A Soft Barren Aftershock by F. Paul Wilson
As Mick the Mick whipped through the jungle, overwhelmed with bladder-squeezing panic, he tried to force lucidity and make his very last thought something profound and revelatory. Instead, all he could think of was that Brady Bunch episode in Hawaii when Greg found the cursed tiki idol.
Not a brilliant last thought, but everyone had to admit that was one of the show’s best episodes. “Mick! It’s not following us anymore!” Mick the Mick chanced an over-the-shoulder look and indeed the T. Rex had once again abandoned pursuit. It simply stood there, staring off into the jungle, as if in deep thought. Then it dropped to the ground like it had been shot, the impact a sound of thunder.
Had some caveman killed the dinosaur? Or perhaps some rich hunter from the future on some kind of prehistoric hunting expedition? Or Nate the Nose, who had come back in time to get his money?
But another look at the Tyrannosaurus dispelled any such notion. The thunder lizard wasn’t dead. It was licking itself between its legs. Really going at it, too, like a giant Jurassic dog.
“I wish I could do that,” Willie said. “But he’d probably bite me.”
After a good thirty seconds, the T. Rex sighed loudly, ballet-ically leapt to its feet, and became distracted by one of those dragonfly things, wandering off after it.
This T. Rex was beginning to remind Mick the Mick of someone he knew. He just couldn’t place who. But he was getting a flash of why the damned things were extinct.
Which gave Mick the Mick a great idea. An idea that would save their asses and make them even richer than Action Comics #1.
“Look for an egg, Willie.”
“An egg, Mick? You hungry? I’m kinda hungry, too. I like my eggs sunny-side up, because they look like big yellow eyes. Then I make a smiley mouth out of bacon, and I call him Mr. Henry. Don’t we need chickens to get eggs, Mick?”
“Dinosaur eggs, Willie. If we bring one back with us, we can grow a dinosaur. Just like that movie.”
“Which one?”
“The one where they grew the dinosaurs.”
“The Merchant of Venice?”
“Just find an egg, Willie.”
“I get it, Mick. We grow a dinosaur, and we can feed it Nate the Nose so he won’t kill us—”
“Shaddup and search for a damn nest.”
“I’m searching, Mick. Hey! Look!”
“You find one?”
“I found one of those pink flowers that smell like fish and look like—”
Willie screamed. Mick the Mick glanced over and saw his lifelong friend was playing tug of war with one of those toothy prehistoric flowers, using a long red rope.
No. Not a red rope. Those were Willie’s intestines.
“Help me, Mick!”
Without thinking, Mick the Mick reached out a hand and grabbed Willie’s duodenum. He squeezed, tight as he could, and Willie farted.
“It hurts, Mick! Being disemboweled hurts!”
A bone-shaking roar from behind them. The T. Rex had lost interest in the dragonflies and was sniffing at the newly spilled blood, his sofa-size head only a few meters away and getting closer. Mick the Mick could smell its breath, reeking of rotten meat and bad oral hygiene and dooky.
No, the dooky was all Willie. Pouring out like brown shaving cream. Willie’s face contorted in pain.
“I think I need a doctor, Mick. Use your cell phone. Call nine-one-one.”
Mick the Mick released his friend’s innards and wiped his hand on his shirt just as the T. Rex leaned over them and opened its maw, blotting out the sky. All Mick the Mick could see was teeth and tongue and that dangly thing that hangs in the back of the throat like a big punching bag. He could never remember what those things were called.
“Look, the dinosaur is back,” Willie groaned. “Check out the size of his epiglottis, Mick. Like a big punching bag.”
The book. It was their only chance. Mick the Mick raised the Really, Really, Really Old Ones and flipped open to the same page that had brought them here. Maybe if he read the passage again, it would take them back to their time. Or if he read a little earlier, maybe they could go back to before Nana made the cake, and prevent this incredibly stupid chain of events.
“I think my kidney just fell out.” Willie held something red and squishy in his cupped hands. “It still hurts from when you punched me.”
