"Midnight, off Arkansas River Trail"
John Gaillard was falling.
The cliff face had opened out from under him a footstep earlier than he’d planned… just enough gravel had rolled beneath the sole of his sneaker, his ankle twisted, and he flew right off, a horrible sinking sensation that this was what he deserved, that he’d made the wrong choices too many times, not least of which had been trapping himself against this ragged precipice in the first place. Time slowed, just like the stories always said, his senses hyper-analytical, his mind on overdrive firing through the picture show of his life: eating burgers, drinking beer, fucking, fighting, wishing, crying, memories he’d not thought of for years, a million years it felt like, all compacted into the time it took for him to fall, fall, fall, and at the last he let loose a singular scream of desperation and rage at what all had occurred.
He fell through the night sky, down the mountain, and the impossible happened. The highest tip of the tallest pine below him flashed through the moonlight, and his body was angled just the right way, plummeting just the right way, with the air lifting his shirt up over his head like an unfurling parachute, that the skyward reach of that pine’s top ran up the side of his torso and under his shirt and out through the neck hole and caught him, snapping him back upward as if he’d ricocheted off a wall. He hung there, impaled, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, then when he did, it came in such a rush and a gasp that the constrictions of his chest sent him slipping free of his shirt, and he fell again.
Now he fell through the branches, each one arresting his descent in a sort of slow motion drop, the way a drip of blood may channel down across the uneven ridges of a wound, turning left, slipping right, switching left again. Pine needles stabbed at his face, tree bark slashed his chest, something tore his knee, his shin cracked, but he scrabbled around off each, finally landing on a bed of leaves overlaying a fortuitous mound of loose soil. He lay there awhile, breathing heavily, and he knew if he let it he’d start sobbing, and such an act would be uncontrollable to stop.
A small pinecone dropped next to him, and the sound it made was delicate, peaceful.
He stared up at the tree he’d fallen through, watching the shaking of the limbs subside, each in turn returning to its state prior to his plunge through their midst. Above that was the mountain face he’d come off, spiraling up against a full moon that cast its glow over all it touched, as if sympathetic for what John had gone through.
He hurt all over, but he’d escaped.
Then he saw the distant figure of Junior Clove run along that same precipice, so high up he appeared nothing more than a little dot before his eyes, the kind of speck you scrunch up your face and examine, and it turns out to be a gnat, or a fleck of ash. But John had no doubt about who exactly that speck was...
Junior stopped, looked around, and turned his head to John two hundred feet down in the dark, through the trees, perhaps noticing a final shifting of the upper branches’ foliage as it returned to its natural resting place.
Without a second glance, Junior leapt off the cliff right after him.
John’s throat closed up before the scream could begin. He rolled over and scrambled sideways. The night seemed to still, things went silent. He knew it wasn’t possible, but he imagined hearing Junior falling through the sky like a meteor, gathering momentum, shooting right toward him. John crawled fast on hands and feet, crablike, scuttling backward and unable to take his eyes off the falling man…
Then again, Junior Clove wasn’t a man no more, John had to admit that after all he’d seen. He willed himself to break sight and stand, and he looked desperately at his surroundings. Pine needles and leaves and cones, dirt, the bones of a squirrel; he skimmed past these things, until there was something he saw to use, a large stick, the diameter of a broom handle. He lifted one end and, with his good leg, stomped down on it, breaking off a three-foot length with a sharp, jagged point.
Junior hit the tree tops, and a thunderous crash burst high above, thudding louder and louder through the branches, like waves rolling in, until a final eruption let John know Junior had landed.
Christ, let him be dead, he thought. His best friend for fifteen years, and now John pleaded for him to just be done and ended. He took a hesitant step toward the swirling leaves and dust, hoping--anything, he’d do anything, he swore—to see that figure crumpled and still.
The odds of me surviving that fall, coming out with so little injury, John thought. It couldn’t be possible to occur for two men in a row…
Junior’s dark figure slowly stood.
“Shit on me,” John muttered.
Junior, at the least, hadn’t come through the fall as unscathed as John. When he finally got to standing upright, his left arm dangled loose, like a link of chains. Something in his leg geysered out blood, as did his mouth.
A low chuckle rose from the depths of Junior’s throat. His voice was a distant thunderstorm, when he replied to John, “Oh, I’m gonna shit on you all right.”
That was it, then. John ached all over, he overflowed with terror, but he knew this was his opening, with Junior half-stunned from the fall, injured, unarmed—John charged him with the stick aiming to ram the jagged point straight through Junior’s chest… only Junior twisted and fell back at the last moment, so the spear didn’t do much more than leave a gash across his breast, probably right above that tat he’d gotten three years ago of an oversized sombrero casting shadows over bright, smoking eyes.
Junior’s good arm—the one not busted up and limp—shot up and caught the end of the spear, his grip like a vise. John kept his hands tight on the other end of the spear, and he tried to rear back, but Junior had always been the strongest of them, and now that vigor had somehow multiplied; even one-armed, the spear was wrenched easily away.
At the least, the recoil from winning the spear threw Junior off-balance, and John tried some kid-style Karate kick he’d learned at a studio when he was twelve, only Junior blocked it hard with a side-thrust, and then he lunged forward, snarling. Junior’s mouth opened, and the teeth were turned hideous, somehow larger and sharper, somehow multiplied…
And in that moment, that fraction of a millisecond, John got a good look into Junior’s mouth, past the flapping swollen tongue and lolling tonsils, down the cavernous raw throat, and he saw the flash of another person within, a demon or Big Bad Wolf or something else, wearing Junior as a costume…
John turned, and he began to run again.
#
Only four hours ago, they’d been driving in Junior’s ’85 Chevy Impala with the sun-faded paint on the hood and a missing hubcap on the rear, and license plates they’d heisted off another car that didn’t have expired tags. One of the headlights only worked half the time, the other flickered ominously, in the dark, the gloom, the shadows.
Junior, John, and Bobby Gelb, barreling down Arkansas River Trail, shootin’ up dirt and leaves from the back tires and giving a sort of middle finger to Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Junior had been behind the wheel, drinkin’ a brewski. Bobby was sprawled in the big leather rear seat that was striped by duct tape meant to keep together all the splits, and smoking a fat joint. John was telling a story, reliving their old glory days from school years ago, when he’d had a pet ball python, and they’d slipped into the girls’ locker room during lunch with it, a-creeping toward the showers…
It started to rain. Junior flicked on the car’s wipers with one hand, upended his beer in the other. Steered hard to the right with his elbow at that turn, while Bobby shrieked with laughter. Just when John was getting to the good parts about Jenny Penn’s locker and Sherri LaFoux coming out from a stall with nothing on but a smile--
—then that goddamned old fucking lady stepped the fuck out from nowhere right into the path of the car. There were screams—more than one. The whole car shuddered when they hit her; she dented the grill, went over the hood, smashed the windshield to hell, then kept flying up and over the roof, sailing like a sack of shit with wings. Junior hit the brakes, and the Chevy swung wide, fish-tailed. John smelled burning rubber, acrid, but not as bad as the smell of blood, the gut-wrenching scent of copper corrosion. His ears rang, something howled, the wind or his beating heart, and still the car turned, his whole body clenched, and he almost broke teeth clamping his jaw together so hard, and he couldn’t see nothing since his eyes locked shut, and still the car turned, spinning now, and his guts went flying up, and he forgot how to breathe, except for the shrill wheeze escaping from his throat.
