The Poisoned Man

「 “The Poisoned Man” is a horror short story. It is brief and completely stand-alone, so I consider it a good entry point for my writing style. However, it does feature profane language, disturbing imagery/subject matter, and graphic violence, so it is not suitable for younger readers.」

     Gerald stood in his kitchen at midnight, drinking a tall glass of cold milk. As he got halfway through his nightcap, Gerald ran a hand from his balding head down to his wrinkled neck. Sweat dripped from his hand as he brought it back in front of his eyes. The heat was at its hottest since summer began. His tank top hadn’t been enough to offset the sweltering heat he felt under the blankets that his wife refused to reduce—clinging to the claim that she was still cold.
     No matter what planet’s thermometer she was borrowing, Gerald was glad to take refuge in his milky salvation, letting the liquid pass through and chill his chest. He brought the emptied glass to the sink, thinking about how he would be forced to lay on top of the covers for the next few days. As he rinsed out his glass, Gerald absentmindedly looked up into the dark window above the sink and froze.
     In the middle of his yard, hunched in between the trampoline his child used to play on and the edge of the light coming from above his concrete patio, was a figure. They wore a dusty grey suit jacket and black pants. Their hands were both clutched around a fat rabbit whose head hung limply to the side. And their head, the part of them most obscured by the night, was three times swelled past normal size. A proboscis ran from it into the rabbit, throbbing as it slurped the animal up.
     Gerald dropped his glass in shock. The resulting sound as it shattered in the sink woke up his wife, who yelled something down from upstairs, but it also alerted the figure, who turned from their meal to stare at Gerald with two small eyes set widely apart that glowed like embers. Their fingers went slack, and the rabbit fell onto the dirt. The figure then rose, slowly, before backing away from the light, their eyes still fixed on Gerald.
     He tracked the figure’s shape as it dissolved into formless shadow but broke his attention at the sudden thudding of footsteps behind him.
     “What happened?!”, Bea shouted from the doorway to the kitchen, gripping a dented aluminum baseball bat.
     “O-Outside, there’s …” Gerald paused simply because he could not explain what he had seen. “I thought I saw an animal kill a bunny.”
     Bea scrunched her nose. “Eugh, really? Like a cat or a coyote?”
     “Um, more like a coyote.”
     “Okay?”, she replied, seeing his disarmed mind stretched over a limp face. “Here,” she held out the bat.
     He took the handle like a baby taking a rattler. Bea walked to the glass backdoor and unlocked its sliding handle.
     “You want to check on it?”, she asked as if it was a forgone conclusion.
     Gerald shook off his shock, convincing himself in an instant that he had seen the long snout and bright eyes of a coyote, made nightmarish by his exhaustion. “Sure”
     His knuckles made a white cage around the bat as Bea dragged the door open. He stepped out into the humid night and was hit by a symphony of crickets and frogs. The holes in his socks introduced the soles of his feet to the stinging concrete. He shuffled to the end of the patio and into the cool grass. Bea had slippers, which let her take her time in following him.
     Gerald creeped along the edge of the concrete to the right. He soon saw the spot where the light from their house sputtered out and the brown hump of hair lying there. He stood over the body, scanning his yard to confirm its emptiness. He then poked the rabbit with the tip of his bat.
     It did not react.
     “What kind of animal does that?”, Bea asked, shining her phone’s flashlight on a perfectly round wound stabbed into the rabbit’s lower stomach.
     Gerald’s heart sunk into his intestines. His excuse that whatever he saw had been a coyote was no longer feasible. “I don’t know. Might not have been an animal.”
     “You think someone shot it?”
     “There wasn’t a noise. And there’s no trail of blood.”
     “Well,” Bea turned her light to the fenceless perimeter of their yard, “Maybe a boar got in an’ gored the little fella. There’s a bunch of them roaming around now, y’know.”
     “S-Sure” Gerald’s eyes did not leave the rabbit, searching for some sign of the human hands that he had seen clutching its body.
     “… Let’s go back inside. We can throw it away in the morning.” Bea put her hand on Gerald’s shoulder until he followed her back inside. He made sure all the doors were locked before he dared return to their bedroom. Even then, he would check out the upstairs window six times that night, watching for a pair of ember eyes.

