New Short Story: Ragged Flesh

A jolt shot up Charlie’s spine like a lightning bolt. A spell of dizziness made him stumble a little, standing there holding his exposed penis. He had pulled over to take a piss. Vast horizons of Nevada desert surrounded him

“Whoa!” he whispered. “What the hell? There’s no way! What the hell?” Chills scattered over his shoulders like a swarm of pricking ice-cold fingers.

Despite vehement denial, it was happening. The flaccid corpse of a deer slid across the desert ground before his very eyes, moving over rocks and sage brush, as if pulled by some invisible string. It stopped. Jerked one way, and then back the other way, like two invisible forces playing tug of war.

His wife Carol called from the car: “Charlie! Stop playing with yourself. Let’s get the show going again.”

Charlie waved his hand. “Carol, come see this!”

She groaned. The Subaru’s passenger door slammed shut and she rustled her feet through the sandy rocks of the bar pit. She mumbled as she walked over. Charlie never took his eyes off the deer.

“Charlie, put your junk away,” Carol said.

“Oh!” He quickly stuffed his junk back in his pants and zipped and buttoned up. Then he pointed at the deer. “Do you see that?”

“Yeah. I smell it, too. Someone probably hit the poor thing. Can we get out of here?” She stood there with her hands on her hips, dressed in a white and brown checkered blouse, jeans shorts, and a white sunhat.

The deer corpse shuffled back and forth. “Look! See it moving like that?”

Carol removed her hands from her hips, facing the direction of the corpse. Her body visibly tensed. “Is it still alive?”

 “I watched it get dragged.”

Carol stepped toward it.

“Careful,” Charlie said.

She ignored him, and soon Charlie reluctantly followed, taking a few steps closer. He was a thin, wiry man who spent most of his time in the basement on his computer, working out finances for a company. When he wasn’t working, he spent much of his time watching docuseries or listening to news podcasts while either enjoying green tea in the backyard or walking the same routine route. Charlie loved his order, but hated chaos. He hid inside the shell of comfortable familiarity like a threatened turtle. It was his wife that demanded the road trip, protesting about it for months until Charlie finally couldn’t resist the nagging. Once the trip started, she was pulling him along like an overexcited dog on a leash. His hesitancy at times nearly choked her.

They both now stood over the deer corpse on the edge of a small hill. Both their faces were scrunched expressions of uneasiness and disgust. The blank, dead eye of the deer stared up at them like a black crater. Its tongue amusingly poked out of its mouth, almost in a bizarre and teasing manner.

The limp body writhed back and forth in small, spasmodic jerks.

“What’s moving it like that?” Charlie asked.

Then the center of its abdomen bulged. Carol gasped. Charlie’s eyes widened, and his heart pounded wildly. The fur-covered flesh of the deer’s midsection bulged and rippled, and a short moment later, the flesh ripped open, gushing blood and fluids. Carol gasped and Charlie moaned. Both of them stepped backwards as a swarm of strange multi-legged creatures emerged from the ragged hole in the deer’s flesh.

Carol leaned closer. “What are they? Ants?”

Dozens of them clambered all over the body, some of them burrowing back inside at different sections. Rapid clicking sounds that reminded Charlie oddly of Rice Krispies in milk emanated from these new creatures as they busily swarmed about, devouring the deer’s body. They did look a lot like ants, but some of them were larger, reaching the size of a tennis ball. Others were more the size of a silver dollar with large round abdomens. Their bodies were a fierce red color, and they were covered with patches of wiry, sharp black hair that almost resembled Velcro. The big ones had rows of black eyes. To his mind they had to be spiders, but they swarmed like a large ant colony.

“Unbelievable!” Carol said. “They’re devouring it. Just look at ‘em Charlie! Isn’t that just…wild?” She stepped closer, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

“Don’t get too close, Carol.” Charlie reached out, as if to grab her, but she was out of reach.

“I gotta get video of this, Charlie. I swear. We’ve found a new species.” She hovered around the corpse, leaning forward in an attempt to keep some distance between them and her feet. She recorded the stunning scene with her phone camera.

A small line of them crawled toward her. The moment carried out before Charlie in slow motion.

“Carol! Watch your feet!” He fruitlessly reached for her, but it was too late. Four of them crawled up her bare leg. Carol jumped back, shaking and dancing. She shrieked and dropped her phone. She ran back toward the Subaru but tripped into the sand and rocks along the way.

Writhing and shrieking, she slapped at her legs. Charlie ran over to her aid.

“Are they off me?” She said, whimpering.

“I think so.” He searched around, gritting his teeth with tense apprehension. He saw one that had been crushed into the sand. Its red body like a smooshed cherry. Fluids bubbled from its mangled body like black acid.

Charlie took Carol’s hand and pulled her up. “Let’s get to the car.” She was still hurting. During the short hike up the embankment, she winced and hissed in pain, gripping his shoulder as she limped along.

“I dropped my phone back there,” she said.

“I’ve still got mine. I don’t want to go back there and mess with those freaking things.”

He helped her into the passenger seat, holding her arm as she settled into place. As he hurried to the other side of the car, he mumbled to himself, “I think I can go the rest of my life without another road trip.”

A preacher clamored on the radio when he climbed into the driver’s seat: And we shall go forth and as the Lord has stated…we shall multiply and replenish the earth—

Charlie turned off the radio. Then he cranked the air conditioner to full blast and maneuvered the Subaru back on the highway.

“We’re all good now, Carol. We’ll be just fine.”

He took a deep breath and thought: That was just a little strange turbulence, a little bizarre scare. Now we can find a little motel, get a pleasant meal and maybe be back home tomorrow. Haha. This experience will surely make for some great stories later, a fun story to tell at the neighborhood party Carol liked to hold every summer.