Then it was over. John opened his eyes to darkness but for what the moon cast through the forest canopy above. He sat there, unable to move, just feeling his chest pound in and out, and that’s when Bobby screamed.
“I’m burning! My mouth! Get me out!”
John turned, instinctively, to the big, leather rear seat where Bobby’d been laying, but it was empty.
“Get me out!”
John looked to Junior, and Junior looked down at his feet, and there was Bobby, thrown and smashed under the dash of the car, curled up like a baby in swaddling. John grabbed one leg and Junior the other, and they extracted their friend from the metal and wire casing.
“Goddamn, I swall’ed my joint,” he said. A thin wisp of smoke curled out when he spoke. His teeth were missing, sheared off, or knocked out from colliding in the car. Blood poured out from between his lips. “I feel it burnin’ my tummy…”
“We hit someone,” John remembered.
They got out and found the old woman forty feet away.
Most of her.
One leg and an ear were another ten feet beyond.
“I’ve been drinking,” Junior said. “I’m already drivin’ on a suspended.”
“I need a doct’r,” Bobby said. The smoke had extinguished from his mouth, but the blood still flowed.
“That woman needs a doctor,” John said.
Junior toed her corpse with his shoe. “This bitch is gone and dead,” he said, real reverently. “I done it too, I never killed anyone before.”
“I still need a doct’r,” Bobby moaned, feeling around the empty sockets in his mouth. “Or maybe just a dentist.”
“It’s prison,” Junior said. “I’m goin’ to prison for sure…”
The rain came harder, a steady staccato beat, pattering against the asphalt road, sluicing through the leaves of the tree. John looked around in a slow circle, feeling the horror of what they’d done, of what would happen afterward. His best friend to prison. The rest of them branded too, by association. Fuckin’ judgmental town would spit at them.
The woman was gone, nothing to be done there. It was horrible, but true. She coulda been any one of their grannies, baking cookies, babysitting them as kids, reading them bedtime stories. Now she was a smear, a gray-haired, skinny, busted-up, old smear. Her clothes looked hand-made, like calico gowns, her fingers wore large rings. But none of that mattered, she was a smear, and they were up the deepest falls of Shit Creek.
“Your car still running?” John asked.
Junior held out his hands, pleading. “I don’t know.”
“We gotta hide her, man. Take her somewhere, bury the body. No one’s gotta know where she went. Old people go off wandering all the time, dementia and shit. They fall down holes, trip into rivers, never seen again.”
“You think so?”
“It’s raining, ain’t it? No better luck than that, water’ll wash away the blood on the road… but your car, you gotta get it started, so we can get out of here. Get it cleaned up, fixed up.”
They all held their breath, almost talismanically, even Bobby, through the blood and busted teeth.
Junior got the car running again. John almost wept. He asked, “What time is it?”
Bobby wore an old Casio. “11:55.”
“Pete’s got that chop shop garage runnin’ over on Bovard. He’ll still be up, ’til at least 1:00. It’s hooker night.”
Bobby’s smile was ghastly, like a bottle of Heinz detonated in his mouth, but it made Junior smile in return. His laugh was a relief. They tossed the old woman and her sundered parts into the trunk and drove away.
By then, it was 11:58…
#
How long had he been running, and how long could he sustain it? John wondered. The rain had let up after midnight, sometime after whatever-the-fuck-had-happened to Junior, but the ground was still wet for it, muddy, slippery.
He’d played varsity baseball in school, could steal bases like a goddamned hero, until crappy grades had gotten him kicked off the team. ’Course, that had been three years ago, and those three years hadn’t been filled with much in the way of physical conditioning, unless walking out to a gas pump when customers rolled in could be counted as such. Now his heart hammered, he found himself gasping for breaths, the cramps in his sides wrenched deeper with each step… he’d lost one shoe in the fall, so now his pace was unsteady too—he tried to settle himself—breathe in slow and deep, in through the nose, out through the mouth—but tasted blood whenever he inhaled in such a way. He found himself limping more, his remaining shoe split at the heel, catching on spurs, and his knee threatening to give out from where he’d struck it during that fall through the trees.
He was weakening, which meant Junior would be gaining, which meant he’d be dead soon, and not in a pleasant “easy” way.
Junior’s voice seemed to confirm his thoughts, roaring from behind, followed by another roar, this of tumbling sticks and rocks, of sliding.
“I’m gon’ get you, Johnny,” his old friend shouted. The voice sounded at least a distance away, not far enough for John’s liking, but not breathing down his neck either.
The moonlight flickered in and out through pine branch divides and drifting night clouds. It was all he could do to strain his eyes in the ethereal beams not to trip over treacherous roots and clods. Maybe moving slower would be safer, so he wouldn’t snap an ankle, but then Junior would gain more. Or maybe Junior would trip…
The ground fell away again, but at the last, John threw himself backward, a nightmare-shriek of falling, falling, falling like before, but instead he just landed on his ass in the wet. He looked down, all of eight feet below to a dry creek bed, filled with jumpseed and ironweed, and some holly tufts on the banks. There were rocks down there too, good-sized boulders of quartz, feldspar.
Maybe Junior would trip…
John yanked off his remaining shoe, grabbed at the lace, undid the little bunny-eared knot, unwound it from the eyelets.
“Jooohhhnnny,” the voice was nearing.
Assuming Junior would follow the same path as himself, it’d lead him here, through the breaks in the bushes and brambles. John tied the shoe lace across the path, about two feet high like a trip wire, tightened it around the trunk of a cottonwood, which he then crept behind. There, he found a chunk of granite the size of a baseball, sharp at the edges.
“Fuck you, Junior, I fucked your mom,” John shouted. It was a lie, of course, but he couldn’t think of anything else. “And your dog, too!”
Ten of the longest seconds of his life passed, and Junior came bursting through the trees along the path, frothing like a rabid dog. He was running, right for the stretched lace—one trip and he’d fall headfirst into the rocks.
Only Junior stopped at the edge. He sniffed the air like an animal, scanned the darkness. His feet were right behind the line, and under it. Without even looking down, he said, “A shoelace trap… that all you got?”
John lobbed the rock out across the creek into the opposite bank. It thudded through the twigs. Junior perked right up, tensed at that direction, facing over the channel.
John leapt up, hit him hard from behind in a linesman’s tackle. The lace held. Junior’s feet caught under it as he went over the edge. It wasn’t far, only eight feet or so, but the tripwire caused Junior to land upside-down, on his face. There was a gurgle, a choking sound. John jumped down on top of him, grabbed one of the creek rocks and brought it down on the back of Junior’s head, then again, and again.
The skull cracked open, patches of hair, splatters of blood went sailing. John could see the horrible red-veined gray matter of the brain underneath. He thought it was over, he’d won.
Wrong.
Junior recovered, he rolled over, throwing John aside, throwing him hard. One of Junior’s eyes was crumpled shut, his face bleeding in a dozen places. The glee was unmistakable when he said, “My turn.”
John staggered upward, tripping back while trying to stand, feeling the cold, sharp rocks cut into his feet, while Junior’s good arm grabbed his own rock from the creek bed, lifted it. John knew what was coming, he brought up his arms in a defensive crouch, crying out, flinching all the while.
