Fodschwazzle

It's a bar with glossy oak floors and vintage soup cans full of shelled, salted peanuts punctuating a dark walnut counter top. It's Jackson, Tennessee, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" playing on the jukebox in the fifteen minutes before karaoke starts. Karaoke night was specified--I never begged for the privilege to know whether talentless drunk people shrieking into a mic were inherently any different in Tennessee or in New York City, though I suspected I would get to hear more country music than I would normally enjoy. This was the time and the place. Never question.

The man two seats down at the bar is tearing thin paper strips in spindles from his coaster with his right index fingernail while his left hand emphatically chops the bar towards the man to his right. His red and white, plaid, button-up shirt makes me somewhat dizzy watching it saw up and down with whatever it is that he's saying, fan blades above twisting shadows all around the room. He is nervous about something. When one of his thoughts ends, his wrist lamely dies with a thud on the counter top until the other man is finished speaking, but the fingertip scratches even harder, sending flakes of paper to the floor.

The bartender looks at him with a bit of disdain. Almost as much as he uses on me, the only black man in a bar filled with white people in Tennessee. I am trying to overlook that fact as I glance back at him, slowly nod my head, and drink from my beer. Yes, I am alone. See how calm I am? You can trust me as long as you keep serving me, I think at him. He blinks, straightens his back, and turns.

The woman to my left has shoulder length brown hair that curls at the end in an uneven roll. The necklace around her neck is fixed with a clasp that is little more than a hoop and a metal hook to slide through it. The metal is bronze coated, but it has flecks chipped off at the base of that hoop, as if someone needed to hammer it into place. She is wearing a black, red accented dress that dips low in the back, revealing a delicate pair of shoulder blades, smooth skin, and the smallest fibers that could yet be called hair. It strikes me as funny, then, that we would look at such a thing as disgusting. What, is she supposed to shave her back, when moving her arms to reach back there would change the shape of the thing she was shaving?

I think too much, Lucy tells me, although she's the one always knowing where to be, when, and who to hunt.

He sits in the empty chair to my right. His grey hat has a black and white striped ribbon around it and is shaped like a bowler hat, but flatter on top. Is he a regular? Does he know that I'm not? Lucy never tells me enough. I see the left side of his thin face, brown and grey tinged stubble creeping subtly across his chin, the steep curve of the  jaw slanting upward and outward towards his ears. Crow's feet amiably crease in an upward slant at the corners of his eyes while he looks at the bartender, nodding without word. Just a smiling nod. He's a regular. As he slowly turns towards me, the whiteness in his teeth and the tightness of skin on his brow give him a predatory look--the same look I'm looking for.

The smiling eyes depart and return like a man remembering to hold the door for someone immediately behind him.

"Hello," he says, offering his hand.

I have to shake. "Hi."

"You're not from around here, are you?"

You're not either. No trace of the region on your tongue. "No, I'm visiting family. I'm from out of state."

"Where about?"

"New York City."

"Really? Never been."

I'm glad, although that doesn't change what I need to do. "You don't sound like you come from here either. Where are you from?" I ask.

He takes a moment to straighten the vest he's wearing. I'm guessing that he normally sings swing or jazz music, given his hat and vest over a striped tie and a white, long-sleeved shirt. "I'm actually from California."

"Really? That's a long way to go to be here."

"So is New York City."

"That's true," I reply, signaling for another drink from the bartender as the silence stretches across the bar.  "What brings you here, if you don't mind my asking?"

He leans back on his stool, stretching his arms behind his neck. He has muscles, but they leave much to the imagination as the cuffs on his shirt are stretched down below his wrists. "Work," he sighs. "I'm a nurse. California has far too many nurses, and no one can afford to live there. I came here, where people are more hopeful and more soulful. What about you? Is your family in Jackson?"

"Mostly in Jackson," I lie, shivering a little bit to know his occupation. "I have an aunt in Nashville that I'll visit as soon as I'm done here."

He stares at me for a moment, intently sipping from his drink, which is a red lager. I'm not much for the names. I never drink, I think, before realizing that my glass is almost empty.

"I'm not much for family reunions," I say, to finish up my previous statement. He is still staring when the karaoke DJ starts speaking about signing up for singing. Her voice is loud and cuts the air with overenthusiasm. His attention diverts to the stage, or rather, the area where tables and chairs are pushed aside to resemble a stage.

"Excuse me," he says. Well, at least I'll get to hear him sing before I do what I need to do. I signal for another drink while I look down the bar. The coaster is in pieces now, but the man is gone. Beneath the pieces, I can see scratches in bar top where the fingernail went when the coaster was done. Some of the coaster pieces are tinged red.

