Here's the completed Jaws of Life story that I started back in October. I'm thinking about writing a collection of horror stories, perhaps interspersed with the remnants of my Resurrection novel that I never finished. I'm 40 years old now, for chrissakes. I got to finish some shit.
...
The Jaws of Life
As I stood before those masticating jaws, I suddenly knew that I couldn’t do it.
“I can’t,” I said to the gate agent.
“Excuse me?” he asked. He wore a red jacket with a little mouth pin speared through the lapel.
“I can’t walk inside that mouth, and let that thing eat me.”
“Uhhh,” said the gate agent. His toupee reminded me of a snake trying to swallow an egg.
I looked around for my clothes and saw them in a black garbage bag in the waiting area, so I started walking toward them.
“Wait, what are you doing? He is expecting someone! You’ve been prepared!”
My skin was saturated with butter, and black pepper fell from my graying locks.
“I just can’t,” I said. Part of me wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t. Not with those peg-like teeth and that giant tongue still visible beyond the threshold.
“What am I supposed to say to Him? They’ll make me talk to him, you know! I’ll be the poor sap that has to give an explanation! Look out there! Look at him! Does He look like something you’d want to climb up on a giant escalator and shout inside the ear of? Because that’s my day now, buddy. All thanks to you.”
I looked outside the window and saw Him sitting there, cross-legged on the tarmac, giant hands resting folded in his lap.
“I’m sorry. I can tell them that it isn’t your fault.”
“Of course it’s not! It’s yours! What you can do, buddy, is get back over here and climb past the threshold, and start your journey to the Great Beyond, like every other sixty-year old man! You think you’re the first person to have reservations about climbing inside of a giant mouth? It’s what we do, though, alright? It’s part of the deal we struck with the Gods. It’s the only way to the Great Beyond. You want to see your wife, right? Your parents? All your deceased loved ones? Then stop chickening out and get the fuck over here!”
All while he spoke, his volume had crescendoed from a whisper to a shout. I went over to the bag and put my clothes on, ignoring how the greasy butter made me feel. I knew that part of my hesitation was due to the fact that my system had always resisted the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Yet who could die this way? Years of propaganda tried to prepare the mind for this gruesome end. However, the sight of that open maw quivering with anticipation filled my mind with more fear than I could even contemplate.
“I’m going home,” I told the gate agent.
He threw up his hands and shook his head, the toupee threatening to come loose from his skull.
“No one will pick you up from here. This is supposed to be a one way ticket. And you have to wear this now. No buts.”
With one quick motion, he slapped a sticker directly on the center of my forehead. I knew what it said.
Heretic.
…
“What the hell are you doing here?” asked my son as he opened the door to my former residence.
I was haggard and tired, having walked for hours on the highway, and perhaps I did resemble a walking corpse in the failing light.
“Coming home,” I replied, as I tried to push past him.
“Woah, wait, wait, wait… you left the temple without ascending? Please tell me there was a like a problem, a technical setback.”
“Yes, son there was.”
“Oh thank the gods…”
“I didn’t want to climb inside a giant mouth,” I admitted.
The hallway of my old home was strange, the lighting weak and amber, as though it was somehow leaking through the blinds from a sodium lamp outside. In the kitchen I saw my daughter in-law sitting at the table, her face mortified.
“Dad, you gotta go back. Is that a heretic sticker on your forehead? Oh my god, I could lose my job! Do you realize what you are doing to us?”
“They’re lying to us, son,” I tell him. “They slather you with butter and put pepper in your hair right before you’re supposed to climb inside. They give you a hallucinogen to cloud your mind. We’re food for them. Those monsters.”
“So you really are a heretic.”
We have never left the entryway, and my son has backed away from me, as though I am some creature with an infectious disease.
“Never would have expected this from you. You raised me right, took me to church, told me to work hard, to always vote. Now at the end of your life you’ve turned into an iconoclast. Not just that, a fucking heretic!”
“Jerry, you’re shouting,” said my daughter in-law.
She whisper-yelled this from the kitchen, but the consequences of this argument have manifested in two small shadows standing atop the stairs.
“Grandpa?”
The kids came bounding down and embraced my legs. I placed my hands on their little heads and feel the force of life itself, and I wonder how anyone could willing embrace the narrative that we aren’t needed anymore after six decades.
“Oh Frank, what have you done?” said Lauri, my daughter in-law.
She has stood finally and tries to pull the kids away from me.
“You’re supposed to be in Heaven with grandma!” said my grandson.
