Like that peckerwood, Herbert thought, passing a dead guy draped across the hood of a Ford. He’s certainly changed. In one night, he’d changed from some random asshole into a heap of worm food, just like that. Presto, change-o!
Now if that wasn’t magical, what was?
Herbert drove on.
Chapter 38
A thousand miles away, Jamie "J.J." Jarvis was drunk as hell. He’d spent the night over at Dean’s, and everybody there had gotten drunker than hell.
Somebody had dropped him off. He couldn’t remember who.
He was feeling better now, though. He figured maybe he’d see what the girls were up to, shake hands with the one-eyed man, and call it a night.
He went to the keg-er-ator, tapped a cold Bud, swept the pretzels off the counter, and shambled back to his computer, the closest thing to a girlfriend he had just now.
The chair squeaked under his weight as he leaned forward and powered on the Dell. By the time the thing had loaded, he’d knocked back half the beer and was starting on the pretzels.
He drew up the browser, typed Fratfuckin.com, and hit the return key. The screen changed, and…
"What the fuck? What’s this shit?"
As a paying customer to the site, he’d expected hot college girls banging old dudes, however, there was some crazy, fucking, S&M fag shit. One guy was bent over, taking it in the ass, screaming, and the guy behind him was pumping away and beating the shit out of the guy with a rock or a brick or something. What kind of sick shit was this?
Then he saw the girl. She was down on the ground, blowing the guy who was taking it in the ass and getting the brick put to him—fuck, but that had to hurt!—and J.J. was thinking at least the guy was getting a blowjob out of it, but then the girl pulled away, and J.J. saw her face all covered in blood and something hanging like raw steak out of her mouth, and saw the red mess between the guy’s legs…
"AW, FER CHRISSAKES!" J.J. bellowed. "GAWD!"
Any further commentary was lost when J.J. launched a wave of puke all over his keyboard. As J.J. lurched and heaved again, he pinched his eyes shut, not wanting to see another second of this sick shit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shut out the sound, and he heard the guy on screen squeal and holler. "I didn’t do anything!" the guy yelled. "I didn’t do anything!"
"For fuck’s sake," J.J. said, and powered down. "Now I’m gonna need a new keyboard!"
Chapter 39
Herbert wheeled around the corner and let the car idle. Everything was going as planned. He’d been talking to his passenger the whole time. So what if she was out of her gourd? So what if all she said was fuck? Herbert didn’t give a shit. Herbert was boiling over. He had to talk. Shit, he’d talk even if she wasn’t back there.
And nobody could do anything about it.
He chuckled. Then, looking in the rearview mirror to where the meatheads were just rounding the corner at a trot he said, "Here come the assholes."
Then, rolling down his window, he called back, "Come and get it, you stupid bastards!"
A hundred yards back, the meatheads raised a collective roar and quickened their pace.
This made him laugh harder. Stupid fucking meatheads. He’d been leading them for several blocks now, their group swelling the whole time, growing from four or five to a couple of dozen. And every last one of them wanted to kill and eat him. He thought about that for a second, tried to picture it going down, tried to imagine them catching the car and pulling him out, eating him, and found he couldn’t make it real in his head. It just wasn’t possible.
Still, he got close enough to make his ball sack tighten and crawl.
He grinned.
"I’m the Pied Fucking Piper," he said and started the car crawling ahead again.
The idea of letting the meatheads close the gap tempted him, but he couldn’t let manic enthusiasm cloud his thinking. If they got too close, and he came to some large obstruction, an overturned trailer truck or a burning spill, he wouldn’t have time to turn around and build the speed needed to mow through them. And he wasn’t about to let a group of pudding-brained assholes get the best of him. No thanks.
He reached the end of the street, checked the sign, and turned left, thrilling with fresh anticipation; one more block and he’d turn onto Darlington.
Darlington was Milling’s street.
Milling. That fucking asshole. He thought he was so goddamned smart.
