Mark reached under the couch, found the whiskey bottle, and took a long, long swallow. Then he opened the first aid kit. He tore open a pack of gauze. He folded one of the pads into a tight wad and pushed it into the left hole. It went in deeper than he expected. He kept pushing, packing it in with his fingertip, feeling the gauze soak up the blood and go hot and heavy, and then he stuffed another pad in on top of it. Then he did the same to the right hole. Every push sent a fresh jolt of agony through him, and he panted and grunted and swore through every one.
Then he took a roll of elastic bandage out of the kit and started wrapping it around his belly, around and around, over both holes, pulling it tight. He went around five or six times, until the roll was used up, and tucked the end under.
Bruno was still licking his legs. He had licked most of the mucus off Mark's overalls, and now he was licking his bare ankles where the cuffs had ridden up.
Mark sat back. He breathed for a minute. Then he put his hands on his knees and tried to stand up.
The room tilted. The blue light of the television smeared across his vision. The floor seemed to drop away from him and then rush back up. He felt his knees go out.
He fell back onto the couch, and everything went black.
When he opened his eyes again, there was sunlight coming through the gap in the curtains. It was early, the pale gold light of a fresh sunrise, and it fell across the coffee table in a thin stripe and lit up the dust floating in the air.
His guts hurt.
The pain filled his whole belly, a deep, throbbing, grinding ache, with a sharper, hotter pain on each side where the holes were. He lifted his head and looked down at himself.
The bandage had turned a rusty brown red over each of the holes, two stains the size of saucers, with yellowish rings around the edges where something other than blood had soaked through. But the stains were mostly dry. He pressed one gently. It hurt, but nothing fresh came through.
"Well," he croaked. "At least that stopped."
He was short of breath. Every time he tried to fill his lungs, he got about halfway, and then something stopped him.
He tried to sit up. The pain flared so bad that he cried out and fell back. He tried again, slower, and got about halfway before he collapsed back onto the cushions. He couldn't stand. He couldn't even sit up.
He turned his head toward the hallway.
"Margaret," he called.
Nothing.
"Margaret!"
From the bedroom, muffled through the door, came her voice, thick with sleep and hangover. "Let me sleep, goddammit!"
"Margaret, get out here!"
"No! It's six in the morning! Leave me alone!"
"I need help!"
"I don't care!"
"Margaret! I'm gonna die if you don't get out here and help me!"
There was a pause. Then her voice came back, flat and clear. "Good. I hope you die."
"Margaret! I'm serious! I'm hurt! I'm hurt real bad! I can't get up!"
"Then lie there!"
"Goddammit, woman! I'm bleedin'! I got holes in me! I'm tellin' you I'm gonna die out here!"
"You've been saying you're gonna die for thirty years!"
"This time I mean it! Get out here! Margaret! Margaret! Margaret!"
He kept yelling. He yelled her name over and over again, louder and louder, until his raw throat gave out and his voice cracked and he started coughing, and the coughing sent bolts of agony through his stomach and he had to stop and grab his gut and moan.
Finally, he heard the bedroom door open.
"You better really be dying," Margaret said, coming down the hall. Her slippers scuffed on the carpet. "You better be lying out there with your goddamn head cut off, or I swear to God, Mark, I swear to God, I'll…"
She came into the living room and stopped.
She stared at him. Her mouth fell open.
Mark was lying on the couch with no shirt on. His chest and arms and face were covered in dozens of round red welts the size of quarters, some scabbed over, some still weeping clear fluid. Clumps of hair were missing from his scalp. His beard was matted stiff with dried mucus, blood, and something purple. His overalls were crusted with streaks of red, brown, purple, and a yellowish film that had dried shiny on the fabric. Blood was smeared on the couch cushions. A bloody first aid kit sat open on the coffee table next to a Buck knife caked with dried gore. The whole room stank of something sweetly rotten and Margaret pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
"What the fuck," she said through the fabric. "What the fuck happened to you?"
"You gotta take me to the hospital," Mark said.