While he told himself these things, his body language said different. He gripped the steering wheel with trembling hands. The muscles in the back of his neck had stiffened to the point of aching. Carol didn’t look well at all, either. She leaned back in her seat, head turning side to side as she moaned. Her face was pale, and a sheen of sweat drenched her face.

“How you doin’ sweetie? We’ll find some place to stop and rest.”

“I feel sick,” she said, her voice husky and hoarse. “And I just realized one of them got me.”

He glanced over and saw where she moved her hand. Blood smeared across her skin. There was a puckered hole in the flesh of her thigh.

“Oh, shit,” Charlie muttered through clenched teeth. “It looks like one of them burrowed into your leg. Did one of them burrow into your leg?”

“Pull over,” Carol said.

“What?”

“Pull over! Now!”

He veered off to the side and stopped. Carol opened the door, leaned out, and vomited. Charlie flinched as his wife blew chunks. He tried to comfort her, patting her on the back, feeling the muscles between her shoulder blades flex with each heave. He glanced to the glimmering mirage on the highway. A crow landed in the center of the road, briefly looking at them before taking flight once again. The scene seemed to foreshadow a dark, bad omen.

Carol collapsed back into her seat, looking worse. Her face was white as milk and a string of slobber dangled from her lips. Her body trembled.

“Carol?”

She mumbled incoherently.

“Carol, honey?”

Her eyes rolled back in her head, body convulsing. “I’m calling 9-1-1.” He fished his phone from his pocket with adrenaline-surged fumbling hands. A familiar sound startled him enough that he flinched, flinging his phone in the air where it landed in the footwell by Carol’s feet. Snapping and crackling.

He nearly reached over to try to grab his phone, but a wave of red bodies burst from Carol’s open mouth like a fountain spouting red. Crimson legs, armored with coarse black spiny hairs, propelled these creatures all over her face and down her neck, some of them viciously burrowing back into her flesh, creating more ragged, puckered holes.

Charlie gazed in paralyzed horror. A bizarre thought flickered in his mind among a string of other thoughts that were just exclamatory static: My God dear you’re a spouting volcano!

Paralysis broke. Charlie rammed his shoulder into the side of the door and grabbed for the lever. The door pounded open, and he tumbled face-first into the gravel. Gasping and whimpering, he stumbled to his feet and hurried away from the car. When he turned around, he got a new unpleasant surprise: the spiders—hundreds, maybe thousands—had overtaken the interior of the car. Carol was no longer visible; she was concealed by the swarming red blanket.

Charlie hopelessly yelled her name anyway. He reached toward the car, wanting desperately to do something, but there was nothing to do. Even his phone was lost at this point, covered up in the swarm.

Horror and anguish swelled inside Charlie. He clenched the sides of his head with both hands and screamed.

---

Charlie marched along the lone highway under the oppressive summer heat like a mystified zombie. His face was pale with shock. At times the corner of his jaw spasmed, the result of tense panic that had exploded throughout his body. Parading through his mind were the course of events that led up to this tragic moment: Carol stumbling into the bar pit…if only he had prevented her from even getting close to them! He vividly imagined himself stopping her, gripping her by the shoulders and escorting her to the car before any of this could happen. Storms of different emotions worked through him. At times he was merely lost in a disorienting cloud of dejection and shock. Other times the cloud was ripped away with another white-hot flash of panic. Sometimes this was accompanied by the shattering thunder of anger. Before leaving the car, he had yelled obscenities at them, even hurling a pair of rocks at the windshield, wanting so badly to fight.

 Large oval stains of sweat drenched the front and back of his shirt by the time a new sight appeared on the horizon that caused both a feeling of hope to spring inside him as well as greater dejection—a small town. Madly, he thought maybe there was still time; perhaps he could still get help. He was also tormented by the reality of how close they had been to civilization.

An old wooden sign riddled with pocketknife graffiti labeled the town as White Mountain Falls. Most of it was made up of trailers. There were a few old houses scattered about like so many scabs. White Mountain Falls could be a ghost town for all he knew. Regardless, he needed to try something. Perhaps someone had a phone he could use to notify the police that these weird creatures were spreading, multiplying like some pandemic disease. The words of that preacher echoed in his mind as he stood before the leaning wood fence that bordered the first house: And we shall multiply and replenish the earth as the Lord has stated…

Charlie gulped, a chill ran through him. Those words didn’t feel as hopeful in the context of his situation. Perhaps these things were multiplying and replenishing the Lord’s wrath.

He walked along the patchy yellow grass toward the front door. It was a scuffed up old thing with a brass knob. There was a knocker bolted on the front. Charlie flipped the knocker a few times, waiting. No one came. And then he heard it, muffled behind the door—a vigorous, rapid popping. His stomach turned to ice. No…It couldn’t be. They couldn’t have already spread this far…

Charlie opened the door. The sound of cracking and popping boomed in volume, blasting from the shadows of the house. Charlie stepped through the doorway where thousands of them swarmed. Their hairy bodies shifted, scrambling in waves over walls, the floor, chairs, and other house items. Charlie stared in sickened horror, mouth hanging open, as a severed hand bumped and flowed across the floor in the entryway, guided by their crawling bodies. The hand almost weirdly looked like a body crowd-surfing through a concert audience.

Charlie stumbled dizzily backwards, heart slamming in his chest. He shook his head in denial. It couldn’t be. He didn’t want to believe his eyes. But as hordes of them poured out of the doorway into the thinning patches of grass, he couldn’t deny it. There was no escape. Soon they would spread to every city, every town, and human existence would be swallowed up by their monstrous frenzy.

He yelled for help, but no help came. Pain, like fire, spread up his legs and body as a red swarm of a new species engulfed him.