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Chattering Spines

By Mike Wyant Jr

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My neighbors smile when they burn.

The flames melt the flesh from their bones, revealing the full six inches of sharp spines that brought them here. I swear they sigh in relief.

Hell, I would, not that I’ll say that out loud.

No screaming, though. Never that. Just the crackling silence of flames and the perpetual hiss-pop of melting fat and burst organs. That stopped being a surprise a long time ago.

Now, this is just my last shift at the burn pit for the day.

The sky is black with starless night, thick gray clouds of sin and shame spiraling upward. My skin is alight with the heat. My nostrils sting, clogged with the stink of burning flesh from the thirty-something bodies draped within. Like a barbeque downwind from a burning trash pile.

“There!” Amy, that smart farmer-girl from down the street who isn’t going to Colgate anymore, cries out.

The black barrel of her own shotgun catches the light just as she swivels. I heft my own, but I don’t see the target. Last one was attached to a raccoon that’d become more skeleton than beast, just a tiny thing. Almost missed it that time. But that’s why there’s four of us here. Me, Amy, that idiot, Jimmy, and Amish Caleb, the guy with the hoe.

The glimmer of a muzzle flash sparks alongside the hard, grainy pop of buckshot from Amy’s shotgun.

I finally see it. One of the bastards who did this to us shivers and curls on itself at the edge of the firepit. They aren’t natural. Or not from Earth, anyway. Least that’s what the shortwave says.

But who knows anymore? Could barely tell truth from fiction before the Spines showed up. The hell am I supposed to do now? Not believe the things I see with my own eyes?

I mean, look at it! That spiraling mass of hand-length prickers still twitches away just there, firelight dancing on the fluid oozing from their tips like a busted up disco ball.

If that’s real, maybe the Illuminati and all that other garbage is real, too.

Was, anyway. It don’t mean much anymore.

Amish Caleb, the tall, gangly guy from down the street, steps up and pushes the corpse into the flames with his farm tool. Still looks weird without his stark black jacket and hat, but it’s the twisted flesh of his jaw reflecting the firelight that really makes him hard to look at.

Still feel a little bad about that, but what’re you gonna do? Only one way to keep someone from infection after they been stung, after all. We hadn’t had time to shave his beard, not with the stingers in his chin from where he’d hugged his girls.

But that’s why we keep the heavy metal plate in the coals, red-hot and ready to sear.

Still hear him screaming sometimes—and still picture his face as the beard ignited and melted his cheeks—but it goes down into the boulder in my gut with the rest. No time for rest or reflection, not yet. Maybe not ever…

Chattering sets the hairs on my arms on end, sending those thoughts cackling away. I swing ‘round in time to catch a new Pricker—that’s what ol’ Eustace called them before he joined them—come into the vast ring of light cast by the fire.

“Ssssss…”

It’s just the one hissing letter, but I’ve always been good with voices. Vicki. Cute little old lady from Columbia, town over next. Six grandkids who all look like the mailman that isn’t her son-in-law and a beagle with an attitude as long as my old man’s medical file.

The sound means she’s well and gone. Probably walked the entire twenty-six miles even though she was using a cane last I seen her.

Don’t look at her feet, I remind myself. Never look at the feet.

I step out of the way as she changes from a vague smear in the shadows to what’s left of a human being. Vicki is just a wisp of the heavyset woman with the bum knee. Her skin should be sagging in heavy folds with the weight she’s lost since she got stung, but those goddamn spines keep things where they are. Like one of those the butterfly collectors decided to pin you up, still breathing, on a frame of your own bones.

The hell they called? Lepidopterist.

That’d have bugged me.

I step to the side without urgency, hefting my shotgun in stiff arms.

Year ago, I’d’ve run the other direction, but now we have the bonfires. That’s part of the thing. Spines make people shiver. Make ‘em cold. Beyond that, a human is only good as a shell for these spiny pricks. A vehicle. Humans’re just knockoff Nissans with no warranty, and the Prickers are… dammit, kind of lost that metaphor.

Einie, my cat, would be pissed if she knew I’d stopped writing. She’d crawl on my shoulder after I snagged my coffee, then sit with me while I typed away. Every day.

