Down the Drain

could have been the thing’s goddam sperm for all he knew.

The creature dropped to its knees and brought its claws up to its face. It let go long enough to swipe at Bruce, but the attack was feeble and pathetic. He dodged it easily.

Before it could regain its composure, Bruce hit the thing again. He swung so hard this time his entire body ached with the movement. His penis—still sore from the earlier violation—slapped his thigh and throbbed. The sledge hit the top of the thing’s head, driving it to the ground and creating a dent large enough to put your fist in.

Which Bruce did. Too sore to swing the sledge again, he kneeled over the creature and punched at the hole in its head until he found the wet gunk inside that felt like used toilet paper but must have been brains. He grabbed a chunk of the wet matter and tossed it back over his shoulder. He heard it land somewhere in the vicinity of the sink—plop—but didn’t bother looking. Instead, he ripped out another handful of psuedo- brain. And another. He gutted the skull until it was jack-o-lantern hollow.

The creature made a final attempt to bite his hand and actually got its teeth around Bruce’s thumb, but when it bit down, it didn’t have enough life left in it to do anything except make a pair of barely visible punctures near the knuckle. Before it died, it looked at Bruce with its remaining eye and hissed its last hiss. Bruce watched the life drain from its pupil, watched it dull and become murky and unreflective.

He dropped back on his bare ass and sat there with his face in his hands for a very long time. He ran the emotional gamut: sad, angry, doubtful about his own sanity, relieved, victorious. He cried a little, laughed a little, shook and wondered if he'd gone into shock. Finally he opened his eyes and faced what he’d done.

The creature lay on the floor surrounded by the battle’s spilled fluids. If you’d glanced at it, you might have thought it was a demolished toilet or a pile of construction debris. Unless you’d seen the eye, of course, that single bit of near-humanity buried in a mound of lifeless junk.

Bruce reached his hand behind his butt to push himself up but put his fingers down in the regurgitated mess that had been his cat instead. Selina. He groaned, jerked his hand away from the mushy mound, and fought the urge to vomit into his lap. Blood and strings of guts dripped down his fingers and over his wrist. He looked for something to wipe his hand on, but there was nothing within reach. He shook his hand and flung the gore at the dead creature.

He spent the next half-hour demolishing the tub and piling the pieces on the monster’s corpse. The bathtub hadn’t shown any further signs of life, but Bruce didn’t want to chance it. And it wasn’t as if he’d be able to use the thing again even if he’d wanted to. Not with a giant, gaping birthing canal in the center.

He tore it all out: the tub, the surround, the fixtures. When he'd finished, he went into the bedroom and put on a pair of old work clothes. They were too torn apart to wear in public, but they made a perfect outfit for this particular chore. He’d throw them away afterward. Or maybe burn them.

He went back to the shed, got out the wheelbarrow, the shovels, and a small tarp, and took it all back into the house. It took five trips to get everything out of the bathroom and into the backyard. By the time he was done, sweat had drenched every inch of his clothes.

He dug a hole just big enough for the debris (the remains?) and spent another hour shoveling in the broken bits and burying them. That single eye—so disturbingly similar to his own—stared at him for most of the job. When he finally covered it in dirt, his own eyes blinked sympathetically.

Don’t sympathize with that piece of shit.

He rubbed his eyelids with the backs of his hands and finished the job.

He was more ceremonious with Selina. He wrapped what was left of her in the tarp and placed the bundle into an old DVD player box. This he buried beneath a rose bush on the opposite side of the yard from the monster’s grave. When he’d finished that final chore, he sat beside the smaller mound of dirt for a long time, not wanting to return to the emptier-than-ever house.

In the morning, he’d try to lose himself in his work. And on his way home, he’d stop by the hardware store and see about a new tub.

SIX

Beneath the house, the creature listened to the father-thing destroy its brother, desecrate its mother’s corpse, and then cart off the bodies. It hunkered in the dark, waiting for the father-thing’s return. Its mother may have died bringing them into the world, and its brother trying to earn alpha dominance, but it would not join them in death.

When the father-thing came back, it would ascend from the darkness, claim its place in the world, and light out for the hunt.

PRAISE FOR DANIEL PYLE

DISMEMBER