Swift to Chase: A Collection of Stories by Laird Barron

Author:Laird Barron [Barron, Laird]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Horror, Short Stories & Anthologies, Short Stories, Single Authors
Amazon: B01K4ZI1K6
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2016-10-06T22:00:00+00:00

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This transformation started long before the inciting incident in the hole. Maybe it had been occurring my entire life. Ten bucks says Dad’s sperm was already mutating when it t-boned Mom’s egg. He’d gotten spritzed with Agent Orange during his tour in Vietnam and suffered all kinds of health problems afterward. He drank, and so did Mom. There was also a sense of cursedness haunting the family line. Dad went in a wreck. Dad’s cousin was an ace Alaskan bush pilot who death spiraled his Cessna into Lake Illiamna. An uncle was eaten up by cancer despite living a clean, Presbyterian life, no smokes, no booze. An aunt did ten years in the pen and got hit by a motorcyclist three days after her parole. Somebody else got shanked in a brawl at the Gold Digger, back when it really was a saloon with sawdust and a mechanical bull and full of motorcycle club thugs and crank heads looking to stab you in the kidney. My sister, she joined the FBI. Her name was Jeanie and last I saw her she was eighteen months and counting. Rumor is she went down in a corruption sting and sliced her wrists.

Dumb luck I didn’t pop out of the womb with two heads.

I like the idea that death is a transitory state; my passage from pupa to final instar. I’m a whole new insect. While the notion I’ve become posthuman sends my nerves a-twanging, I’m not exactly afraid, or even concerned. Oh, a tiny fragment of the old me mewls and screeches in its cage, but to no greater effect than the whine of a fly under glass.

The Usurper deigns to answer my imprecations at one point.

We are the next big thing. This whisper issues from inside me; it oozes forth. The whisper is blood welling from a puncture. Sexless, dispassionate. We are Omega, we are Kingdom Come. We have always been; we will always be. I receive a picture, muddy and flickering, of warm seas and green light, of trilobites and worms and moss. Dinosaurs have not been invented, but the devil is everywhere.

We are the apparatus. We are the apex. We are first.

I cannot reply. I’m trying to decide if apex means precisely what it intimates and if it’s something I want to be (of course you do, you ninny!). Again, images coalesce from the ether, like bursts of speech through shortwave static. The future unravels in an arc of projectile vomit from the jaws of Saturn: an approaching tsunami of blood and peeled flesh and more blood. A thousand feet tall, rolling at a thousand miles per hour. The first of many such waves. Wave after wave of carnage, and me in gigantic repose atop a heap of bones. My friends and foes, beneath me at last!

Ferris is fucking Monroe. We don’t have to take that kind of bullshit. We should fix their wagons. We are the apparatus. We are the way.

That sounds reasonable. A man should attend his priorities.

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