The Losers: Know-it-all Nick Part 2

The Losers takes a turn into horror with the second half of the second chapter. Catch up by reading chapter one here, and here, and then move on to the first part of chapter two here.

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   “I’m not worried about it,” she said as she started to walk up the hill toward their tiny house. He followed her, the lump in his throat tightening with every step. What the hell is wrong with me? His anxiety seemed to be increasing by the day. Nothing dramatic had changed in their life. He had food, water, shelter. No murderous hordes stalked the area. Yet the banal complications of life had him gasping for air. Gretchen can’t know. She didn’t need to worry about him; he also clung to his masculine image like a life preserver. He might be suffocating, but no one would ever know.

   He followed Gretchen into their four-hundred square foot house, which consisted of a living room/kitchen and a bedroom. Everything was within arm’s reach, and they didn’t have very many things. If they needed space away from one another, they’d go outside. A pellet stove kept them warm in the winter, and by the time the summer heat rolled around, they’d acclimated themselves to constant sweating from working outside.

   Gretchen had discarded her clothes and jumped into the shower. Nick had an inclination to join her, but the shower stall was too small for two people, so he sat down on a rug and leaned against a chair, concentrating on his breathing. The wolves had not resumed their howling, which bothered him. Through the twilit sky the moon appeared like a ghost, dead and barren. Surely it’s not the pesticides. His breaths quickened, coming in short, ragged gasps. With deliberate calm, he took another drink of his beer. There was a change coming, some dangerous element that would shake up the terroir, shred his routine, upend the circle. No organism liked change. A creature adapted to a particular habit went extinct when that habitat changed. What habitat am I adapted for? What ecological niche am I occupying? The little red spec he had observed earlier came to mind. He saw it burrowing down into the earth, hyphae spreading tendrils, a mycelium of glowing red coils bleeding into the soil, changing it, draining nutrients to create an unrecognizable substance that writhed in strange rhythms like the inner workings of an alien organism. To erase the image, he rose to his knees and shook his head like a dog.

   “Eduardo had a good idea,” said Gretchen, emerging from the shower. “He said we should make video diaries of our farm for Youtube. Might get people invested in us, build an audience, maybe get funding that way.”

   Nick said nothing. He thought Eduardo was a sleaze who had more than a friendly interest in Gretchen, but he knew well enough not to say such. A black shadow moved past the window, darting out of the moonlight like a specter, followed by another fleeting image. Say something. His mouth was dry, tongue fat and slug-like. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

   “What’s wrong?” asked Gretchen. She had on a TPM t-shirt, his old band, the letters purple and fading.

   “Look and tell me what’s outside,” he managed, his voice a croak.

   He saw her squint her eyes, watched the surprise register on her face.

   “There are wolves out there. Must’ve got out. We should call the sanctuary.”

   “Wolves,” he said, eyes closed. “You are sure? Do they look normal?”

   “Nick, what’s wrong? Are you having a panic attack?”

   Yes that was it. A panic attack. A bizarre vision spurred on by miasma of fears sitting like stagnant water in the swamp of his mind. He was no seer of doom, no oracle bleating prophecy. The wolves running about the farm were just escapees, half-domesticated beasts fleeing the captivity forced upon them. Then why are you so scared to look out the window? He didn’t trust himself, that’s why. Gretchen had opened the door, peered out, her long neck craned. Get in the goddamn house he wanted to scream, but he also wanted her to reassure him, to tell his beating heart that there was no reason to pound like a bass drum.

   “Come here,” said Gretchen. “Look at this.”

   It was not what he wanted to hear, but his body complied. His arms pressed against the door frame, his head planted on his wife’s shoulder.

   A wolf sat on its haunches, staring at them with amber eyes. There was a red spec lying on its nose like a snowflake; the wolf was covered in glowing red dots. Nick noticed that it was raining, the crimson colored particles coming down heavy like ash. One spec landed on a dandelion by their door; he watched in horror as the plant shriveled up and died. The wolf growled, a bassetto rumble that seemed to emit from the bowels of the earth. Some instinct made him look at the dandelion again. A bright red phallus had emerged from the dead flower stalk, an uncanny fungal reconstruction. The wolf’s tongue flicked out to lick a sliver of saliva from its muzzle. Its eyes measured them by alien criteria, and Nick knew that none of his anxiety had been misplaced, that he had always been right to worry about everything, because nothing was impossible and they were just two struggling creatures on a planet that had always been hostile to individuals, and for all their sentience, they had no more value than the mutilated dandelion or the wolf arbiter that judged them. He felt Gretchen’s body move backward inch by inch; slowly she withdrew her head from the doorway, all the while keeping eye contact with the wolf. When she had finally shut and bolted the door, they both collapsed against it, as though an inch and three-eighths of wood could keep them safe from the strangeness that was falling from the sky.

   “What in the hell’s going on out there?” asked Gretchen.

   “What do you think that shit is doing to the apple trees?” managed Nick.

   “Nothing good. Maybe there was a chemical fire. Oh god, maybe a nuclear power plant blew up.”

   “I don’t think radioactive fallout is red,” said Nick.

   “I didn’t know you were an expert! I’m just looking for a rational explanation, okay?”

   “Did you see the dandelion?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

   “What? I was looking at the wolf. Did you get a sense that it was…”

   “Judging us? Measuring us in some manner?”

   “Yes. Wolves are really smart, aren’t they? They’re not just wild dogs.”

   “No, they’re apex predators.”

   He’d been terrified of wolves as a child, likely a result of seeing The Howling when he was eight years old. Of course, wolves and werewolves were different, the latter being a monstrous version of nature made monstrous by the mixing of human vices with the mystifying wild. Yet he still conflated the two, the animal and the monster, like a caveman whose imagination attributed supernatural powers to an eater of flesh.

   Gretchen called the wolf sanctuary but no one answered, so she called the police, who advised them to stay indoors while they investigated. After calling his parents, she then made them both a cup of tea. They didn’t talk much more, and eventually she retired to bed while he stayed up, staring out the window, watching the red rain falling down, wondering to what extent his farm was transitioning into a biome of the bizarre.

…

  There, past the apple trees do you see it, the little box, the home of the two-legged things that fall and tear so easily, that run so slow, that scream so loudly that it is a relief to take their throats in between our jaws and clamp down so that the red blood comes and flows like the red rain that sticks to our coats, warming us and telling us how special we are, what excellent creatures we are, reminding us of our function which is to run and howl and eat, and so we live to please it, so we roam to please it, so we search to find the one that escaped, who has fled amongst the two-legged things to hide like a deer in a glen, and her smell is the ripe stench of fear, a wet coating that sticks to grass and sweet earth like blood she will eventually shed, and so we will comb the earth for her, for the red rain, for our function, to revenge ourselves against all that have caged us, killed us, beaten us, and taken away the forest from our kin.

   When we find her it will be such a sweet, sweet moment, a happy feast, and she will know what it is to be eaten to completion.