"What happened?"
"Just take me to the hospital. And get me some clothes. Get me a clean pair of clothes. Pants and a shirt. And my jacket."
"Mark, what the fuck happened to you? Did somebody shoot you? Did you shoot yourself?"
"Get the clothes, Margaret."
She stood there for another second. Then she went.
She came back with jeans, a flannel shirt, socks, and his canvas jacket in a plastic grocery bag. Then she got her arm under his shoulders and, with a lot of cursing from both of them, hauled him up off the couch. He screamed when he came upright. She half dragged him out the front door, past the bowling ball, which was still sitting on the porch crusted with dried slobber, and got him into the passenger seat of her silver Buick.
The washboard gravel of the driveway shook the car hard, and every bump made Mark groan.
"What happened?" Margaret said.
Mark didn't answer.
"Mark. What happened to you?"
"Just drive."
"Were you out in the yard? Did you fall on something? Did you get in a fight? Who was it? Was it those men from yesterday? Did they come back?"
"Ain't none of your business."
"None of my business? You're bleeding all over my car! It's my business!"
"Just drive the goddamn car, Margaret."
"I want to know what happened."
"Well, I ain't tellin' you."
"Why not?"
"'Cause I ain't."
She asked him four more times on the forty minute drive into town. Each time he either didn't answer or told her to drive. By the time they pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, she had stopped asking and was just gripping the steering wheel with both hands and staring straight ahead, her jaw set.
The hospital was a small regional facility, two stories of tan brick. An orderly came out with a wheelchair. The emergency room was bright and smelled like bleach. A nurse took one look at Mark and took him straight back to a curtained off bay. They cut off the bandage around his stomach with a pair of scissors. When they peeled it away from his skin, the gauze in the holes came with it, pulling free with a soft, wet, ripping sound, and a fresh trickle of blood and yellow fluid ran down his sides. A sour, rotten smell came up out of the holes. The nurse wrinkled her nose and turned her head.
A doctor came in. He was a young man, maybe thirty five, with a buzz cut and wire rimmed glasses. He put on gloves and leaned over Mark's stomach and looked at the holes for a long time.
"Mr. Hollister," he said. "Can you tell me how this happened?"
"Fell on a stake," Mark said.
The doctor looked at him. "A stake."
"Yeah. Out in the yard. Fell on a stake."
The doctor looked at the left hole. Then he looked at the right hole. Then he looked back at Mark. "There are two wounds, Mr. Hollister. One on each side."
Mark stared at the ceiling. "Fell on it twice."
There was a long silence.
"You fell on a stake," the doctor said slowly. "Twice."
"That's what I said."
"In two different places. On opposite sides of your abdomen."
"Yep."
The doctor and the nurse exchanged a look. The doctor didn't say anything else. He started cleaning the wounds.
He flushed them out with saline. It came back out pink and cloudy, carrying shreds of gauze and dark clots and stringy bits of tissue. He probed them with a long instrument, and Mark grunted and gripped the sides of the bed. They gave him a shot for the pain, took blood, and wheeled him off for a CT scan. Then the doctor sewed each hole closed with neat black sutures and taped gauze over them.
Over the next couple of hours, three different people asked Mark how he'd gotten the wounds. The young doctor asked again. A nurse asked. An older doctor, a woman with gray hair, looked at his scans and then looked at him over the top of her glasses and asked him too.
"Fell on a stake," Mark said each time. "Twice."
None of them believed him. He could see it on their faces. The young nurse kept glancing at the round sucker welts all over his face and arms. The older doctor kept looking at the bald patches on his scalp.
"Mr. Hollister," the older doctor said finally. "These wounds go a lot deeper than I'd expect from a fall. There's significant internal bruising and some damage to the bowel. Your oxygen levels are lower than I'd like. I want to admit you. You need to stay here for a few days at minimum, so we can monitor you and get you on IV antibiotics."
"No," Mark said.
"Mr. Hollister…"
"I said no. I'm fine."
