The Losers: More from the Cretin

What do we know about the Cretin so far? That he likes one night stands and Freddy Got Fingered? Developed characters have more than a few quirks. They have personality and a defined arc. So yes, I have my work cut out for me regarding the Cretin. In this chapter, he meets Tovia, another old friend who's quiet and reserved, despite being handy with a shotgun. Read the previous chapter here.

  “Motherfucker,” said the Cretin as the door of Preacher’s church shut in his face. He turned around and looked across the empty parking lot, the distance between the church and his house a vast expanse, a black asphalt sea of nothingness. His legs moved before his head had made a decision. It was all the goddamn cop’s fault. If he hadn’t banged on the door and shouted in his idiotic manner, then Silica would still be in his house, possibly enjoying Freddy Got Fingered while he slipped an arm around her shoulders, marveling at the miracle bestowed upon him. He hadn’t really contemplated the implications of finding a living, breathing duplicate of his sex doll; neither had he thought much more about the shimmering prison that seemed to encapsulate Hillsdale, but the Cretin was not a man prone to rigorous, deep thinking, or much thinking at all, for that matter. He was an instinctual creature who acted first and regretted later, and therefore his actions, when finding Officer Larry in his backyard with his arms around his sex doll, were much easier to understand.

  “Son of a bitch,” spat the Cretin, having just clumsily climbed over his fence.

  “Who?” said Officer Larry, almost out the gate.

  The Cretin was not a violent man. He’d had a few confrontations, none of which had ended in his favor, yet at that moment he was truly capable of anything. With a bellow that sounded like the call of an asthmatic water buffalo, he charged at the much bigger and brawnier Larry, who thrust the sex doll out in front of him as a shield. The Cretin crashed on top of her, with Larry pinned beneath, his flailing blows unable to strike the policeman with much force.

  “You off your rocker, you wacko?” asked Larry, who was struggling to push the Cretin and the sex doll off of himself.

  “Motherfucking son of bitch goddamn idiot shithead…”

  “Tone it down, champ,” said Larry, who managed to shove the sex doll and the Cretin a considerable distance.

  “I don’t wanna deck ya…”

  The Cretin’s fist connected Larry’s upper lip, bursting it open and causing blood to flow down his face and drip from his mustache. The Officer howled and threw out a blind punch, but it connected, hitting the Cretin on the right side of his temple. Instantly he fell to the earth, eyes fluttering. Larry said something else, the meaning of which was lost, yet he was dimly aware of a wad of bloody spit hitting his face. Through the haze he saw Silica being dragged through the earth, her hand still outstretched, eventually disappearing into the darkness.

  “Don’t take her away,” he managed, face full of dirt.

  “Oh I’m gonna wine and dine her, you bet, buddy. Then I’m gonna invite a couple friends over, and we’re getting freaky. Say ‘bye-bye’ to the nice asshole in the dirt, Silica. Hell, I’m changing the name. She looks like a Topanga. Hasta la vista, amigo. Eat shit.”

  The wheels of Officer Larry’s patrol cruiser burned rubber as he tore off into the night. The Cretin stood up and almost fell over. He was tired and emptied of all fight. With all of his being he hoped that Officer Larry rammed his vehicle into the shimmering barrier that encompassed the town. You don’t seem to be having that sort of luck. Wasn’t that the truth.

  He went inside, grabbed another beer, and then staggered back outside, his feet carrying him past the driveway, down his street, and then leftward toward Main. There were sons of bitches everywhere, motherfuckers, evil bastards that stole your sex doll and frightened off the real thing, dooming you forever to a lonely, desperate existence, a life of solo fornication and piss-flavored beer. How he was angry at the world at that moment, furious at whatever cruel force that had made him how he was, imperfect, flawed, incapable of not fucking up. He tripped over a bush in the front yard of a suburban ranch house, and in his inconsolable fury, he tore at the foliage, shredding leaves like a human hedge trimmer, until the front porch light flipped on and he was forced to hightail it several houses ahead, where he hid behind a brick mailbox until the light turned off. While he hid, the Cretin saw a yard gnome staring blankly at him, a cheeky grin on its rotund face. Bim-Bim, is that you? Three feet tall, forty pounds in weight, Bim-Bim was a level twenty druid who was kicked out of his ancestral home for defecating on the sleeping face of his brother, a notorious buccaneer. How many years had it been since he’d rolled the twenty-sided die? Since you, Know-it-all Nick, Gretchen, and Tovia had been friends. Were they not friends anymore? At what point did a friendship end? He didn’t know how to end anything besides female contact. A friend was someone you could count on, someone you talked to once in a while, maybe not every week, but at least once a month or two. Did he have any friends? Did Weedy Joe count? What about the other dealers? Did he have a friend in the entire Grand Argosy Casino? Friends are for pretenders. Life is quiet, brutal, and short. A loser’s maxim.