When Herbert was a sophomore, he’d taken Milling’s English class. They’d read some George Orwell essays, one about a rogue elephant and another about a guy getting hanged and how a dog came up and wanted to play with the guy while he was being led to the gallows. Herbert smiled now, remembering that old dog. Those essays were pretty good, but otherwise, they’d read a bunch of bullshit, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the most boring book ever written, Sister Carrie. Milling had talked all that lit-crit horseshit and ruined everything, even the essays, talking about inherited guilt and how much America sucked and feminism and Marxism and all kinds of whiney crap. It had bugged the shit out of Herbert, but if blatant stupidity and wasting Herbert’s time had been the asshole’s only offenses, Herbert probably wouldn’t have listed him. What did it was the paper.
Toward the end of the course, the spring of Herbert’s sophomore year, Milling had come in all emotional. He said he loved the weather. Said his wife was sick. Said sometimes he didn’t know what teaching was all about. And then he told them he was breaking from the normal curriculum, that he wanted them to do a short paper on what they would do if they only had five days to live.
Herbert had raised his hand.
"Yes, Mr. Weston?"
That was another thing the guy did, always calling them Mr. so and so and Miss so and so, all smarmy about it, like this was some private school for spoiled teens or something.
Herbert asked what the paper would replace. They’d had the syllabus since the first day.
Milling didn’t like that. It was enrichment, he said. Above and beyond the syllabus.
"Extra stuff you cooked up on a whim, you mean?" Herbert asked, and some of the asshole kids around him laughed.
"Just write it," Milling said, all pissed off just like that.
So Herbert had written it.
He’d surprised himself, getting into it, writing it all in one sitting, "pouring out his heart and soul" like some kind of English-major queer-bait. In clean prose, he explained that he’d spend the five days driving around, killing people who’d done him wrong. It was logical, detailed, and even funny at points, Herbert thought. Honestly, he’d been kind of proud of it.
A week later, it returned to him, a big, red F on the last page. Below the grade, Milling had written three words: This is sick.
Those three words were the only justification the asshole had offered for the failing grade on a bullshit assignment he’d given on a whim. And in the end, it had been just that poorly justified grade on that sky-blue bullshit assignment that had dropped Herbert’s final average in the course to a B+.
A fucking B+?
In all of Herbert’s time as a college student, Milling’s course was the only class in which he’d been given something other than an A.
He’d gone to office hours to complain. No Milling. A teacher from an adjacent office tried to cover for him, bringing up the sick wife. None of that mattered to Herbert. He knew the truth. Milling was such an inept piece of shit he didn’t even attend his own office hours.
So be it, Herbert had thought, standing there outside the locked office. So fucking be it. Even then, back in sophomore year, the seed of some grand plan had begun its dark germination. He’d settle the score, all right.
So even before there had been a list, Milling had been on it. And that only made this moment sweeter, for, as the old Spanish proverb said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
He’d taken his time, rushing nothing. That was cool. And Herbert Weston was the Master of Cool.
Now he’d see about Milling
’s whimsical assignment.
Chapter 40
The kitchen was very bright. Dianne and Burt had relocated to the den. Susan Billups, busy at the counter, said, "I’ll have fresh coffee in a jiffy, Chuck."
Charles smiled and said he’d see, but he’d probably skip out on this pot.
She asked if he was hungry. When he shook his head, she said, "Well, if you change your mind, there are meatballs in the crock pot and rolls on the counter."
"I just came in for Mary’s medication," he said. "It’s almost time for her next dose."
"Okay," Susan said, and a brief, awkward silence ensued.
"Thank you, Susan," Charles said, "for everything. You and Hank, everybody, I mean, it was really nice of you to stay with us."
She smiled. "It’s nothing."
"It is, though," Charles said. "It really is. It means the world to me." He opened the refrigerator, withdrew the pharmacy bag, and from it took the oversized vial. Twisting the lid free, he palmed one of the large morphine suppositories.
"My mother," Susan said, and stopped.
When Charles turned, he could see she was close to tears.
"Cancer took my mother," she said.
"I’m sorry," Charles said. What else could you say?
