Chapter 23
Belly of the Beast
As soon as Leo stepped into the cafeteria, Brick and his cronies surrounded him.
He sighed. Now what?
“Hey Leo,” Brick said, “there's a rumor going around that the world's going to end on October 16th.”
“Who told you that?” Leo asked, curious.
“Word is going around,” Brick continued, “that on October 16th, those implant wearers are going to turn into monsters and eat everybody.”
“Like that bitch we met last Monday,” Left Crony said.
“Yeah,” Brick said. “If I'd known that bitch was an implant wearer, I wouldn't have held back. I'd have pounded her ass.”
“We got her in that video at least,” Right Crony said with a chuckle.
“Do you believe the world's going to end?” Leo asked.
“No. But it occurred to me that somebody might be thinking if the world ends on the 16th, they won't have to pay me anything on the 17th.”
“I can see how it might look that way,” Leo said. “I promise I'll pay you the money, even if the world ends the day before.”
“You'd better. Because if you don't, we'll hunt you down.”
“Hey, somebody left cupcakes,” Left Crony said.
Leo saw Charlotte walking away.
“Grab them,” Brick said. “They're ours now, and I'm hungry.”
“We got four cupcakes, you want one, Leo?” Brick asked.
Leo nodded. It was all he could do not to laugh. “Sure.”
“Well, fuck you. You're not getting shit until we get our money. Now go away.” Brick extended his middle finger in Leo's face.
“Fine,” Leo said. He turned and walked away, joining Jason and his new friends, ignoring the chatter as they argued about something in their D.U.D game.
Brick and his cronies ate the cupcakes, Brick, in particular, made a big show of stuffing one cupcake into his mouth after the other, chewing with his mouth open, smirking to make sure Leo knew what he was missing.
As soon as they'd finished, the three ran from the cafeteria. Leo suppressed a chuckle, imagining the bullies in the bathroom with Charlotte's Ex-Lax cupcakes going through their systems. Considering Brick had eaten two of the four cupcakes, Leo imagined it would be particularly bad for him.
But Brick was by far the least of his problems. If an early bloomer Afflicted was eating children, it needed to be dealt with. The question was how? He knew what he should do. See if Trent's police friends could look into it, and file an anonymous report telling them he saw someone make their wrist glow violet or something. They'd investigate and hopefully find something. That was the safe option. But there was a good chance the police wouldn't kill the monster, and he needed the experience and Demon Tears to gain a better character class.
Any safe option might dilute the award.
Unfortunately, before the Change, you couldn't go around killing people just because they were child-eating monsters. And though Imp told him there was a child-eating monster in that area, he had no idea who. Killing the wrong person would be bad, for obvious reasons. Then there was the question of if he could kill an Afflicted with his current stats. Fifty years from now in the previous future, he could have killed this thing in his sleep, but he was currently a twelve-year-old boy, and the Afflicted were fast and dangerous. He needed to investigate.
When school ended, he went home and got supplies. He also changed into old clothes and shoes. Mom was sleeping, so it was easy enough to grab some stuff and leave again. He'd wondered how best to investigate the monster until he realized that, since he was a kid, he could use himself as bait and the monster would come to him.
He wandered around the neighborhood where he'd received the quest. A drone followed him. This presented yet another problem. If he got caught on drone camera killing the monster, he suspected the authorities would be unsympathetic to his “but it was a child-eating monster” defense.
He sighed. The situation was far from ideal. But he wasn't about to back out, either. All he could do was complete Imp's quest and hope for the best.
He knocked on the door of the house where he thought he'd seen the Afflicted's shadow. Nothing happened. He rang the bell a couple of times and knocked again.
A curtain moved. Several seconds later, the door opened.
Leo forced himself to smile, though it was all he could do to not turn and run.
Anyone who hadn't spent fifty years in a post-apocalyptic hellhole would see a lady, albeit an older lady, who'd spent a lot of money on Bio-Blessed and looked far younger than she should. A woman who could have passed for her thirties, but who wore a thick baggy red sweater over a long baggy skirt. Old lady clothes. There were the vestiges of an old-woman smell, and he saw a walker in the corner of the darkened room behind her.
The monster's blue-gray eyes had a slight red tinge. She wore black gloves, no doubt to conceal thick, sharp fingernails at the ends of long fingers. Her shoes were too large for someone her size, again to conceal longer feet with thick, sharp toenails. Her arms and legs were longer than they should be, and she moved with the fluid grace of a predator.
“Uh, I'm collecting donations for our school's marching band,” Leo said. He was pretty sure his school didn't have a marching band, but she didn't need to know that.
The monster's lips pulled upward further than they should have been able to in a facsimile of a smile, lips covering her teeth, to conceal their length and sharpness.
“Oh, you poor boy,” she said. “You look cold. Would you like to come in? I'm making hot chocolate, and I'd love to donate to your marching band.”
“Okay,” he said.
He followed her inside.