As Vicki shuffles by, I drop my old cat memories back into the narrow space reserved for them in my gut. Long-dried trails of blood soak through her thin shift, torn and ragged with wear and the constant bite of those needles. One of her breasts sways openly in the light, one long, long spine erupting straight from the poor woman’s nipple. The venom veritably seeps from the end. A whiff of feces, urine, and a sharp, rattling tang burns my nostrils.

Enough to make a man gag if I hadn’t been doing this for so long. I avert my gaze and… goddammit. Her bare, swollen blue feet shuffle forward, the constant chatter of frozen teeth matching up with tonight’s nightmares.

No nails on those toes, not anymore. Just scarred patches in black, blue, and crimson.

Bile washes the back of my throat, but I swallow it down before anyone notices. Vicki doesn’t look my way as she steps into the coals. Doesn’t stop until she lay atop the bonfire, clothes disappearing in a sweep of flame just before her flesh crisps black and sharp.

I swear I hear the sigh. You can’t, of course. No way over that constant roar.

But still.

Jimmy says I’m nuts—and I am, just not the way he thinks—but Jimmy still thinks it’s safe to eat packaged meat, so he can go to hell.

Only takes a minute until Vicki stops twitching. But those spines aren’t still. They writhe, sharp, silver lines dancing behind the wave of heat and smoke. Another fifteen seconds, right on schedule, and her flesh rips open from the inside, all the way down to the bone.

I brace the shotgun and catch the Pricker as it tumbles away and down the pyre. Big one here, which I expected given poor Vicki’s transformation.

“Got it!” I call out to Caleb, Jimmy, and Amy, so they don’t go and blow my balls off.

They retreat a step as I circle the bonfire, still ready in case I screw up. Then… boom, boom, boom, boom.

Takes all four shots to set it to twitching in on itself, the spines stuck out like some twisted sea urchin.

It ain’t dead, not yet. But it will be.

Caleb sweeps up again, just like he always does. Guy can’t hold a gun anymore without losing his grit. Can’t say I blame him. Not sure I’d be able to if I’d had to watch my family kill themselves, either.

The shuffle of feet behind me tells me something is coming. Amy lets out a low whistle that sets the hairs of my neck on end. By the time I turn, Amy and Jimmy are stepping to the side.

Beyond them, a small thing walks from the shadow on padded feet. Now I see it, it’s not small, not for what it is. It’s a black housecat, a white patch on her chest. Green eyes catch the firelight, slits locked on the pyre.

My heart fills to bursting. I fall to my knees, the ache I’ve held back for so long breaking through my will like they’d made the Hoover Dam from popsicle sticks. The boulder in my gut dissolves into gunpowder.

“Einie.” The name slips from my lips alongside the shotgun. Both hit the ground with a thump.

Amy clears her throat. “Hey Louie, be careful.”

“Don’t touch it,” Caleb warns, his charred hoe held before him like a shield. He knows better’n the rest of us.

But I’m not listening.

Not as my cat, lost these past eight months, pads over, eyes breaking from me to the fire and back again. Her pupils shift. She lets out that long mournful wail she always did when I’d been gone from home for too long.

When I left her alone.

Has she been by herself since the house burned down? Since I lost Sheila?

Before I know what I’m doing, I reach out, stroke her soft cheek. She leans into it, eyes closing, the barest rumble of a purr threading through my fingertips like a starting engine.

“Ow.” I know I messed up as soon as her fur smoothed against my palm.

My finger swells with just a single teardrop of crimson, but…. dammit!

A shudder runs through her body.

I see ‘em.

Just like I knew I would.

They’re everywhere. Sticking out through her sable fur, her legs, shoulders. The patches of dried blood stand out now, including the ones on her nose, the ones outlining her white spot. The one in the corner of her eye, keeping her poor eyelid from closing.

My heart drops as she mewls long and low. Her gaze flickers between me and the pyre again.

“Go on, Einie,” I whisper, holding my good hand against my chest. “Go on.”

Einie’s always understood me, just like I understand her. I pulled her from the womb during her mother’s hard birth. Seventeen years. Seventeen years. Only for this.

The gunpowder in my gut ignites.

“Louie—”

I swat at the air between me and Jimmy. “Shut it, I know.”

“Goodbye my baby girl,” I whisper to my cat, my goddamned cat, one last time as the world dissolves into a thick haze, leaving only me and Einie here and now.

She tries to nuzzle me, and I let her because… dammit! A half-dozen pinpricks now.