But it was Junior’s bad arm that got him, the one that’d looked shattered after he’d jumped off the mountain. There must’ve been a dozen busted bones in that left arm, flopping around like a link of loose chains. And maybe nothing held the arm together the way it was meant to, maybe the ligaments or tendons had gotten pulled, stretched unnaturally or something from the fall, but when Junior lashed out with his left arm it became like a whip--a motherfucking whip—uncoiling, stretching, elongating…
For the briefest of moments, John thought of the cartoons he’d watched as a kid, of Spider-Man flicking out his wrist to shoot a beam of webbing, and then Junior’s arm struck like that, in an impossibly wide-reaching hook, fist-first, smashing into his temple. The sky lit up in sparkles as John slumped over, banging his ribs on the rocks.
And then Junior threw the rock he’d been holding with his good arm—the kinda rock that would cave in a face—and John didn’t have time to react. It was a rocket, and John watched it come for him, nearer and nearer in shutter-clicks of time, and then it sailed past, shattering against a boulder in a shower of needling stone fragments. Maybe whatever was inside Junior Clove had made him stronger, made him faster, but it hadn’t done anything for his aim. Junior’s aim had always been shitty.
John had played varsity baseball in school, and besides stealing bases like a hero, he could throw like a pro. He grabbed another rock, scrabbled to his feet, and launched his own returning salvo, and it was a direct hit. Junior howled, toppling backward.
John moved in, but in no time at all, Junior was already getting to his feet, his nose reduced to a crater. He started to spin his left arm, winding it up like a medieval mace…
“The last little asshole,” Junior said.
John turned, and he began to run again.
#
They sped down the road in the Chevy, ripping along the switchbacks of Arkansas River Trail.
“Slow down,” John said. “You’re gonna drive us off the cliff.”
“We gotta get out, we gotta get out,” Junior kept repeating. They were both hysterical.
Bobby didn’t say anything. He was in the rear seat, real quiet and proper this time, sitting straight-backed with his seatbelt on. His mouth still bled to hell, and he held his shirt to it, dabbing and dabbing.
Outside, the rain pounded away, splashing in at them through the broken windshield. The Impala had a clock on the dashboard, one of those small radial analog devices in black and white, with a little spinning red needle.
“We still got an hour, at least, while Pete’s at his shop,” John said, glancing at the clock.
Glancing, just as that little red needle circled around the top, 11:59 turning to 12:00 midnight.
The sky erupted in a flash of brilliance, it detonated with the thunder of vast explosions. John went blind, deaf. The car flew.
There was a sickening crunch, something smashed his face, he rebounded off the dashboard, remnants of glass sluicing his skin, he felt upside-down, then inverted, then swimming, then dead.
Then he wasn’t any of those things, but opened his eyes again to desolation. They were cantilevered off the road, a fat pine through the Impala’s front. Steam billowed out from the crumpled radiator, and John could smell oil, gas, something else like piss mixed with rotten milk.
Junior was staring at him, eyes as saucers, giant and shimmering. He whispered the great secret, “What. The. Fuck.”
John coughed, found his voice. “Lightning… that was lightning.”
“Lightning?” He couldn’t comprehend.
“We got hit, struck.”
Junior again, “What. The. Fuck.”
They looked back. Bobby was still belted in, sitting as before. “I’m fine,” he announced real proudly. “’Cept for my teeth, I mean.”
A thud jarred the car, coming from behind. A florid, hoarse voice announced, “I smell assholes.”
Junior’s eyes couldn’t go any bigger, but they did. “What. The. F—”
“Bobby?” John asked.
“Assholes…” the voice sang. “Three little assholes, sitting in a car, killed me on a road, now they won’t get far.”
Then laughter, a choking, scratching rise of musical notes getting higher and higher in tones so shrill the remaining windows rattled, then those notes dropping low, low, the reverberations of a bass tube. Another thud jarred the car.
“Bobby,” John whispered, “that’s coming behind you…”
“What is it?”
“The trunk,” Junior said. “It’s the trunk, that old woman we hit—”
Another thud, and a fist smashed through the center back of the rear seat, through the metal springs and framework, through the cushioning, through the leather. The fist paused, old-lady knuckles drawn tight, gnarled from arthritis, spotted from age and disease, then the fingers splayed open all at once as if reaching for something. Bobby was seated left of it, and he screamed, the way a little girl might if a spider dropped in front of her.
The hand closed on air, opened again, and then drew back slightly, grabbed the edges of the hole it’d made, and pulled inward, widening the gap. A second fist punched through, and grabbed the other side of the hole, pulling it back too.
Bobby screamed again and tried to bolt away, but he had his seatbelt on. His hands scrambled to unlatch himself, then he flung open the passenger door, only it banged against a tree, with no more than a couple inches of space. He tried to squeeze himself through anyway, but did not succeed. The hole in the seat’s backing was bigger now, big enough for the old dead woman’s head to emerge, big enough for John to see the eyes, tinged yellow and streaked through with blood, big enough to see her gray hair, matted with mud, with filth, big enough to see her teeth, somehow more than he’d ever seen in a person’s mouth…
Her face turned to Bobby. “First little asshole.”
She reached out with both arms and snatched Bobby around each shoulder, then withdrew into the hole, taking Bobby headfirst with her. His screams were non-stop, shrill, hideous. Only his legs stuck out from the gap leading into the trunk, and they kicked out ferociously. John and Junior each grabbed one, trying to pull him out, but, just as fast, he was sucked from their grasp, entirely into the trunk, among the sounds of great smacking, chewing, thudding, and screams.
John looked at Junior, Junior looked at John. They threw open their doors and leapt out, circling to the trunk.
Junior had his keys out, calling, “Bobby!”
At the last, John shouted, “No, wait!”
There was another eruption, a flash of brilliance, a shattering explosion, a lightning strike.
John woke lying on the ground ten feet from the car, Junior opposite him. The car’s trunk was scorched black. It unlatched, popped open on its own.
Bobby climbed out, pushing the old woman’s body ahead of him. It fell like an egg, desiccated, hollow, shattering on the ground, just a limp pile of calico gowns and hair and drained flesh. He turned his head, alternating looks from John to Junior.
John blinked about a million times, trying to clear out the fuzz from his vision, the ringing from his ears. Bobby was a mess, and not just his busted-up teeth. He had bite wounds all over, dappling his neck and cheek, and ragged holes leaked across his clothes. Claw marks etched his forehead, a finger was missing. He wore blood like a Halloween uniform.
“Bobby?” Junior asked, standing.
Bobby’s chest sorta hitched, and a spasm ran through one jittery arm. He sniffed the air, he said, “I smell assholes.”
A laugh, a song: “Two little assholes, found ’em on the road, now they shall reap the seeds that they’ve sown.”
He lunged at Junior, arms reaching, fingers splayed out. Junior was quick, at least—he still held the keys in his hand, the ones he’d been fumbling with to open the trunk, and now he popped in a quick jabbing punch, trunk key sticking out from between his knuckles like a little dagger, ripping into Bobby’s face, tearing open his side along the chisel of the cheekbone. Skin and gristle parted from skull, and Bobby reeled, floundered, then leapt up, lunging again. Junior tried punching a second time, but Bobby dodged, grabbed him, they both spun toward the car and fell to the ground. Junior headbutted him on the way down, Bobby’s head ricocheted off the Chevy’s fender. Someone growled, someone else cursed.