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     In the morning, his eyelids heavy, Gerald stood in his kitchen sipping hot coffee. Bea had already left for work, conveniently unable to throw away the rabbit herself. He sighed and put down his empty mug. In his khaki pants and baby-blue button-up shirt, Gerald exited his home through the backdoor.
     Dew clung to the grass and a layer of fog clung to the ground. The sky was bright but also completely overcast. The raucous insects and frogs from last night had been replaced with jabbering birds. He walked straight to the area of grass where he had seen the rabbit and its killer last night.
     Neither were there, though there was a depression where the body had been.
     Gerald felt every area of his exposed skin light up with pinpricks, as if he were being watched from all sides. He noticed that there was now a trail of dried blood dotting the grass leading from the vacant resting place. Making sure to give the trail a wide berth, he followed it to the shed. The trail quickly ended, and Gerald was left balling his fists idly at the back of the shed, where the blood had died out next to a patch of his wife’s vegetable garden, which was trampled and dug up, but not eaten.
     He scratched his neck at this confusing display, before hearing a whistle from behind. He spun around and found a rabbit crouching in between the bushes that cordoned off his neighbor’s yard.
     Except the rabbit, its side still an open red maw, was not fully a rabbit. The head between its long ears had swelled to the size of an apple and bulged with veins running through patchy fur. Its eyes stuck halfway out from their sockets in opposing directions. But the feature that sent cold piss running down Gerald’s thigh was the proboscis sticking out from the rabbit’s snout, a structure of brittle bone that burst out of the creature’s skin.
     Gerald twisted around, cracking his back as he did, and ran. He got halfway to the backdoor before falling into the dirt with a pain in his foot. He lifted his head, spit out a blade of grass, and shifted to view his leg.
     A round puncture, an inch across, marked the area just above his ankle. It oozed blood and foamed with bubbles of pain. He saw the rabbit sitting a few feet away with a red stain dripping from its proboscis. The creature then sprinted away, disappearing into a patch of ferns.
     Gerald’s chest thumped up and down like the bulb of a blood pressure cuff. He struggled to his feet, shifting weight off his injured ankle, and hobbled to the backdoor. Once inside, he slammed the door shut and smacked its lock down. Pill bottles flew out of the medicine cabinet as he ripped its door open. He took out gauze and rubbing alcohol.
     His trembling hand doused the wound in cold pain and wrapped it with a desperate tightness meant to contain both his blood and the sights it represented. He picked up ibuprofen from the floor, passing over aspirin because he knew that that form of headache killer was a blood thinner as well. After popping a pill, Gerald straightened his posture and swallowed a quick inhale. He took a step forward, fully intending to chalk this up to an animal attack and continue on with his day of work.
     But then he stopped.
     Gerald was not daft; he couldn’t ignore this. He saw that man, if it could be called that, stick its proboscis into a rabbit, then that rabbit grew a proboscis and stuck it into him. He could guess what came next. The rabbit appeared to be dead last night; maybe it was just incapacitated before it transformed. Gerald could be on the verge of collapsing a man and arising a mutant.
     The more he thought about his theory, the more likely it felt. But what would really happen to him? Was it just a physical change? No. Even putting aside the man’s midnight meal, rabbits didn’t attack people. Would he have any control of his mind? What if he hurt Bea, or God forbid, Rebecca?
     His eyes crept upward, to the plaster of the ceiling, imagining his daughter, snoring like a jackhammer in her bed, taking full advantage of her summer break.
     Gerald considered amputating his foot. But there was no way to know that whatever was inside him hadn’t already crept into his torso. He also pondered the possibility of a cure. But this aberration hadn’t appeared in the news, at least since yesterday. He even thought about getting the police to confine him. But then he thought about what they’d do after he turned; the same thing he’d have done if he owned a gun.
     Which left Gerald with a simple realization: he didn’t want to die. The most comforting aspect of this hell was the rabbit’s resurrection, yet this comfort was at odds with his need to protect his family. Gerald could imagine Bea and Rebecca’s horrified expressions as his hairline further stretched out over a globe of taut skin and a spear of bone burst out of his nose.
     He decided that he need more information. Gerald walked into the family room and turned the TV on to a low volume. CNN greeted him with the worst possible confirmation. A reporter was stood over a corpse, relaying information to the anchor. The corpse was that of a middle-aged woman in a cardigan and jeans. Her body was deflated and stretched out, like one of those huge squids that washed up on the shore. This even extended to her head, a wide pancake of flesh with a rigid horn of bone rising out of the middle.
     Gerald brought his gaze down to the news ticker at the bottom of the screen and homed in on the words “found in Las Vega”. That was thousands of miles away. He saw another phrase “shot dead” and shut the TV off, unable to look at the desiccated body any longer.
This was happening all over: an apocalypse just as the world was winding down from its first foray into a pandemic. And he was on the side of the virus, inching closer to being shot dead with every minute.
     Gerald felt lightheaded. Maybe it was the blood loss, or maybe it was the sickness inside him finally coaxing him to sleep. He had to act fast. Maybe he could protect himself, maybe he could protect Bea and Rebecca from himself, but how could he do both while protecting them from a world that was already infected?
     He knew what he had to do.
     Gerald took some zip ties from a cabinet in the garage and walked back into the kitchen, putting them on the counter before removing a jar of peanut butter from the back of the pantry’s top shelf and an EpiPen from the medicine cabinet. The EpiPen he stuck deep into his pocket as he began to unscrew the jar.
     He went around the house, putting peanut butter on the knobs of the front and back doors. Then his feet dragged him up the steps. His hand shuddered as it pulled aside Rebecca’s door, but it calmed as Gerald looked at his daughter and beheld the red mark on his ankle in his mind’s eye.
     He ambled to the center of the room, not bothering to quiet his footsteps. Two of his fingers dived into the peanut butter within, lathering themselves before he aimed them like a gun at his daughter.
     He looked at Rebecca’s sleeping face, nostrils flaring and mouth lulled open. She was the best thing he’d even made, better than any wage he’d earned or home he’d bought. Good enough to keep him and Bea together past their prime and great enough to make them proud in college and beyond; someone he could not lose.
     “Rebecca, get up!”
     She shifted slightly but kept snoring. 
     “Rebecca, GET UP!”, Gerald roared.
     Her eyes shot open, and she bolted upright, but then she stopped. Rebecca’s allergy was severe enough that she didn’t need to see the peanut butter to detect its presence in the air. Her skin reddened and sweat began to bead on her forehead. She scrambled backward against the wall.
     “Wh-What are you doing?!”
     “Come out of your room,” he demanded, gesturing at the open door.
     “Dad, what the fuck are—”
     “Just do it, Rebecca!” Gerald brought the butter closer, sending Rebecca’s heart racing.
     “O-Okay, okay!” She got out of bed and rushed to the door with her eyes still locked on the peanut butter.
     Gerald followed her out of the room. “Keep going, down the stairs, to the kitchen.”
     Rebecca didn’t argue back anymore. She kept up a quick pace to keep away from his fingers, but Gerald moved just as fast. Her eyes widened and her gait slowed for a moment once she saw brown poison dripping off the knob of the front door.
     But that lapse only brought the threat behind her closer, Rebecca proceeded meekly to the kitchen.
     “Sit down,” Gerald said softly.
     When she complied by pulling out one of the chairs from the dinner table, he walked behind her, still aiming his fingers at her to shield himself from questioning.
     “Stick your arms out the back.”
     Rebecca wormed her hands through the holes in the chair’s backrest. While she couldn’t see him, Gerald wiped his fingers onto a paper towel. Then he grabbed a zip-tie, looped it around her wrists, and yanked it tight.
     “Just talk to me,” she begged.
     Gerald started to open his mouth, but a sharp pain carved its way up his spine. “There’s no time,” he whispered before continuing with his work.

