Apocalyptic Organ Grinder

Tanner give the chain a tug and the boy’s head pulled back just enough to reveal the slit in his throat. The gash almost looked as though it were smiling up at him and Tanner found himself wishing he had some peanuts with which to distract the boy. When a search of his pockets turned up empty, he knew he had no choice: he’d have to make the child dance to keep from seeing that hideous grin again.

Cranking the handle of the barrel filled the street with a sound that was like the music of a pipe organ that had been salvaged from the bricks of a toppled building. The tempo dragged and lagged, demanding that Tanner crank evenly more quickly to bring the song up to speed.

In response to the discordant music, the boy scooped a tasseled fez from the sidewalk and walked toward the street until the chain would allow him to go no further. With a slight bow, he danced an elegant waltz with an invisible partner, swirling among the lazy dust motes as if pulling them into his imaginary ballroom. This display, in turn, led a gentlemen with a particularly shiny top hat to flip a quarter into the air. Tanner watched the coin tumbling end over end, flashing in the sunlight as everything in the background faded to black.

There was the coin. There was the music. And the void bridged them.

As he watched, the coin changed mid flip into a bloated heart. The ventricles ballooned out with built up pressure, snapping veins and arteries like taut wires, as the muscle continued to swell. Once the size of a closed fist, the organ inflated larger and larger until the over-extended heart burst into a shower of smaller organs with a pop that sounded like distant gunfire: kidneys, intestines, lungs, pancreas, brains, and liver – all fell through the perfect darkness in slow motion clarity. Every wrinkle, every strand of sinew and glob of gristle was so defined that it was like gazing into valleys of meat and tissue.

Glancing down, Tanner noticed that the padding from the top of the box had inexplicably disappeared and he could now look directly into the instrument. Instead of the pins and staples of a barrel organ, silver cylinders with tooth-like spikes gnashed against one another. The spikes clanged abrasively and polluted the tune with a metallic backbeat that bordered on chaotic.

As he watched, the tumbling viscera fell into the box, where they were chewed and crushed and shredded between the whirring mechanisms. The ground meat was then forced into a slender tube that led to a spigot on the front of the box, where it oozed out of the tap like a long, bloody feces.

And then Tanner himself was falling through the void, rushing toward the hungry teeth while the organ played on.

Tanner Kline lifted his head from the ground as his body was wracked by a fit of coughing. Water gushed from his eyes and nose with the force of projectile vomiting as his fingers clawed at his throat as if he could scratch open an airway. Gasping for breath, he struggled to sit up and realized he was shivering so violently that his teeth chattered against each other. Drenched from head to toe, his face and tattered suit were coated with gritty sand and a chill radiated from within him as if his skeleton were made of ice.

Blinking away the tears in his eyes, he looked at the world through a shimmering veil. Dark trees blurred the horizon and he heard the rushing waters of the river behind him. There was another noise as well, so faint that he at first thought it was simply a remnant of the nightmare clinging to his mind. Cutting in and out of the river sounds were the slightly off-key notes of a barrel organ, cranking through a song that Tanner’s grandfather had taught him years ago: Blue Danube.

Tanner attempted to stand but a jolt of agony blazed through his leg. With a sharp cry he fell to the ground again and lay there, panting, as he waited for the pain to subside. When he felt as if he could move without throwing up, he crawled across the shore, inching his way toward a mass of driftwood that had become snagged in the exposed roots of a tree. His trembling hands wrenched pieces of timber free until he found a forked branch that was about the right size. Snapping part of the lower half over a rock, he placed the Y-shaped crook in his armpit and used the makeshift crutch to help him to his feet.

Now that he was standing, Tanner could see lights shining through the cluster of pines up river. The organ music had stopped, but he was certain it had come from the same direction . He was just as sure that the soft glow in the distance could be nothing other than a Settler community and he gritted his teeth through the pain as he hobbled toward it.

He would have his story to tell Shayla after all. She’d undoubtedly cried herself to sleep by now, her mind inventing myriad horrors to explain why her daddy hadn’t come home. Nightmares would surely follow, but within a matter of days she would be in his arms again and he would chase all the bad dreams away.

The thought of nightmares gave Tanner pause as the image of the boy rose like a ghost in his mind. He saw the silver chain as clearly as if it had been overlaid upon reality. The velvet coat and red hair. The gash in the neck grinning up at him, mocking with smug condemnation.

He was a Spewer. Plain and simple. It had to be done. For Shayla.

He also realized that someone would have found the body by now. And they would not be happy. As he stood there, thinking about that poisonous little bastard, the entire Spewer village could be scavenging the riverbank, searching for the child murderer who’d eluded them.

It’s not murder… it was self defense.

Still, unless he wanted to risk falling into their hands again, he had to get his ass moving.

Weaponless and alone, Tanner Kline trudged toward the light.

XII.

It had been three days since Tanner Kline drug his battered body to the gates of the community he came to know as Knoll. It was smaller than most settlements he’d visited in the past, comprised of five buildings pieced together from logs and various scraps of wood.  The structures themselves lacked any real foundation and most leaned to one side so precariously it looked as though their tin roofs were about to slip off..  All in all, it was standard Settler architecture with the buildings clustered around a courtyard. The ground in this common area had been trampled underfoot so often that only sparse clumps of grass were able to push their way through the hard- packed earth. The entire community was surrounded by a wall that had once been mounds of Old World refuse; covered in dirt and seeded with grass it was the singular feature from which the community took its name.

Though the earthen wall was so high that Tanner had to scramble up the ramparts just to glimpse the forest and river beyond, he could still see the remnants of the Old World city from the courtyard. The crumbling towers rose in the distance like a forest of trees that had been snapped in half; ivy clambered over most of them so thickly that their steel skeletons were no longer visible, except for the occasional flash of sunlight glaring off the windows hidden beneath the leafy vines.

Earlier in the morning, Tanner had seen an eagle take flight from the top of the tallest structure and his eyes now scanned the blue expanse of sky, watching for the black speck of the great bird’s return. If he’d had his antique rifle, he was sure he would’ve been able to drop the creature mid-flight if it soared close enough. It would be nice to present the half a dozen residents of Knoll with a token of his gratitude before setting out for home. They’d welcomed him into their homes as if he were one of their own, shared their meager supplies, and helped nurse him back to health. Though his leg was still surrounded by an anklet of purple and green bruises, the swelling was mostly gone, thanks to their care. It was tender and warm to the touch, but within a day or two it would be healed to the point that his limp would be a thing of the past.

As he searched the sky for signs of the eagle, his eyes came across a column of black smoke to the south. The smoke curled into the heavens like a roiling pillar of soot attempting to poison the sky. It mushroomed out at the top, stretching dark tendrils towards clouds that seemed to instinctively flee from its touch.

Four, five miles tops. Tanner thought. Something about the smoke made Tanner feel as if the outer walls of his stomach rippled. Pressing his hands against his belly, he realized his palms were so clammy that they left moist prints against the green tunic one of the settlers had given him. Too small for a forest fire, too large to be burning brush… something’s wrong.

As soon as the thought passed through his mind, it solidified into certainty. Hadn’t Roger, the old man who played the barrel organ, said something about another community up river? Tanner was sure he had; and even though he’d never personally been there, he was just as positive that the smoke was coming from that settlement.