“Aww fuck,” Leon said, his thirteen-year-old voice surprisingly deep. Leon was five-ten, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, a small mustache already growing on his chestnut face. “Why’d we have to come down this alley?”
“We’ve been down here a million times,” said Calvin, Leon’s pale, red-haired companion. He was three months younger than Leon, had just hit puberty, and stood five inches shorter than his best friend. “We’ve never seen her before.”
“We shouldn’t have skipped school,” Leon lamented, stepping closer to the woman. She was either Latina or Asian. It was hard to tell with bruises covering her battered face, her eyes swollen shut, nose mashed like that of an over-the-hill boxer. Her black hair was cut short. She wore a simple flower-pattern dress that was hiked up high on her slim thighs.
“She’s just some whore,” Calvin said. “Probably didn’t pay her pimp so they put a boot to that ass and left her here.”
“Nah, look at her arms and legs,” Leon countered. “Look at the way her skin be, like, almost moving. Shit’s freaky.”
Calvin shook his head. “You tripping. She’s just jonesing for some fetty.”
“Nah, there’s something else.” Leon looked around the garbage-strewn alleyway, grabbed a cracked wooden baseball bat, and pushed the woman’s dress up almost to her crotch. She moaned but remained still.
“What you doing?” Calvin said. “Trying to peep her snatch?”
“Shit, I seen plenty of snatch.”
“Yo’ momma’s!”
“Suck your momma’s dick, bitch,” Leon said before he yelped, dropped the bat, and stepped back, almost tripping on a discarded box of wilted lettuce.
“Her beef flaps scare you?”
“There’s something inside her … something trying to get out.”
Calvin picked up the bat, stepped closer to the woman, and gasped.
Leon was right. The woman’s skin all over her body—arms, legs, even her gaunt face—was undulating, moving, like some cheap-ass CGI horror video. Except this was no movie. This shit was real.
“We gotta get the fuck out of here.” Leon’s voice cracked with fear. “There’s a bud store two blocks over on Franklin. We can go over there and see if someone can help.“
“Just chill,” Calvin said, repulsed yet fascinated by the strange gesticulations on the woman. “Lemme see your phone, man.”
Leon frowned. “What? Why you want that?”
“I want a selfie.”
“Nah,” Leon said. “My momma does phone checks. She sees this and I’ll be in big trouble.”
“C’mon, man, give me your phone. I’ll put it straight to my Insta, then delete it. Your momma will never—”
Calvin’s words died in his mouth as a geyser of arterial blood erupted from the woman’s thigh. The hot red shower arced in the air, a crimson fountain landing on his new Jordan Retro sneakers.
“Oh shit!” Calvin cried, scurrying back like a crab being chased by hungry seagulls.
“Look! Look!” Leon said, pointing at the woman.
Calvin looked and wished he hadn’t. The jaundiced skin on the woman’s legs and thighs ballooned, ready to pop, and where the skin had ruptured, a six-inch-long, pencil-thin thing was wiggling its way out.
Calvin thought maybe it was some type of crazy worm the woman picked up shooting fetty. But when the thing tore itself free of her skin and fell on the dirty asphalt of the alley, he realized it was nothing like anything he’d seen before. It was a grotesque, bizarre creature, four inches long, dull black like an ancient piece of coal, a monster come to life. It had five hair-thin appendages sprouting from its body, all whipping around in a frenzy of movement. It latched onto a busted wine bottle and pulled itself upright, now standing on two of the spindly appendages.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” Leon repeated, the woman’s body contorting and shaking as if in the grips of a grand mal seizure. Her eyes opened impossibly wide before her right eyeball popped out of its socket with a hair-thing attached, the bloody white orb flopping about like a too-large lollipop.
“Leon, help!” Calvin cried, beating on the first hair-monster clinging to the wine bottle. His hits were hard and true, yet it was like beating on a piece of hard rubber. One of the writhing appendages of the hair-monster wrapped itself around the bat like the arm of an octopus and pulled its way toward Calvin’s hand.
“Throw it away!” Leon yelled from behind him. Calvin turned to see Leon ripping a two-by-four from a pallet. It came free with a splintering sound, three nails sticking out of the end. Calvin dropped the bat and Leon handed him the board.
“Let’s smash these fuckers!” Leon hollered, ripping free his own two-by-four. Like knights with long swords, they attacked the monstrosities that continued to burst out of the woman’s rippling, bloody flesh.
For a brief moment, jacked up on fear and adrenaline, Calvin and Leon felt like they had gained the upper hand in their nightmare war against the hair-things. But as the monsters encircled them, their hope faltered. More and more of the coal-black things ripped their way out of the woman’s ragged flesh and came lurching toward them; when they knocked one away, two more appeared.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Calvin panted.
