Double Feature
Page 8
She took out her cell phone, only to discover she wasn’t getting any reception. After a few curses under her breath, She began walking around the Waffle Hut, holding the phone up above her head, watching to see if she could get at least a couple bars so she could call the police. Finally, she resorted to leaving the restaurant and roaming the field around it, still trying to get a signal, holding the phone up like something being offered to the heavens. Finally, when she was standing out in the middle of the road, she got a signal and called the cops.
“Hi,” she said. “This is MaryMae at the Waffle Hut. We’ve had a break-in and a murder. I don’t know who it was; I didn’t get any kind of a look at them, but it might not be human. It has some big teeth, whatever it is.”
While MaryMae was waiting for the police to show up, she went into the bathroom and plucked her eyebrows, then peed again. When she heard the police pull up outside, she washed her hands.
Chapter 6
“You expect me to believe a horse did this?” Detective Daniels asked.
MaryMae pulled at her hair in frustration; she’d been over the story a million times, but these policemen were too skeptical to believe her.
“Not just a horse. It was, like, a unicorn. It had a knife or something on its head. It just came barreling through the diner and ate one of my regulars.”
“This man here?” Daniels asked, prodding what was left of Lou’s corpse with his foot. Carrie looked down to see what the detective was gesturing at. It was Lou, her old friend. Well, not really friend, but he tended to give her decent tips. Not good, but decent. A couple bucks.
“Yes,” MaryMae said, exasperated. “Do you see any other bodies around here?”
The detective looked around. “No,” he said. “But how do I know you didn’t do this. It’s awful suspicious, you know. Murder like this. Town small as this’n. People are going to talk.”
“Talk about what?” MaryMae asked.
“MaryMae, I’m going to ask you straight,” the detective said, balancing the weight of his bulky frame on one stiff leg while the other one didn’t hold nearly as much. “Were you having an affair with Lou?”
“With him?” MaryMae asked, glancing wildly at Lou’s corpse.
Daniels nodded. “Yes.”
“No!” MaryMae was repulsed by the idea. Just the thought of Lou’s wrinkled old behind made her skin crawl.
“Because here’s what I think, MaryMae. I think you and old Lou had a little thing going. Perhaps it started as a harmless flirtation, but it quickly became something else entirely. Passion will do funny things to a woman. Maybe his old lady found out or your old man did, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you killed Lou in cold blood on the floor of this very diner!”
“Daniels!” Vincent Dahawg, the clever deputy, called out. “You better get a look at this!”
Daniels gave MaryMae a stern look. “We’re not finished here.”
MaryMae gave him a furious look, but said nothing. Her daddy had taught her to respect the law, and she’d do it.
“What is it?” Daniels snapped. “I was this close to a full confession.” Daniels was holding his index finger and thumb very close together.
Dahawg gestured with his head toward the floor; Daniels looked down. On the old, dirty linoleum of the diner floor were several bloody hoof prints. “What the hell are those?”
“Look like bloody horse prints to me,” Dahawg explained. “We can get that crazy old farmer in here to confirm. You want me to call it in?”
“No. They’re horse prints. They match her story perfectly,” Daniels grumbled. His eyes shone with fury. “A little too perfectly.”
He marched over to MaryMae and grabbed her by the lapels, shaking her. Her name tag popped off her shirt and onto the floor, landing in a small puddle of blood that had something like an eyeball at its center. “You think you can just kill a man and stomp some horse shoes around the floor and we’ll believe whatever you say, eh? Tell me the truth, woman! Tell me you killed him!”
“I didn’t do it!” MaryMae cried, tears streaming down her face. “It was that horse thing!”
Daniels slapped her across the face, bringing some sense to her empty mind. He was angry with her and frustrated with her unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation.
“Confess!”
“I’m innocent!”
“You silly bitch! Tell the goddamned truth!”
“Daniels, you might want to have a look at this,” Dahawg called, his voice now a familiar sound in the diner.
“What is it, Deputy?” Daniels demanded, slapping the useless woman again.
“I just had a look at her security footage. She’s telling the truth.”
“What?”
“Look at the tape. At first, everything’s normal. Then a horned fuckin’ horse walks in and fucks everything up.”
Daniels let go of the woman and walked over to the deputy, prepared to start slapping him for being a jackass. Just as he was raising his hand, Dahawg pressed play. Daniels gave a passing glance to the screen and saw a horse push its way through the door.
“Does that door have a lock?” Daniels demanded. No one answered. The tape kept playing. The horse walked up and pushed its way through the door. It walked right up to the empty counter and speared Lou right through the back. The horse shook its head back and forth, having a difficult time getting the old man off its horn and killing him more in the process. Finally, he flew off, smashing his face against the counter. The horse then leapt over the counter and helped itself to some fried potatoes. Daniels couldn’t tell what kind they were because of the poor resolution of the video, but he figured they were hashbrowns. The horse then went into the kitchen, likely in search of more tubers. The view was obscured from there, so there were a few painful minutes when the animal was out of view. Eventually, the horse came back out into the diner and started chewing on Lou’s body as if he were a dessert.
