Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

The earth contracted, then expanded again like the belly of a fat and snoring old hobo under a leaky roof. We drove half-blind through Utah, the few miles there were left of it, driving even through the steam that billowed from the red-hot hood of Neal’s jalopy. The state was a horrible void of clapboard towns we flew past, cracked alkali flats and squirming horrors only we could see above. The Black Dreamer filled every inch of our vision, tentacles glinting under the moon, mountainous talons sinking deep into the sands off the side of the highway. There wasn’t even room for shadow to fall so Neal and I just kept our eyes on what we could see of the yellow line of the highway. When the car was about to fail, Neal cut the wheel hard, sending us into a screaming skid half a mile long. We stopped finally, blocking both lanes of the road. Then Neal got out into the cold night and plopped himself on the hood. It was hot; I could smell the hair on his arms burning, but he snuggled into it and took a single breath. With the exhalation the pain and pressure were all gone, his long nose and ears even relaxed, dropping a bit. Damn we got old somewhere along the line. But Neal was resting like a babe, an opiate smile painted across his face with a single joyous smack of a God’s brush against blank canvas. Me, I just stood there shivering in the dark while Neal warmed himself up on the steaming Detroit steel of his car.

It was a huge station wagon that came upon us. It rolled up and stopped about twenty feet from us, idling a low growl, and flashed its brights. I put up a hand and squinted. Neal just smiled on, his eyes closed, his hands in his lap, gentle as flowers. The figures in the car, there were at least four, they didn’t move at all. I don’t know if they were expecting us to move or just to fall over like cardboard cut-outs, but they were pretty patient. Whiskers of smoke still snaked out of the grille and did a little dance in the aura of the bright lights. Then they spilled out the doors of the wagon and rushed up to me. Still stupid, I waved my arms and said “Hey!” just as the first one, a fellow in black slacks and the most neatly pressed white shirt I’d ever seen, barreled into my stomach. I punched him off, but he hung on to my arm. I kicked, but another guy (same sort of neat shirt) was already there, down low, grabbing at both my feet. One of my shoes flew off. They worked together real well; the first two were just there to take my punches, punches that were too weak from booze and buzz anyhow. It was the big guys from the backseats who really laid into me with big smacking fists. Then firecrackers went off and the biggest one, a monster with pit stains on his shirt, went dead. The others dropped me and howled “Elder, Elder!” and swarmed about the big man, so concerned and worried like babes that they didn’t even see that they were bleeding. I stumbled back and from the corner of my eye saw Neal carefully fit a few more bullets into a revolver, aim and fire into the akimbo arms and legs of the suits. Then he slid off the hood and ambled up to the bodies that just weren’t quite dead. They groaned a bit. The biggest of them at the bottom of the heap burbled and whispered to the blood in his mouth from beyond the veil.

“Why did they attack me? Were they cultists?”

Neal shrugged. “Either cultists or Mormons. They knew how to work together at least.” He laughed. “Maybe they were missionaries! Ha ha, you almost got you some religion, Jack!” I stole a look at Neal. He was haggard and worn but full of static electricity; there were twin spirits in him, like two sides of a dagger, tussling and playing and swapping old stories as they plotted their own little adventure. I was just ballast somehow, I felt, and that made me want to wail.

“You just shot them, in cold blood,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice from cracking. I had a big old bruise buried between two ribs from the beating, so it was hard enough to talk anyways.

“I shot ‘em in hawt blood!” he said, shouting up at the sky. And he fired again, into the mass of slithering sky. “Speaking of blood, look into the puddle. I’m gonna put our stuff in the wagon. We got to hit Colorado soon as we can.” And I looked into the puddle and saw four little souls, masses of cotton candy strands whirled into tiny baby faces, drowning in the black blood. It sizzled against the chilly asphalt.

Without a word Neal made three trips between cars, even loading extra gas from his trunk into the wagon, then got behind the wheel and waited for me. It took me a while, and not just because I had a few pings and bumps, to get up to the door of the car and slide in next to Neal. I watched the four little souls, so moral and clean, shrivel and bubble away in the muck, ‘til they were nothing but pinprick stars. Then I got in, and in a dull, throbbing exhaustion, fell asleep while staring at the yellow line of the highway.

I woke in Denver two days later. We were holed up in Larimer Street and when I finally blinked awake, Neal was gone. Out catting and exploring, probably, rousing the same old hell that fell to rest back when I dragged him out of here years before. Two whores (unpimped, friends of Neal, probably, but we spent two days together in a big old bed) fed me tea and slippery sardines from a dented tin. My head was throbbing and mouth full of ghostly cotton. Every once in a while one of the girls would slide into bed with me, and curl on up. They were so smooth and milk-fed though, Lurlene and Sarah, with curves like warm winter pillows, that my poor bruised body didn’t complain.

Lurlene was a quiet type, a dime novel prostitute, windblown and hardbitten in the face, but with a smile for a raggedy man new in town, and Sarah the bubbly one with long curls. She’s the one who whispered to me that Denver had gone mad with an otherworldly fever. Obscene blasphemies with naked bloated businessmen and pear-shaped women, their hips and thighs lined with varicose blue lightning, on the steps of the mint, the marble stairs running red with blood. Girls held down and raped in the schools, up against the lockers, not by the boys who are forced to kneel and watch, dicks limp and tucked between their legs, but by the principal, and the black-robed town fathers. The wind tasted of acid and coal dust all the time now because the men of the town—not because they were slaves, but because they all got the idea at once—marched to the outskirts and starting digging. First picks, then roaring dynamite for twenty-four hours a day, digging deep under ground. The night shift rolled through the streets during the day on chicken and hay trucks, shouting for death and the hungry embrace of tentacles.

“And we’re landlocked, sugar,” she murmured. “These boys have never even seen a tentacle.” She had though, back in Chicago, where she was from. The girl was a spontaneous Freudian. She saw I was getting agitated, fired up to take to the streets and do something stupid, some ridiculous glorious act of futility, so she just stroked my hair and kissed my forehead and told me about Greektown, and the little salads she’d get for free from the hairy men with wide smiles and eyebrows thick as shrubs. That’s where she’d take her beaus too, back when she lived on the cusp of her old secretarial job and her new gig as very reliable company, and she’d order salads for herself, and for her man. And they’d come, little purple tentacles, all coated with tiny kissing suckers peeking out under lettuce leaves and vinegar-soaked feta cheese, in clear bowls with a leafy design etched onto the glass. And if the boy looked all confused and said, “Well, how do you keep the suckers from sticking to your cheeks?” she’d just smile and say, “You don’t. They stick, but just a little,” and eat a big forkful