Earworm

by Aaron Thomas Milstead

  Dare gasped.

  “I didn’t,” I shouted. “I promise. You know I would never do that. It’s not a word I use and certainly not directed at your mother.”

  “Mom . . . ” Dare began, but Carrion-Six-Toes buried her face within her hands and continued to dramatically weep. Dare turned to me, her expression almost apologetic as she said, “Ripley, I think you need to go.”

  Shadow burst into tears as I leaned down to kiss her on the forehead. I turned and was yet again exiled from my home.

  We’re fucked, Bogart mumbled. Fucked.

  I was solemnly walking down the driveway, back toward my prison cell nestled beyond the stagnant swimming pool—a death row inmate contemplating the mortality held within the confines of an awaiting electric chair—when I heard Dare shout, “Ripley, wait.”

  My heart fluttered as she rushed down the driveway toward me like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. I would scoop her up and kiss her and mumble, “I’m never leaving you again.”

  She would nod and say, “I’m so sorry. I was useless without you. I never knew what I had until it was gone. You complete me.”

  I would kiss her deeply and carry her into the pool house. That’s when the scenario would shift from PG to PG13 as I slowly kissed her neck and lower as I stripped her down to bra and panties, but no more than side boob would be seen. That’s when I’d carry her into the bedroom and strip her down into a solid R rating. Maybe we’d start at a hard R as I moved her into a gentle doggy style, while careful not to show penetration. Obviously, it wouldn’t be long until our scenario morphed into full XXX goodness. If she was impressed with my new physique, wait until she got a load of my newfound cardio. It would be a long night.

  Dare stepped in front of me, just far enough that I couldn’t reach out and scoop her into my arms. The shadows gently hid her face. “Ripley . . . ”

  “Yes?” I was going to be patient as she expressed her profound regret at taking me for granted.

  “You didn’t call my mom the C word, did you?”

  Not exactly the lead in I was expecting and certainly not a clear affirmation of her newly regained devotion. “Of course not, Dare. I have nothing but respect for your mother. She’s . . . ”

  Dare chuckled and said, “Don’t lay it on too thick, Ripley. We both know she’s a total pill, but I also know that even when you drank . . . even on your worst day you avoided that kind of insult. Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you about her and, well, we haven’t exactly been on the best of speaking terms lately.”

  “We can fix that,” I interjected.

  “I hope so,” she said doubtfully. “What I wanted to tell you is that Mom has Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” I lied.

  Dare sighed. “Actually it’s worse than that. She’s had it for a while and no one was brave enough to question her when she forgot something or called them by the wrong name. You know how she can be.”

  I nodded silently.

  “Tonight was actually as lucid as I’ve seen her lately. She’s taken to calling me Brenda, her mother’s name. And she usually thinks Shadow is me. According to the doctors she is very far gone. I’ve been told to expect her to pass . . . ” Dare sobbed and continued, “She could pass away very soon.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks. It’s pretty awful. I know it seemed like she strolled in tonight all willy-nilly, but she has a driver now and a fulltime staff that cares for her at her home.” I imagined a stoic Morgan Freeman trying to resist smothering her after a day filled with N bombs. “I’ve had to assume full control of her estate.”

  You just won the lottery, Bogart said. Finally, your wife has control of the windfall. Too bad our life expectancy can suddenly be measured in hours. It’s like that Alanis Morrissett lyric about irony: your mother-in-law will soon die, but so will you and I.

  Pineapple!

  “That must be awful,” I said. “A lot of responsibility for you to bare by yourself.”

  She nodded. “It is. I know her intrusion and her outburst was just another symptom of her affliction. And the timing could not have been worse.”

  “I agree.”

  “Ripley . . . ” her voice was soft. Sultry?

  “Yes?” It was the moment I had been waiting for ever since she kicked me out.

  That’s when she finally leaned in close and mumbled, “I want a divorce.”

