Eat'em by Chase Webster Page A

Eat’em scoffed. “Indubitably, as always, your disregard for physics astounds me. You are a giant, yes… but your brain is sooooo tiny.”
    For a moment I considered knocking. Perhaps someone else would answer the door, a stranger, and I’d find out the old man never lived there. The heavy ball of mass pressing in my gut told me that wouldn’t be the case. It was definitely the old man’s house. I knew he lived there. I knew he was single and without kids. What eluded me was whether he still lived there. Had he crawled away after I presumed he died?
    I rubbed my hand across condensation built up on one of the windows framing the front door. A small living room and formal dining room made up the front entrance. A bathroom or closet was to the left. And an open doorway led to a hallway lined with framed photos that were mostly black and white.
    I checked the doorknob. Unlocked.
    My legs trembled as I stepped into the empty living room. Breaking and entering took more guts than I normally had. We broke into an empty home, though. Louise Parsons was dead. I killed him. Now I just needed to find out how a dead man got up, changed clothes, and seemingly walked away.
    The house barely looked lived in. A bookshelf stood in a corner with neatly stacked books all alphabetized. Beside a beige recliner sat a magazine rack. An old television with a built in VCR was by a fireplace. A cold shutter crawled up my spine as my eye caught the crude fireplace poker hanging above the open chimney.
    I crept into the kitchen. It had a small island in the center equipped with hanging pots and pans. Above the sink, a window looked out to the vast grayness.
    Eat’em ran to the fridge and pressed his face against it. He sniffed the air. “There’s something in there!”
    Two picture magnets were on the otherwise undecorated refrigerator. One picture was of a man crawling across the tops of an electrical wire meters above a thick canopy of trees. A helicopter hovered in the foreground. The other picture was of an old man and a mastiff. The dog wore a Civil War General outfit. The man wrapping his massive arm around the dog was definitely Louise Parsons. I was in the right house.
    “Jacob,” Eat’em tugged at my pants, “please open this, yes.”
    I reached for the handle and froze.
    Behind me, reflected in the chrome freezer door, stood a lumbering figure.
    I spun around just in time to brace myself for the rampaging Parsons.

 
    Chapter 15
    My face blistered above the scarlet stovetop. A bead of sweat rolled across my brow, down my bronzed cheek, and clung to my clinched jaw. It hung for a moment, too stubborn to let go. It fell and crackled as it splashed against the coils.
    The large hand, which prevented my escape, belonged to the same beast of a man I encountered at the planetarium. His face, pocked with scars, was adorned with a brick jaw that looked more akin to Lou Ferrigno’s than the former Louise Parsons’s. His gnawed fingernails tore into my scalp as he wrestled my face ever closer to having a spiraled scar and one less ear.
    My fiery eyes stared back at me in the reflection from the freezer chrome, decorated with the giant dopey-looking mastiff and a younger, less brutal version of the retired lineman.
    Large veins wound up my forehead from the bridge of my nose. My teeth grinded and my cheek swelled. The first thing that would go would be my left ear, shriveling into my skull like a melted candle, leaving a charred black stub. Then my eye would dry out. Burst in its socket. My lip would curl away from my teeth; my skin would tighten, wrinkle, and flake away. I would need a graft.
    So… that would suck.
    “Welcome to my home.” Lou turned up the heat with one hand as he held my head ever closer to the brightening coils. “Enter freely, won’t you?”
    My body flopped uselessly under his immense strength until my hand landed on an open drawer. I fumbled through the scattered contents. My fingertips, slick with sweat,