Apex Book Company

5.

He elbowed his way through a group of teenage girls blocking the hall that accessed the restrooms, then shouldered the door open, only to slam it shut again and slap the lock into place. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he did, and for a heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d come face-to-face with an albino psychopath.

Without wasting another second, he turned away from the mirror and crammed his own finger down his throat in an effort to puke. He reached as far back as he could, stabbing tender flesh and poking his tonsils.

He gagged a few times, but nothing came up.

“Dammit,” he shrieked. “This can’t be happening!”

He slammed his fists on the sink top and punched a hole in the plastic cover of the paper towel dispenser. He tried hitting himself in the stomach a few times, but when that didn’t bring up the finger, he took his frustration out on the wastebasket in a flurry of kicks.

Huffing out of exertion and fear, he leaned against the sink and paused to collect himself.

“Think, dipshit! Think!”

His breathing had just begun to ease when the door to one of the two toilet stalls clicked and slowly swung open. A moment later, a balding middle-aged man wearing a business suit and wire-frame glasses stepped out, clutching his unzipped pants at the waist. Without making eye contact, he edged toward the exit like an overweight tourist who’d fallen into the lion pit at the zoo.

Jimmy gaped at him. “Can’t you see I’m having a moment here, pal?”

“I don’t want any trouble, mister,” the man quickly replied.

A dull silver cell phone poked out of the breast pocket of his shirt.

Jimmy saw it and lunged at him.

The stunned patron blubbered out a string of half-coherent pleas as Jimmy seized him by the lapels of his jacket and plucked the phone from his pocket. The man’s pudgy hands flew up to ward off Jimmy’s attack, leaving his pants and underwear to collapse at his feet.

“Please, mister, don’t hurt me!”

But even as he said it, Jimmy unlocked the bathroom, shoved the phone-owner into the hall, and yanked the door shut again before the man’s bare ass hit the floor.

Jimmy flipped open the phone and dialed Stuart’s number.

“Hello?”

“Stu, it’s me–”

“Jesus, Jim,” Stuart gasped. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all morning. Listen, don’t–”

“I swallowed it, man!”

“What?”

“The finger! The fucking thing’s in my guts!”

Stuart’s reply came out as one word. “Wathefugitshididyoudothatfor?”

“I was hungry!” Jimmy bellowed back at him. “What do you think?”

“Jesus, this figures!” Stu moaned.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means Sheriff Pickett came by this morning and told Harrington not to ship the corpse over to HCMC for cooking, that’s what! Some homicide detective called about him last night, and he’s on his way here right now to ID the body. If he’s right, our illegal amigo might actually be a Navaho serial killer!”

“I don’t give a damn!” Jimmy replied. “I need you to pump my stomach!”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“You’re the goddamn medical expert here, you gotta do something!”

“Shit . . . I don’t know . . . Just give it some time; it’ll pass through you.”

“I don’t want it to pass through me, you idiot! I want it out!”

Suddenly a fist pounded on the bathroom door. “Open up!” a formidable voice ordered.

“Jim, we’re in deep sewage here,” Stuart said.

“Yeah, thanks for the tip!”

Jimmy snapped the phone shut and shoved it into his jacket.

“I said open up in there!” the voice ordered.

Rather than go for the door, Jimmy kicked through the window at the back of the room and jumped into the alley, landing in a filthy puddle of runoff from the dumpster.

6.

He went to a roadside motel off the interstate rather than chance returning to his trailer, and he spent the better half of the evening waiting for the police to show up.

Finally, around two a.m., he lay down on the bed. Sleep came in short spurts, but only out of exhaustion, and during the times when he dozed, he dreamed of the finger sloshing around in his stomach, refusing to digest.

Or trying to crawl out the way it went in.

Jimmy moaned at the thought, not wanting to recall it.

He’d chugged a whole bottle of FiberAll for dinner, followed by half a package of Exlax that he picked up at a small market adjacent to his hideout. So far, neither had freed him of the thing.

Earlier, he tried to call Stuart, but the bastard never picked up. On the contrary, his stolen cell phone rang about two dozen times, its display glowing with the names and numbers of callers he didn’t dare answer.

He finally drifted off to sleep as the first red rays of sunlight bled over the horizon.

7.

When Jimmy awoke, he went straight to the bathroom.

