Pulling Teeth

  PULLING TEETH

  by

  Alan Ryker

  Copyright 2011 Jeffrey Rice

  Published by Sucker Punch Press at Smashwords

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law. Contact: jalanrice@gmail.com

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  "The New Words" first appeared in the anthology Bound for Evil published by Dead Letter Press in 2008. "Psyche's Mark" first appeared in the anthology Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry by DarkHart Press in 2009. To learn the true story of the Amtrak tunnel denizens depicted in "Invasion of the Shark-Men," watch Mark Singer's fantastic documentary Dark Days (2000).

  Cover art "Pulling Teeth" by Caroline Horst, carlie.art@gmail.com, http://mydeadflowers.deviantart.com/

  Cover art "Mouth" by Daisuke Kuroneko, http://daisukekuroneko.artworkfolio.com

  Cover design by Wendy McBride, mcbride.wendy@gmail.com

  Copy edit by Rebecca Stigge, rhstigge@gmail.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The New Words

  Birth and Death

  Psyche's Mark

  Cold

  Background Characters

  Invasion of the Shark-Men

  THE NEW WORDS

  It seems as if an important day should start differently. The day the books went silent was the first of the last days, but you wouldn't know that from how it started. I went to work that morning as usual, and drank my coffee, as usual. There was the usual chitchat; the usual quiet struggle with an urge to defenestrate myself as quick and strong as the urge to yank a hand away from a hot burner. The usual request to fix a coworker's computer.

  But it wasn't the usual request. Solving the usual request involved going to the format menu. It involved restarting the computer, or removing a sticky-note from the bottom of a mouse. This one had me stumped. This one made me rub my eyes and take another look.

  I couldn't read the screen.

  Yes, the monitor was plugged in, and it was on. I could see the letters just fine, a grab bag of the standard 26. They were arranged in patterns I recognized, but they transmitted no meaning. I went back to my own cubicle, my own computer, and tried to read an email. It meant nothing. Several other coworkers had the same idea as the first and came to ask me for help. I opened the cabinet under my desk and read the first file that came to hand.

  "I don't think this is a computer related problem," I said, showing them the newly cryptographic pages.

  We sat around a coworker's clock radio that usually played country music at an infuriating, barely perceptible level. Now it told us that this wasn't the effect of carbon monoxide poisoning. This wasn't localized to our accounting department, or to our office building. For no known reason, illiteracy had suddenly become an epidemic.

  Illiteracy isn't contagious. It isn't a virus. The morning shock jocks blamed a terrorist plot. Terrorists had somehow infiltrated our mass communication systems, radio, television, and movies. They planted some sort of subliminal block to written language in our minds. Unfortunately, at the time, it was a better theory than most.

  I left work because working was impossible, and I felt something very bad drawing near. I didn't ask permission;I just walked away, with the sense that whatever was coming was gaining speed.

  As I drove the highway with locked elbows and pinched shoulder blades, the knots of muscle in my neck threatened to herniate a disc before a collision could. People unused to finding their way by landmark on landmark-poor, walled-in, asphalt death chasms drove half the speed-limit, rubbernecking every exit for an indication that it was theirs. Signs previously allowed us to drive in a meditative null-state, subconsciously watching for the words "Exit 82B Lennox Ave." An eight-lane highway normally overflowing with idiots on autopilot was surprisingly preferable to the now-hypersensitive idiots not watching the road ahead of them. I left the highway quickly for the only slightly more feature-rich four-lane roads of the suburbs. I knew I had to turn east at a McDonald's across from a strip mall.

  The Emergency Alert System interrupted normal broadcast several times with a less-than-comforting message assuring us that we had no reason to panic. So the problem was nationwide.

  As I packed my suitcases and listened to the radio, the newscaster asked her audience to remain patient. With the normal avenues down, all information came to them through the phones and the broadcasts of other news organizations. The source of the widespread, spontaneous illiteracy remained unclear. Although they weren't crazy enough to say it, it was apparent to me that words had deserted us. I didn't know why, then. Now I think they became weak, and with it their ability to protect us. Maybe they just got tired of being ignored, and wanted to show us that they took us out of the caves, and they could put us back.

  I admit, I read a lot more when I was young. That's almost all I did, living out in the middle of nowhere, receiving only two reliable television stations. I lived lifetimes of adventures, and learned about biology and history and space. I loved to read.

  Unfortunately, my life-sucking accounting job had turned my brain to mush. If I decided to read instead of watch television for the evening, that evening would last fifteen minutes before the sweet oblivion of sleep took me. Maybe the words didn't care that I wanted to read but couldn't seem to find the time. Or maybe the majority upset them more, those who wouldn't read if they had endless ages of free time. Maybe they got sick of trying to compete with the darling media of the age: film, television, video games. Movies and video games set new sales records every single year, while bookstores shut down every day. The only ones that managed to stay open sold more paper in the form of DVD covers, CD booklets, and coffee cups than books.