“Just what I thought,” Daniels said. “I heard about stuff like this from County. Bovine growth hormone or something. Bad reaction in horses. That one’s clearly messed up. Call animal control and we’ll get this sorted out. Maybe Game and Fish.”
“Righto, Detective,” Dahawg said, excusing himself to radio in the request. He disappeared out the front door, the very door that Carrie had used to enter and exit the establishment.
“I told you!” MaryMae said, her frail voice streaked with emotion. “I told you it was a horse!”
“How do I know you weren’t in cahoots with that horse?” Daniels asked coldly, reaching for his handcuffs. “You’re not on that video at all.”
“I was on the can!” MaryMae exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Daniels said, grabbing the frightened waitress by the wrist, not knowing why she was afraid. MaryMae screamed.
“Shut your trap!” Daniels commanded, slapping the woman again. It felt good to slap her. Her cheek felt like his ex-wife’s.
“The horse!” MaryMae said, turning away in fear.
Daniels was calm. “Sure, the horse,” he said, knowing full well that the horse had left earlier in the night. He’d seen it on the tape. MaryMae’s eyes widened, then she fainted. Curious, Daniels turned around. Directly behind him, he saw a horse-like creature. It had the head of a horse and a long screw made out of pure bone sticking from its forehead. The body was still that of a man. It was as though it was undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. It’s guts still hung down. This horse was Lou!
“Shit!” Daniels shouted and the horse bit him on the forearm, tearing away a chunk of flesh. Daniels screamed.
“Get down!” a voice yelled. Following directions, Daniels hit the deck, covering his head with his arms. Dahawg stepped into the room and unloaded the clip of his weapon into the werehorse, felling the creature. Dahawg kept firing until the gun only made clicking sounds. Daniels chanced a look and watched the animal choke out its last sputtering breaths. Then it was dead.
“Not sure, Sir,” Dahawg said.
“I think she had something to do with it,” Daniels mused, pointing at MaryMae.
“Is she even conscious?”
“She was earlier. Cuff her.”
Dahawg shrugged his shoulders and made his way over to the unconscious woman. He slipped the handcuffs around her wrists and clicked them shut. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“Done,” he said, looking up just in time to see the half-changed corpse of the cook, who none of them knew about because they hadn’t gone into the kitchen, came charging toward Daniels, his newly-grown horse teeth chattering. Instead of alerting his partner, he pulled his gun from his holster. He could handle this. He could be a hero.
“What the hell are you doing?” Daniels asked as Dahawg raised his weapon. Dahawg pulled the trigger. Clicks echoed through the diner.
“Oh, shit,” Dahawg said, realizing his error would likely cost Daniels his life.
Chapter 7
The bone horn of the French horse hit at the base of Daniels’s skull. Daniels’s face just had time to register the pain of a horn driving through Daniels’s head, his mouth opening in surprise, and his eyes widening significantly. Then, the horn burst forth from his eye socket, the eye popping like a zit. Vitreous fluids, blood and brain matter rained down on the diner, and Deputy Dahawg was startled into action.
As the vicious beast continued running, a flaccid Daniels still hanging from its horn, Dahawg leapt into the air and grabbed ahold of the ceiling fan. He pulled his legs up as the man-horse rushed past beneath him, jumping forward and landing on the bar. Looking back, he wiped sweat from his brow, trying to remain calm and collected in this unexpected diner experience.
The horse turned, shaking its head violently. As the horse delivered a swift kick, the body of Daniels was torn away, only the head still stuck on the thing’s horn, the mouth still open as if Daniels still hadn’t accepted his strange fate and was surprised by it.
“Motherfuck,” Dahawg said, watching as the horse began charging him again. He was frozen in fear for two seconds. Then, recovering, he reached down and grabbed a full bottle of Jose Cuervo. Taking a rag from behind the bar, he dipped it halfway into the bottle, then removed it with the tequila still dripping. Squeezing it out a little, he flipped the rag around, leaving the tequila-saturated part hanging halfway out of the bottle. He then reached down and procured a box of matches from beside the cash register. Lighting a match, and then igniting the rag hanging from the bottle of tequila, he then looked up at the zombie horse that was fast approaching.
He waited, not wanting to blow the ace up his sleeve if the evil beast was going to fold its hand during this round of betting. But it didn’t: the horse kept rushing towards him.
Throwing the bottle, Dahawg cheered as it shattered against the face of the horse. Letting out a fiendish neigh, the creature was blinded by the cloud of flame that surrounded its face. Dahawg rolled to the side as the horse rushed past, smashing through the bar and running right into the wall of alcohol bottles. The whole goddamn display went up in a tremendous wave of flame, and Dahawg was tossed forward, crashing down on a table.
Pushing himself to his feet, Dahawg jumped down from the table. Pulling his cowboy hat off and wiping his brow, he looked at the flaming display. The bones of a strange, mutant horse were still standing in the midst of the wreckage, although all of the flesh had melted away.
The door opened and two young women came walking in, in the midst of conversation as they began approaching the bar. Suddenly, they realized something was off kilter. They stared at the flaming bar, and at the upright unicorn skeleton.
Dahawg spat upon the floor, walking over to the ladies.