My palm goes chill.

Then she walks by.

Into the flames.

I don’t turn and watch.

Caleb steps up next to me, a haunted look in his thin, thin face. He takes my shotgun and finishes it for me like I couldn’t do for him.

The boom breaks the dam behind my eyes.

And the gunpowder explodes. I dry heave onto the ground, the very air a thing of knives and edges, cutting and gouging away the best parts of myself.

I don’t even notice when they draw the metal sheet from the flame. I’m just there, shuddering at the knowledge, the acceptance, it’s gone, all gone.

Even my cat. My baby kitty.

And no one even knows why? Why are they here? What’s their purpose? They just keep infecting everyone, everything… and we just keep culling our own.

A hand on my shoulder shocks me out of my stupor. My lungs hurt, eyes burn. Amy grabs my chin with a hand and waits until I finally match her gaze.

“You ready?”

“No,” I say because it’s true.

Not ready to keep going. Not ready to keep murdering and burning.

But, like everything else on this fucking planet, it doesn’t matter what I want.

I don’t sigh and I don’t smile.

Instead, the night splits with my screams.

I guess that means I’m not a monster.

Not yet.

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Host Commentary

Everyone doing okay? Here’s a note from Mike: Oh Spines. I wrote this while at a writing conference called Superstars Writing Seminars back in February of 2022 after attending a session run by Kevin Ikenberry. I forget the details of the class (and my notes are AWOL), but I came out of it obsessing over the idea of finding the most emotional beat of a story and crafting the rest from that singular moment.

I think the elevator doors had just closed when the idea that became this story lodged itself in my brain. Two hours later, sobbing, I finished the story in my hotel room. This version has had only minor edits for clarity from that initial draft.

And I still cry every time I read it.

 

Me again.

There’s a metafictional structure here that puts you on your ass every page or so and it’s incredible. By metafiction I mean both the genre of the story and the way subversion of that genre is weaponised. This is a story as much about what isn’t on the page as what is. We start not just mid outbreak but with the first act of stories like this receding into the rearview. Something terrible has happened. People are infected and infecting. People are dying and being killed. The inhuman has a beach head, and it’s not going to stop there.

 

This is a story I always enjoy reading, watching, playing and hell even listening to. One of my earliest memories is listening to the Jeff Wayne musical version of War of the Worlds and being terrified by the ululating war cry of the Martians and the enormous crash of the music and I’ll link to the Escape Pod story in show notes that, years later, made me love that even more. . We love horror because we love being scared. But not too much. And there’s something distinctly comforting about this sort of story. Something, oddly enough, mapped onto War of the Worlds other incarnations. We know we win. We know it’s just a matter of survival. It comes down, as both the Spielberg War of the Worlds and M Night Shyamalan’s Signs show, to accepting you’re not the protagonists in the world’s story and trusting that’ll be enough to keep you alive. It…goes less well…for the main characters in Cloverfield but the point stands.

 

So cutting the first act off that denies us the comfort of knowing what the story is. Then there’s the close-quarters brutality here which just tips us over into something a little more familiar and more horrific. As I write this, troops are on the streets of Washington DC for reasons no one can fully understand, pensioners have been arrested for holding signs protesting the genocide in Gaza in this country and I woke up this morning to news that a scout troop had been racially assaulted elsewhere in the country because they’d been mistaken for migrants.

 

In that climate, you look at the ease with which these folks turn on one another and whether or not you want to…you pause. You wonder whether there’s an element of settling accounts to this. The card house of smalltown politeness simultaneously fused together by alien gristle and ripped apart by an excuse to FINALLY cut loose. Humanity’s worst instincts, used as weapons on both sides of an inhuman war.

 

And then the cat arrives and Mike, with the casual grace and undeniable power of a perfectly executed Judo throw, drops us again and suddenly all that matters is that the cat’s okay. And she isn’t. And she knows. And you’re still reeling from that when you realise what the protagonist’s love for his cat has done to him and you’re still reeling from THAT?

 

When you realise she walked back into the fire when he asked her to.

 

She understood.

 

And if she understood then either she beat the alien or…the ‘infection process’ runs both ways.

 

And if it works both ways and we don’t see that, or we do and the people who see that die? Then we really are doomed.

 

And there’s the horror.

 

Incredible work, everyone. Go hug your pets.