“Did they kick you out?” asked my granddaughter.
“No, Grandpa’s going to Heaven, he’s just a little delayed,” explained my son.
“I don’t want to go to Heaven, either,” said my granddaughter. “I don’t want to walk inside a giant mouth.”
“Good,” I said. “You shouldn’t want to.”
“Alright, Dad, you got to leave,” said my son.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked.
“Here.”
He thrusted a wad of cash toward me.
“Take it. Go sleep somewhere and think about what you have to do tomorrow.”
He pushed me outside and shut the door in my face.
…
I wandered down by the docks, and the fog crept in, seething around everything like an encompassing spirit. The streetlights were faint, just murmurs, and I was cold. It was a seeping cold, the kind of cold you feel from being wet—it starts in your fingers and passes through your hands and soaks into your core—and the only way to cure it was to sit at a roaring hearth with a steaming cup in your chilled palms. The water lapped against the pier with a consistent rhythm, and I considered stripping down and jumping into those icy waters. There will be no hearth, never again, and wouldn’t it be preferable to freeze and drown rather than to be eaten by a giant? So went my thinking, and I had already removed my shirt and taken off my shoes when I felt a hand fall on my bare shoulder.
“What are you doing, my son?” asked the priest.
“I’m going to jump into the water,” I admitted.
“Will you come with me? It’s warm in the church. I can give you something to drink.”
I felt something collapse inside me, and so I followed the priest.
In the church I felt the vestiges of the past and the horribleness of the new. The old iconography had been removed; there was not a cross in sight, nor did I see any signs of Jesus or the Apostles. Instead, in the center of the altar was a looming statue of a giant, hands outstretched and raised toward the heavens. In its palms were people sitting peacefully, their tiny faces radiant with glory. The giant’s mouth was tightly shut, however, and it wore clothes to hide its musculature, unlike the real thing. There was nothing uncanny about it, really. It resembled a statue of a man. Having looked inside the maw of the creature and observed its bulk sitting on the tarmac, I can say that the sculpture is misleading at best. Through the thick malaise of depression and apathy came a sharp burst of anger as I turned toward the priest.
“That statue is a lie,” I told him as he brought me a cup of coffee.
He paused and looked at it for a moment before handing me my cup.
“Yes, I think you are right,” he admitted.
“They don’t look like us, really,” I said. “Maybe a crude resemblance. They have two legs, two arms, and a head. But their skin is gray, and there are massive lumps on their shoulders, and their eyes have a deep emptiness in them, as though they have stared into the abyss and taken some of it with them. They are monsters, not saviors. And you’re feeding us to them.”
“You’re right. I can’t argue with that.”
The priest sat down on a pew and leaned back with a great sigh.
“I devoted my life to the cloth,” he said. “I believed with all of my heart. Sure, I had the occasional doubt, but I knew that the Creator was real and that salvation was possible through belief. And so I believed. I believed when these things crawled out of the earth and came down from the sky. I believed when they materialized out of the air, when they rose from the ocean depths. It wasn’t until all resistance crumbled that I lost my faith. I kept waiting for us to persevere, but there was nothing we could do. All weapons were useless against them. “God helps those who help themselves.” We couldn’t help ourselves, so one of two possibilities was true. Either God wasn’t real or the arrival of the giants was a trial we had to endure. A compromise was brokered. And you are right that we, the great religions of the world, negotiated it. They wanted to eat all of humanity, you understand. We promised them that, but they would have to wait if they wanted us to cooperate. Time doesn’t mean anything to them. In the face of total annihilation, senicide is a worthy compromise, wouldn’t you agree?”
“It doesn’t appeal much to me at this moment,” I said.
“No, of course not. But you’ve had sixty good years, am I correct? You had a family, children, grandchildren. A successful business. A nice home, vacations, good times. You’re among the luckiest human beings to have ever existed, really. No dying from infection or watching your children get eaten by a bear. All the comforts and joys of modern life have been experienced. And now it is your time to pay your debt to society. Nothing of what you have enjoyed will be left for future generations if you don’t start your journey to the Great Beyond. Think about your kids and grandchildren. Think about their children’s children. Think about the human race.”
He was right, I supposed. I remembered the appearance of the giants and the brief war that followed. But the propaganda was what really disturbed me. That, and the fact that I had to be eaten by a giant monster.
“Why do we have to lie to everyone? Why can’t we figure out some way of killing them?” I asked.