John tried to intercede, he rushed in, kicked at Bobby, aimed for the head, but Bobby and Junior moved rolling away, and John connected with the exhaust pipe instead. He howled in pain, then Bobby and Junior rolled back and Bobby kicked John’s legs out from under him, while Junior tried to gouge out eyes. Glass littered the ground around them, and Bobby grabbed a chunk, sunk it into Junior’s throat. New screams broke the night, and the sound of snapping bones, the sound of rushing air...
Bobby’s jaw unhinged, opening, like the way John remembered his pet ball python doing before feeding. Bobby’s face went over Junior’s, and he breathed something out, some puff of dust, a rainbow of glitter sparkles, and words John had never before heard.
There was another lightning explosion. He felt himself lifted, tossed through the air, but he landed soft this time, he felt almost used to it by now.
His head cleared. He didn’t know what to expect next, but figured it’d be bad whatever happened, and so it was. Junior stood, kicking away Bobby Gelb’s body. What was left of Bobby sorta tumbled away as if it were a dandelion gone to seed and dispersed by a sigh of wind, just some flapping loose clothes and torn skin looking dry and frail as corn husk.
Junior coughed once, stretched toward the stars. Looked around, sniffing. “I smell an asshole.”
John ran from there, down the road as fast as he could, from the laughter, from the song. He ran and ran, and Junior chased him, and they played cat-and-mouse, and they fought, and they ran some more, and then John took the wrong step off a mountain cliff…
#
And now he was running still, his bare feet torn and dragging, the gasps for air coming harder and harder as he pushed through the forest, the trees. Drool and snot splattered his face, and blood and mud, and all else, even tears, which John had not shed in a long, long time.
Keep pushing, keep pushing, John told himself, he pleaded with himself. Junior-Fucking-Clove… how much was left of him to put up this chase? Junior was limping, pouring blood too, one-eyed, busted bones, the back of his head erupted…
But it didn’t matter, and of this, John was transcendental in his certainty. If Junior had one single toe remaining, it’d be undulating in pursuit like some killer worm. That woman they’d hit, that fucking old woman, that gypsy, that witch, that demon, that whatever. He wanted to know desperately who she was, but he also recognized that, he did not ever want to learn. Should he discover who she was—who she’d been, what curse she’d carried—would mean she was inside him, the way she was inside Junior. No, no, ignorance herein was truly bliss.
So he ran, and he panted like a wounded dog, and he sobbed and wished his life otherwise.
A sharp crack sounded ahead, a shifting of branches, a voice, “Hold!”
John spun, looking to flee, but couldn’t find a way besides the path straight ahead he’d been going.
A man came out of the trees, a hunter in camouflage attire and a bright orange vest. He carried a long sleek rifle in gloved hands, a scope, pouches of ammo. “You almost caught a round, fella.”
John tried to speak, but his gasps for air wouldn’t allow it. He winced at the sharp pains in his side while pointing backward, sputtering.
“What’re you doing out here?” A second hunter followed the first, looking like brothers. They both had shaggy chops, caps pulled low, ’bacco stains on their chins. Their clothes were wet, beaded with moisture from the earlier rain, though they didn’t seem to mind. One curious eye squinted at John, then did a slow double-take. “You been in an accident?”
“There’s a man,” John gasped. “Behind me, gonna kill me, he was killed, killed others, gonna kill me too, gotta keep g—”
“Hold a sec, fella,” the first hunter said. The fucker seemed to share a smile with his brother, some sort of inside joke. “Say there’s a man who was killed, gonna kill you now?”
“He’s coming…”
“You take drugs?” one of them asked. The other, at least, started to look around, showing some spare concern.
Then the crashing came, nearing through the underbrush, footfalls, branches breaking, no care for caution. A displaced owl hooted, taking to flight with slow, lithe flaps of the wings. The hunters were attentive now, they moved apart on the trail, crouching into the shadows. John went past them, walking backward.
“Shoot him,” John urged. “Shoot him.”
Junior appeared, a walking golem of gore. His steps were shuddering, as if jaunting on rickety stilts, but going fast, some force pumping them up and down, forward ceaselessly. “Johnny, oh Johnny,” he said. “Johnny made some new friends.”
“Hold it there,” one of the hunters said.
Junior didn’t. He walked right for the man.
“I’m gonna shoot.”
He did.
It was a quick pow, and Junior’s shoulder gained a peephole. John didn’t know how much blood Junior could’ve had left, but there was suddenly enough of a geyser ejecting from his back that John figured it must still be pumping normal as can be by whatever force kept him moving.
“Ouch,” Junior said, flatly. He reached the man, took the rifle by its barrel and jerked it away, then brought it around in a wide circle to smash its stock into the man’s head. The other hunter fired, hit Junior again, just as Junior dragged the first man down.
John didn’t need to see any more. He ran.
A hundred feet away, there was an explosion of lightning come from behind.
By another quarter mile later, he heard a couple more gunshots, some weakening screams, then another lightning strike.
It wasn’t fair, John thought. He hadn’t done nothin’ but sat in the passenger seat, told a stupid joke. Sure it was his suggestion to cover up the accident, but shit, the woman was already dead. No harm trying to help his friends, to protect them… that, in fact, was the definition of kindness, fucking altruism for others, and now this was happening…
He just couldn’t go on.
John fell to his knees, and after the thunder of his breathing eased from his ears, he heard another type of thunder, a soft, purring sound of sustained motion. Fast-flowing, churning water, the Arkansas River. No, he thought, he’d hit the Maumelle River first, and that would wash out to the Arkansas River. Maybe, just maybe…
He forced himself to his feet by whatever grace of God’s will filled him, some resoluteness he’d never before in life touched. John limped and stumbled and floundered, and soon he made it to the river’s bank, sloshing through the glorious brown shallows, wading past knobs of cypress and supplejack, virginal rose mallow, and a million other flowers and briers and thickets of beauty. The cold water was a balm over his feet, his knees, hips, and then he fell weightless, rolling onto his back and floating, and letting the current carry him away.
The roar of the water grew as he was pulled farther out, but it was a harmonious sound, a normalcy. Smells comingled in the air of rotting moss, of fish, of mulberries and musk, of survival. It was the smell of goddamned survival. Freedom.
He closed his eyes and wept, just let it all out. The river carried him, it caressed him, cradled him, and he fell to sleep in its embrace.
Some time passed, and he realized he wasn’t moving so much, just sorta bobbing, caught up on the shore of an inward cove. It might’ve rained some more, he couldn’t tell. The sky far east began lightening. He bobbed there, and cared not what else should happen.
A voice woke him from directly overhead.
“I smell an asshole.”
It was one of the hunters, his vest gone missing, the camouflage attire in tatters across his chest. His hat was gone missing too, the hunter’s head underneath pale and hairless like a wind-swept dome, with a long bloody gash on one side.
John screamed.
The hunter laughed, and then he laughed some more, a roiling mirth that filled the waterways, echoing across the dawning sky. He took a step nearer.
The horizon broke under a rising sun, and its first ray grazed him. The hunter’s face pained, and he took a step back.
“No,” the hunter muttered, “no, no, no.” He braced himself, made a big show of resolution, took a step forward, and the touch of the sun burned him again. He shrieked, backed away from the shore, toward the cover of the trees where the light had not yet quite reached.
John just eyed him, his heart jackhammering, then with one foot’s nudge, pushed himself from the bank back out into the river, to float away.
The hunter yelled at him, cursed at him, and John didn’t care, until the last, parting words reached his ears over the chirping birds and wakening, howling wildlife, the words that promised, “Midnight. I’ll be back again at midnight!”
