Harsh World

A story about a secret door under the wallpaper.

It was already raining.
After they shot the gangsters, they spent some time walking around blasting the teeth out of all the corpses. They pushed the long barrels of the guns between the lips and pulled the triggers. They propped up the bodies and put bullets through the darks of their necks.
Eventually, their heads caved in on themselves. There was a lot of spilled shit and urine pooling around.
Muel sat down heavily into the chair that had been pulled up in front of the television. The springs in the seat sagged and groaned miserably under his weight. There was nothing for him to watch because someone had kicked a hole in the screen. It could have been one of the gangsters or one of them.
The clock on the wall chimed. It chimed three times.
Muel took out his lighter and flicked it open. He squinted at the flame for a while then lit a cigarette. He took a long drag from the cigarette and then coughed it out.
“Fuck,” he said. “Where the hell did you get these?”
“Iran,” said Blic. He was sitting on the floor polishing his gun with a shred of linen from one of the gangsters’ shirts. He rubbed it up and down the shaft with long, slow motions.
“Fuck,” said Muel. “They’re harsh as shit.”
“It’s a harsh world,” said Blic.
“Can’t disagree with that,” said Muel.
Just then, a warthog came in through the open front door. Its nose was pressed to the ground, following a scent trail. It walked over to the far wall and started pulling strips of wallpaper off with its teeth. The two men watched it doing this. It didn’t pay any attention to them. Eventually, it tore off so much wallpaper that they could see the outline of a little secret door underneath.
The door didn’t have a doorknob, just had a wet opening with rows of sharp teeth inside. Some fluid started leaking out of opening.
“What the hell…” said Muel.
The fluid leaked down and trickled across the floor. It came over to where Blic was sitting and he bent down and stuck the tip of his finger in it. He put the glistening finger up to his lips and tasted it.
“Tastes like nothing,” he said.
“Fuck,” said Muel.

A while later Gaunt came in from another room. He had been making punctures in the abdomens of some of the gangsters. He had straddled their bodies with his knife in one hand and plunged it down again and again. When a millipede crawled out of one of the wounds he had decided to stop.
There were some crows outside and someone was firing guns at them. It was still raining. Sound of the crows, sound of the guns, sound of the rain hitting the roof and in the mud in the big, empty yard. Inside, rats were gnawing on some splinters of wood in rotted section of the floor. The warthog was long gone.
“Gaunt,” said Muel. “Check that.” He pointed at the little secret door with the wet opening in it.
“I’ll stick my whole arm in that,” said Gaunt, grinning. He stooped down and stuck his fist into the opening. It made a sucking sound, like a partially clogged drain.
Gaunt pushed harder. He pushed his whole fist in. The opening wrapped around his fist like a cephalopod and bit his fist off. Gaunt pulled his bloody arm stump out and held it up in front of his face.
“Fuck,” said Gaunt.
“You good?” said Muel.
“Yeah,” said Gaunt.
He went into the other room and came back with a new hand on his wrist. The hand was extremely pale. There was no blood on his arm anymore.
The little secret door swung open. Inside, it was all dark. There was the sound of huge boulders grinding against each other.
“Better shut that,” said Blic.
“No, we’re going in,” said Muel.
“I’ll take point,” said Gaunt.
They went through one by one. The door shut behind them. A rat crawled around in the busted television until it fell asleep. After a few days, the sun came around and burned through the roof of the building. The bodies of the gangsters started to bake in the heat.

Later, some of the men were shackled inside glass capsules in a laboratory. They were naked except for primitive loincloths. A scientist was walking between them taking notes.
The laboratory was a grid of metal walkways above a bottomless pit. The walkways had metal guardrails and some tall poles with lamps attached to them that lit up everything brightly. Tables in the center with things like beakers and scalpels and forceps. There was no visible exit.
“This place is almost at the bottom of the world,” said the scientist.
“Where’s the real bottom of the world?” said one of the men. It was Gaunt.
The scientist furrowed her brow. “You already know that,” she said. Just then, an electrical surge knocked the power out for a split second. When it came back on, the men had phased halfway through the glass. Their bodies were caught frozen in mid-stride, like mannequins.