Free Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig

finger—a crooked twig, puffy with cracked calluses—probes the crater in his head that was once an ear but is now just a hole . He’s trying to figure out how old the man is. Older than him, surely. Late 40s? Early 50s? Older still? The maimed face offers too few clues—all buried beneath criss-crossing furrows of scar tissue. Scar tissue that Cason can now see continues well beyond his face—down his neck, around his arms, each finger laced with a mesh of old slices and gashes.
    The man jabs Cason in the ribs with the gun.
    “You like staring at me?”
    “Not really.”
    “I dunno about that. Way you and everybody else on this bus is watching me I half expect some of you to hike down your shorts and start diddling yourselves. Maybe I should put up a website. Charge people for the peep.” All the man’s consonants are hissed and whispered as they come out of his ruined mouth—some are lost entirely, dropped into a dark hole and forever forgotten.
    Cason blinks raw, red eyes. Sniffs. His nose is still crusted with mucus—the so-called Cicatrix didn’t give him time to clean up. He just grabbed a newspaper and a crumpled paper bag and used the gun to politely urge Cason onto the bus.
    “What the hell was in that canister, anyway?”
    “Tiger piss and pickle juice,” the man growls. “Whaddya think it was? Pepper spray. Capsaicin. My own special brew. I used a couple of those ghost chilis—the, ahhh, naga booty whatevers. Stuff’s so potent it’ll eat the chrome off a bumper.” His bloodshot eyes roll around in their lidless sockets and point toward Cason. “Speakawhich, seems like it worked as designed. You look like you shoved your face in a bee-hive. Your face is almost as ugly as mine, and I look like a human garbage fire.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “Yeah, yeah, fuck me. Such a nice Kenzo boy.”
    So he knows more about me than I do about him. “Where we going, anyway? Heading south, but why? Where? Thought you were going to tell me what’s going on.”
    “I said show you. Showing’s always so much better than telling. You rather hear about an elephant butt-fucking a pony, or you rather see it?”
    Cason’s twisted face gives him the answer.
    “Bad choice, maybe. Point is, I tell you what I tell you, even after all you’ve seen, you probably won’t believe me. But if I show you, you’ll get it lickety-split.” The freak fishes in his pocket, pulls out a plastic bottle of unlabeled eyedrops, pops a few in each eye. “Gotta moisten the old jeepers-creepers, you know.”
    “Fine. Whatever. Where we headed? Might as well tell me, because I’ll see when we get there.”
    “North of the airport. Eastwick.”
    Eastwick’s a shithole. So much of the city is. Run-down houses. Some flooded and damp—that whole area’s on a marshy plain. Then there’s the dump sites: the area’s the closest thing you can get to ‘rural’ living inside the city margins, with tracts of open land here and there. Companies have been using that land to dump trash and chemicals and medical waste. Burying it sometimes; other times, maybe not so much with the burying and more with the ‘leaving it out in the open.’
    “And what’s in the bag?”
    “You’ll see. Why spoil the fun?”
     
     
    T HE BUS LEAVES them in a cloud of fumes.
    “Walk,” Cicatrix says.
    They move to cross an empty parking lot, leaving road traffic behind. They head toward a sidestreet lined with grungy townhomes.
    The freak stays behind. Gun still hidden under the newspaper, bag tucked under his armpit. Cason starts to think that he can take him. He has to move fast—no move is faster than a bullet, but that’s not the point. The point is to disarm. Or point the gun elsewhere. He just needs opportunity. But when?
    “So. Cicatrix. Quite a name.”
    “Not a name. More like a... nom de plume . A CB handle.”
    “Got a real name?”
    “Steve. Bob. Delbert. John Jacob Jingle-titties.”
    Cason shrugs. “I’ll just call you Trixie,