Universal Monsters IX
He told us we could call him Casanova Jones. We told him that was ridiculous and we would not.
Even though he was sitting on a throne he made from werewolf skulls we told him we would call him, “Sarah.” He had a small Dutch boy he named Jeff that he used for an ottoman and his throne-skulls were held together by taffy and coagulated chupacabra blood. From time to time Jeff would turn back and gnaw at the mortar only to be scolded whenever Sarah noticed. If he was after the taffy or the chupacabra blood remains a matter of some debate, and even those of us who came down on the side of the taffy have never really trusted the Dutch since. Or Jeffs, for that matter.
Seventy-seven minutes after we met him Casanova Jones killed a dragon with his teeth and we told him we would call him anything he liked. He grilled dragon steaks and told us stories.
But we are getting way, way ahead of ourselves. Streets ahead. States ahead.
After Fraction went swimming we wandered for a spell. Directionless and still without any real clue what was going on we stalked information. We broke into abandoned homes and bars swimming ankle deep with blood. We tracked down computers and smartphones. But every television was white noise, radios were silent, phones dead. Every facebook update was, “Ohhhhhh Fuuuuuuuck!” Or some variation thereof.
“They’re everywhere!”
“Holyshitrunthisisnotokay!”
“It’s eating me! Why am I typing this while it’s eating me?”
Stuff like that.
We traveled in a small pack. In part this was for protection but mostly we just didn’t know what else to do. We stayed at the waters edge for a while, but the damn Loch Ness monster, or his cousin or his protégé or something ate a guy named Brett and pretty soon after that we found ourselves on the move. We figured we may as well move together.
Brett’s thing was, I guess, getting eating by giant fuck-off monsters. None of us really knew him.
We tried to stick to shadows, tried to keep our backs to walls, but we’re convicts, not ninja. And if we were better at not being caught we wouldn’t be convicts at all. Just regular old murderers sitting across from you at Starbucks and beside you at the cinema and on the train.
Two-hundred of us followed Fraction to the Gulf, seven hours later we were nineteen. Not all of us died. We splintered and argued and fought and yelled and napped and decided here was as good as anywhere else and we might as well stay. Most of us decided things like that at pubs and roadhouses.
We didn’t see another living creature that day. Not a man, not a cat, not so much as a mosquito in the Everglade swamps. Not a single living thing. Other than the demons, of course, if they may be called, “alive.” And if they may be is a matter of some debate. None of us are ickyologists.
We didn’t even see all that many bodies or parts, as if everything with guts in them had been swallowed whole. Everything in the world that wasn’t us.
The religious amongst us thanked our gods that we were still walking. Thanked them for their mercy. The rest of us, we thanked Danny Fraction for his.
It got late and we got tired. Most of us, we didn’t understand the outside world before that Tuesday. Now we had no fucking clue. The universe was all the way out of it’s entire mind and we needed sleep. And we needed to get off the roads because nighttime is when the vampires show up. And even ropens don’t fuck with vampires.
We had no homes to speak of, no back to go back to. And sleeping in a dead man’s bed has a way of feeling wrong even to a killer. Not all killers, of course, but all the ones you’d want to know.
It turns out there are all kinds of prisons.
Seven hours after we walked out of MGD 64 State Penitentiary, we walked back in.
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