“Smarter people than you and I have contemplated that question,” he replied wearily. “Suffice it to say a better solution has not been reached. Please, let’s no longer ask why circumstances can’t be different. We are unable to change the way the world is; we are just two men adrift in an ocean that will swallow us one day. I have stronger hallucinogenics that I can give to you. Take them with you. Return to the airport tomorrow at six o’clock. Then you can ascend to the Great Beyond and the world can keep on spinning. Think about this, my friend: everything depends on you right now. You are responsible for the fate of us all. Every person who does not ascend weakens the truce between mankind and the giants. You have to show up tomorrow. You will, won’t you?”
I looked at the capsules the priest placed in my hand. Giant, bright-red horse pills. Would I be able to swallow them? I didn’t seem as though I had a choice.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do as I’m supposed to do.”
…
I took one of the pills as I walked out of the church. It was still cold but the fog had lifted, and the moon had poked through the clouds, painting the way forward. I walked onward, waiting for something to kick in, a jolt of faith or purpose. Past the ruined industrial buildings and deeper into the city I went, leaving behind the scattered memories of a life. It seemed, as the drug took effect, that every step I took triggered a memory and a little burst of emotion. Standing on the hillside as a child, looking for Kirsten Summers in the darkness as the children played tag. That house in Chicago with the painted red walls and moldering basement shower. My old dog, black and shaggy, sitting on the armrest of the couch, his long nose pointing through the window blinds. Kissing my wife for the first time against her red Firebird. Suddenly, I stepped out of the past and realized I was standing in the middle of the street in the heart of downtown. Not a car was in sight, and a strange quiet hung in the air, as though the current hour were a forbidden time for the living. The buildings were huge, the lights flashing, the streets wide, the steam billowing out of the sewer grates. Would this exist without me? When I vanished down the throat of a monster, would I take the entire universe into the bowels of the beast? The drug was supposed to heighten my connection with the living world, but all I felt was alienation and doom. Had the priest given me the proper pills? Or was I seeing the world how it truly existed, through my eyes and my eyes alone?
There was no way for me to know any of what I desired. Perhaps I would ascend when the giant consumed my body, even though I knew the truth. Maybe when you believed something, you made it true. As I meandered out of the street, I felt the resistance of my heart soften. There was no way to fight, no where to run. I was doomed, and all that remained was for me to begin the long walk back to the terminal.
“Hey, Heretic. Come here,” said a voice in an alleyway.
All I could see was a black leather-clad arm, a bare finger extending from a gloved hand motioning toward me. My end was preordained, so what would be the harm of being knifed in an alleyway?
A hooded face came into the light. I saw a chin and nose and not much else. The voice was female but harsh, like she smoked packs of cigarettes constantly and gargled with whiskey.
“They’re going to make you Ascend tomorrow, ain’t they? You want to do something to change the whole bloody process?”
“Yes,” I said without any emotion.
“They couldn’t kill them from the outside, but they haven’t tried from inside,” said the woman. “You hop in that mouth with enough high explosives and that giant won’t eat another human again.”
“That would dissolve the agreement,” I said. “We’d be at war with the giants.”
“Wouldn’t war be better than this bullshit? Lying to everybody that they’re gods and we’re going to heaven when we jump in their mouths?”
Her voice dripped with disdain.
“We didn’t rise to the top of the food chain to go back down it. This world is full of too many people unwilling to resist. You’ve already proven that you don’t always do what you’re told. My group has something figured out tomorrow. We’re going to convince everyone that’s Ascending to wear four pounds of plastic explosive layered over their body. We’ll take out the monsters in a one fell swoop. How would you like to be a part of that? While everyone else walked willingly to their demise, you decided to put a stop to the whole rotten system. That’s a legacy to be proud of, friend.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why the fuck not?”
“That’s the attitude,” said the woman, who still refused to step completely into the light. “Come with me. We’ll fix you up, and you’ll fix those goddamn giants and go down as a hero, not a sheep.”
Without hesitation, I stepped into the darkness of the alleyway.
…
I walked down the terminal, struggling to hold on to that sense of displacement, the feeling that I wasn’t really where I was. Agents in red coats passed, hurrying toward their terminals to escort people to their Ascension, but I took my time, of course. No amount of philosophy or purpose had prepared me for my death. It didn’t matter that I had plastic explosive hidden on my person, and my drug consumption had failed to alleviate the fear. All of it had went by so fast, quick as a flash—my adolescence, my youth, my marriage, my kids, my career—and now I was at the end. Why couldn’t I hold on to a moment? Why couldn’t I just slide back into the past and ruminate forever? We always had to be marching forward, the inexorable progress of time. Except it wasn’t progress from my perspective. It was degeneration. It was time to be culled.