  He’d wandered downtown, the streets deserted, the lamplight flickering with every step as though his passage were a harbinger of dysfunction. Something pulled on him, drew his attention toward the river. He’d lived next to the Ohio all of his life, but he’d never thought much about it. Its waters were muddied, polluted with trash and liquid waste, the shores littered with bottles, tires, bits of weathered plastic. It was an ugly river, a conveyor of filth, a force of nature that had been sickened by the machinations of man. How many bodies had sunk in its depths? Was the riverbed littered with bones?  What sort of life could such a ruined ecosystem support?

  When he reached the gazebo, he knew that she had been there. It had traces of her aura all over it. His hands caressed the worn wood, desperate for some reassurance that she had been real, that she hadn’t been a dream. Looking out at the river, he thought he saw something, a figure wading into shallow water, but when he blinked, there was nothing, so he turned away. She wouldn’t go there, not into the dead river. He just knew that she wouldn’t.

  An instinct made him turn around. There, at the end of Main, was a wolf sitting on its haunches, its great black head cocked sideways, amber eyes fixed firmly on the Cretin. Slowly, he felt in his pockets, searching for food, but came up empty. Jesus Christ. Every follicle was tensed with a stiffened hair; his hands, now free of pockets, began to shake. The wolf’s stare was not that of an animal’s. It looked inside him, saw the rot, saw the emptiness of purpose. This creature is my antithesis. Everything about the wolf screamed focus. When its lips parted to reveal the shiny white denture, he could swear that it was smiling at him, amused by his horror, his realization that he was soon to be steak tartare.

  Where is she?

  He heard its voice inside his head, a guttural groan unused to language.

  You smell of her, you’ve met her, you’ve touched her, you’re following her, you must tell us where she is, you must or we will remove your limbs from your torso and gnaw at the stump where your head used to be.

  The Cretin had been threatened many times during his life; he’d stared down his fair share of them, because most people were full of shit. The wolf was not full of shit. The wolf meant every single word that it had beamed directly into his head. So instead of lying or stalling, the Cretin did what he had done in the past when a threat had turned into an action—he ran for his life. With a speed he didn’t know he possessed, he cut across the street and attempted to slide across the trunk of a car. The jaws of the wolf clamped down on his shoulder, ripping and tearing, and though the Cretin screamed as the pain cut through him, he managed to pull away, leaving behind a ragged shirt sleeve and a decent amount of blood. Through an alley he went, the animal hot on his heels, his worn Converse losing traction as he scrambled, knocking trash cans behind him, seeing a fence up ahead and realizing that there was no way he could vault it. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. The Cretin despised religion, but the refrain came out of a deep place inside, the last reservoir of hope. Maybe he could make it over the fence if he were suddenly endowed with the power to jump several feet in the air. It seemed like something Jesus could do for him. He hadn’t asked Jesus for much in thirty-four years.

He had a foot to go before he reached the fence when the wolf landed on his back and knocked him to the earth. Great, slavering jaws clamped down on his throat, the canine teeth poking into his skin. Tell us, tell us, tell us. Show us, show us, show us. Then you can feed us and we will give you a quick death, a gentle twist rather than the gnawing and gnashing you will feel otherwise.

  He didn’t know what to tell the wolf. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t think he could speak. Would anyone be able to identify him when they found his corpse? He decided that it didn’t matter. Everything would’ve been a little better had he drank a couple more beers. Being eaten alive had to be more bearable ten Natty-Lights deep instead of six beers and still able to drive.

  A shot rang out, and the Cretin felt the wolf’s body stiffen. The jaws removed themselves from his throat, but before the animal could offer a retort, its head exploded in a shower of blood and gristle. The Cretin moved his shaking hands to wipe the gore off his face, ears ringing with a sound not unlike the roar of a tornado. With blinking eyes, he turned his head and saw Tovia sitting on the trunk of her car, skinny legs covered in a pair of holy jeans, long face wearing a barely perceptible smile that made the Cretin want to kiss her face. Tovia, who changed her name from Tobias at the ripe old age of 29 and began to transition a year later. He’d said some things over the years that he wished he could take back, but Tovia wasn’t the grudge-holding sort. The twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands had been given to her by the Cretin when he had rid his house of most of his weapons for reasons that he didn’t want to share.

  “Where in the hell did you come from?” he said before he vomited all over the sidewalk.

  “I went for a walk,” said Tovia, shrugging her narrow shoulders.

  “With you shotgun?”

  “Well, I was about to go for a walk,” Tovia said, pointing at the Cutlass Supreme behind her, “when I saw you getting mauled.”

  “It was sweet of you to help me out,” the Cretin replied, staggering to his feet. “You never call.”

  “You never call anymore either. Lot of people don’t.”

  “It’s not because of you being a girl now, just so you know. I’m just shitty at keeping friends.”

  “What the fuck’s going on?” asked Tovia, inclining her head toward the dead wolf.

  Cool as a cucumber in ice, thought the Cretin.

  “There’s some weird shit going on,” replied the Cretin. He briefly considered telling her about Silica, but then reconsidered.