  I thought the old words might be happy to see these media all gone and the supremacy of the written word proven. Society wouldn't have collapsed if video games decided not to work. I thought that maybe, when we'd been ground down low enough, they'd come back to us. Now I see they're gone for good, because we're gone for good. They wouldn't have done this out of spite.

  The sun stood hot and high when I left the city for my parents' house in the country. I couldn't have called my brother to tell him to do the same even if I'd thought it necessary. The phone lines were overloaded with calls right up until service collapsed due to techs being unable to read their computers. But I was confident that my brother knew what to do. We were the children of post-apocalyptic fiction. We knew at the first sign of nuclear war, bird flu, or zombie attack to pack our guns and nonperishables and drive to our parents', fleeing the city ahead of the panicking herds.

  My brother and I weren't survivalists. We weren't militants, the type you'd normally expect to lock themselves in a well-armed compound at the first sign of trouble. We weren't even gun nuts. We'd shot guns since we were children, spending sweaty summer days in the tick-filled fields with our bb guns, and later, .22s, but gun politics didn't interest us. Comic books and movies did interest us, and those said that when the shit hit the fan, you got the hell out of the city.

  I made for the countryside as quickly as I could, but the traffic on the highways already sputtered, sprayed, and choked like hard consonants and stretched vowels from a stutterer's wet lips. Seeing that things were going to get much worse, I left the interstate as soon as possible, driving too fast down a hilly two-lane highway with one-lane bridges. Crossing onto the dirt roads surrounding my childhood home felt like entering sanctuary.

  A scrap heap piled against a tin shed had come with the o
ld country house. A mother's nightmare, it was a jagged, lock-jaw-inducing amusement park, the main attraction being the rusted-out bed of a pickup truck. We'd always said that, come the apocalypse, we would chain it to motorcycles and ride it as a chariot, wearing armor fashioned from black football pads and spikes.

  "I brought the football pads. Did you bring the motorcycles?" my brother asked as I stepped through the door. Having grown up isolated, miles from other children, we spoke in code. We built entire conversations from inside jokes, unintelligible to outsiders.

  My parents expressed both relief that we were home and uncertainty that our flight had been necessary. Maybe they didn't have the imaginations my brother and I did. It was a bit of a leap to go from where we were then to where I am now, huddled in the dark in the concrete shell of a burnt-out auto shop, cradling my shotgun and counting my shells over and over with my finger tips, fighting the growing void inside myself.

  The radio stations faded to white noise one by one. We slowly searched the dial for fuzzy, low-frequency stations still broadcasting news of the world outside our ten acres. At first, the festive spirit that accompanied small interruptions to the status quo had people gathered in the street, waiting to see what would happen. When they realized that the situation wasn't temporary, that we weren't going to wake up to a normal world tomorrow or next week, panic set in. In the cities, resources went to those strong enough to take them. Gangs ruled the streets; entire neighborhoods burned to the ground; the police postured and snarled like chained dogs, useless without the advantage of their complicated dispatch systems: standard end-times stuff.

  Things weren't so bad out where we were. We lived at the center of a maze of Osage-orange hedged dirt roads, several miles from blacktop in every direction. Our distant neighbors stayed distant, as they always had, and we relaxed slightly. We had dogs and guns, and we tended the large garden my retired parents kept as a hobby, and waited.

  Honestly, for awhile I enjoyed myself. I had hated my job. I had few acquaintances in the city, and no friends. They could all burn for all I cared. The only people I'd ever been close to were safe and near. It couldn't last, but I wanted to believe it could, that we would remain undiscovered and safe until the outside world fixed itself, or faded.

  Things changed in October. The silence of the words had persisted for several months. The number of people we drove away with warning shots rose sharply and then decreased. There were several who wouldn't be warned, who came back again and again, and who I finally put down. They fell in the golden, brittle, waist-high grass, and I dragged them out into the field and fed them to the earth. Nightly, my brother, father or I sat in a tin tractor shed out by the garden with a shotgun and the dogs. The dogs thought it was great fun until the shooting started. They might have been hounds, but they weren't hunting dogs. I wonder how they are, without their people to feed them. I imagine not good.

  "Words are speaking again. Don't read them. The new words aren't the same as the old. I've seen…" She ranted for awhile, nonsensical, hysterical phrases, familiar, but without meaning, like the words in our silent books, until, "No, get out!"

  The woman's screaming went on for a long time, piercing, and then hoarse, until it finally croaked wetly out, and with it, the violent crashing of voiceless killers.

  Living in tornado country, we owned a crank powered radio-flashlight for emergencies. Every night we cranked it up and waited. Radio stations, remnants or pirate, all broadcast whatever meager news or messages they possessed just as the sun went down, knowing that people needed to conserve their batteries. There was no longer much to say, anyway. But this was new.

  We'd heard fear in the last few months, but nothing like what had just poured from the radio. The woman's voice came from the bottom of a well, a warning from a dark place she knew she couldn't escape. And the screaming… My father flipped a switch on the radio, turning the lantern on, and I saw in my family's eyes the same fear I felt, confused and without referent.