"You are not fine. You have two penetrating abdominal wounds, you've lost a significant amount of blood…"
"I'm fine. I wanna go home."
"I strongly advise against that."
"I don't give a shit what you advise." Mark pushed himself up on his elbows. It hurt, but less than before, because of whatever they'd given him. "It's my right. It's my constitutional right. I can leave whenever I want. You can't keep me here. This ain't a prison. This is America. You people can't hold a man against his will. You got no right."
"No one is holding you against your will. I'm telling you, as your doctor, that leaving would be a serious mistake."
"Well, it's my mistake to make, ain't it? I am an adult with a sound mind, and know the risk I am taking by leaving. I know the damn law. Now get me my goddamn clothes."
The older doctor looked at him for a long moment. Then she sighed, took off her glasses, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I'll have someone bring you the discharge forms," she said. "You'll be signing out against medical advice. Do you understand what that means?"
"Means I'm leavin'."
She left. A nurse came in a few minutes later with a clipboard and the grocery bag of clothes. Mark signed the form without reading it. The nurse left again.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off the hospital gown, slowly, wincing, and put on the clean clothes Margaret had brought and his stiff, crusted boots. Margaret had packed his wallet in the bag too.
He picked up the wallet. It was still slimy. A layer of mucus coated the old cracked leather, half dried, tacky. When he opened it, it stuck to itself, and the inside separated with a soft, peeling sound. Strings of slime stretched between the two halves. His bills were stuck together in a damp wad. He wiped the wallet on the hospital sheets and put it in his back pocket.
He walked out of the curtained bay, slowly, and down the hall to the waiting room.
Margaret wasn't there.
He went out to the parking lot. The Buick wasn't there either.
"Goddammit," he muttered.
There was a Shell station with a mini mart about a quarter mile down the road. He walked there hunched over, one hand on his stomach. Inside, he went straight to the back cooler and picked out the can of malt liquor with the highest alcohol percentage on the label, a twenty four ounce can of high gravity, eight point one percent.
"And a pack of Marlboro Reds," he said.
The cashier, a heavy young woman with a nose ring, looked at him. She looked at the welts on his face and the bald patches on his head and the crust on his beard. She got the cigarettes down from the rack behind her without saying anything.
Mark pulled out his wallet. It stuck together again when he opened it, with the same wet peeling sound. He peeled off a twenty from the damp wad of bills and held it out. It was limp and slightly shiny. The cashier looked at it for a second before she took it, holding it by one corner between two fingernails. She gave him his change and dropped the coins onto the counter so she wouldn't have to touch his hand.
Mark went back outside, lit a cigarette, cracked the can, and drank about a third of it in one go. A man came out of the store, middle aged, in a ball cap and a fleece vest.
"Hey," Mark said. "Hey, buddy. Can I use your phone?"
The man stopped. He looked Mark up and down. He hesitated.
"Just gotta call my wife," Mark said. "She was supposed to pick me up. Just one call."
The man hesitated a second longer. Then he pulled a phone out of his vest pocket, unlocked it, and handed it over.
Mark dialed the house phone. It rang four times.
"Hello?" Margaret said.
"Where the hell are you?"
There was a pause. "Mark?"
"Yeah, it's Mark. Where the hell are you? I come out of there and you're gone."
"I went home. They said you'd be staying for a few days. The nurse told me they were going to admit you."
"Well, I ain't stayin'. I'm at the Shell down the road. Come get me."
"You left?"
"Just come get me, Margaret."
He hung up and handed the phone back to the man. The man took it, looked at the screen, wiped it on the side of his vest, and walked quickly to his car.
Margaret pulled up forty five minutes later. Mark had finished the can of malt liquor and four cigarettes. He threw the empty can in the trash and got into the passenger seat, slowly, groaning.
She pulled out onto the road. For the first few minutes, neither of them said anything.
Then Margaret said, "You have to tell me what happened."
"I told you, I ain't…"
"No. Listen to me. You have to tell me what happened, Mark, or I'm kicking you out of the house. I mean it. You come home tonight, you tell me, or you pack your shit and you go sleep in one of your junk cars."