They looked at him, still a little unsure of what was going on. “Are you guys closed?” one of them said.
Dahawg looked back. He watched as Detective Daniels’s body began to rise, despite its lack of a head. A bone horn was rapidly growing from the stump where its head used to be. Clearly, whatever kind of beast these things were, decapitation was not going to be enough.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, spitting. “I believe this whole town might be closed. Closed and going out of business.”
Carrie was hiding in an alley, looking at her reflection in a puddle on the ground. Since leaving the house of the doctor, she had rapidly been losing weight, despite her effort to eat as frequently as possible. Her horn was stained red, and so was the bridge of her face because she could not reach her tongue high enough to clean either. All of this impaling has taken its toll on her looks, but she wasn’t interested in horses, anyway, so it was a moot point. She might as well let her looks go to hell. After all, she already looked like a horse.
Walking down the alley dejectedly, she came to the dumpster where she had been storing her kills when she wasn’t ready to eat yet. Strangely enough, though, they all appeared to be gone. Where could they have gone? Before she left to go grab lunch at the diner, she’d stocked up quite a collection of food. After all, a brilliant idea had struck her earlier in the day, and she’d traveled the town an hour before school, picking off all of the children who were standing by themselves on street corners. Thanks to being weighed down by heavy backpacks, not a single student had been able to escape as she skewered them one by one.
But where could they have gone now? Was her luck REALLY so bad that the trash truck came around and took all of her children away? That must be it, since no police tape had been put up in the alley. After all, they didn’t just get up and walk off.
“No, I know it’s only four thirty. But usually the bus shows up at three o’clock, and Mandy never misses it. She’s a really punctual little third grader, and I know she would’ve called if anything happened on her way to or from school that was out of the ordinary. Can’t you call the bus driver and ask them whether she’s still on the bus?”
Mandy’s mom listened to the phone intently. She really cared about her daughter, and her fingers tightly gripped the phone as if she might lose her hold on it and never find out where her daughter had gone. Her knuckles were white with the tightness.
“What do you MEAN the CB system is down? Doesn’t she have a cell phone? Well, one of the kids must have a phone. They aren’t? That’s a stupid rule. So, nobody on the bus has a phone and the CB is down? How do you inbred morons communicate, smoke signals?”
Frustrated, Mandy’s mom slammed the phone back down onto the receiver. She brushed her blonde hair back, letting out an exasperated sigh that made her breasts heave. She was just so pissed off she could scream, and could only think of one thing that would help her calm down, and help her take her mind off of her lost daughter.
Walking into the bathroom, Mandy’s mom disrobed. She admired her slightly upturned tits in the bathroom mirror, and the supple definition of her midriff, before climbing into the shower and turning the hot water on.
She washed herself while naked, her hands rubbing up and down the curves of her nubile body.
Then, she heard a strange sound from not in the shower. With the water still coursing down, across her toned shoulders and traveling down her 25-C cup breasts with large areolas and defined bikini tan lines, she pulled the shower curtain aside.
Standing in the bathroom and staring at her was Mandy. However, Mandy’s facial expression looked unlike her normal one, looking menacing and vindictive. A long horn made of bone was protruding from her forehead, and she had a little horse body, like a pony. Her mother screamed very loudly.
Mandy thrust her horn into her mother’s wide open mouth, the horn bursting forth from the topside of the woman’s head. Pulling her horn back out, Mandy watched as her mother’s body fell against the shower wall, sliding slowly down it, and falling to the floor with a clunk. Blood was running down the shower drain as her mother’s vacant eyes stared into nothingness, her body entirely naked and her legs parted a little, showing her closely-trimmed vagina.
Mandy laughed as her mother’s eyes opened. Finally! The two of them could be together again, and they could feed, and create an army! Mandy reared up on her hind legs, neighing with delight. Her mother did the same, her bare and damp breasts bouncing like speed bags.
Chapter 8
Blaine rolled off the prostitute and slid his dick out with a contented sigh.
“God damn you, you crazy son of a bitch,” the whore said, cupping her hands over her ass. Her ass was gaping wide from Blaine’s member, bleeding profusely. She chanced a look at his penis, which was large and covered in her shit and blood. Sugar, the prostitute, always had the worst luck.
“Shut your damn mouth, bitch,” Blaine said. He reached over to the nightstand and grabbed a twenty. He flung it at the whore with nonchalant venom. “You’re getting paid.”
“I’m getting paid? This is twenty dollars!” She screeched. “I said fifty to fuck me in the ass!”
“The room cost forty. You’re lucky to get what you’re getting,” Blaine insisted. “I’ll tack on another five if you come over here and give me a blow.”
Sugar looked at the shit-stained cock like it was a McDonald’s hamburger. Some things just weren’t worth five dollars. “Fuck you, man!”
With as much dignity as she could muster, Sugar wiggled her way into her skirt, wishing, not for the first time that night, that she’d worn underpants. Even a thong would have helped. She felt the blood trickle down her legs as the feeling started to come back to her rectum. She would be in for a world of hurt tomorrow. And all for twenty dollars. Hopefully, her meth dealer would cut her a deal on some dirty shit.