  I was leaning in to kiss her when her words struck me like a Chuck Norris snap kick. My knees wobbled. I almost dropped to the ground and rolled down the hill until I splashed into the swimming pool and sank to the bottom.

  Fuck her, Bogart screamed. You can do better.

  “Why?” I’m ashamed to admit that my voice cracked and I couldn’t hide the pain or desperation I felt.

  “Ripley . . . ”

  “Is it someone else?”

  Dare shook her head and said, “No, Ripley. It’s you. It’s just you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t love you.” She mercifully turned her head and walked away so that only Bogart could witness my tears.

  Another head hangs lowly.

  Child is slowly taken.

  And the violence, caused such silence.

  Who are we mistaken?

  But you see, it’s not me.

  It’s not my family.

  In your head, in your head, they are fighting.

  In your head, in your head they are crying.

  In your head, in your head.

  Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie.

  What’s in your head, in your head?

  Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh.

  —The Cranberries

  11.

  Power Play

  I’d like to offer a dramatic interlude so that you can process the emotion I must have been experiencing with the confirmed loss of my marriage and the realization that I was on the hit list of some sort of ancient evil deity. I realize my narrative has been fairly introspective so far, but your patience is about to be rewarded as all Hell breaks loose. Balls to the wall intense. Less Kramer vs. Kramer and more Point Break.

  I was walking toward the pool house with Bogart alternately giving me affirmation that losing Dare wasn’t the end of my life and bemoaning that my life was going to be over anyway because Carrion-Six-Toes was going to come for me soon. I could hear his incessant ramblings like elevator muzak, but I wasn’t really listening to him. Instead, my inner voice was repeating a familiar mantra that presented itself during particularly stressful moments.

  Drink. Drink. You worthless, no good motherfucker. Drink. Worthless. Drink. Unloved. Drink. Nobody loves you. Drink. Drink. Worthless. Nobody loves you. Drink.

  There was a filthy bottle of Kentucky Hunter rotgut whiskey hidden deep in the cabinet behind several cans of lima beans, creamed corn, and sweet potatoes. I probably should have just thrown it away. By “it” I mean the whiskey, not the sweet potatoes, but I thought keeping it represented self-control.

  I wanted to gulp down that bottle more than anything in the world. I needed to. Anything to quiet my inner pain body. When I realized I’d left the front door open it gave me just another reason to curse myself. I also realized that I couldn’t get the stench of my mother-in-law out of my nostrils.

  I stepped into the living room.

  A video was playing on my computer. The last thing I’d been watching was a live Twitch stream of competitive teams playing Overwatch, but what was playing then was a filthy porno featuring two overly endowed men assaulting a wide-eyed girl with mascara dripping from her eyes.

  Get out of here, kid. Run.

  The toilet flushed and a figure stepped out of the bathroom. It moved like a bad stop-motion figure made of clay. A slightly less coordinated zombie from Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead.

  It was Chaz.

  Clearly, he was still very, very dead, but somehow he’d had the decency to put on pants. I was disappointed as I realized that he was
wearing my favorite pair of blue jeans. The rest of his body was fully exposed. He had been a revolting man in life, but that was nothing compared to the hideous mess he had become. His head was perpetually flopped back as if staring up at an unforgiving God. Of course, the more concrete reason was that his throat had been cut open so wide that the loose rotting flesh was barely holding his head in place.

  Wherever his body had been stored didn’t have proper air conditioning because his skin was loose and leaked a foul brackish, inky fluid. He looked like a water balloon that was on the verge of bursting. Most of his inner organs and whole sections of his skeleton were visible beneath the paper-thin skin.

  There was a legion of maggots and several green flies that ravenously hovered around the corpse like a protective force field. The smell I’d mistaken as the residual stench from Carrion-Six-Toes was actually the corpse—a sufficiently overpowering stench is practically indistinguishable from another.

  “What the fuck is that?” I mumbled aloud. “Why are you here?”

  It’s a power play, Bogart explained. Carrion-Six-Toes is showing us who is in charge. Controlling a dead body is super high level bullshit. Way past what I could even attempt to do on my best day. No worries though, he shouldn’t be much of a threat in that condition.

