Last night I was driving home from work when I saw a car crash up ahead. It had just happened I think—the front of the small brown sedan was cozied up to a massive cypress like it was giving it a hug, and as I slowed, I thought I could make out a thin trail of grey smoke among the gloomy twilight shadows that covered the tree line. No signs of movement, but no signs of help either. I glanced into the rearview and my heart sank. No headlights or other signs of bystanders that could share or take the burden of helping from me, and I was already wasting time, wasn’t I?
Pulling onto the shoulder, I grabbed my phone as I got out. I tried to call 911, but it just buzzed and then went dead each time. Awesome. Just fucking great. Leaning back in, I turned on my emergency lights and headed down toward the car.
“Hello? Anyone there?”
I kept hoping I’d see them pop up from around the far side of the car or the bushes somewhere—something that meant that they were okay and just needed a ride maybe, not someone to try and save their lives. Not that I was against helping—I don’t mean that. I just don’t know that much about CPR outside of a college class a few years back, and I really don’t want to be responsible for deciding if someone needs to be moved from a wreck or not.
“Hello?”
Still nothing. And yeah, I now saw the limp figure of a man behind the wheel. Great, just awesome. Maybe he was just unconscious though. Maybe if I just…crept up to the door and tapped on the window.
“Hello? Sir, are you okay?”
What if this was a trick? A ruse to rob someone on a lonely highway? I glanced at the crumpled hood of the car. Seemed kind of a stretch though. Looking down at my phone, I tried dialing 911 one last time. Buzz buzz buzz and then nothing. Fuck me.
I reached for the door latch gingerly like I was moving toward a hot stove. It wasn’t far from the truth, maybe, the thought pushing me to be quicker in case something in the car decided to catch fire or explode. Just open the door, check and see if the guy was alive and…
“Look like you could use some help.”
I screamed at the voice behind me. Spun around, eyes wide, simultaneously terrified and grateful that I wasn’t alone anymore. The woman in front of me was short and petite, and it looked like she was wearing scrubs and a white coat, but it was hard to tell in the growing darkness. “Hey! Um yeah. I…I just found this guy.”
She looked past me and then met my eyes again. “It’s okay. I’m a doctor. Just help me get him out and away from the car, alright?”
I nodded, forcing myself to calm down a little and think. Okay, I was here and helping, and this lady was a doctor and knew way more what to do, so I’d just do what she said and then everything would be okay. Except…
She was so dirty. I mean, she was dressed like she’d come from a hospital or something, but why were her pants and shoes so muddy? And her white coat was streaked with brown in more than a few places. The ground was a little damp, but if she’d come from the shoulder, she shouldn’t look like she’d been on a wet hike through the woods, right?
I looked back up at the road. And where was her car? Where had she come from? I was about to ask if she’d been a passenger in the wreck when she seemed to pick up on my line of thought.
“I guess I look a mess. I saw the crash a minute ago but kept driving until I could get a mile marker for 911. It was just a round the bend, and so after I got them I just decided it was quicker to jog back here.” She wrinkled her nose as she rubbed her hands on her coat. “Guess the mud was slicker than I gave it credit for.” Nodding her head at the car, she stepped closer. “But we need to hurry and check him. See if he can be saved and if anyone else is in there.”
Blushing, I nodded. “Yeah, sure sure.” Emboldened by her presence and not wanting to look cowardly, I gripped the latch and opened the door. The man inside sagged against his seatbelt limply. I glanced back at her. “Is he…dead?”
The doctor moved past me and put her hand against his cheek. “No, but he’s fading. We need to hurry so I can check him.” Leaning over him, she undid his belt and gripped him under his left arm before catching my eye. “No passengers. Grab him under his other armpit and let’s drag him out.”
I did as I was told, and within a couple of minutes we had drug him fifty feet down from the car. For a small woman, she was surprisingly strong, and while checking him by touching his face seemed weird, she certainly seemed to know what she was doing. As soon as we had him laid out on the ground she started working, checking him for wounds, looking at his eyes and mouth, listening to his chest. I stood nearby watching pensively, hoping that she could save him or at least keep him going until the ambulance arrived. His wallet had fallen out as we’d drug him, and now I held it clutched tightly in my hands. I’d made the mistake of looking inside. His name was Tim Landers. He was in his thirties and on his license he looked like a nice enough guy. It all made it more real for me. Made him more real. We needed to save him, and…
My heart sank when she started shaking her head. “This isn’t working. He’s too far gone. What a waste.” She leaned back from working on the man, his increasingly wet and ragged breaths stretching out in the silence between us.
“Isn’t there anything else you can try? Do you need anything from your car?”