I glance at the bartender. His eyes are different now, dejected and older. He is looking at the floor while holding a dripping rag in his hand. What is he staring at? He is barely responsive, moving like mud when I signal him for a drink. He stops just before setting the frothing beer on the counter. He is confused. I already have a beer, although it is half gone. My head feels warm as I reach up and take the beer from his hand. Did I accidently order twice? Is this my third or my fourth?

He doesn't return right away. Two country songs about, as near as I can tell, whiskey and soap, crackle and twang to the bleating of a she-goat and the reasonably on-key singing of the woman who was sitting to my left. When did she move? For her size, she has impressive vocals. Her face is young and enthusiastic while she's singing, but when she hands the mic to the man in the grey hat for the third song, for a brief moment her jaw falls slack, her eyes flash white as if the pupils suddenly vanish, and all color vanishes from her cheeks. As soon as the mic leaves her hand, her face returns almost to normal, but the youth is gone. This is why I'm here, I think.

I fail to realize that I'm probably already affected. Another beer is in front of me. Aspects of the room are beginning to swing with the beat of Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife" as performed by the man I am pursuing. I think I'm losing him, Lucy, I think as another beer appears in front of me. The fan blades are now below the light source and every spin of the blades puts a new quarter of the room in darkness. He's a good singer: even the shiny slats of wood undulate to the rhythm of his song. I realize that I'm half off my stool and pull myself up with my right elbow and forearm, but gravity is so powerful now. The bartender is trying to remove the cork from a bottle--do they serve wine here? If not, what else comes with a cork?-- He's not having a good time with it, his hands slip, and the bottle neck breaks off. He could clean up the glass shards, but he just stares at the severed neck, the blood on his hand, the neck.

I focus again. The upbeat DJ is slouched back in her seat, smoking a cigarette or a blunt, I can't tell. Her hands cross her eyes again and again, the mascara smearing with her tears. The mood is greasy now, like you can't hold it or predict which way it will slide, but it's careening towards the floor, and there is nothing you can do except throw your body and life at it as it falls. Everyone is twisting under the weight of trying to be happy and alive. Everyone is trying to be loved but not succeeding. No one is speaking, and I'm starting to think that this man is not a regular at all.  His song slows while he struts left and right, his fingers wrapped around the microphone. He is so happy to be heard. The metal poles supporting the stools become jagged with his cheer and no longer support me as I tumble to the floor. I think I'm losing myself, Lucy.

The thud awakens me a bit, so I crawl to the bathroom to clear my stomach of all of my drinks as quickly as I can. His song is over, and I know that he sees me, and he's coming, and I'm crawling as fast as I can, and I'm through the door and the stall door and to the toilet and throwing up more than I have ever in my life. With my heel, I nudge the stall door shut, but it doesn't latch. In a moment, his shadow towers over me.

"You know me," he says. He's still smiling. "You're here for me. Tell me everything you need to know about me."

I cannot. Even if I wasn't losing my stomach right now, I couldn't speak and jeopardize everything.

"I can tell you this. You're on the floor right now. You don't know me well enough," he laughs, before  kneeling down beside me, pressed grey slacks brushing through the dirt around the toilet.

He leans forward so that his eyes are on mine. The gleam in them: the smile is fearsome. His right hand walks up my hunched over back and begins to rub my hair. "I'll do you a favor, man from New York. I'm going to show you the future. The far off future, long after you and I are gone. You decide if that's something you want, and then you tell me why you're looking for me after you decide."

His right hand spreads across the back of my head and then clenches. I see it.

An endless sea of hairless bodies writhing against each other, eating, contorting, copulating. Swimming in blood, from one horizon to the next, like a rock overturned to see only worms looping together, mammals lost in a multitude of screams in millions of different pitches and tones. This is how it ends. No character, no consequence, just a feast of skin until the world is no more than blood and bone, and it's already begun, Jonas, it's already started.

When he removes the hand from the back of my head, I tell him everything. How it's our goal to track down unique individuals and detain them, if at all possible. How our organization is run by a magnificent young girl named Lucy, and how we came to work together. I tell him how we found him. I tell him my name and my entire history. I tell him what we thought he was capable of, and he stops me and laughs, because we've already reached the hotel I'm staying at, and he's already tucking me into bed, cinching the sheets around my shoulders when I can only vaguely recall the fires in the bar, the smoke, and the ambulance pulling up as we walked away. He laughs.

"I'm Suicide, Jonas. I make people want to die. I'm the fear of living another day or the sensation of seeing someone else slip away."

I can speak no more.

"You'll never catch me, though I welcome you to try again," he says, before leaning in closer and dropping his voice to a whisper. "I lied about how the world will end. That is why you are still alive." He exhales softly into my ear.

"Chase me, if you dare."

He's gone. I still don't know his name, but he knows mine.

The car slammed against an oncoming pickup truck after drunkenly swerving into the left lane, catching the front bumper with the right headlight, unbuckled driver soaring through the windshield and exploding across the branches of a sycamore tree in someone's front yard.