  As if cognizant of Bogart’s voice within my head, the shambling corpse reached down to pick up a lamp and waved it in front of him like it was a lightsaber. It was a horrifying display, but also very hard to take seriously. A rotting Pez-dispenser covered with douchey tattoos and filled with overripe organs and bile that smelled like menudo rather than the typical sweet candy. A nightmarish piñata of filth and decay. I watched it wave the lamp in a wildly uncoordinated display of mock menace and my mind went to the Evil Dead. I wondered how Ash would handle the situation.

  Probably with a shotgun to the head, but if they were going for a gross out scene then maybe he’d take his chainsaw arm to open up the corpse, let him unravel like thick strands of sausage and shower Ash in putrid black blood.

  Fuck him up, kid. The Elder is testing your mettle.

  I took a step forward and the corpse raised the lamp above its head and brought it down to strike me, but the cord caught and it jerked out of his grasp, then fell to the ground. The bulb burst and the room went dark, except for faint moonlight that trickled in through the blinds.

  The darkness drained away my bravado and I felt the familiar sensation of deep, primal fear. The lumbering thing in front of me tried to scream, but the sound was a pitiful gurgling. It took a step toward me.

  Bogart commanded my brain to produce adrenaline and it responded at the speed of thought—which is really just an electrical impulse, so basically at the speed of light. It might as well have been a gamma ray as I was suddenly filled with strength, and rage, and uncontrolled aggression.

  I threw a right hook that caught the corpse in the left ear and sent him tumbling to the ground. I stood over the flailing body and curb stomped him more times than I care to remember. The bones cracked like papier-mâché beneath my dress shoes and the corpse was quickly reduced to blood pudding or spotted dick or some other disgusting shit that British people call dessert.

  The vicious onslaught happened so quickly that I barely blinked, but I still just noticed a thin shadowy creature with long twisting limbs as it skittered out of an eye socket just before the skull caved in. Only through the power of memory am I aware of seeing it, as if it had some kind of psychic defense against being seen in the moment.

  I stared down at the corpse with the broken jack-o-lantern head and felt strong, aggressive, and primally alive. Fuck with me motherfucker and you get fucking fucked up.

  You showed her, kid. If she wants a piece of you then she better come correct.

  I nodded and swatted a bloated fly away from my cheek. Their buzzing seemed to intensify around me until I realized that the sound wasn’t them at all. It was several police sirens screaming from somewhere far away but growing closer by the second.

  Kid . . . I think we’ve been framed.

  I stared down at the brutalized corpse and imagined a chalk outline in its place. A detective stoically shaking his head and remarking: “The dumb bastard killed him here in his own god damn house. Probably ordered a massage so he could pay back the victim for hitting on his ex-wife earlier. Motive and means. Open and shut case. I hope they give the fucker the electric chair.”

  You got to get rid of the body, kid. And quick. Popo is coming.

  Fueled by the recent surge of adrenaline I acted without another moment’s hesitation. I ran into the bedroom and pulled an old cream-colored sheet out of the closet. I wrapped the corpse in the sheet and bound him with duct tape as tight as a white trash mummy. It took a bit longer to stuff all the loose bone shards and innards into a matching pillow case.

  All the while the sirens grew louder.

  I used a dustpan to scoop up the smaller bit of filth and once the pillow case was mostly filled, I tied it off and duct taped it onto the mummy, like a foul conjoined twin.

  I dragged the corpse outside.

  The sirens had grown deafening.

  Get rid of the body, kid! Hurry!

  I didn’t have time to bury him in the backyard next to our former pet—a poodle named Stanton. I didn’t have time to cut the body into pieces and mail them to ISIS or the Westboro Baptist Church. I didn’t have time to slowly dissolve it in sulfuric acid and I didn’t own a herd of starving pigs. There was a burn ban in town and besides, how could I explain a bonfire that smelled like human barbeque to Dare?