The day had come and gone while he slept, and he felt confident that the long rest had given the meds time to generate some results. Much to his disappointment, he spent nearly twenty minutes on the toilet straining/praying to shit out the finger, secretly fearing that he’d crap a whole hand.

Back in the bedroom, the television droned. He’d left it on last night to escape the burbling sounds produced from his gut, and now some sitcom gave way to the ten o’clock news.

“Our top story: a morbid case of burglary at the Hewitt County morgue–”

Jimmy bounded back into the main room with his pants trailing behind him.

“–involving the theft of an unidentified corpse.”

The newscaster explained how the county’s medical examiner had found the morgue’s autopsy room in disarray earlier that evening, a discovery that led him to a second scene of destruction inside the cooler. There, the perpetrator(s) had stolen the decapitated remains of a body held for forensic testing as part of a murder investigation by authorities upstate. According to sources, the room’s stainless steel door had been torn off its hinges.

Jimmy dropped down on the end of the bed as he listened.

The events of the last few days spiraled through his mind, chased by the dread of whatever new miseries the future might hold, and all at once, he clutched his midsection and ran for the bathroom.
The lurching started even as he leaned over the sink. He seized the faucet handles to stabilize himself while the tremors passed through him, then sagged in despair when the convulsions concluded with nothing more than a foul-smelling belch.

He rinsed his mouth and was about to leave when he glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision. He glanced to the left, facing the room’s tiny window.

And saw a dog staring back at him.

Two yellow eyes glinted in the dark, reflecting the light from the bathroom, and Jimmy leapt backward in shock even as his over-stressed brain realized that the eyes had to be at least six feet off the ground.

The window exploded in a hailstorm of glass.

Blood-splattered arms reached through the frame.

Jimmy shrieked as the attacker clutched fistfuls of his shirt, each hand a skeletal mess of torn flesh and exposed bone, as if the person outside had recently clawed his way out of a grave–or through a stainless steel door. Then, in a split-second of hyper-awareness, he saw that the assailant’s smallest right-hand finger ended in a clean, circular stump.

Oh, Jesus, he thought, it can’t be!

He punched at the restraining limbs, struggling to break free. Several of the meatless fingers tore through his shirt, and he mewed in disgust when the cold bones touched his skin.

The man leaned through the window, into the light, and Jimmy’s shouts died in his throat.

Unlike before, the corpse was no longer headless.

At the point where the man’s neck should’ve started, a railroad of thick stitches connected the severed head of a coyote to the human skin of his torso.

Jimmy shook his head, unable to escape the glare of the animal’s yellow gaze as it stared down at him over a lipless snout filled with jagged white fangs. It pulled him to the edge of the window, inches from its reeking flesh, where a legion of maggots explored the bare patches of skin that dotted its fur.
“It was an accident!” Jimmy heard himself repeating.

The stink of formaldehyde wafted out from the thing’s dripping maw when it opened its jaws, and a new degree of terror pushed Jimmy’s mind to the edge of insanity as the monster started to laugh.
“Yee-nadlooshii!” the undead nightmare declared, speaking each syllable with perfect clarity despite the mouth that produced them.

Its putrid breath gusted into Jimmy’s face, but the creature’s ghastly physical composition no longer compared to the terror of facing an intelligent being with supernatural strength and a malevolent spirit.
Suddenly, the back of Jimmy’s head crashed into the wall.

A swarm of fireflies swirled across his vision, but when they cleared, he saw the monster towering before him, still only halfway through the window, holding two equally shredded halves of his t-shirt in its bony hands.

Jimmy patted his bare chest, just then realizing that he’d braced both feet against the sink in an effort to escape the creature’s grasp and must have torn clear through his clothes!

The coyote-headed horror roared, spraying spittle through the air.

It gripped the edges of the window frame, and with the gunshot noise of cracking timbers, it yanked a five-foot section of the wall into the night.

Sparks hissed from a severed electrical line, and the bathroom lights went out. A ruptured pipe shot water at the ceiling.

But Jimmy was already through the door and across the bedroom, fleeing from the building in nothing but his boxer shorts.

Behind him came another thunderclap of destruction, another downpour of rubble.

Outside, in the parking lot, a blue convertible sat idling in the space reserved for the room next to Jimmy’s, trunk open, front end facing away from the building.

Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat without even touching the door and left twenty feet of burnt rubber smoking on the asphalt as he peeled away from the motel.