Six Inches Thick Read online

  Sammy’s voice oozes with sarcasm, maybe too much. Fetch pauses. Her eyes stay closed but her brain races to catch the words floating away. She’s suddenly hysterical. Her brain is spinning. Sime is backing away, dragging himself across her face. Her body shakes and absorbs another thrust from Fetch but she couldn’t care any less. Sime’s leaving. Rejection and desperation crash down from above and smash her against the roof. She quickly turns her head, opening her eyes and shaping them as wide and as innocent as possible. Please, it was just a joke. A bad joke. I’m so sorry. She lets her mouth hang open, her tongue begging him to return. Please... Please...

  But Sime isn’t even looking at her anymore.

  Something’s different. He’s shaking.

  Sammy’s mouth snaps shut. Sime’s face is washed of all color. It’s as white as paper. There’s sweat dripping from his hair. His hands are shaking. His cheekbones look odd and twisted. He moves like his knees have been frozen to the roof. Is he waiting for Fetch? Wait, Fetch was ready to blow it. Is that what he’s scared of?

  She twists around, lifting herself up on her elbows and pressing them down into the layer of muck beneath her. Her head tips forward expecting to see a half-Mexican dick aimed straight at her and ready to ceremoniously fire its first load onto a girl. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

  He’s not even there...

  “Fetch!” Sime screams from behind her, his reaction curiously delayed, as if a hand were just pulled away from his mouth. It’s followed by another scream from the edge of the roof. It catches her attention like a right hook. She reaches up and pushes the hair out of her face.

  “Wha—“

  There he is. His eyes are huge and trembling. They’re totally bloodshot. The veins in his neck have swollen and rippled the skin all the way to his shoulders. He jerks back and forth. His whole body is being grated against the roof as if he’s being crushed and smeared beneath something neither of them can see.

  His fingers are clawing desperately for something to hold onto to. There’s blood on his broken nails. He can’t stop it. He’s being dragged away. He’s trying to scream but his voice morphs into an outpouring of fluids. Blood and vomit explode from every hole in his face.

  Behind her, she can hear Sime whimpering. This is beyond his limits. Sammy’s, too. But then there’s another sound. The pigeons. There are suddenly pigeons everywhere. They have covered the roof all around them, masking every shape and surface of the building in a creamy white film. Their feathers fold into each other. There are no gaps. They never end. She feels them exhale as one. Their heat circles in around her. It’s humid and heavy. Their thousand tiny, solid black eyes twitch in a billion directions at once. They spill over each other like maggots festering over spoiled chicken. Sammy pulls her legs in against her chest and the pigeons react, moving as one, riding on a wave of gelatinous jelly that spreads out below them.

  Sammy throws her gaze over the edge of the building. It’s too far to jump. But there’s the car. It’s still there. If she could just get to it… She holds back the urge to scream, too afraid to open her mouth. What if they fly in? Did they get in Fetch?

  She looks back at him and finds their ooze is dripping from his body. It’s bubbling over the backs of his thighs, over his backside. It’s coming from his backside. He’s hardly conscious, but his mouth still flaps open, still begging for help but his throat is filled with even more of their rancid excretion. His body snaps, pieces of it break and contort into painful, disturbing angles. He’s being squeezed and emptied like a roll of toothpaste. The fluids, all of them, swell up from the depths of his gut and burst, popping his eyes from their sockets and releasing a blast of blood and knobby brain mass.

  “Oh my god! Run!” Sime shrieks and grabs her shoulder. She springs to her feet as if the roof had just been electrified. Adrenaline races through her body and obliterates her buzz. She pulls her eyes away from what’s left of Fetch as her instincts take over, focused and suddenly stone cold sober.

  “Okay, get us the fuck out of here!”

  He doesn’t tell her. Not directly anyway. There isn’t time. No matter, she knows. He pulls her toward the broken hatch. It’s the only way. The roof is groaning badly, pushed to its limit by the weight of the enlarging bird blob. The boards begin to crack and splinter under their bare feet.