  The roaring sirens were almost upon me and I could see blinking lights on the horizon like multi-colored heat lightning. I shook my head sadly and rolled the body into the swimming pool. At first, I was afraid it might float, but it slowly sunk down into the thick, brackish water and a moment later only a few random bubbles marked its passing.

  Several police cruisers rushed past the main house, followed by at least three fire trucks. I watched as the lights and the warning sirens quickly faded away.

  She’s fucking with us, kid. She probably set a fire somewhere close by.

  Why would she do that?

  She wants to show you that she’s in charge. That she can take you whenever she wants. She could have somebody after us that we couldn’t deal with on our best day—not if I filled your veins to popping with adrenaline. She could have had that corpse filled with enough explosives to blow up your entire block. She could have had that corpse climb into bed with you while you were fast asleep and call the cops so that they discovered you like that. There’s a million ways she could have fucked you and she’s been around long enough to know them all—Hell, she probably invented some of those ways.

  Then why?

  She wanted to send you a warning. Carrion-Six-Toes is an Elder, but she’s not as enlightened as she might want to believe. Just like the rest of us she has a weakness and hers is that she likes to play the game. She gets off on it.

  Well, if it’s a game then I’m winning.

  Are you, kid? You just killed a guy you had reason to dislike and you disposed of his body in your own swimming pool. There’s enough evidence dripping on your guest house floor to give you a death sentence and even your hero, Barney Fife, is savvy enough to solve the case.

  I didn’t kill him. He was long dead.

  Tell that to the jury. The infamous: he was already dead defense. Your honor, is it murder if the victim is a zombie?

  Bogart was right. I had fucked myself in less than an hour after Carrion-Six-Toes declared war on me. I was extremely outclassed.

  You got no choice now, kid. You have to run. Her first shot was a bluff, but the next one is probably a musclebound fiend with a blowtorch. That’s how she plays, quickly escalating until there are no boundaries at all. Your wife . . . Your daughter . . .

  I knew he was right, but I also knew that there was nowhere for me to go. I’ve already outlined how pitiful my group of friends is and how my f
amily unit was shattered. I was as alone as a person could get with a sentient symbiote living in their head.

  I rushed to my closet and pulled out a large army-green duffle bag and filled it with t-shirts, shorts, blue jeans, half a dozen pairs of flip flops, two hoodies, and several pairs of boxer briefs. I then ran into the living room and snatched up my laptop, iPad 2, iPhone 6, 3DS, and the power strip that held their chargers.

  Get a fucking weapon, kid! Are you preparing to go to Gen Con?

  No.

  This isn’t a vacation, you are going to be running for your life. You are about to be hunted like a fox.

  People hunt foxes?

  Pretend like I said white-tailed deer or raccoons. Fucking East-Texas. I’m talking about guns. I know you can’t be living in the redneck capital of the world without guns sprouting around you like mushrooms after a summer rain.

  I nodded and ran back into my bedroom and pulled my gun out of the top of my closet. Even though my wife had given it to me as a birthday present four years prior, she was afraid of it and made me immediately take it out of the main house. Her heart had been in the right place—she bought it soon after we had spotted a water moccasin in the swimming pool and I was forced to kill it with a hoe, almost getting bitten while she shrieked behind me. Her choice of gun might have been overkill when it came to a snake disposal though. It was a Benelli M4 tactical shotgun with a pistol gripped stick. It was a favorite choice of the US Marines.

  I hadn’t fired it once since I’d unwrapped it.

  I shoved the shotgun and a few boxes of shells in the duffel bag and grabbed a walking cane that had a sharply-tipped fencing sword hiddenwithin that popped out with a push of a button that was nestled in a metal hilt capped with a stylized skull. I’d tested the wicked blade on a watermelon and it slid all the way through without any resistance.

  I paused just long enough to take a piece of paper out of my printer and quickly scratch out a note to Dare. I left it on the glass table in the living room and placed a drink coaster on it so it wouldn’t flutter away.