The coffee maker beeped, finished.
"It was a long, hard fight," she said, and then she was welling up. "What I’m trying to say, Chuck, is that all this time, I knew what you were going through. All this long time, I knew what Mary was going through, and I knew I should be over here, helping you like a good neighbor, like my neighbors did when my mother was sick, but, well, I don’t know…I guess a part of me was afraid if I did, it would bring it all back, everything, and it just didn’t seem like I could handle that."
Charles felt a lump in his throat. "It’s okay, really. You don’t have to—’
"No, I do. You see, that’s why I can’t stand to hear you thank us. That’s why I refuse to feel good about staying here tonight. It shames me to my core that I haven’t been over here all these months, doing my duty as a neighbor. And it pains me to think that it took this… insanity…to bring Hank and me across the street."
"Don’t feel that way," Charles said, drawing her into a hug. "You’re here, and you’re wonderful neighbors. Tonight is going to change people. We’ll all see things differently, and we’ll regret things we’ve done and things we’ve avoided, but it wouldn’t be fair or sensible to hold prior selves to this new standard. We’ve changed, and now it’s time to move on. The past is the past."
Susan stepped back, smiling, and wiped away tears. "You’re a good man, Chuck, a good husband. You get back to Mary. And I’d better see to the coffee."
Atop the counter, the scanner crackled once more to life. "We have mass movement westward," a voice reported. The voice shouted over a loud beating that Charles recognized as helicopter blades. "Most of the rioters are moving into the West End."
Another voice said something about the National Guard and tear gas. Charles wasn’t really listening anymore.
This was the West End.
His hand closed in a fist around the morphine.
Rioters? These weren’t rioters; they were homicidal maniacs. And it sounded like they might overrun this neighborhood any minute.
As if in agreement, Burt groaned across the hall.
"I’d better tell the men," Susan said, and she left.
Charles followed her out of the kitchen, heading toward Mary, but paused in the hall, chilled by what he saw in the den. Sitting there in the semi-gloom, taped and tied into the wheelchair, Burt sputtered and nodded, looking worse than ever. Diane knelt on the floor, cradling her injured arm, talking to him.
Diane let her broken arm drop to her lap. It had to hurt like hell. A slow twitch rolled across her features, but she didn’t cry out with the pain. Instead, she lifted a toy train into view. It was green.
Quite inexplicably, it filled Charles with dread, as if it were a model not of one of yesteryear’s iron horses, but rather that of greater significance, The Entropy Express, an O-scale machination of fate, the little toy engine of the world’s ceaseless insistence on death and decay.
Looking up and seeing him there, Diane offered a weak smile. "Don’t be angry," she told Charles, "but I snuck out. I got an engine from next door." Her smile quivered. "It’s a 1925 Lionel 10E. Burt never thinks I pay attention to his trains, but I do. See, Burt?" She turned toward the wheelchair and held the train inches from Burt’s face.
Burt had stopped nodding. His eyes were shut, and his chin was on his chest. He opened his mouth, made a gagging sound, and sprayed flecks of green onto his shirt, which had gone emerald with slime. Charles figured Burt was approximately ten million miles from hearing Diane.
She didn’t seem to feel that way. She said, "Look what I brought you, Burt. It’s one of your trains, sweetie. See? Choo-chooooo, chugga chugga, chugga chugga, chooo-choooo."
Charles hated the trembling enthusiasm in her voice, the desperation. She crept the rim of a total collapse. In her face, Charles saw so much that it was hard to take in: optimism, fear, pain, desperation, mania, resolve, anxiety, love, need… And he knew, somehow, that at some point during the night, mad with pain and grief, Diane had all but given up hope, and that what he was witnessing now was the fruition of a manic return to hope, one last-ditch plan wherein a toy train, like some magic artifact, would save her dying husband.
Charles opened his fist. The suppository sat like a dark and miniature rugby ball in his palm. He looked from it to the train, from to train back to it. To what strange talismans we cling during times of need, he thought, and left this particular tragedy in favor of his own.