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     Bea arrived home early. It had been easy to get permission to leave work when Gerald texted her; everyone at the law firm had been preoccupied with the news anyway.
     She pulled her sedan into the driveway and got out. His text had called it an emergency, but he was being strangely vague other than that. Bea jogged up to the front door and swung it open.
     Her mind instantly locked onto the sight of her daughter tied to a chair with packing tape sealing her mouth.
     Rebecca’s eyes widened and she shook in the chair, screaming an unintelligible warning.
     Bea stepped inside. Only four steps past the threshold, and she heard the lock click shut behind her. Before she could turn around, a pillowcase fell over her head and its opening tightened at her neck, cutting off air.
     Bea lurched forward, trying to run, but the strength of her attacker nearly tore her feet from the ground. She clawed at his hands with her nails, but his grip remained tight. Yet in her groping motions she felt the ring on his finger and found a guess at his identity.
     Her panicked mind couldn’t process the betrayal, but she could process how to act on that knowledge. She drove her elbow into the right side of Gerald’s abdomen, where he’d had an appendectomy just over a week ago. He howled, his grip weakened, and she slipped out of the pillowcase.
     She turned around and had her worst fears realized, but he wasn’t just her husband. Gerald’s head had grown; The plates of his skull now separate as they pushed against his skin. His blue eyes were now a sickly yellow, clinging to the depths of their widened sockets.
     “G-Gerald?!”, she yelped.
     “Bea,” he replied in a warbled voice with one of his arms outstretched and the other behind his back, “Just let me do this.”
     “Do what?! Jesus Christ, Rebecca is—” Bea tripped as she backed away into the hallway’s carpet.
     She fell backward. Gerald’s arm swung from behind his back with her aluminum bat in his grip. It missed the side of her head, but the tip collided with her nose and dappled the yellow wallpaper with blood.
     Bea clutched the crooked remains of her nose as she lay on the floor. She looked back and saw tears streaming down Rebecca’s face.
     Gerald muttered, “Sorry,” and brought the bat down on her forehead.