  Our home had seemed like the last remaining bit of civilization. We told stories remembered from books and movies, creating them anew. We reminisced about our childhood high jinks. God, was my brother mischievous. People took one look at his grin and pitied my mother.

  We looked to our memories because our age had passed. That broadcast was the harbinger of the true end. The sputtering remnants of our old life, insignificant pieces I ferociously clung to, would soon be extinguished. I would kill anyone I caught trying to steal a pumpkin or a handful of green beans, fanning dark red life across over-grown tufts of field grass, but I had still preserved a small part of the past inside my home and myself.

  Snatching up the flashlight, I was first to the bookshelf. We kept the useless blocks of paper because we had nothing else to put in their places, and because they were family. Previously, the shelf held a row of twenty-five faux-leather bound Western Greats. Now, every spine read The New Words. The letters on each were different, the titles different lengths, but they all said the same thing, The New Words. I reached for one, but my brother knocked it out of my hand.

  "Don't read it."

  "I don't know…" I couldn't finish the sentence, because my lack of understanding extended to what to say next, what to do next, what to think.

  "What's going on?" I asked, still shining the flashlight on the bookshelf. My parents stood unmoving behind me, looking as well at the once familiar tomes. The print did not dance or change. They were stamped permanently on the spines as they had always been, but their meanings moved. No, they called. I picked up a paperback. A painting of a whale upsetting an old ship adorned the cover.

  "Moby Dick," my brother said, forcefully rejecting the present.

  No, The New Words. The words had regained their voice. We could be like we were. Better. Once again I began to open a book, and once again my brother slapped it out of my hands. I reached for another, but he shoved me, slamming me into the bookshelf.

  Though younger, he was larger than me, and I hit the books and careened into a corner, splintering a glass shelf of ceramic figurines on my way to the floor. I sat stunned. Whether from my impact with the wall, the fact that my brother had unexpectedly sent me flying, or the lingering effects of the books, I can't say. My mother grabbed his arm, but he shook her off, still looking at me.

  "Those aren't real words. I don't know what they are, but they aren't real." The radio-flashlight had been knocked from my hand and lay on the floor. My brother picked it up. He gathered an armful of books, carried them out to the gravel turnaround, and dropped them. I followed him like a dog, still dazed, and looked down at the pile of The New Words, lying in the gravel in different sizes and colors. They called to me. The new words beckoned me, the titles a teasing taste of the banquet inside the covers, and I was a starving man. I had loved them when I was a child, spending almost every evening of every summer lying on my bunk bed with a book, rolling from my back to my stomach, switching from one side to the other as my arms went numb and my neck cramped and the hours disappeared into other worlds. The new words used this nostalgia against me.

  My brother grabbed and shook me. I couldn't think straight. An unintelligible muttering in my head clouded my thoughts, babbling over them. I don't know why he didn't feel the same pull I did, or how he was so certain that we needed to resist the new words, but he was right.

  "You can't read these. Something is wrong with them. They have you hypnotized and you only read the covers. Those aren't the old words. Those are impostors, filling the empty space left when the words went away."

  I nodded, trying to concentrate on what he said.

  "I need you to not touch the books," he said. "For me. Don't pick them up. Don't even look at them."

  So I turned my back on them, and looked out at the dying red of the western sky, for my brother.

  When he returned, he held another armful of books and the bucket of kindling. He spread the kindling on top of the books and then added ripped-out, balled-up pages of The New
Words to the small heap. My fists and jaw clenched. My legs spasmed, trying to throw me forward onto him, to stop him as he flicked the lighter into flame and lit the pile.

  Most of my struggle was against the call of the new words, but some of it was the knowledge that he lit a funeral pyre. "Bonfire" comes from the antiquated "banefire," a fire in which bones are burned. The old words wouldn't come back. The books were animated corpses, bones. The time for hope had passed and mourning begun. He returned them to ashes and dust, and I stood and watched and clenched my fists, and didn't move an inch.

  My brother convinced my parents to help him collect every book, newspaper, and magazine in the house and throw them on the fire. It raged so hot I began sweating in the cool night. It burned hot not with the energy of the ideas those books once held, the power of history, of civilization and all that humanity had become, good and bad. Those were cold and dead. I see now that it burned with the anger of the new words.

  The holocaust lasted for hours, as they routed out print I never would have thought to look for. Boxes on the back porch with pictures of VCRs and televisions, now calling to me with the promise of unknown things. Electronics manuals, old bills, tax records. Finally, my mother carried out the plastic tub of keepsakes. Report cards. A+ papers. Before she could toss it into the fire, I snatched a hand-drawn comic from her. When I was twelve, I knew I'd grow up to be a comic book artist, not an accountant.

  Grimm loomed over his city, a brutal vigilante who dressed like the grim reaper and delivered judgment and justice with the edge of his scythe. But the title didn't say "Grimm," and in the first panel, the street thug didn't demand a woman hand over her jewelry. He said, "In the beginning there was nothing. From nothing, the words spoke themselves…"