Last Cup of Sorrow #5
His second shot missed. On the third shot, he struck one of the charging dogs in its side.
He had seen videos of guns being fired into blocks of ballistic gelatin and the dog’s exploded, rippling wound reminded him of that.
In its slowed-down way, it scrabbled its four limbs horribly in the dirt.
From that great wound, exposed orange and green threads whipped madly in the air, as if each had its own worm-like life, and maybe they did; maybe the dog-like exterior was only a vehicle to house a kind of colony.
However, when the dog’s blunt paws stopped kicking up a cloud of dust, the threads flopped down and ceased their crazed dance, too.
Suit took this all in quickly, however, as he was still wheeling and firing.
Three more bullets...yet the next two shots were also misses. Only the last bullet found its mark, bursting a dog’s head just as it was gathering itself to pounce upon him. Chunks of transparent meat scattered, rolled in the dirt, trailing green or orange filaments that only briefly squirmed.
In the last few moments before the rest of them brought him down, with his gun clicking empty, he again heard their cries in his skull-space – though he didn’t know if these much more piercing sounds were the lingering shrieks of the three he had managed to kill, or the anguished laments of their fellows.
He shrieked, too, and the impact of the bodies colliding with his sent the gun flying from his hand and into the underbrush.
The combined, higher-pitched, more urgent howl that threatened to detonate his head, as they pinned him down – a sound like electronic feedback cranked up to a deafening level – suggested something beyond the torment of mere mortal creatures.
It was like a signal from the nothingness that nested at the core of the universe, where there were no warming stars.
***
“Hey, old-timer...you okay? You drunk, or what?”
A prodding hand. He opened his eyes. A hovering visage, surmounted by a visored cap.
“I’m not seeing any booze in his car,” called another police officer, this one a woman, peeking in through the windows of a rundown, secondhand car that was parked a short distance away.
Her patrol car had come to a stop a little behind, its blue and red lights strobing though they hadn’t activated the siren.
The old man rolled his aching head, pebbles against his nape, squinted past the male cop’s face into bright morning sky as seen through the bristling boughs of evergreen trees.
Had he been drinking? Vodka? He did have a vague memory of that...
but when, where? Ranked bottles softened to gelatinous glass in his dissolving memories. He groaned as he started to sit up.
“Whoa, easy there,” warned the first cop, who had squatted beside him. “What were you doing out here? You escape from the nursing home, or something?”
He saw he had been lying exposed in the pale morning light on a dirt path that ran alongside a smallish body of water – a pond?
– with a shaggy little island near its center.
What might secretly dwell upon that island?
This narrow path was bordered by a line of evergreen trees, a carpet of rust-brown needles beneath them. It seemed such a peaceful place.
“This is your car, right?” the female cop said, turning and walking back to join them. He saw that her pinned hair, under her cap, was honey blond...and that observation almost stirred a memory, but it flowed through his fingers like mercury.
“I don’t know,” he croaked.
“You don’t know?” she said, standing over him.
“Dementia,” said the male cop, in a lowered voice, as if this man might not hear it. An empty gesture of respect toward the aged.
He continued struggling to stand up, and the pair of cops took hold of his arms to help him do so. He wavered on his feet.
“Do you have any ID?” the policewoman asked him.
“I don’t, uh...maybe?”
The male officer fished the passive old man’s wallet out of his back pocket, then fished an ID out of that. The cop stared a long time at the card he held, then he looked back up into the elderly man’s face...then at the card again...and then he showed the card to his partner.
“Ah. Of course,” she said.
“You should know better than coming out here alone, Mr. Suit,” the male cop said, half-turning his body to point across the road. “Look at those things.” To his partner he added, “Have you ever seen so many?”
“No, I…” she began. Then she seemed to digest his question a little more, and said, “Oh yeah...sure.”
The old man squinted in the direction the male cop was pointing.
Between the evergreen trees, and even looming above them, he could see a row of six black metal towers with dishes cocked attentively like ears at their summits.
Strung along these towers, near their tops where they tapered, were numerous translucent loops...
between six and eight larvae upon each structure.
“What are those?” he asked, scrunching up his deeply wrinkled face.
“Maybe we better call him an ambulance,” the woman said. “Have him checked out.”
“I’ll call it in,” the policeman said, sidestepping a little away and touching the radio pinned near one shoulder of his black uniform.
The policewoman still propped up the ancient man they had chanced upon. She looked him up and down, her voice sounding both amused but pitying.
“Hey,” she said. “That's a nice suit.”
The End