She looked back at me and offered a slight smile. “No, it’s okay. I have what I need right here.” Reaching into her coat pocket, she pulled out a long…was that a needle? I guessed it was, but there was no container…no syringe part. It was just a straight line of thick metal that she gripped in one hand as she placed her other palm on the man’s face and shifted her weight onto it. Before I could ask what she was doing, she had rammed the needle through his left temple and deep into his head. I let out a scream, my cry echoing back from the trees as the man’s body jittered twice and then stilled.
“What the…fuck did you do? Why?” I was backing away now, first from what I was seeing, and then from her. She’d risen to her feet and was walking toward me, smile now wide on her lips.
“Just what was necessary. It was a waste to spend more time or energy on him. So I gave him mercy instead.”
I kept glancing behind me as I backed up. I knew I was heading away from my car, but the idea of moving toward her or turning my back was too much at the moment. I just needed time to wrap my head around everything and then I could go if I needed to. Did what she was saying make sense? I mean maybe, but even if she was a doctor, didn’t she have to try to save him? Could doctors really just put someone down like a horse with a broken leg?
“But the ambulance…maybe they could have…”
The doctor frowned at me. “No, there was no help for him. The cloud puts a strain on the system unfortunately, and with his injuries, nothing would have survived. Better to cut my losses and look toward other resources.” She smiled at me. “Are you a smoker?”
I stared at her, confused, as I continued to slowly backpedal like a frightened crab across the wet grass. “Um…no? What cloud are you talking…”
“Good.”
Her voice was muffled now despite her mouth being open wide, almost painfully wide. It was because something was in her mouth—a dark, furry thing matted with spit and blood and ichor that gleamed in the first traces of the evening’s moonlight. The thing’s eyes were glittering too, but with an unnatural shine that came some from somewhere inside them, a hungry gleam that only intensified as it tensed itself when the woman lurched forward.
I opened my mouth to scream, the start of a panicked plan to turn and run, but it was too late. I was too slow, and it knew what I was going to do, and it was already jumping from the woman, black legs splaying out as a bright gray membrane flared out between its limbs, catching the air and shooting it forward and onto my waiting
tongue. They aren’t for making forts.”
I tried to look stern at Candace and failed. She had waited until the last minute for her class project, again, and now she was stuck in my office until I got done with patients. And while I was giving her a hard time, I had to admit she’d done a pretty good job making a fort out a box of tongue depressors and a couple of surgical drapes.
“It’s for school. I don’t want to be doing this either. Sally’s mom made hers for her, you know.”
I frowned at her. “Sally’s mom is an alcoholic who thinks doing her child’s homework makes up for being a bad mother.” When Candace’s eyes got big, I laughed. “And if you repeat that at school I will skin you.” She nodded and I lightly rubbed the top of her head as I went to the door. “Go ahead and finish it up. Tim said I have one more patient and then we’ll go get dinner, okay?” She nodded, and giving her a wink, I closed the door and headed down the hall to the second exam room.
Opening the door I saw an older man sitting in one of the chairs, his hands clenched tightly around his stomach. Glancing at the name on the chart, I offered him a smile. “Mr. Nials? How’re you doing today?”
The man didn’t look up or even acknowledge me speaking at first. I could tell from past notes that he had heart issues and was a cronic smoker, and this was already looking bad, like something that needed an ER more than a regular urgent care visit. But maybe he was just hard of hearing or distracted. I drew closer and put my hand on his shoulder.
“Mr. Nials? Can you hear me?”
He looked up then, his eyes glassy and bloodshot as he stared at me. “It…it hurts so bad. It’s tearing up my guts.”
I frowned. “What is? Do you know what’s causing it?”
The man blinked and laughed as he smacked lips caked in dried spittle. He looked to be badly dehydrated, but his lips were the worst. There were lacerations there, as though something had cut his mouth recently but he lacked the moisture to bleed. Instead there were just raw, red slashes at the corners of his mouth and along his bottom lip. What was this?
“It killed my dog, you know?” His voice was rough and harsh at first, but then it broke with emotion. “Killed my Tusker.”
“What did?”
He started to shrug and then sucked in a painful breath as his hands went back to his belly. “Ah…fucking thing…he was a good dog. Best squirrel dog I ever…” Nials broke off into a coughing fit that turned into something between a choke and a wretch. Then just as suddenly, he was looking at me again and talking. “It doesn’t like it in here. It can taste my cancer maybe. It wants to be somewhere better. Somewhere it can spread the cloud.”
I crouched down next to him. “Mr. Nials, I’m about to go call an ambulance, okay? I don’t like the way you’re looking and we can get you checked out there better than we can here.”