What really gave the Afflicted away was the smell. A sick, sour smell most people wouldn't notice, but sensitized as he was to the Afflicted, the scent was overpowering to Leo and made him feel ill.
The monster led Leo through a darkened room and equally dark hallway. He kept a smile plastered on his face as she brought him to her kitchen and sat him at the table. Grabbing a red teakettle from the stove, she poured hot water into a mug that had pictures of cats on it and the words “Cat Lover” written across it. He saw no sign of any cats, however, and suspected she had eaten them first.
She fumbled with her long gloved fingers, opening a cupboard and pulling out a packet of hot chocolate mix. She tore the top off the packet and emptied the contents into the mug, then stirred the mixture with a white plastic spoon, and handed the mug to Leo.
“Thank you,” Leo said with a fake smile. He sat at the table, holding the mug with a shaking hand, and pretended to take a sip, knowing the hot chocolate might be poisoned. He wore gloves of his own so he wouldn't leave fingerprints. If she noticed his gloves, she didn't say anything.
The monster let out a high-pitched giggle. “You just enjoy that while I get my checkbook.” She left the kitchen.
What was he doing, going into this creature's lair? Was he trying to commit suicide? Was it possible for him to be any dumber?
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Unfortunately, he wasn't coming up with any better plans. If he left for help, there was no guarantee the thing would still be there when they came back, or that he'd get another chance. And he needed the Demon Tears and bonuses.
He'd been assigned a quest. He'd complete it, or die trying.
Feeling and smelling something behind him, he turned in time to see the monster creeping up on him, holding a small syringe containing a colorless liquid. Her hands were bare, revealing the filed-down claws at the ends of her too-long fingers.
He threw the hot chocolate into the monster's face and dove to the side as she tried to grab him. Her non-syringe-holding hand brushed his head as he went down.
Her mouth opened wide and she screamed. He'd been right about the teeth. They were long and sharp.
***
Leo threw the cat mug at the monster before she could attack, missing her head by inches. Reaching into his pack, his hand touched a heavy iron pipe. Pulling it out, he stood up. He backed away and kicked his chair in her direction. This turned out to be a mistake. She dropped the syringe, picked up the chair and threw it back at him, hard. He turned and tucked his head and arms into his body as the chair slammed into his back and bounced away, to smash against the kitchen wall.
He pushed himself up and attacked, taking hold of his iron pipe and swinging it at the creature's legs. She dodged the pipe, and, with shocking speed, swung at him with an open hand. Expecting the swing, he dodged, moving away and to the side. With her other arm, she grabbed the steaming teakettle and threw it at him. He ducked, backing into the table as he did so. The tea kettle slammed into the wall behind him.
The monster kicked his legs out from under him, sending him crashing to the floor under the table. He swung at her legs with his pipe while crawling backward, using the table for shelter. She pushed the table to the side and kicked him again. He dodged, trying to get up while swinging at the creature's legs. He slipped on the water from the thrown teakettle and fell to the floor a second time. With inhuman speed, she grabbed the pipe and yanked it from his hand. He kicked the monster's knee from his place on the floor, making her grunt. He should have grabbed the ice pick. Dammit.
The monster stepped forward and swung the pipe at his head, connecting with brutal force. He went down.
Leo woke up to a high-pitched giggle. Still in the kitchen, he couldn't have been out for long.
“Yum yum yum. Yum yum yum.” The monster chanted, grabbing his feet and dragging him across the floor. His arm and body caught on a table leg, slowing her down. The syringe she'd attempted to use on him was inches from his left hand. He palmed the syringe in his hand, praying the creature hadn't noticed.
“It's wrong to eat children, yes it is, but they taste so good.” She pulled harder. The table caught on Leo's arm and traveled a short distance with a screech before releasing him. “Yum yum yum. Yum yum yum.” She pulled him out of the kitchen and down a hallway. His head hurt less than it should have. The levels he'd gained by getting punched in the head and face must be paying off. That was something. A door opened. She dragged him down darkened stairs. The afflicted had better night vision than humans. One more thing to be concerned about.
Bump, bump, bump. His already aching head bounced off each step. One, two, three, four... fifteen, he groaned silently, still pretending to be unconscious as she dragged him into the cold dark cellar. He could smell meat and repressed a shudder. The creature had dragged him into its meat locker.
She giggled again. “Yum yum yum. Yum yum yum,” she chanted in a singsong voice. “Don't want to butcher children, but they taste so good.”
Two facts went through his mind: Many drugs affected the Afflicted much like they did humans, and the Afflicted had two large veins on each side of their legs. He'd killed enough of them in his previous life to gain a general grasp of their anatomy. They also had fewer nerve endings in their skin and extremities, allowing them to shrug off wounds that would debilitate a normal human.
Leo heard a quiet yowl from a very unhappy cat.
“Sparkles!” the monster hissed. “You can't hide forever. I will find you!”
Leo heard a scrabbling noise as the cat ran from its cellar hiding place and shot up the stairs, escaping into the rest of the house. Leo used the distraction of poor Sparkles to carefully take hold of the small syringe, and jab the needle into the side of her leg, right above the ankle. He pushed the plunger down, hopefully injecting the drug into her leg vein, where it would, hopefully, put her to sleep. Or at least slow her down.