By the time I reached the scene, coming from the 7-11 on the other side of Shields Street, there was no one left to whom  I could issue a moving violation. The ambulance arrived and scooped up the damaged, sobbing passenger, clawing her face at the giant hole in the windshield, the pristinely green grass of a front yard, and the tree where someone she knew was scattered. The truck was totaled, certainly, but the people inside it were uninjured. It fell to me to escort them home, as other police officers showed up, and the entire block was sealed off.  I was grateful for it. The scent of the man in the tree made it hard to breathe without vomiting.

Later that night, a curious lack of radio communication left me with little to do, so I took my second break at the end of my shift. I returned to that 7-11 to idle and observe the cleanup. The "Lights Out" ordinance, put in place to cut energy bills for the city, felt darker on that night; the only glow came from my dashboard and the phosphorescent wash from the 7-11's broad windows.

Across Shields and further down Mulberry, two patrol cars with no lights on were parked underneath that sycamore tree. Two men stood next to these cars, slowly turning in opposite directions, scanning the whole block for passersby or people snooping from their windows. I could not see anyone cleaning the tree.

The leaves of the tree, almost impossible to see at this distance, swayed even though the night was calm, no breeze rustling any other trees. I stared hard, cupping my hands around my eyes, before I saw them--dark shapes crawling over branches. Big bodies shuffled up and down the tree, stopping at regular intervals for a second before continuing to move. The same bodies crossed over the same parts of the tree multiple times. Eventually, they stopped moving in unison and began crawling out of the tree. They were all men in uniform. How did they move like that?

Each car filled  with four officers- one in the front, three in the back. The last of the officers who had been crawling in the tree stopped before getting in the car and stared down Mulberry until he was looking at me directly.  I couldn't see his eyes or mouth, but I could feel his gaze as if he was in the car with me.

*****

Michael, my only son, was very sick. He caught a virus from school that closed up his lungs almost completely, spending a week in a hospital bed before finally being allowed to return home. Even at that, he was in and out of consciousness constantly, confined to his bed for fear that he might be walking up or down the stairs, lose control of his breathing and pass out. I took what little leave I could muster to be by his side and await his needs. Money was tight, however. I knew that, between hospital bills and being off work, food was going to be scarce this month.

He was asleep, and I was nodding my head into an automotive magazine when I heard the scratching at the window the first time. When I stood up and threw back the curtain, no one was there. I am not a superstitious person, and I pride myself on my attention to detail, so it bothered me that I was unable to identify the source of the sound. If the wind made the sound once, it would surely happen again. I leaned back, stretched my arms and waited, staring at the window.

The next time I heard that scratching, I was ready. I leapt out of my chair and threw back the curtain.

A man in a police officer's uniform sat hunched on the sloped ledge of roof over the garage, right in front of the window. His fingers were long and thin, one hand crossed across a knee, the other hand drawing back from the window frame. He had no sidearm that I could see, and his uniform was consistent with the Fort Collins Police Department, but he was no one that I knew. He had a long face with no hair on it. Red eyes with no whites gleamed from underneath his cap. He grimaced, revealing bright, straight teeth, before leaping off of the roof and disappearing.

I guess I had an unusual reaction to this. Blame it on me being a police officer. I was livid. Either a man had stolen the uniform of a member of the department, or someone I had never met was investigating me or my comatose son. I grabbed my aluminum baseball bat and sat next to the window again, cracking it just a little bit this time, hoping that the man with the red contact lenses would be stupid enough to try it again.

In less than an hour, just as dawn was starting to break, the window slid open and the man leapt into the room. I slammed my bat against his face so hard that it seemed to adhere to him, dragging the bat to the floor as he fell. I closed the window behind him and then bent down to retrieve the bat. I couldn't remove it from his face. I flicked the light switch on and saw the man's tongue wrapped fully around the bat twice, flicking and licking drops of his own blood that were scattered along that length while his head shuddered, red eyes blinking away pain. His nose appeared to have been broken, his tongue casually flicking at it while streams of blood and tears rolled down his face. He was screaming, but he sound only came out like a hiss with a high, shrill pitch behind it. I placed my boot against his head and pried the bat away from his tongue, which began to flail wildly once free, slapping the hairs on my leg. The tongue was darker than a normal tongue, substantially longer, and abrasive like that of a cat. My sense of wrong twisted my judgment as I brought the bat down on his head three more times.

I thought I had killed him, but he still had a pulse. His tongue was still now, rolled across the carpet that he was quickly staining with blood. My fervor had not ended. I needed to know what this man-shaped thing was. I handcuffed him, threw a Toy Story pillowcase over his head and fastened it to his neck with bungee cables. Luckily, throughout this whole endeavor, I never woke my son.