The cliff face had opened out from under him a footstep earlier than he’d planned… just enough gravel had rolled beneath the sole of his sneaker, his ankle twisted, and he flew right off, a horrible sinking sensation that this was what he deserved, that he’d made the wrong choices too many times, not least of which had been trapping himself against this ragged precipice in the first place. Time slowed, just like the stories always said, his senses hyper-analytical, his mind on overdrive firing through the picture show of his life: eating burgers, drinking beer, fucking, fighting, wishing, crying, memories he’d not thought of for years, a million years it felt like, all compacted into the time it took for him to fall, fall, fall, and at the last he let loose a singular scream of desperation and rage at what all had occurred.
He fell through the night sky, down the mountain, and the impossible happened. The highest tip of the tallest pine below him flashed through the moonlight, and his body was angled just the right way, plummeting just the right way, with the air lifting his shirt up over his head like an unfurling parachute, that the skyward reach of that pine’s top ran up the side of his torso and under his shirt and out through the neck hole and caught him, snapping him back upward as if he’d ricocheted off a wall. He hung there, impaled, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, then when he did, it came in such a rush and a gasp that the constrictions of his chest sent him slipping free of his shirt, and he fell again.
Now he fell through the branches, each one arresting his descent in a sort of slow motion drop, the way a drip of blood may channel down across the uneven ridges of a wound, turning left, slipping right, switching left again. Pine needles stabbed at his face, tree bark slashed his chest, something tore his knee, his shin cracked, but he scrabbled around off each, finally landing on a bed of leaves overlaying a fortuitous mound of loose soil. He lay there awhile, breathing heavily, and he knew if he let it he’d start sobbing, and such an act would be uncontrollable to stop.
A small pinecone dropped next to him, and the sound it made was delicate, peaceful.
He stared up at the tree he’d fallen through, watching the shaking of the limbs subside, each in turn returning to its state prior to his plunge through their midst. Above that was the mountain face he’d come off, spiraling up against a full moon that cast its glow over all it touched, as if sympathetic for what John had gone through.
He hurt all over, but he’d escaped.
Then he saw the distant figure of Junior Clove run along that same precipice, so high up he appeared nothing more than a little dot before his eyes, the kind of speck you scrunch up your face and examine, and it turns out to be a gnat, or a fleck of ash. But John had no doubt about who exactly that speck was...
Junior stopped, looked around, and turned his head to John two hundred feet down in the dark, through the trees, perhaps noticing a final shifting of the upper branches’ foliage as it returned to its natural resting place.
Without a second glance, Junior leapt off the cliff right after him.
John’s throat closed up before the scream could begin. He rolled over and scrambled sideways. The night seemed to still, things went silent. He knew it wasn’t possible, but he imagined hearing Junior falling through the sky like a meteor, gathering momentum, shooting right toward him. John crawled fast on hands and feet, crablike, scuttling backward and unable to take his eyes off the falling man…
Then again, Junior Clove wasn’t a man no more, John had to admit that after all he’d seen. He willed himself to break sight and stand, and he looked desperately at his surroundings. Pine needles and leaves and cones, dirt, the bones of a squirrel; he skimmed past these things, until there was something he saw to use, a large stick, the diameter of a broom handle. He lifted one end and, with his good leg, stomped down on it, breaking off a three-foot length with a sharp, jagged point.
Junior hit the tree tops, and a thunderous crash burst high above, thudding louder and louder through the branches, like waves rolling in, until a final eruption let John know Junior had landed.
Christ, let him be dead, he thought. His best friend for fifteen years, and now John pleaded for him to just be done and ended. He took a hesitant step toward the swirling leaves and dust, hoping--anything, he’d do anything, he swore—to see that figure crumpled and still.
The odds of me surviving that fall, coming out with so little injury, John thought. It couldn’t be possible to occur for two men in a row…
Junior’s dark figure slowly stood.
“Shit on me,” John muttered.
Junior, at the least, hadn’t come through the fall as unscathed as John. When he finally got to standing upright, his left arm dangled loose, like a link of chains. Something in his leg geysered out blood, as did his mouth.
A low chuckle rose from the depths of Junior’s throat. His voice was a distant thunderstorm, when he replied to John, “Oh, I’m gonna shit on you all right.”
That was it, then. John ached all over, he overflowed with terror, but he knew this was his opening, with Junior half-stunned from the fall, injured, unarmed—John charged him with the stick aiming to ram the jagged point straight through Junior’s chest… only Junior twisted and fell back at the last moment, so the spear didn’t do much more than leave a gash across his breast, probably right above that tat he’d gotten three years ago of an oversized sombrero casting shadows over bright, smoking eyes.
Junior’s good arm—the one not busted up and limp—shot up and caught the end of the spear, his grip like a vise. John kept his hands tight on the other end of the spear, and he tried to rear back, but Junior had always been the strongest of them, and now that vigor had somehow multiplied; even one-armed, the spear was wrenched easily away.
At the least, the recoil from winning the spear threw Junior off-balance, and John tried some kid-style Karate kick he’d learned at a studio when he was twelve, only Junior blocked it hard with a side-thrust, and then he lunged forward, snarling. Junior’s mouth opened, and the teeth were turned hideous, somehow larger and sharper, somehow multiplied…
And in that moment, that fraction of a millisecond, John got a good look into Junior’s mouth, past the flapping swollen tongue and lolling tonsils, down the cavernous raw throat, and he saw the flash of another person within, a demon or Big Bad Wolf or something else, wearing Junior as a costume…
John turned, and he began to run again.
#
Only four hours ago, they’d been driving in Junior’s ’85 Chevy Impala with the sun-faded paint on the hood and a missing hubcap on the rear, and license plates they’d heisted off another car that didn’t have expired tags. One of the headlights only worked half the time, the other flickered ominously, in the dark, the gloom, the shadows.
Junior, John, and Bobby Gelb, barreling down Arkansas River Trail, shootin’ up dirt and leaves from the back tires and giving a sort of middle finger to Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Junior had been behind the wheel, drinkin’ a brewski. Bobby was sprawled in the big leather rear seat that was striped by duct tape meant to keep together all the splits, and smoking a fat joint. John was telling a story, reliving their old glory days from school years ago, when he’d had a pet ball python, and they’d slipped into the girls’ locker room during lunch with it, a-creeping toward the showers…
It started to rain. Junior flicked on the car’s wipers with one hand, upended his beer in the other. Steered hard to the right with his elbow at that turn, while Bobby shrieked with laughter. Just when John was getting to the good parts about Jenny Penn’s locker and Sherri LaFoux coming out from a stall with nothing on but a smile--
—then that goddamned old fucking lady stepped the fuck out from nowhere right into the path of the car. There were screams—more than one. The whole car shuddered when they hit her; she dented the grill, went over the hood, smashed the windshield to hell, then kept flying up and over the roof, sailing like a sack of shit with wings. Junior hit the brakes, and the Chevy swung wide, fish-tailed. John smelled burning rubber, acrid, but not as bad as the smell of blood, the gut-wrenching scent of copper corrosion. His ears rang, something howled, the wind or his beating heart, and still the car turned, his whole body clenched, and he almost broke teeth clamping his jaw together so hard, and he couldn’t see nothing since his eyes locked shut, and still the car turned, spinning now, and his guts went flying up, and he forgot how to breathe, except for the shrill wheeze escaping from his throat.
