Bad Glass

His quivering hands made their way up to the line of buttons on his shirt. He grasped and pulled the drab fatigues apart, revealing the pale white skin underneath. Then his eyes—until now completely rolled back inside their sockets—slowly spun forward, and he looked down in terror as his fingernails continued with their ripping motion, now working away at his flesh. It was like he was trying to pull his skin apart, trying to open up his chest and reach inside. His fingernails left behind beveled lines filled with crimson.

“Danny!” I managed, my voice choked with shock and confusion.

And then the hand broke through.

It should have torn him apart, it should have pushed him wide open, but it barely made a wound: no displaced mass, no tectonic movement inside his bones and flesh. Just a hand, reaching up from his heart, sprouting from his skin like a grotesque tree.

First fingers, then wrist. Then forearm. Then elbow. All the way up to a thin, unexercised bicep. Pale, subterranean skin, streaked with thin streams of blood.

The hand swiveled on its wrist—a graceful, artistic movement—and blood spilled from its open palm. It froze in that position, palm open and cupped—not as a statue would freeze, motionless, but rather as a human would freeze, complete with tiny muscular tremors.

Floyd, Charlie, and the soldiers all stumbled back as one, and I heard the sound of retching behind me—a violent dry heave—but I stayed perfectly still. Despite their terror, they all kept their flashlights fixed on Danny’s grotesque, broken form. Some of the beams were shaking, and I heard Floyd give voice to a tiny little sob.

Danny quivered for a moment—the last vestiges of life fleeing his body—then his lower back collapsed to the ground and all of his muscles fell slack. His bladder released, and the room filled with the stench of urine. I thought I heard the sound of his last breath rattling out in a violent heave, but that might have just been my imagination, my need to put some type of punctuation at the end of this horrific statement.

It was a gruesome sight. Absolutely horrible.

Slowly, reflexively, I popped the lens cap off my camera, raised it to my eye, and started taking pictures.

The soldiers ran away as soon as they got the chance. They retreated back the way we had come, leaving behind a stream of choked obscenities. I think Floyd would have run, too, if I hadn’t been there to stop him. And Charlie … I don’t know what Charlie would have done. His face was calm despite startled, wide-open eyes.

“C’mon,” I said, pointing to a door in the left-hand wall. “Taylor’s still out there. We’ve got to find her.”

“But … but Danny,” Floyd said, his voice searching, desperate. His eyes remained fixed on the dead body. His face had gone paper-white. “What happened to Danny?”

“I don’t know,” I said, omitting all the stuff I did know, all the stuff I’d seen—Weasel’s fingers, Taylor’s father, merged flesh and broken form—that might shed light on the situation. “The city. The city happened.” It was a statement I’d made before, and it still seemed to hold true.

Unless it’s me and not the city. Unless I happened. My presence, my being here—melting Danny, punching out his heart.

Then I grabbed Floyd’s forearm and pulled him across the room. I cut a wide berth around Danny’s broken form and steered us clear of the piles of twitching spider parts.

Charlie followed.

We crossed through two more rooms, then back through the maw of an earthen tunnel. Once again heading down.

There were wires in the walls here, poking intermittently from the dirt. Not neat, straight lines like the ones we’d found beneath our neighbor’s house, but branching and skewed, like veins in the walls of an organ, as if they’d developed here over time to push blood through the bowels of the earth.

I headed straight through an intersection, then turned left through another hub. More passages followed. I was moving at random, stopping every now and then to listen for sound in the dark, looking for something to guide me through this maze. But there was nothing, and I just kept moving. No sound. No hint. No clue.

Once I looked back and saw Charlie drawing an arrow in the wall with the blade of his shovel. Marking our path.

Then we were in another hub. There was a lantern perched atop a folding metal chair here; it was lit, supporting a tiny guttering flame. The walls danced in flickering light.

I was ready to plunge forward through the mouth of another tunnel, but Floyd grabbed my arm and pointed toward something on the floor, half buried in the dirt. He dropped to his knees and started clearing away some of the muck. It was a messenger bag—tan canvas smeared with mud, a ripped and reknotted shoulder strap.