Mick the Mick concentrated. Concentrated as hard as he could, blotting out Willie and the T. Rex and everything in this horrible prehistoric world except the words on the page.
“It looks like a kidney bean. Is that why they call them kidneys, Mick? Because they look like beans? I like beans.”
Mick the Mick’s hands shook, and his vision swam, and all the vowels on the page looked exactly the same and the consonants looked like pretzel sticks, but he began to read aloud.
“Is this my liver, Mick? And what’s this thing? I should put all this stuff back in.” Willie dropped to his knees and began scooping up guts and twigs and rocks and shoving everything into the gaping hole in his belly.
The T. Rex lowered its mouth, about to swallow them both at once.
Sweat soaked his face and stung his eyes, and the hair still left on Mick the Mick’s comb-over started to curl from the T. Rex’s breath as its jaws began to close, but he finished the passage, reading better and faster and harder than a homeschooled foreign kid who won spelling bees. Nothing happened.
The fabric of reality didn’t vibrate. The ground didn’t dissolve. There was a familiar pbbbbth sound, but it was from Mick stepping on Willie’s colon.
Willie flopped sideways and sprawled out onto his back, limbs akimbo, looking like he took a bath in lasagna. Mick the Mick ducked down next to him, narrowly escaping the snap of the dinosaur’s bite. The Tyrannosaurus grunted, then opened wide for a second try.
“Mick . . .” Willie panted, his breath fading. “Read . . . read the part . . . that sent us here . . . but . . . read it backward.”
The T. Rex snatched both of them into its jaws like a giant bulldozer, if bulldozers had jaws and could snatch people. The Really, Really, Really Old Ones book fell from Mick the Mick’s grasp, and the dagger teeth punched into his legs and chest with agonizing agony, but for the first and only time in his life his dyslexia paid off, and with his last breath he managed to cry out:
“OTKIN ADARAB UTAALK!”
Another near-turd experience and then they were excreted into a room with a television and a couch and a picture window. But the television screen was embedded—or growing out of?—a toadstool-like thing that was in turn growing out of the floor. The couch looked funny, like who’d sit on that? And the picture window looked out on some kind of nightmare jungle.
And then again, maybe not so weird.
No, Mick the Mick thought. Weird. Very weird.
He looked at Willie.
And screamed.
Or at least tried to. What came out was more like a croak.
Because it wasn’t Willie. Not unless Willie had grown four extra eyes—two of them on stalks—and sprouted a fringe of tentacles around where he used to have a neck and shoulders. He now looked like a conical turkey croquette that had been rolled in seasoned bread crumbs before baking and garnished with live worms after.
The thing made noises that sounded like, “Mick, is that you?” but spoken by a turkey croquette with a mouth full of linguine.
Stranger still, it sounded a little like Willie. Mick the Mick raised a tentacle to scratch his—
Whoa! Tentacle?
Well, of course a tentacle. What did he expect?
He looked down and was surprised to see that he was encased in a bread-crumbed, worm-garnished, turkey croquette. No, wait, he was a turkey croquette.
Why did everything seem wrong, and yet simultaneously at the same time seem not wrong, too?
Just then another six-eyed, tentacle-fringed croquette glided into the room. The Willie-sounding croquette said, “Hi, Nana.” His words were much clearer now.
Nana? Was this
Of course it was, Mick the Mick had known her for years.
“There’s an unpleasant man at the door who wants to talk to you. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
A new voice said, “Or else you two get to eat cloacal casseroles, and guess who donates the cloacas?”
Mick the Mick unconsciously crossed his tentacles over his cloaca. In his twenty-four years since budding, Mick the Mick had grown very attached to his cloaca. He’d miss it something awful.
A fourth croquette had entered, followed by the two biggest croquettes Mick the Mick had ever seen. Only these weren’t turkey croquettes, these were chipped-beef croquettes. This was serious.
The new guy sounded like Nate the Nose, but didn’t have a nose. And what was a nose anyway?
“Oh no,” Willie moaned. “I don’t want to eat Micks cloaca.”