I lifted him and shoved him in the back of my car, driving as quickly as I could to the station. When I arrived, I ignored all procedure, so mad and scared I was, carrying him over my shoulder to the back room where Major Jenkins' office was located. I didn't knock.

The Major was a white man, likely in his forties, with a carefully trimmed goatee. He was not startled by this early morning intrusion, as I tossed the unconscious thing into the chair directly in front of him.

"What is this?" he asked slowly, as if he was waking up.

"I would very much like to know the answer to that question, Major," I replied. My face was hot and my nerves were twitchy, as if I was not finished fighting yet.

"It looks like you've captured Officer Daniels and bound him in a Toy Story pillow case, Paulson."

"I had no idea our force even had an Officer Daniels, and when this--" I snapped the pillow case off of the thing's head, letting his head nod to the side with the tongue lolling all the way down to his chest, "--man showed up at my window, trying to get inside, I took care of him. Can you please tell me who or what he is, sir? Is he an officer?"

"Take a seat."

I sat a reasonable distance away from the unconscious creature. I could feel the pent up tension beginning to spiral out of control as reflexes gave way to clear thoughts. What the hell is going on? I wondered.

"You have just witnessed something that few on our force and even fewer in our community are even aware exists." The Major stitched his fingers together and spoke with an almost reassuring calm. "This is called a Gasp. Our station has been working with them for about two years."

"How did we not know--"

"Let me finish, officer. I know you are stressed, and you have good reason to be. But you need to hear me out completely, because what I will tell you is extremely important."

"Sorry, sir."

"Good." The Major took a sip of black coffee before continuing. "Two years ago, we started to catch people in situations similar to that which you have described. It was about the time the 'Lights Out' ordinance took effect, and it is my belief that these events are somewhat connected. Homes would be broken into without contents disturbed, except that people would go missing in their sleep. No signs of struggle or prints of the individuals exist outside of these crime scenes. You were lucky. Somehow, your intuition as a police officer enabled you to see the Gasp before it attacked. If you hadn't, your son would likely be dead."

"How do you know it was my son and not me?"

"I know all of my officers better than you think. I know you've been on leave for about two weeks now, and I know that your son is sick. I know the results of your last physical, performed only a month ago--I know your health is just fine. Furthermore, I know that the Gasps smell the imminence of death."

"That is not comforting to know."

"No, you're right. It makes them hungry until inevitably they snap and consume that which is dead or dying. They feed on every dying aspect of a human. Their teeth are much stronger than they seem, and they can easily crush bone with their jaws."

"Why are we working with them?" I asked, too shocked to process all of the details he was conveying.

"A sensitivity to death can prove highly useful. Once we began to identify these elements that were invading homes throughout our city and managed to catch a few, mostly after the deed had already been done and post-meal sluggishness had set in, we received a classified order from a superior. All officers that had been involved in capturing these creatures were to be employed in a very particular way in incorporating the creatures as officers themselves."

"How does that even work?"

"We reserve them for night projects. A month ago, right around your beat, I believe, a car crashed and a man died. We used the Gasps then, to clean up the extensive ensuing mess. It was very efficient, and it kept them from having blood urges."

"Blood urges?"

"When a Gasp goes too long without feeding, his risk of breaking routine becomes great. They comprehend ideas and follow directions like people just as long as they've been fed recently. So you see, we serve a dual purpose by maintaining these officers: they help us clear away blood and gore, and we keep them away from our citizens. Do you understand?"

"Mostly, sir."

"Very well." The Major paused, sliding out one of his steel desk drawers after unlocking it with a key, pulling out a manila folder before calmly opening it and sliding a paper towards me. "I will need you to sign on this line, please."

It read: Change of Job Status--Overwatch

"What does this mean, sir?" I asked.

"It means that you are now responsible for what you have seen and heard. I am putting you on Overwatch, a taskforce designed to monitor and carry Gasps wherever they are needed. You will notice a substantial pay grade increase."

Indeed, I briefly considered that this month might not be that tight after all. Then I shook my head and said, "I'm sorry, I refuse. I can't be in charge of a monster," I said, gesturing to the empty seat to my left. "What? Where did--"

"I am sure you will find them eager to work with you, Paulson," the Major stated, looking at me and then looking to the doorway behind me where the Gasp stood, arms crossed and tongue flicking across his face and head to clear away dried blood. "If you don't sign, how will you go home to tend to your son?"

"What do you mean?" I demanded, standing up.

"They sense death, Paulson. If this one broke away from his unit just to come to your house, it's a strong smell. Likely one of your son's organs is failing. You may be able to save him if you sign this paper and join the Overwatch. You will not leave this room without signing. Otherwise, I can't imagine having to find something to do with your clothes after the Gasp is finished with you. You had the advantage last time. Not now."

I looked at the Gasp. His eyes, blood red in entirety, were smiling back at me.

I signed the line.