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     Bea awoke to the taste of blood. A steady drip ran down to her lips, despite the crumpled band-aid that had been hastily applied to her wound. She tried to move and found her ankles tied to the chair’s legs and her hands bound to its back. She looked around, finding a dark house in the middle of the night. Rebecca’s chair was a few feet away, but she seemed to be asleep, her chin resting on her chest.
     Bea tried to call out her daughter’s name, but tape kept her quiet. She couldn’t see Gerald anywhere downstairs, and the house was quiet. She used what little range her feet had to drag her chair toward the front door inch by inch. However, her movements sent out the screech of wood rubbing against wood.
     Suddenly, footsteps thudded from the room overhead to the top of the stairs and then down to the landing. Bea watched a hulking creature wearing the clothes of her husband lurch into the hallway.
     His head was so swollen that it threatened to topple him, so he kept it upright with his wrinkled hands. His eyes shown in the darkness and cast light on the bleached white bone shutting from his face.
     Bea screamed as loud as the tape would allow, causing Rebecca to wake up and follow suit.
     “Noooo,” Gerald moaned as he moved toward them, his voice like a tortured flute, “You were supposed to be asleep!”
     He kept moving forward. Rebecca shook so much that her chair toppled over, but that did not free her.
     “Why hasn’t my mind gone yet?!”, Gerald complained, “I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE FOR THIS!”
     He stopped the doorway to the kitchen, returning Bea’s horrified stare in full.
     “Maybe that’s good. It’s just physical, just the head. I was right to do this! Better me than a stranger.”
     Bea shook her head vigorously, but it was too late. Gerald crept up to her, drool spilling out of his proboscis. He eased himself to his knees so that his head was at her chest before he lunged forward, stabbing his syringe into her navel. He twisted his head back and forth to drive it into her organs. It throbbed as it filled her insides with poison, and her nails tore from their fingers as she scraped them against the armrests.

「This is a work of fiction. Any references to real places, real people, or historical events are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.」

Copyright © 2021 Matthew Cammarano
All rights reserved.