Then it was over. John opened his eyes to darkness but for what the moon cast through the forest canopy above. He sat there, unable to move, just feeling his chest pound in and out, and that’s when Bobby screamed.
“I’m burning! My mouth! Get me out!”
John turned, instinctively, to the big, leather rear seat where Bobby’d been laying, but it was empty.
“Get me out!”
John looked to Junior, and Junior looked down at his feet, and there was Bobby, thrown and smashed under the dash of the car, curled up like a baby in swaddling. John grabbed one leg and Junior the other, and they extracted their friend from the metal and wire casing.
“Goddamn, I swall’ed my joint,” he said. A thin wisp of smoke curled out when he spoke. His teeth were missing, sheared off, or knocked out from colliding in the car. Blood poured out from between his lips. “I feel it burnin’ my tummy…”
“We hit someone,” John remembered.
They got out and found the old woman forty feet away.
Most of her.
One leg and an ear were another ten feet beyond.
“I’ve been drinking,” Junior said. “I’m already drivin’ on a suspended.”
“I need a doct’r,” Bobby said. The smoke had extinguished from his mouth, but the blood still flowed.
“That woman needs a doctor,” John said.
Junior toed her corpse with his shoe. “This bitch is gone and dead,” he said, real reverently. “I done it too, I never killed anyone before.”
“I still need a doct’r,” Bobby moaned, feeling around the empty sockets in his mouth. “Or maybe just a dentist.”
“It’s prison,” Junior said. “I’m goin’ to prison for sure…”
The rain came harder, a steady staccato beat, pattering against the asphalt road, sluicing through the leaves of the tree. John looked around in a slow circle, feeling the horror of what they’d done, of what would happen afterward. His best friend to prison. The rest of them branded too, by association. Fuckin’ judgmental town would spit at them.
The woman was gone, nothing to be done there. It was horrible, but true. She coulda been any one of their grannies, baking cookies, babysitting them as kids, reading them bedtime stories. Now she was a smear, a gray-haired, skinny, busted-up, old smear. Her clothes looked hand-made, like calico gowns, her fingers wore large rings. But none of that mattered, she was a smear, and they were up the deepest falls of Shit Creek.
“Your car still running?” John asked.
Junior held out his hands, pleading. “I don’t know.”
“We gotta hide her, man. Take her somewhere, bury the body. No one’s gotta know where she went. Old people go off wandering all the time, dementia and shit. They fall down holes, trip into rivers, never seen again.”
“You think so?”
“It’s raining, ain’t it? No better luck than that, water’ll wash away the blood on the road… but your car, you gotta get it started, so we can get out of here. Get it cleaned up, fixed up.”
They all held their breath, almost talismanically, even Bobby, through the blood and busted teeth.
Junior got the car running again. John almost wept. He asked, “What time is it?”
Bobby wore an old Casio. “11:55.”
“Pete’s got that chop shop garage runnin’ over on Bovard. He’ll still be up, ’til at least 1:00. It’s hooker night.”
Bobby’s smile was ghastly, like a bottle of Heinz detonated in his mouth, but it made Junior smile in return. His laugh was a relief. They tossed the old woman and her sundered parts into the trunk and drove away.
By then, it was 11:58…
#
How long had he been running, and how long could he sustain it? John wondered. The rain had let up after midnight, sometime after whatever-the-fuck-had-happened to Junior, but the ground was still wet for it, muddy, slippery.
He’d played varsity baseball in school, could steal bases like a goddamned hero, until crappy grades had gotten him kicked off the team. ’Course, that had been three years ago, and those three years hadn’t been filled with much in the way of physical conditioning, unless walking out to a gas pump when customers rolled in could be counted as such. Now his heart hammered, he found himself gasping for breaths, the cramps in his sides wrenched deeper with each step… he’d lost one shoe in the fall, so now his pace was unsteady too—he tried to settle himself—breathe in slow and deep, in through the nose, out through the mouth—but tasted blood whenever he inhaled in such a way. He found himself limping more, his remaining shoe split at the heel, catching on spurs, and his knee threatening to give out from where he’d struck it during that fall through the trees.
He was weakening, which meant Junior would be gaining, which meant he’d be dead soon, and not in a pleasant “easy” way.
Junior’s voice seemed to confirm his thoughts, roaring from behind, followed by another roar, this of tumbling sticks and rocks, of sliding.
“I’m gon’ get you, Johnny,” his old friend shouted. The voice sounded at least a distance away, not far enough for John’s liking, but not breathing down his neck either.
The moonlight flickered in and out through pine branch divides and drifting night clouds. It was all he could do to strain his eyes in the ethereal beams not to trip over treacherous roots and clods. Maybe moving slower would be safer, so he wouldn’t snap an ankle, but then Junior would gain more. Or maybe Junior would trip…
The ground fell away again, but at the last, John threw himself backward, a nightmare-shriek of falling, falling, falling like before, but instead he just landed on his ass in the wet. He looked down, all of eight feet below to a dry creek bed, filled with jumpseed and ironweed, and some holly tufts on the banks. There were rocks down there too, good-sized boulders of quartz, feldspar.
Maybe Junior would trip…
John yanked off his remaining shoe, grabbed at the lace, undid the little bunny-eared knot, unwound it from the eyelets.
“Jooohhhnnny,” the voice was nearing.
Assuming Junior would follow the same path as himself, it’d lead him here, through the breaks in the bushes and brambles. John tied the shoe lace across the path, about two feet high like a trip wire, tightened it around the trunk of a cottonwood, which he then crept behind. There, he found a chunk of granite the size of a baseball, sharp at the edges.
“Fuck you, Junior, I fucked your mom,” John shouted. It was a lie, of course, but he couldn’t think of anything else. “And your dog, too!”
Ten of the longest seconds of his life passed, and Junior came bursting through the trees along the path, frothing like a rabid dog. He was running, right for the stretched lace—one trip and he’d fall headfirst into the rocks.
Only Junior stopped at the edge. He sniffed the air like an animal, scanned the darkness. His feet were right behind the line, and under it. Without even looking down, he said, “A shoelace trap… that all you got?”
John lobbed the rock out across the creek into the opposite bank. It thudded through the twigs. Junior perked right up, tensed at that direction, facing over the channel.
John leapt up, hit him hard from behind in a linesman’s tackle. The lace held. Junior’s feet caught under it as he went over the edge. It wasn’t far, only eight feet or so, but the tripwire caused Junior to land upside-down, on his face. There was a gurgle, a choking sound. John jumped down on top of him, grabbed one of the creek rocks and brought it down on the back of Junior’s head, then again, and again.
The skull cracked open, patches of hair, splatters of blood went sailing. John could see the horrible red-veined gray matter of the brain underneath. He thought it was over, he’d won.
Wrong.
Junior recovered, he rolled over, throwing John aside, throwing him hard. One of Junior’s eyes was crumpled shut, his face bleeding in a dozen places. The glee was unmistakable when he said, “My turn.”
John staggered upward, tripping back while trying to stand, feeling the cold, sharp rocks cut into his feet, while Junior’s good arm grabbed his own rock from the creek bed, lifted it. John knew what was coming, he brought up his arms in a defensive crouch, crying out, flinching all the while.