  “If you want to go for a drive, I’ll show you,” he explained. For a second he thought Tovia was going to deny his request because of any number of reason, the primary one being, of course, that he was covered in bits of blood and viscera, but then she nodded her head and hopped in the driver’s seat, and he sat in the front passenger seat, feeling nostalgia rearing its ugly head as the ancient fabric conformed to his body’s shape as though it had missed the touch of his degenerate flesh. There were little figures bobbing on the dashboard, bobble-head miniatures from some anime that he didn’t recognize, along with a weathered book on kendo fighting and a pair of yellowed socks. The ceiling had been recently stapled, although a tumor hung down right above his head like a scrotum. He ventured a look behind him and saw that the back seat was cluttered with detritus, mostly fast food wrappers and old clothes.

  “You live out of your car?” he asked.

  “It’s temporary,” said Tovia.

  “You get kicked out of the Shack?”

  “I left it voluntarily.”

  “Did they cut the power off?”

  “No running water. My bedroom also caved in.”

  The Shack was Tovia’s ancestral home, a sprawling mansion that had once been grand. Years of abuse by Tovia’s four half-brothers had reduced the once proud dwelling to little more than a dilapidated hovel. He had pleasant memories of sneaking over there with a twenty-two and a case of Natty Light to shoot gophers from the balcony as they popped up in the backyard. But then Tovia’s brother Remy had driven his truck into one of the supports, and the wholesome past-time of gopher shooting had been abandoned. He couldn’t even imagine what condition the place was in now.

They drove out toward Millerbrick road, the Cretin staring out the window looking for any signs of Silica. The houses were quiet, sleeping tombs, the woods a blur of darkness, the river a reflection of the moon’s light.

  “How’s Renardo Vanderbuilt doing?” he asked.

  “Still the greatest Ranger in the North. I haven’t played in a while.”

  “Neither have I, but I saw a yard gnome, and I thought of Bim-Bim.”

  “He’s a little shit. I think Renardo might decapitate him the next time he pisses in his mead.”

  They climbed the hill halfway before the Cretin told Tovia to pull over. The shimmer of the terrarium was almost invisible, but when they threw a stick at it, the border lit up with fire and pulled the branch into whatever netherworld existed on the other side.

  “How far does it extend?” asked Tovia, who kept her emotions sheathed.

  “I don’t know, but I saw it come down. I think it’s like a bowl turned upside down. Something has sealed us in.”

  “Something?” asked Tovia, raising a bushy eyebrow.

  The Cretin took a deep breath and slumped his shoulders.

  “I have a sex doll that I named Silica.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Earlier tonight, right where we stand, I encountered a woman who looked exactly like my sex doll. What do you think her name was?”

  “Ebony? Jasmine?”

  “Silica. We didn’t talk about much. She said she was running from someone, and that she needed a place to hide. She wasn’t very communicative, said some strange things. That idiot Officer Larry scared her off when he started banging on my door.”

  “Yeah, he’s a dickhead. Gave me a ticket for sleeping in my car.”

  “What I’m thinking now though, is that maybe she’s the cause of this magma wall terrarium that’s presumably surrounding Hillsdale. That wolf that attacked me? It spoke. In my head. Said it was looking for her, and that I had her smell on me.”

  “You didn’t harass this woman, did you?” asked Tovia.

  “No! Why would you say that? I don’t know what people has said, but I am a perfect gentleman…”

  “In the few minutes that you knew her, did you ask her if she wanted to watch Freddy Got Fingered?”

  “That’s not the same as assault…”

  “Some would argue it is.”

  “Jesus, Tovia, I know we haven’t been the best of friends for several years now, but you gotta believe me, hell, see it with your own eyes, weird shit is happening and we’re right in the middle of it, and if we don’t do something, God knows what fresh horrors are in store. I’m talking about talking wolves that threaten to eat you alive! Maybe everyone’s sex dolls will be replicated and there will be a whole goddamn army of plastic toys running amuck. Help me with this, will you? If don’t, I might as well run into this fire wall, because I simply can’t do something like this by myself.”

  “You blackmailing me with the guilt of your suicide?” asked Tovia.

  “Yes,” said the Cretin, falling to his knees.

  “Who have you talked to about this?” she asked, indicating the shimmering prison.

  “Not a soul,” said the Cretin.

  “Why not?”

  “Who do I have to talk to? Who should I have told? Officer Larry? Do you think he would’ve investigated?”

  “Maybe Nick and Gretchen,” said Tovia.

  “I got kicked out of Nick’s house two years ago for passing out in his tomato patch.”

  “Actually, it was for pissing in the corner of his garage,” corrected Tovia, “although I don’t think your destroying his crop helped.”

  “Fine, let’s go tell him. I don’t see how it will help anything, but the more the merrier. Do you think he’ll let me have any of his beer?”

  “No, probably not,” responded Tovia. “You should probably sober up. It’ll help your cause.”

  The Cretin rose to his feet, paused for a microsecond, and then embraced Tovia with a rather overly-enthusiastic hug. It took a few minutes for her to push him away, after which they entered the Cutlass Supreme and drove toward Dirtbag Organics.