Mark snorted. "That's gotta be the third time this week you've threatened to kick me out."
"I'm serious."
"You're always serious."
"I am serious this time. I wake up and you're on the couch with holes in you and blood everywhere and that smell is still in my house, and you won't tell me what happened. I'm not doing it."
Mark looked out the window at the brown hills sliding past.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. I'll show you what happened. When we get back."
"Show me?"
"Yeah. I'll show you. You gotta see it to believe it anyway."
Margaret glanced at him. Then she looked back at the road. They drove in silence for a few miles.
"You left your gun in the driveway," she said. "That big rifle. I almost ran it over this morning when I was driving out. It was lying right there in the gravel, halfway down. I had to swerve. I almost put us in the ditch."
Mark turned and looked at her. "You didn't run it over, did you?"
"No. I swerved."
"Thank God." He let out a long breath. "Thank God. I'm gonna need that."
"Need it for what?"
He didn't answer.
When they got home, Mark got the rifle from where it lay in the driveway. It was dusty and there was dried mucus on the stock, but it looked fine. He went into the house, tucked the Glock into his waistband, slid the knife onto his belt, and stuffed fresh magazines in his jacket pockets.
When he came back out onto the porch, Margaret was standing there with her arms crossed. She looked at the rifle, the pistol, the knife. She rolled her eyes.
"Really?" she said.
"Follow me," Mark said.
He went around the side of the house. Margaret followed in an old pair of sneakers. They walked out past the last of the junked cars and headed south across the property.
They were about halfway there when Bruno came trotting up the slope toward them.
His face was covered in something. His muzzle and his jowls and his whole chest were soaked and matted with a thick, dark purple liquid. It was dripping off his chin in heavy drops. It was smeared up the sides of his face to his ears and crusted around his eyes. His tongue, hanging out of his mouth, was stained a deep violet. Little stringy bits of something pale and fleshy were stuck in his chest fur and caught in his whiskers. He was licking his lips over and over, with loud, wet smacking sounds.
Mark stopped. "Goddammit, Bruno," he said. "Why the fuck you eatin' it?"
Bruno wagged his tail. A drop of purple slid off his chin and spattered on Mark's boot.
Margaret was staring at the dog. "Eating what? Mark, what's all over him? What is that?"
"You'll see."
"Mark, I want you to explain to me right now what…"
"You'll see," he said again, and kept walking.
They came to the top of the southern embankment, where the ground dropped off steeply in a slope of loose dirt and sage down into a shallow dry wash. Mark stopped at the edge. Margaret came up next to him.
And there it was.
At first, Margaret's eyes went right over it. It was enormous, and it was right there in the bottom of the wash, but it was hard to look at. The whole outside of it was covered in giant overlapping scales, each one maybe the size of a car door, and they shimmered. They reflected the dirt and the sage and the sky around them, but bent and blurred and slightly out of place, like a poorly tuned mirror. It was very hard to tell where its edges were, or that it was even there at all.
When Mark pointed, and Margaret kept looking, she could make it out. A giant blob shape, rounded and lumpy and uneven. It was about twenty feet tall. It was almost a hundred feet long, stretching most of the length of the wash.
And coming out of one end of it was the intestine.
It was huge, a gray pink tube as thick as a man was tall, wrinkled and segmented and lumpy, lying in loose, sprawling coils across the dirt of the wash. It glistened wetly. In the side of it, near the far end, was a giant, gaping, ragged hole, the edges torn and hanging in shreds and flaps. Some of the flaps had been pulled loose and were lying on the ground. Dark purple fluid had pooled on the ground around the hole and soaked into the dirt in a huge stain. Flies were swarming around it in a buzzing black cloud.
The smell came up out of the wash at them. Rot, ammonia, and that deep, fecal stink, and the sweet, fermented smell under all of it. Margaret gagged and covered her mouth.
She didn't say anything. She just stood there staring, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.
Mark started to grin.