His mouth spread wide as he began to do a strange, wet honking snort. What was that in his mouth? Was he choking on…Suddenly he was grabbing me with surprising strength, pulling me over and climbing on top even as I tried to throw him back off. He was too heavy though, and I needed to use the time I had left to scream for Tim. He’d still been up there a few minutes ago, knitting on a scarf or something. I had to scream loud enough for it to carry up to the front and make sure I was
heard Tusker let out a bark. Not just any bark, but his “hey, I found a squirrel” bark. I smiled to myself as I turned in that direction. Damn if that dog didn’t find game better than anything I’d ever used, even if he only seemed interested in squirrels most of the time. That was fine though. Last time we got enough for two stews, and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings to have that much again. And surely finding something this early was a sign it was going to be a good night.
I stepped slowly, quietly at first, not wanting to scare anything off. You wouldn’t think it, but Tusker barking almost never spooked the things. Maybe the squirrels knew he couldn’t climb trees, or maybe they were just that stupid, not realizing that he wasn’t out there by himself.
I could see Tusker now, his tail stiff and slightly wagging through the trees as he stared up at something perched above him. I started moving around, circling toward his back so I could get a good angle to see what he saw, when a black shape flew down from the trees like an arrow. I saw Tusker fall over a second before I heard him start to scream.
Hunting forgotten now, I raised my .22 and started running toward him. He was still making noises, but it was more muffled now, and as I reached him, he fell still and quiet. Crouching beside him, I scanned for some sign of what would have gotten him as I called out.
“Tusker? You okay, boy?”
Looking closer I could see blood on his head and neck, and more around his mouth. What could have done that? Had someone actually shot him with an arrow? I didn’t see any signs of that though. I reached out to touch him, and as my fingers brushed his fur, his neck rose up to meet my hand. There was a moment when I thought it was him moving or breathing, but then something broke through the surface of him, clawing out a bloody hole as it sunk its claws into my hand.
“Oh, oh God!” I staggered back, flailing my hand to get it off even as it scuttled up my arm toward my face. It stank of blood and death, and…was it a…it looked like a flying squirrel. Just like the ones we had gotten last time, though this one looked bigger and a thousand times meaner. All of this flashed through my mind in an instant, a second of shocked, stupid staring as it closed the distance to my mouth and began to claw its way in. I felt a flush of terror as I pawed at it, but it was impossibly strong and slick, and it had already made it past my lips. I felt my mind starting to cave as I felt it crawling down my throat, gagging and crying as one final thought made it out.
That this squirrel knew what we had done, and this was its
revenge. The squirrel’s thoughts were different than the people thoughts that would come later, but no less rich or complex. A squirrel’s mind is always half-dreaming, half-painfully awake.
The alert self is a machine of survival. Detecting movement, judging the environment, searching for food and dangers and opportunities. The dreaming self is full of colors, which is strange, as my friend’s waking eyes can’t see much in that way. But it’s the way of many things in this world and others. So much is bound together unseen, and the heart beats to rhythms unknown but still felt in some sacred chamber of the soul.
The squirrel’s soul shines brightly from the dark of the pools I tend to swim in. Its dream-self, full of emotion and memories and intricate stories of sensation and motion and synchronicity is beautiful in some ways to be sure, but it is also difficult to penetrate. Its perpetual paw in dreaming gave me a way in, but it was hard to exploit something that rarely thought in terms of anger or greed or…revenge.
There was something here, wasn’t there? A small imperfection to be exploited, a recent wound of loss. I push forward into its dream a little and see it. Its family was killed a few days ago by a man and his dog. It mourns them and is alone now, and that sadness and fear has bred a weak and vague species of hate. Given time, this hatred would likely die of starvation, as this creature doesn’t seem fertile soil for such things. But with a few whispers from me, I can hone and harden it into something useful. A motivation. A crack I can slip through.
Revenge.
It only takes a few days. The squirrel is not stupid, and it knows that I’m an invader. An other from outside. It thinks of me as wrong and is wary at first. But it is weak in its grief and foolish in its fear, and when it bows its head and accepts me, I know it is largely because it doesn’t want to be alone anymore.
I can sympathize. I don’t want to be alone either.
When I touch the creature, when I change it, it has a moment of fear and pain, but then it is off dreaming, now and forever. I show it the past and the future, and I think it is comforted by what it sees. The terrible man and his dog. The doctor. The man who works for her, an attempt at hosting a cloud that I think will fail, but must be attempted for the sake of causality. The man at the wrecked car. And on, and on.
We will jump from person to person, branch to branch, and along the way we will find hosts for more of my kind that will adapt to being born in the world instead of outside it. And when they come to me, I will tell them of the Outside beyond, filled with terrible, hungry things writhing in a cold and lonely dark, and the Inside, filled with people we can take and use and consume, adding their knowledge and memories and resources to our own. I will tell them all of this and they will appreciate the truth as I do. As you may, when I tell you these things, only after it is far too late.
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