But it was Junior’s bad arm that got him, the one that’d looked shattered after he’d jumped off the mountain. There must’ve been a dozen busted bones in that left arm, flopping around like a link of loose chains. And maybe nothing held the arm together the way it was meant to, maybe the ligaments or tendons had gotten pulled, stretched unnaturally or something from the fall, but when Junior lashed out with his left arm it became like a whip--a motherfucking whip—uncoiling, stretching, elongating…
For the briefest of moments, John thought of the cartoons he’d watched as a kid, of Spider-Man flicking out his wrist to shoot a beam of webbing, and then Junior’s arm struck like that, in an impossibly wide-reaching hook, fist-first, smashing into his temple. The sky lit up in sparkles as John slumped over, banging his ribs on the rocks.
And then Junior threw the rock he’d been holding with his good arm—the kinda rock that would cave in a face—and John didn’t have time to react. It was a rocket, and John watched it come for him, nearer and nearer in shutter-clicks of time, and then it sailed past, shattering against a boulder in a shower of needling stone fragments. Maybe whatever was inside Junior Clove had made him stronger, made him faster, but it hadn’t done anything for his aim. Junior’s aim had always been shitty.
John had played varsity baseball in school, and besides stealing bases like a hero, he could throw like a pro. He grabbed another rock, scrabbled to his feet, and launched his own returning salvo, and it was a direct hit. Junior howled, toppling backward.
John moved in, but in no time at all, Junior was already getting to his feet, his nose reduced to a crater. He started to spin his left arm, winding it up like a medieval mace…
“The last little asshole,” Junior said.
John turned, and he began to run again.
#
They sped down the road in the Chevy, ripping along the switchbacks of Arkansas River Trail.
“Slow down,” John said. “You’re gonna drive us off the cliff.”
“We gotta get out, we gotta get out,” Junior kept repeating. They were both hysterical.
Bobby didn’t say anything. He was in the rear seat, real quiet and proper this time, sitting straight-backed with his seatbelt on. His mouth still bled to hell, and he held his shirt to it, dabbing and dabbing.
Outside, the rain pounded away, splashing in at them through the broken windshield. The Impala had a clock on the dashboard, one of those small radial analog devices in black and white, with a little spinning red needle.
“We still got an hour, at least, while Pete’s at his shop,” John said, glancing at the clock.
Glancing, just as that little red needle circled around the top, 11:59 turning to 12:00 midnight.
The sky erupted in a flash of brilliance, it detonated with the thunder of vast explosions. John went blind, deaf. The car flew.
There was a sickening crunch, something smashed his face, he rebounded off the dashboard, remnants of glass sluicing his skin, he felt upside-down, then inverted, then swimming, then dead.
Then he wasn’t any of those things, but opened his eyes again to desolation. They were cantilevered off the road, a fat pine through the Impala’s front. Steam billowed out from the crumpled radiator, and John could smell oil, gas, something else like piss mixed with rotten milk.
Junior was staring at him, eyes as saucers, giant and shimmering. He whispered the great secret, “What. The. Fuck.”
John coughed, found his voice. “Lightning… that was lightning.”
“Lightning?” He couldn’t comprehend.
“We got hit, struck.”
Junior again, “What. The. Fuck.”
They looked back. Bobby was still belted in, sitting as before. “I’m fine,” he announced real proudly. “’Cept for my teeth, I mean.”
A thud jarred the car, coming from behind. A florid, hoarse voice announced, “I smell assholes.”
Junior’s eyes couldn’t go any bigger, but they did. “What. The. F—”
“Bobby?” John asked.
“Assholes…” the voice sang. “Three little assholes, sitting in a car, killed me on a road, now they won’t get far.”
Then laughter, a choking, scratching rise of musical notes getting higher and higher in tones so shrill the remaining windows rattled, then those notes dropping low, low, the reverberations of a bass tube. Another thud jarred the car.
“Bobby,” John whispered, “that’s coming behind you…”
“What is it?”
“The trunk,” Junior said. “It’s the trunk, that old woman we hit—”
Another thud, and a fist smashed through the center back of the rear seat, through the metal springs and framework, through the cushioning, through the leather. The fist paused, old-lady knuckles drawn tight, gnarled from arthritis, spotted from age and disease, then the fingers splayed open all at once as if reaching for something. Bobby was seated left of it, and he screamed, the way a little girl might if a spider dropped in front of her.
The hand closed on air, opened again, and then drew back slightly, grabbed the edges of the hole it’d made, and pulled inward, widening the gap. A second fist punched through, and grabbed the other side of the hole, pulling it back too.
Bobby screamed again and tried to bolt away, but he had his seatbelt on. His hands scrambled to unlatch himself, then he flung open the passenger door, only it banged against a tree, with no more than a couple inches of space. He tried to squeeze himself through anyway, but did not succeed. The hole in the seat’s backing was bigger now, big enough for the old dead woman’s head to emerge, big enough for John to see the eyes, tinged yellow and streaked through with blood, big enough to see her gray hair, matted with mud, with filth, big enough to see her teeth, somehow more than he’d ever seen in a person’s mouth…
Her face turned to Bobby. “First little asshole.”
She reached out with both arms and snatched Bobby around each shoulder, then withdrew into the hole, taking Bobby headfirst with her. His screams were non-stop, shrill, hideous. Only his legs stuck out from the gap leading into the trunk, and they kicked out ferociously. John and Junior each grabbed one, trying to pull him out, but, just as fast, he was sucked from their grasp, entirely into the trunk, among the sounds of great smacking, chewing, thudding, and screams.
John looked at Junior, Junior looked at John. They threw open their doors and leapt out, circling to the trunk.
Junior had his keys out, calling, “Bobby!”
At the last, John shouted, “No, wait!”
There was another eruption, a flash of brilliance, a shattering explosion, a lightning strike.
John woke lying on the ground ten feet from the car, Junior opposite him. The car’s trunk was scorched black. It unlatched, popped open on its own.
Bobby climbed out, pushing the old woman’s body ahead of him. It fell like an egg, desiccated, hollow, shattering on the ground, just a limp pile of calico gowns and hair and drained flesh. He turned his head, alternating looks from John to Junior.
John blinked about a million times, trying to clear out the fuzz from his vision, the ringing from his ears. Bobby was a mess, and not just his busted-up teeth. He had bite wounds all over, dappling his neck and cheek, and ragged holes leaked across his clothes. Claw marks etched his forehead, a finger was missing. He wore blood like a Halloween uniform.
“Bobby?” Junior asked, standing.
Bobby’s chest sorta hitched, and a spasm ran through one jittery arm. He sniffed the air, he said, “I smell assholes.”
A laugh, a song: “Two little assholes, found ’em on the road, now they shall reap the seeds that they’ve sown.”
He lunged at Junior, arms reaching, fingers splayed out. Junior was quick, at least—he still held the keys in his hand, the ones he’d been fumbling with to open the trunk, and now he popped in a quick jabbing punch, trunk key sticking out from between his knuckles like a little dagger, ripping into Bobby’s face, tearing open his side along the chisel of the cheekbone. Skin and gristle parted from skull, and Bobby reeled, floundered, then leapt up, lunging again. Junior tried punching a second time, but Bobby dodged, grabbed him, they both spun toward the car and fell to the ground. Junior headbutted him on the way down, Bobby’s head ricocheted off the Chevy’s fender. Someone growled, someone else cursed.
John tried to intercede, he rushed in, kicked at Bobby, aimed for the head, but Bobby and Junior moved rolling away, and John connected with the exhaust pipe instead. He howled in pain, then Bobby and Junior rolled back and Bobby kicked John’s legs out from under him, while Junior tried to gouge out eyes. Glass littered the ground around them, and Bobby grabbed a chunk, sunk it into Junior’s throat. New screams broke the night, and the sound of snapping bones, the sound of rushing air...