“Please be a strong medication that works on the Afflicted,” he prayed silently.
Not noticing what Leo had done, the monster wrapped his ankles in twine, then effortlessly picked him up, using the twine around his ankles to hang him on a hook that had been fastened onto the cellar wall. She pulled off his jacket, dropping it to the floor next to some dark rust-colored spots. The monster was going to slit his throat and butcher him. There was even a drain in the cellar floor below him to get rid of the blood. Fuck.
Hanging upside down, the blood rushed to his head. All he could think about was the sound of grinding steel as the creature sharpened her butcher knife. If he was going to do something, it would have to be now.
He reached up for the knife in his back pocket.
“Ah ah ah,” the monster smiled — a real smile showing all her sharp teeth—waving a finger back and forth. “I know you're conscious, little boy.” She giggled. “That's just fine. The meat is best fresh. Yum yum yum. Down my tummy, here it comes.”
“Do you feel bad?” Leo asked. “About being a child-eating monster?”
“Woman's got to eat,” she giggled. “Didn't want to eat my grandkids. No, no, I didn't, but I'm so hungry.”
“You ate your own grandkids?” he asked, trying to keep the thing talking.
“Didn't want to, but hungry. Everyone wondering where they went.” She giggled. “Yum yum yum, down my tummy, here it comes.” Then she let out a large yawn and passed out in front of him, falling face-first onto the drainboard.
He grabbed the knife in his back pocket and frantically reached up, grabbing the meat hook with one hand and cutting at the twine around his ankles with the other. When he finished freeing himself, he pushed off with his legs so he flipped over backward, landing on his feet as quietly as possible.
The monster was still passed out on the drainboard next to the sink, butcher knife in hand.
The large chest freezer in the back had a big padlock with a key in it. He unlocked the freezer as quietly as humanly possible and pulled open the lid. What he saw inside made him shudder. This creature was definitely responsible for the missing children.
Before he could think about how stupid his plan was, he gently pulled the butcher knife out of the creature's hand. Tucking the knife into his belt, he grabbed the monster. She was light for her size, but very heavy when you were a twelve-year-old boy with a hurt back and head injury.
He could have tried to slit the monster's throat with the butcher knife, but her blood would get everywhere. This way was much neater. Assuming it worked, of course.
The monster moaned, and her hand twitched. He held very still until she stopped moving. He continued, dragging her slowly over to the freezer. When he got there, he leaned her against the freezer, picked her up by her feet, and, with a great effort, dumped her inside the freezer and slammed the lid closed.
The cold of the freezer woke her instantly. With a scream, she slammed against the lid, forcing her hand through the gap between the lid and the freezer. The partially closed latch was all that stopped her from getting free. Panicking, Leo lashed out at the hand with the butcher knife, cutting and stabbing the creature's hand while he pushed down on the freezer lid, fighting to close it. The latch bounced open. Leo screamed and stabbed at the creature, somehow getting the freezer closed again and the latch shut. He put the padlock through the latch and locked it. After that, he sat on the freezer and waited.
The force of her blows put dents in the freezer. Leo wondered if she would escape.
The Afflicted would suffocate at least as fast as a human and they were susceptible to cold. He felt pounding beneath him for several minutes. Then quiet. Leo didn't dare get off until he got an announcement from Imp, over an hour later.
“Congratulations! You have killed the child-eating monster,” Imp said."You have leveled up again in getting punched in the head and gained 48 Demon Tears. Due to this quest's unusual and dangerous nature, you've also gained a special bonus. You may add one level of rarity to whatever character class you choose. Common will become Uncommon, Uncommon—Rare, Rare—Epic. Epic—Legendary, and Legendary—Ultra Legendary.”
That was something.
Leo groaned. The adrenaline left his body; he felt dizzy, his head was pounding, and his face and back were grinding aches.
“Imp, why?” Despair slammed into him. That woman had most likely been a sweet old lady with grandkids, living with her cats. Then she took Bio-Blessed to help with her age and health issues. And she'd Changed. So much pointless suffering. Why? “Imp, why are the aliens doing this?”
“I'm sorry, Leo, I do not have that information.”
“What information do you have? Your aliens bring so much misery to an already miserable world. Why?”
“As I have explained before, Leo, I'm Imp, for Implant Interface, not an alien, and I know little more than you do. There will be a game and it's imperative you get a good character class to survive. If you do well in the game, you will even win valuable prizes.”
“If the aliens see this as a game, there has to be a way to win. How do you win?”
“I do not...” Leo finished along with Imp. “have that information.”
Silence.
“So you know nothing about the game or the prizes.”
“That is correct.”
“Hint?”
“I do not give out hints, Leo, nor will any of the thousands of existing Imps.”
Leo continued sitting on the freezer. “There wouldn't be any quest to dispose of dead bodies, would there?”