An agent approached me, a blond woman with flecks of gray in her long hair.
“It’s time for your preparation,” she said.
“We wouldn’t want it to have indigestion,” I said.
She didn’t even blink an eye.
“Sir, we recommend that you undergo a seasoning to make your Ascension as smooth as possible.”
“I’m going to respectfully decline,” I said.
“That’s your choice, but it is likely to affect your status in the Afterlife.”
“There’s not going to be an Afterlife, and you know it,” I muttered.
She extended an arm and pulled the sticker that said “heretic” off my forehead in one deft motion.
“No more of that,” she said. “It is time to believe.”
“But I don’t believe.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Actions speak louder than words.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Take me to our gods.”
As we approached the terminal, I could see it on the tarmac, sitting with legs crossed, gray-skinned, muscular, gigantic. The yellow eyes stared straight ahead at nothing. Workers scattered around it, busy little insects. One of them looked to be operating a machine to file its toe nails.
“Have you been out there on the tarmac?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“What’s it like? Been around one of them?”
“Surreal. You know that they’re not of this world. You can feel an attraction, almost like a foreign magnetism. I don’t know how to describe it. It really is inexplicable.”
She was right that they didn’t look real—even staring directly at a giant through the window, I kept thinking that it was an illusion, a model or a projection. The mouth, however, did look alive.
You could look down the jet bridge and see it, a quivering cavern of moist, dripping flesh. The pink tongue, the peg-like teeth descending from the upper jaws like stalactites, the throat and bulging tonsils in the rear. The pictures hanging from the walls of the jet bridge featuring idyllic natural scenes and inspirational words like “hope” and “love” did nothing to dispel the sensation of sliding down to your doom. I stopped before the entrance and turned toward the gate agent, in an attempt to delay the inevitable and muster my courage.
“What happened to the other guy? The one with the toupee?”
“What do you think happened to him?” she answered.
“Did his Ascension come early?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you try talking to a hungry giant that eats people and tell him that his meal has been denied,” she said.
That was a catalyst to get me down the ramp. Someone had to feed the monster, and it was going to be me and my plastic explosives. It took only a few seconds to walk down and stand before the opened maw. Hot, rancid breath billowed over me. Every natural instinct I possessed fought my command to step into that mouth. With a shaking, sweaty palm, I removed the igniter from my pocket and hastily connected it to a dangling wire hidden underneath my shirt. I was ready—not cool as a cucumber, mind you—but the deed must be done and there was no way out of it now. It took all of my resolve to step over the threshold and place my foot on that pink tongue. Nothing happened. The jaws didn’t slam shut. With my finger on the trigger, I left the jetway and entered the maw.
I kept waiting for the jaws to compress, for the teeth to come down, for the tongue to come alive like a snake. Any movement on its part, and I would press the trigger and ignite the plastic explosive, destroying my mortal form and hopefully that of the giant’s in the process. The tongue quivered for a second before subsiding. A string of saliva fell from the roof of the mouth and stained my shoulder. Christ, why prolong this I thought. Just fucking press the button…
It happened so fast that I couldn’t react. The tongue threw me upward and I lost my igniter, and for a moment I thought that it would swallow me in one quick gulp, but then I was out on the jetway, dripping on my hands and knees, staring out at a mouth that was now shut and backing away. Yellow eyes viewed my prostrate form with alien dispassion. Suddenly, it spoke in a lugubrious voice heavy with gravel and portent.
“This one does not believe,” it uttered, rising above the tarmac.
Farther down the tarmac, an explosion shook the jetway. The giant didn’t even turn to examine the carnage. It turned toward the setting sun, and began to walk away as sirens and screams rang out. I looked down and saw that my shirt was unbuttoned and the explosives were visible for all to see. A ball of bright light briefly caught my peripheral vision, and my ears were suddenly assaulted by a beastly bellowing that lowering my head in pain. When it ceased, I saw my giant—he was mine, somehow, in what way I don’t know—shimmering in the horizon, his form shifting between the physical plane and that of the immaterial. After a moment he ceased to be, and there was nothing left of the whole process, just burning infrastructure and myself lying confused on a jetway leading to nowhere, the sun going down on the faraway hills, the future a ruin hiding something, perhaps, in its immolated ashes.
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