Bobby’s jaw unhinged, opening, like the way John remembered his pet ball python doing before feeding. Bobby’s face went over Junior’s, and he breathed something out, some puff of dust, a rainbow of glitter sparkles, and words John had never before heard.
There was another lightning explosion. He felt himself lifted, tossed through the air, but he landed soft this time, he felt almost used to it by now.
His head cleared. He didn’t know what to expect next, but figured it’d be bad whatever happened, and so it was. Junior stood, kicking away Bobby Gelb’s body. What was left of Bobby sorta tumbled away as if it were a dandelion gone to seed and dispersed by a sigh of wind, just some flapping loose clothes and torn skin looking dry and frail as corn husk.
Junior coughed once, stretched toward the stars. Looked around, sniffing. “I smell an asshole.”
John ran from there, down the road as fast as he could, from the laughter, from the song. He ran and ran, and Junior chased him, and they played cat-and-mouse, and they fought, and they ran some more, and then John took the wrong step off a mountain cliff…
#
And now he was running still, his bare feet torn and dragging, the gasps for air coming harder and harder as he pushed through the forest, the trees. Drool and snot splattered his face, and blood and mud, and all else, even tears, which John had not shed in a long, long time.
Keep pushing, keep pushing, John told himself, he pleaded with himself. Junior-Fucking-Clove… how much was left of him to put up this chase? Junior was limping, pouring blood too, one-eyed, busted bones, the back of his head erupted…
But it didn’t matter, and of this, John was transcendental in his certainty. If Junior had one single toe remaining, it’d be undulating in pursuit like some killer worm. That woman they’d hit, that fucking old woman, that gypsy, that witch, that demon, that whatever. He wanted to know desperately who she was, but he also recognized that, he did not ever want to learn. Should he discover who she was—who she’d been, what curse she’d carried—would mean she was inside him, the way she was inside Junior. No, no, ignorance herein was truly bliss.
So he ran, and he panted like a wounded dog, and he sobbed and wished his life otherwise.
A sharp crack sounded ahead, a shifting of branches, a voice, “Hold!”
John spun, looking to flee, but couldn’t find a way besides the path straight ahead he’d been going.
A man came out of the trees, a hunter in camouflage attire and a bright orange vest. He carried a long sleek rifle in gloved hands, a scope, pouches of ammo. “You almost caught a round, fella.”
John tried to speak, but his gasps for air wouldn’t allow it. He winced at the sharp pains in his side while pointing backward, sputtering.
“What’re you doing out here?” A second hunter followed the first, looking like brothers. They both had shaggy chops, caps pulled low, ’bacco stains on their chins. Their clothes were wet, beaded with moisture from the earlier rain, though they didn’t seem to mind. One curious eye squinted at John, then did a slow double-take. “You been in an accident?”
“There’s a man,” John gasped. “Behind me, gonna kill me, he was killed, killed others, gonna kill me too, gotta keep g—”
“Hold a sec, fella,” the first hunter said. The fucker seemed to share a smile with his brother, some sort of inside joke. “Say there’s a man who was killed, gonna kill you now?”
“He’s coming…”
“You take drugs?” one of them asked. The other, at least, started to look around, showing some spare concern.
Then the crashing came, nearing through the underbrush, footfalls, branches breaking, no care for caution. A displaced owl hooted, taking to flight with slow, lithe flaps of the wings. The hunters were attentive now, they moved apart on the trail, crouching into the shadows. John went past them, walking backward.
“Shoot him,” John urged. “Shoot him.”
Junior appeared, a walking golem of gore. His steps were shuddering, as if jaunting on rickety stilts, but going fast, some force pumping them up and down, forward ceaselessly. “Johnny, oh Johnny,” he said. “Johnny made some new friends.”
“Hold it there,” one of the hunters said.
Junior didn’t. He walked right for the man.
“I’m gonna shoot.”
He did.
It was a quick pow, and Junior’s shoulder gained a peephole. John didn’t know how much blood Junior could’ve had left, but there was suddenly enough of a geyser ejecting from his back that John figured it must still be pumping normal as can be by whatever force kept him moving.
“Ouch,” Junior said, flatly. He reached the man, took the rifle by its barrel and jerked it away, then brought it around in a wide circle to smash its stock into the man’s head. The other hunter fired, hit Junior again, just as Junior dragged the first man down.
John didn’t need to see any more. He ran.
A hundred feet away, there was an explosion of lightning come from behind.
By another quarter mile later, he heard a couple more gunshots, some weakening screams, then another lightning strike.
It wasn’t fair, John thought. He hadn’t done nothin’ but sat in the passenger seat, told a stupid joke. Sure it was his suggestion to cover up the accident, but shit, the woman was already dead. No harm trying to help his friends, to protect them… that, in fact, was the definition of kindness, fucking altruism for others, and now this was happening…
He just couldn’t go on.
John fell to his knees, and after the thunder of his breathing eased from his ears, he heard another type of thunder, a soft, purring sound of sustained motion. Fast-flowing, churning water, the Arkansas River. No, he thought, he’d hit the Maumelle River first, and that would wash out to the Arkansas River. Maybe, just maybe…
He forced himself to his feet by whatever grace of God’s will filled him, some resoluteness he’d never before in life touched. John limped and stumbled and floundered, and soon he made it to the river’s bank, sloshing through the glorious brown shallows, wading past knobs of cypress and supplejack, virginal rose mallow, and a million other flowers and briers and thickets of beauty. The cold water was a balm over his feet, his knees, hips, and then he fell weightless, rolling onto his back and floating, and letting the current carry him away.
The roar of the water grew as he was pulled farther out, but it was a harmonious sound, a normalcy. Smells comingled in the air of rotting moss, of fish, of mulberries and musk, of survival. It was the smell of goddamned survival. Freedom.
He closed his eyes and wept, just let it all out. The river carried him, it caressed him, cradled him, and he fell to sleep in its embrace.
Some time passed, and he realized he wasn’t moving so much, just sorta bobbing, caught up on the shore of an inward cove. It might’ve rained some more, he couldn’t tell. The sky far east began lightening. He bobbed there, and cared not what else should happen.
A voice woke him from directly overhead.
“I smell an asshole.”
It was one of the hunters, his vest gone missing, the camouflage attire in tatters across his chest. His hat was gone missing too, the hunter’s head underneath pale and hairless like a wind-swept dome, with a long bloody gash on one side.
John screamed.
The hunter laughed, and then he laughed some more, a roiling mirth that filled the waterways, echoing across the dawning sky. He took a step nearer.
The horizon broke under a rising sun, and its first ray grazed him. The hunter’s face pained, and he took a step back.
“No,” the hunter muttered, “no, no, no.” He braced himself, made a big show of resolution, took a step forward, and the touch of the sun burned him again. He shrieked, backed away from the shore, toward the cover of the trees where the light had not yet quite reached.
John just eyed him, his heart jackhammering, then with one foot’s nudge, pushed himself from the bank back out into the river, to float away.
The hunter yelled at him, cursed at him, and John didn’t care, until the last, parting words reached his ears over the chirping birds and wakening, howling wildlife, the words that promised, “Midnight. I’ll be back again at midnight!”
Copyright 2020. Dark Peninsula Press.
Published in: Negative Space: An Anthology of Survival Horror (2020)