“I know!” Leon cried, his head jerking from side to side. “But they got us surrounded!”
Calvin looked; Leon was right. The boys, backed up against the huge pile of stinking rubbish behind a boarded-up pizza joint, were surrounded in the narrow alley by the hair-monsters. Some of the things were crawling, some were wobbling upright, but they were all closing in.
“We need to jump over them!” Leon shouted. “There’s too many!”
Calvin shook his head, tears streaming down his face. “I can’t! What if I fall? What if—”
Leon dropped his board and jumped, easily clearing the line of hair-monsters.
“Leon!” cried Calvin. “Don’t leave me!”
But his friend was already sprinting down the alley. Calvin turned back to face alone the horde of encroaching hair-things. He screamed in anger and fear, bringing the two-by-four down again and again on the nightmare aberrations, but it was no use; they were getting closer, the wood splintering apart into useless pieces. Soon the monstrosities would be burrowing into his young flesh just as—
“Calvin!”
The voice jerked Calvin back to the present. It was Leon, standing just outside the half-circle of monsters, dousing them with liquid from a dented can of lighter fluid.
“Back up against the garbage!” Leon commanded. Calvin did so just as his best friend lit the hair-things ablaze. As Calvin shielded his face against the flames and heat, the hair-things popped and cracked like bacon grease in a red-hot skillet. Thick, oily smoke rose in the air, smelling of rotting flesh and steaming shit.
“They’re not moving,” Leon said after a moment.
Calvin opened his eyes and saw his friend was right. He gingerly stepped over the smoldering mess and stood by Leon. “I thought you was gonna leave me to die.”
Leon punched him on the shoulder. “Hell, no. You’re my boy.”
Calvin wiped snot from his nose with the back of his sleeve. “Thanks, man.” He looked at the mass of hair-things and grimaced. “Where’d you get the lighter fluid?”
“Down the alley. I peeped it when we walked in, and figured that fire destroys everything, so …” Leon shrugged.
Calvin nodded, scrunching his face. “That shit smells like dirty ass.”
“Yeah, that’s nasty.” Leon pulled Calvin’s arm. “C’mon—let’s get out of here.”
They passed by the bleeding, torn-up body of the dead woman. Leon stopped. “It don’t seem right leaving her.”
Calvin sighed. “Ain’t nothin’ right about this city. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What do you think those things were?” Leon asked, holding his nose and squatting down to look closely at the hair-things. “I never seen anything like it.”
“I don’t know, man. The Army put in that new germ warfare research center at the university. Maybe something got out from there.”
“Maybe.” Leon was still looking at the things when Calvin poked him in the side.
Leon screamed and jumped back. “You trying to give me a heart attack? That wasn’t funny!”
“It was funny as shit!”
“Well, it ain’t gonna be funny if the po-po show up,” Leon countered. “Let’s get to stepping home.”
Calvin stayed still, then looked around the alley. “One second.” He rummaged through the garbage, finally coming up with an empty peanut-butter jar and a lid.
“What you doing?”
“Getting me a sample.”
“That’s some crazy bullshit.”
Calvin waved him off and used a piece of the broken two-by-four to carefully scrape one of the hair-things—which still twitched feebly—into the jar.
“Why’d you do that?” Leon asked as the boys made their way down the alley back to their homes.
Calvin shrugged, looking at the hair-thing in the jar. “Maybe we can sell it. You know, to some scientist or museum.”
“That’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
The boys walked in silence for a few minutes until Calvin stopped. He shook the jar and peered inside. One tiny piece of the thing, no bigger than an eyelash, wiggled like a worm on a hook.
“I know that look,” Leon said, staring at his friend, who wore a sly grin. “That’s the look when you’re gonna do evil.”
“What do you think would happen if someone ate this thing?”
“Probably end up like that poor woman it came from.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Calvin shook the jar. “My momma is making some of her no-bake cookies tonight.”
“The ones she fills with bud?”
“Hell yeah! What else you gonna put in ‘em?”
“I don’t like that stuff, makes me paranoid.”
“They ain’t for you. They’re for our fat-ass—and your fat-ass—landlord, Sly Cumminsworth. That greedy piece of shit just loves them no-bakes, and momma figures as long as she keeps giving them to him, he won’t kick us out for always being late on rent.”
“But she’s wrong,” Calvin continued, staring at the worm-thing. “That motherfucker is gonna kick us out as soon as he can sell the place to some rich-ass developer. I say let’s do a science experiment and put this thing into a no-bake and see what it does to Sly.”
Leon thought for a few seconds, then nodded. “I got no problem with that. Hell, I’ll even let you use my phone to record when those things pop out of his rich-ass belly.”