“I meant your own, jerk!” the newcomer barked. “But I have a hernia—”
“Shaddap!”
Mick the Mick recognized him now: Nate the Noodge, pimp, loan shark, and drug dealer. Not the sort you lent your bike to.
Wait . . . what was a bike? “What’s up, Nate?”
“That brick of product I gave you for delivery. I had this sudden, I dunno, bad feeling about it. A frisson of malaise and apprehension, you might say. I just hadda come by and check on it, knome sayn?” The brick? What brick?
Mick the Mick had a moment of panic—he had no idea what Nate the Noodge was talking about. Oh yeah. The, product. Now he remembered. “Sure, Nate, it’s right in here.”
He led Nate to the kitchen, where the brick of product lay on the big center table.
Nate the Noodge pointed a tentacle at it. One of his guards lifted it, sniffed it, then wriggled his tentacle fringe that it was okay. Mick the Mick had expected him to nod, but a nod would require a neck, and the guard didn’t have a neck. Then Mick the Mick realized he didn’t know what a neck was. Or a nod, for that matter.
What was it with these weird thoughts, like memories, going through his head? They were like half-remembered dreams. Nightmares, more likely. Pink flowers, and giant lizards, and stepping on some mice that looked like a lot like the Capporellis up in 5B. Except the Capporellis lived in 5B, and looked like jellyfish. What were mice anyway? He looked at Willie to see if he was just as confused.
Willie was playing with his cloaca.
Nate the Noodge turned to them and said, “A’ight. Looks like my frisson of malaise and apprehension was fer naught. Yer cloacas is safe . . . fer now. But you don’t deliver that product like you’re apposed to and it’s casserole city, knome sayn?”
“We’ll deliver it, Nate,” Willie said. “Don’t you worry. We’ll deliver it.”
“Y’better,” Nate said, then left with his posse.
“Where we supposed to deliver it?” Willie said when they were alone again.
Mick the Mick kicked him in his cloaca.
“The same place we always deliver it.”
“Ow!” Willie was saying, rubbing his cloaca. “That hurt. You know I got a—hey, look!” He was pointing to the TV. “The Toad Whisperer is on! My favorite show!”
He settled onto the floor and stared.
Mick the Mick hated to admit it, but he was kind of addicted to the show himself. He settled next to Willie.
Faintly, from the kitchen, he heard Nana say, “Oh dear, I was going to bake a cake, but I’m out of flour. Could one of you boys—oh, wait. Here’s some. Never mind.”
A warning glimp chugged in Mick the Mick’s brain and puckered his cloaca. Something bad was about to happen . . .
What had Nate the Noodge called it? “A frisson of malaise and apprehension.” Sounded like a dessert, but Mick the Mick had gathered it meant a worried feeling, like what he was having right now.
But about what? What could go sour? The product was safe, and they were watching The Toad Whisperer. As soon as that was over, they’d go deliver it, get paid, and head on over to Madame Yoko’s for a happy ending endoplasmic reticulum massage. And maybe a cloac job.
The frisson of malaise and apprehension faded. Must have been another nightmare flashback.
Soon the aroma of baking cake filled the house. Right after the show, he’d snag himself a piece.
For some reason he thought of an odd-shaped cookie with a prediction inside. What was it called? A prediction pastry? No, something else, something similar.
Who cared? Predictions never came true. The only thing you could count on was Nana’s cake. That was always good.
a sequel to “The Distributor”
by Richard A. Matheson
Time to move.
Monday, April 26
Another town, another rental in another peaceful, unsuspecting neighborhood.
That was the easy part. As for the rest . . . it used to be so much simpler.
Listen to me, he thought. I sound like an old fart.
Well, he was an old fart. He’d been at this for decades, but instead of becoming routine, it had grown increasingly difficult. And he knew the problem wasn’t with him.
The world had changed.
Used to be reputations could be ruined with a mere hint of impropriety—adultery, drunkenness, wantonness, porn peeping. Now it was anything goes. Only incest and pedophilia seemed to lack champions in the mass media, and it was anyone’s guess as to how long before their paladins appeared and hoisted their flags.