Chapter 41
Before leaving, they commandeered jackets from a downstairs closet. Cat’s was too big, Steve’s too small.
"Snazzy," Cat said when Steve modeled his find. "Purple and green."
"You like?"
She nodded, laughing.
Steve shuffled back and forth, flapped his arms, and threw some punches. It was tight, but it didn’t bind him. He had no intention of wearing a straight jacket to his next fight.
Cat rolled her sleeves. It would work until they found something better.
"Ready?"
They hit the streets, walking. They would hoof it out of town, find some cops, unload the Herbert theory, and then they’d say vaya con dios to College Heights.
Steve was glad he’d burned the blend. He felt good. Better, anyway. Awake. The pain receded in his gut, and he no longer felt like going to sleep. He was careful not to move around too much or talk too fast or anything. Cat didn’t need to worry about him going over the edge. When he’d offered her the bowl, she’d stuck to her guns, waving it off, and that was cool. She was holding up all right without it.
Damn, was she hot.
"How about we break into another house, check out its bedroom, too?" he asked.
She smiled, but it was forced, he knew. She was all business. She wanted to get to the cops, let them know about Herbert, and get the hell out of Cheery Valley. Not a bad plan, all in all. Still, he thought, looking her up and down, getting her back in the sack sounded like an even better idea.
"Are you cool?" she asked, surprising him.
Steve made his face serious. "Cool? Yeah, I’m cool. I’m Mr. Cool." But then, feeling the manic hilarity building up inside him, he put the brakes on his mouth.
"Well, then, stay on your toes, Mr. Cool. Keep a good lookout, okay?"
"Yeah," he said and meant it. He’d promised her he wouldn’t go around the bend. Not that he was going around the bend. He just didn’t want to give her that impression, laughing too much, making everything into a joke. So he tightened into himself and kept his mouth shut, and about half a block later, his vigilance started to wig him out a little.
This was some crazy bullshit. Why the hell weren’t they hiding out somewhere?
We already discussed that. Don’t fuck around and upset her.
<
br /> They crossed upscale, residential neighborhoods marred with occasional scenes of naked atrocity. A burning house; a scattering of human teeth spread across the sidewalk like abandoned oracles’ bones boding ill; what appeared to be the arm of a child, lying discarded in a driveway like a broken toy. Like other streets they had passed since crossing Ackerman, however, these were relatively quiet, regardless of their grim milestones. Still, the contrast between streets of unspoiled suburbia and sporadic pockets of mayhem made for a surreal atmosphere somehow more unsettling than the full-blown madness they’d encountered in town.
By the time they reached the intersection of O’Brien and Lavender, it seemed to Steve that every breeze was a whisper, every shadow a crouching crazy. He half expected Banjo to step in front of them, frothing green, that little arm clutched in his mouth.
Fuck that.
Keep your shit together. Just keep your shit together, and this will all be over soon enough.
"Did you say something?" Cat asked.
"Huh? Me? No."
"Let’s turn left up here. That points us out of town, right?"
Steve agreed. Did it, though? Yeah. Right?
They turned onto Maple. Halfway down the block, Steve squinted at a fire hydrant. Had they already passed this spot? Were they walking in circles?
And then, all at once, he had to take a piss. Its sudden urgency and undeniable certainty were oddly comforting. He stopped. "Hold up."
She waited in mock impatience, smirking.
Steve stood in a gap between the hedges and took a leak, the arch of piss steaming in the cold night. In front of him stood nice houses, their windows dark, situated upon wide, flat yards. He’d never put much stock into the old white picket fence and never would, but even now, here, in the midst of all this insanity, he knew that meeting Cat had changed him in some fundamental way, had opened his mind to things he’d rejected wholesale in the past. He’d never end up in a columned estate, discussing mulch with shiny neighbors, but the basic idea of settling down no longer seemed ludicrous. A part of him had always seen it as weakness, settling down, like people just couldn’t make it on their own so they settled for someone and both of them agreed to split housework, pay bills, and share a slow death. And he supposed maybe there was some truth in that.
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