  “What the hell is that thing?” she screams. This question is for real. She’s never seen anything like this. Her emotions are going through a blender. She’s naked and running across a rooftop. He’s naked, too. He starts to answer. “I don’t know. I think it’s a—”

  But then he stops at the edge of the hole and hesitates. He looks back at Sammy and then down into the hole. Then back and then to her… He swallows. She looks over his shoulder. It’s so dark down there that the rungs of the ladder aren’t even visible. There’s a huge crack, and the roof sags even further. It’s going to collapse any second.

  “Um, okay, I’ll go...” Sime stammers, finally ducking down for the hole.

  She pushes at him automatically, but not hard enough to make him lose his balance. His skin feels smooth with sweat and grease. There are clumps of black muck peeling away from his elbows and his knees. His cock is falling limp, but not all the way. I can’t believe that she’s still thinking about that…

  “Just go! Go!”

  He drops down and throws his feet over the edge of the hatch. They tap against the first rung and he begins. Ding. One. Ding. Two. Then he’s gone into the darkness. She drops in next, finding the rung between her toes and quickly begins moving down after him. The pigeon horde swarms in seconds later, blocking out the last ray of sunlight falling in after them. Now it’s total darkness. Sam feels her body start to shake. Moisture drips from above and splatters on her arms and the back of her neck.

  They’re coming down the ladder too...

  But neither of them stops. Their hands and feet continue to descend through the dark, all while listening to the birds’ discordant squeals echoing all around them. They grow louder and louder until the walls themselves begin to shake. But it’s not the mass above them doing it. It’s something else. It’s that noise they heard before. The huge, grinding machine. Fetch was wrong. There IS something else down below...

  Sammy’s heart is trying to pound through her chest. She can feel the rungs of the ladder getting looser in the wall their stuck into. The water in the basement sloshes around something that sounds very big and very heavy. Its movements send groans through the entire steel framework of the building. But they can’t stop. The birds squeak and squish down closer to her head. Her hands and feet work faster.

  “Wait, Sammy! No, stop—”

  There’s a clang somewhere below her. There’s a loud pop and Sime coughs abruptly. Sammy holds the ladder as tight as she can. And for a second hears nothing as the birds seem to stop and wait too…

  THAK!

  There is a dull crack within the sound that makes her skin crawl the moment it reaches her ears.

  “Sime?” She calls out, starting down the ladder once again. She knows he’s no longer below her. She knows he won’t answer. But she has to try. She needs to hear him…

  “SIME!” Her feet and her hands work even faster, grabbing each rung quicker than the last, her legs kick up and down as if she’s riding a bike. Down, down, down. The mass above her begins to fade away. Their noise remains in the place where she stopped, not an inch further. But she doesn’t care about them anymore. She’s focused only on the ladder. She’s in a perfect rhythm, one rung after another. She’s got it. She’ll be at the floor in no time and then to the car...

  And then her foot swinging loose beneath her, passing through a missing rung…

  Her whole body is thrown off balance. Her feet fall away from the wall and she catches herself with the inside of her elbow on the rung beside her head. Her naked body slams against the wall, hanging from the metal while her heart pounds hard enough to break through her chest. A cold chill sweeps o
ver her as she realizes what has happened.

  Oh god, no... Sime.

  The pigeon mob from above suddenly reappears. It’s already at her hands! It squeals and bites at her, tearing at her knuckles and her arms like a ball made of needles. The pain stings like fire. She can’t wait. She skips over the missing step and ducks away from their hungry beaks.

  “Sime, get up! Please get up!” She calls out, clinging to the hope that he somehow survived the fall. And there’s a sound. What?! Is that—? A reply. It’s a pained ache. He’s alive!

  ‘SIME!” She shouts with labored breath. Her legs are back on the bicycle, working the rungs as fast as she can. “Sime, are you okay? I’m almost there. Can you hear me?”

  The sound of his muffled cries is getting closer. Her footsteps begin to echo off the floor... She’s so close. She could jump. More slime showers down from above, coating her shoulders and soaking her hair. But it doesn’t hurt, so she doesn’t care. Not right now. She can’t even see it. She doesn’t look up. You ain’t gonna eat me like you ate Fetch.

