Eat'em: a story about postponing the apocalypse

PROLOGUE

I wasn’t a weird child. I wasn’t awkward or abnormal. I ran track and played baseball. I liked to draw. I had friends.  My family cared about me. I was an average student and did my best to stay out of trouble. I certainly wasn’t a social outcast. Truth be told, I failed to stand out in any way whatsoever.

Things changed when I met Eat’em. Eat’em’s an impish blood-red demon with porcupine thick hair, cold blue eyes, and a prehensile tail. His gait is a cross between a man and a spider monkey. His voice sounds like any number of elementary-aged children, with an easy-to-ignore “Mom look!” kind of cadence and a vocabulary equivalent to a coffee-shop philosopher. Eat’em is my not-so imaginary best friend.



When I was ten years old, I woke one morning to the little red demon on my end table. He stood no taller than my table lamp. He held a bottle of Pepto-Bismol antacid tablets my mother left me for an upset stomach.

“Can I have this?” he asked.

Bronze fur framed his large quizzical eyes – eyes icier than the most frozen blue, encapsulating triangular pupils as dark as the ocean’s depths. I didn’t immediately pin him for a demon. At the time, I was more interested in Animal Planet than mythology. He looked more like a simian to me, a word I’d learned from watching Planet Earth. I figured he was a spider monkey of sorts.

“Human child,” he said, shaking the bottle, “Can I have this?”

Perhaps I should have been more surprised, even scared of the imp shaking the bottle of antacids, but the creature could not have seemed less threatening. His piercing eyes were almost translucent, captivating and hypnotic. I found myself more memorized by his presence than frightened.

“I’m sorry,” I sat up, tucking my blanket onto my lap, and said, “But, you can talk? I mean. What are you?”

“Me?” his eyelids blinked outward from the bridge of his flat nose toward his indented temples. It reminded me of some kind of reptile, like a tree frog or something. “I’m me. You. I’m asking you, yes. Can I have this container of small delectable candies?” He rattled the container dramatically.

“The Pepto?” I asked.

“The Pepto,” he sighed and read the label. “Yes, the Pepto. This, yes. The candies. They’re in here. I found them, yes. I found them here. You. You were sleeping. I found these. They’re yours, yes? I want them. If I can have them. These. These Pepto. Oh… yes. If I can have them I’d be grateful, yes… I’d follow you. I’d follow you now until the day you die. From now until then, yes. I’d follow you and I would be your one true compatriot. The Don Quixote to your Sancho Panza, the Batman to your Robin, the Huckleberry Finn to your Nigger Jim. Yours. You. And… hm… yes. From then on I’d do what you ask of me. As your one true ally to do what you need. I’d be the best friend you have. Best. All I ask for, to be yours until forever, is that you bestow upon me these delightful morsels I have found of yours for my consumptive pleasure.”

“Yes,” I said, not thinking twice. “Take it. Eat’em.”

“Eat’em, great,” he said. “Yes. That’s what you will call me then. Thank you for this.” His long tail whipped around him and wrapped around the lid to the medicine bottle. He twisted hard, his face turning a darker shade of red. “What’s this? A trick! You’ve bought me for a container that doesn’t open? Oh… young human child, this is not becoming of you. No. Not. At. All. Bad start… bad start.”

I reached for the bottle and he yanked it back, clutching it tight to his chest. “It’s a child lock,” I said.

“Whoa there, child!” he said. “You gave this to me. It’s mine. Mine, yes. Trick or not, I want it. It’s mine.”

“I’m just going to open it for you.”

He squinted at me, the quills down his spine puffing out before relaxing back flat. “Okay,” he said. “But if I don’t get it back in… I don’t know how long. How long it takes you to open and return it. That long. If that’s not how long it takes to get it back. If instead it’s longer, yes. Then deal is off.”

“What deal?” I asked as I opened the bottle and handed it back.

He looked into the open bottle, eyes wide with pleasure. “Oh, the deal where I’m indebted to you forever. Don’t worry, no. That was plenty fast. Very fast. Oh… these are so worth it. More than worth it. I’ve been waiting all but the last ten minutes for these. I thought you’d never wake up… Then if you did… I was only half sure you would see me. And if you did, yes, I was only then about one-point-two percent sure that you would say yes to my having these. Which, one-point-two percent of half of never… wow. The odds were so stacked against, yes. But here we are.”

The imp held up a couple tablets, they took up his whole hand. He smiled widely and popped them into his mouth and began to chew, crunching loudly.

“Oh, yes… yes… yes,” he said. “The odds were so high against me ever getting these since I saw them ten… maybe eleven minutes ago. But fate had it that all those harrowing mathematical improbabilities would contradict the reality I had perceived which was you silently sleeping forever and me never ever ever getting these… Pepto. Which aren’t very good, by the way. Not at all. But so worth it to defeat the odds.”

He popped more pink pills in his mouth and chewed, then offered me one.

“No thanks,” I said.

“You are missing out,” he said before crunching loudly on another tablet, “To honor our new friendship, I will eat your share and my share, yes. Man, human child, you don’t know what I had to go through to get these. I was behind this house, huge beast. You. You have a huge dumb beast. Oh how I hate, hate beasts. They hate me though, yes. So that’s mutual. And I had to hide in the dirt behind the house and the beast kept digging until, man… you wouldn’t believe it if I said human child, but the odds are strikingly improbable. More so improbable than you waking to give me these!” He bit a tablet in half, chewed vigorously and continued. “That beast got yelled at for digging. Someone yelled, ‘Reena!’ and the beast went away.”

“Reena?” I asked. “The neighbor’s Chihuahua?”

“Yes, that,” the imp said, “Horrible thing. It went away and I climbed through a hole in the wooden barrier blocking that house, this house, yes. Climbed through, and the door was open. All the doors. Every door, usually shut, all of them open, yes. Leading me to this. This bottle of Pepto! And you. And odds were good I’d be standing here holding the bottle and you wouldn’t wake. Wouldn’t see me. Wouldn’t respond. And odds were against all the good things that had to happen. All the doors. All the waking and seeing and responding. Yes… I was going against all odds and so I bet it all. Bet myself to you. Oh man, human child, worth it. Worth it so much. Even if these. Pepto. Really bad, awful stuff.”



The demon sold himself into servitude for a bottle of really bad, awful stuff. And as promised, he never left my side.

Perhaps he stayed with me because I saw him. Perhaps he stayed with me because he was lonely. Perhaps he stayed with me because he needed me. Whatever the reason, Eat’em stayed with me. Not quite the Batman to my Robin, but he remained my invisible sidekick nonetheless. Even 15 years later, as I stand trial for the world to see, Eat’em remains at my side. After all, he’s part of the reason I’m here.



It’s easy for the media to point at me now and say, “There he is. There’s the crimson-eyed killer of Texas. The Assassin of Arlington.” Whatever they’re calling me. I get it.

But Eat’em and I didn’t set out to kill anyone. We meant to save the world from a threat only I could see. If we couldn’t stop the apocalypse, we at least wanted to postpone it.



Eat'em is the story of a crimson-eyed killer, a sugar-addicted demon, a parasitic infection, and a desperate quest to postpone the post-apocalypse.

Release date: Spring 2014