People daily bragged on TV about what in the good old days would have had them afraid to show their faces in public. And nowadays the love that once dared not speak its name would not shut up.
But other, newer taboos had arisen from what used to be a matter of course.
And the ability to improvise was the greatest asset of an effective distributor.
The last town had been a quiet little place in central Jersey known as Veni Woods. He’d called himself Clay Evanson there, a name he’d used before, way back when. Just last week, before arriving here in Wolverton, a quaint little town on Long Island’s south shore, he decided to use another alias from the past: Theodore Gordon.
Every night before his arrival he’d closed his eyes and made the name his own. He was Theodore Gordon. All other names faded. He was Theodore Gordon and no one else.
After a little research, he found a furnished rental in the racially mixed Pine View Estates development on the eastern end of town. It had come down to a choice between that and another area half a mile west, but when he saw a woman wearing a striped hijab get out of a Dodge SUV on Fannen Street in Pine View and let herself into one of the houses, his decision was made.
He’d spent last Thursday night introducing himself around. As usual, he was a widower—not quite two years since his poor, dear Denise passed—and a financial consultant who worked from home, renting with intent to buy. Seven other houses made up this block of Fannen Street. He met the McCuins and their sullen fifteen-year-old son, Colin; the very Catholic Fabrinis and Robinsons; the waspish Woolbrights; the irreligious Hispanic Garcias with their noisy dog; the Muslim Rashids; and the very black Longwells. He made a point of inquiring at each stop about the best Internet access in the area. This induced Mr. Robinson and Mr. Woolbright to brag about the wi-fi networks they’d installed in their homes. Theodore had been hoping for one; two was a blessing.
Over the weekend he’d used his digital Nikon with the telephoto lens to snap photos of as many of his neighbors as possible as they worked in the garden or mowed the lawn, washed the car, or collected the mail. Between shoots he’d wandered Fannen Street, saying hello, helping unload a van, or transplant a bush. In the process he’d managed to see most of the backyards.
Since the Catholics held the majority, he’d attended mass at St. Bartholomew’s yesterday morning, making sure he introduced himself to Father Bain in sight of the Fabrinis and Robinsons.
Tonight he’d be ready to go. He’d made starting on Monday a tradition.
The Pine View houses all sat
He spent the daylight hours observing the comings and goings and refining his notes. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Rashid carpooled. This was Mr. Rashid’s week to drive. Theodore watched Mr. Robinson open the rear door to Mr. Rashid’s car, place his briefcase on the seat, then take the passenger seat in front. Mrs. Rashid, a secretary at the grammar school, drove Robinson’s girl, Chelsea, to school along with her own daughter, Farah, both ten.
Theodore noted the times of the comings and goings of everyone on the block. Today’s were all consistent with last week’s.
He admired consistency.
During the course of the day he used his laptop to access Mr. Robinson’s wi-fi network next door, but could not enter the system due to a firewall. He would work on breaching that during the week. Firewalls were handy in that they gave people a false sense of security. He’d try the Woolbrights tonight.
Shortly before midnight he wound his way among the pines behind the houses across the street until he came to the rear extreme of the Woolbright’s property. There he turned on his laptop and slowly made his way closer to the darkened house, stopping every dozen feet or so to see if he could access the wi-fi signal from their home network.
He could, and when it was good and strong, he tapped in and discovered that Mr. Woolbright had accommodatingly left his computer on and his webmail program open. Theodore had found this increasingly common over the years. Folks liked to hop out of bed and check their email before running off to work, and didn’t want to fuss with all that log-in nonsense.
Theodore found that Mrs. Woolbright’s password was also stored and so he switched over to her account and logged in to the Village Voice’s online classified site. There he used her email address to apply for membership. He waited for the verification email, then followed the instructions. As soon as he was officially registered, he placed an ad as Mr. Woolbright in the men-seeking-men category. He described himself as “rich and horny and into young stuff. Send a picture or no go.”