  Then, without warning, her foot hits the bottom and she falls to the ground, carried by her own momentum. She feels Sime. He’s lying beside her, his body twisted and bent into impossible angles. The setting sun casts just enough light through the doorway back into the main hall for Sammy to see his face. He’s looking away from her, toward the light. His mouth is jagged and wide open. His features are frozen in a state of utter shock. He isn’t making a sound. He’s not moving.

  “Sime? Can you hear me?”

  She touches his face. His jaw feels loose under the skin, and there’s pooled blood spilling over his teeth. At her touch, a final burble of air escapes from his lungs.

  “No, Sime. Oh, no. Oh, god...” She pulls her hand away and covers her mouth, fiercely stricken with grief. She wants to reach out and touch him again, to feel his warmth, but she can’t. She bolts away and tries to stand, lifting herself up to take in the whole scene.

  Sime’s body is gruesomely distorted. He must have landed face first and his body snapped in half, backward. There are broken shards of bone protruding from his back like splintered tree branches. His lower half has compressed into his upper half, impaled on the exposed shards of his ribs and his spine that have pierced through the skin.

  Sammy’s guts churn and she tastes the bitter sting of stomach acid on the back of her tongue. Shiny greens and browns and yellows flow from Sime’s wounds. There is a large, severed piece of his liver ripped from his side and skewered on a fractured length of his upper arm.

  Her fingers twitch and she bursts into tears. She can’t accept it. She wants to reach out and touch him, to hold him, to put him back together, or to at least close his eyes. But it’s all just too much. Her brain says no over and over again and finally pulls her away.

  The birds begin to ooze across the floor at the bottom of the ladder.

  Sammy feels their heat and hears their horrifying squeal. She shuffles out of their path, using Sime’s dead body as a barricade. The birds begin to swarm over his body and consume his flesh. She feels the vomit climbing in her throat. She wants to stay and scream, but her body makes a run for the door.

  She falls through the opening and rolls out into the main hallway. All she has to do is get up and find the door on the other side…

  But somewhere below her, deep down, there’s something creeping through the water. It’s making that sound. And it’s big. Huge. Unbelievably huge. The floor is rising and lifting her up with it. It cracks apart and splits the entire building in two. Her legs are swept out from under her. Her hands and face slap against the wet, uneven concrete. The rot and the muck splash across her skin. More cracks begin appearing. Things snap. Things explode. She looks up and the room is spinning. Narrow, black metal rods burst from the walls and floor, forming sharp, jagged spikes all around her. There’s a loud tearing sound in the ceiling above her, and she covers her head, listening as angular pieces of wood and steel crash down around her.

  Sammy reaches out and pulls herself forward, dragging her body through the mud and the oil. Her bare hips rake against the floor, peeling the skin away with sharp spikes of pain that pass all the way up through her shoulders. But it doesn’t last. She goes all numb as quickly as it happens. Her eyes spot the little, hidden opening in the wall. She can get out!

  Her mind is reduced to a single thought. She can see the car. It’s waiting for her right on the other side. She could get in and leave. She could still get to work. No, fuck work. She can’t tell them about this. She can’t tell anybody. It’ll be fine. The car’s just a few feet away. The floor is bursting open in front of her, but she doesn’t care. Something is appearing from the hole. But she doesn’t care...

  She doesn’t want to… She doesn’t want to care... She doesn’t…

  But she has to. Her hands swim through the filth a few more times and finally she stops. She tries hard to ignore the sight in front of her, but it’s ripping her mind apart. She has to look at it. It can’t be real. No... No... It can’t be real. It’s not real. It’s not a real thing…

  Rising up through the grate in the center of the room is a giant, white growth of larval-like flesh, milky-thin and translucent. It’s smooth and covered in patches of rot and buzzing flies. But it’s not solid. Its mass swells and spreads across the floor as more of it passes through the drain grate. It looks eerily familiar, like the same jelly that oozes from the birds. She watches the floor disappear inside of it. Holes appear in its body, each one probably bigger than her whole body. They open and close slowly, expelling watery slime and sucking air. Like the mouths of giant babies, they suckle during each breath, inflating the creature’s body wider and wider until it has blocked her every chance of escape.

  The pigeons have returned again. They wash through the opening to the ladder room, having likely finished devouring Sime’s corpse. There, they are met by even more of their kind, flooding in from the collapsed ceiling and through the busted windows. Their ooze covers everything, gelling them together like giant drops of rancid milk.

  Their master begins to rise higher in the center of the hall, enlarged to meet the lowest hanging structures still swinging to the ceiling. Sammy watches in morbid horror as the thing begins lifting itself from the hole, muscles flexing deep beneath its thick, translucent shell. Huge portions of its body shift apart from one another as it becomes thinner and more tube-like. Its birds encircle its base and wait patiently as the phantasmagoric thing lets out a low, loud wail, like a warning siren from a different world. It pierces her eardrums, shattering her brain. Her body jerks and vibrates as if she were riding a roller coaster. There’s a change in pressure. Her head feels heavier. She can taste blood running down the back of her throat, leaking from her ears. Her eyes shake and the sound itself pulls her jaws open.

  It’s the same noise they heard on the roof, only a million times louder. It’s more than her body can process. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, pulling in the musky scent of the mud that covers her. She thinks of home. She thinks of the last thing she did before leaving her house this morning. She thinks about her daddy winning a big trophy. She thinks about his smile when he puts it on top of the TV. She feels her body begin to harden. Fear wraps around her lungs and squeezes them flat. She forces herself to lift her head and look at the beast through blurred vision.

  The worm’s seething, tubular body looms over her. She watches dark, black spikes emerge from the depths of its body, floating up through the jelly, rising higher and higher until they finally come together and protrude from what must be the its head.

  The jagged spikes extend through the skin and fold away from each other, curling like hooks that grip onto the creature’s face like a skeletal, three-fingered hand. They pucker its skin in their grip but do so in such a delicate way as not to puncture through. At their will, the massive beast is twisted and directed through the open room as if it were nothing more than a sock puppet.

  But then she s
ees its teeth and it’s not a puppet any longer.

  The fingers spread further away from each other, gruesomely ripping through the flesh on the top of its head and producing a horrible, jagged void. Like the petals of an extra-dimensional flower, its jaws part to reveal a limitless amount of ugly, black thorns that spiral all the way down its throat. If it is a throat. It may just be a big, big ugly hole.

  She stares at it, paralyzed, unable to move even the tips of her fingers. Something is happening. The birds begin to converge upon it. Their bodies smear across the sides of its body, just like they did to Fetch. It shrinks beneath their weight and appears to back away. Sammy feels a tiny spark of hope blossom somewhere deep inside. She shivers and silently begins to pray. Please, eat that thing. Eat it all up, you mother fuckers...

  The birds begin to shake and convulse, as if possessed by an unknown spirit. They are jarred back and forth, forcibly being whipped against each other. Their beaks unfurl from their chests as if to squeal, but they don’t. Instead, their tiny mouths open further and further, stretching wider and wider until their skulls are exposed and their heads fall off. This leaves a tiny hole at the top of their necks, from which in one final, violent act, their headless bodies lurch forward and vomit their insides onto the worm’s wet, spongy flesh. The stuff is black and red and stringy. And the monster absorbs it all. Stains and smears pass through its hide. Then larger bits appear in the mix. Bits of other pigeons. Bits of Fetch and Sime... The reek of death and rot slams against her as if she had just smacked into a wall.

  Sammy’s body regains enough control to curl in on itself as she too begins to vomit. Her knees are sprayed by a yellow, brown mixture of breakfast and bile. It feels cold. She closes her eyes as she chokes and gags. She sees more blood. She feels it pouring from her nose. Her head falls to the side and sinks into the filth.

  Then the low, grinding wail returns. It’s even louder than it was before. Her head feels crushed by the impossible volume of the thing. She feels sharp, painful explosions on either side of her head. They obliterate the sound, but she can still feel it drilling into her skull. Her eyes pop open, but she can hardly see. Everything is like a watercolour painting. She can feel her head flattening. Her bowels have exploded beneath her. Her chest is caving in. She wants to cry but there are no tears.