Drowning in Gore

by Ledger,John

  Over on the bank Blonde and Groupie2, who’d also elected to go that way, sat frozen in abject horror. They were like transfixed statues, as if somebody had decided to cast two life-like waxwork figures of archetypal band bimbos out in the middle of a swamp for some unknown reason. Neither one of them moved an inch, rigid in their petrified poses. Whether they thought being on land excluded them from the slaughter in the water was anybody’s guess, but it didn’t look like either of them was moving any time soon.

  “Get this piece of shit moving, man!” Lonny was at the front of the craft, hammering insistently at the operator, who was trying for all he was worth to coax any sign of life from it.

  “I can’t do anything, we’re stuffed! Those guys didn’t get under there to see what the matter was.”

  “Toldya what the matter was. Marshlands Malice,” Benchley grunted. “Damn right I was too. We’re all goners, ‘less this craft gets mobile. And that ain’t happenin’, sure as shit.”

  “Someone better get out and fix it!” Lonny shrilled, then to Reef. “You! What was wrong with the boat? Why aren’t we moving?”

  “Did it look like I had time to see shit? You want to get the boat moving, you get your scrawny ass out in the drink and have a look-see for yourself. Fucked if you’ll catch me back out there, Lodge got his goddamn leg ripped off!”

  “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” Lonny screamed like a girl, directing his outburst to anybody who might have had an answer.

  Any that were forthcoming were lost in a deluge of screams, coming from the bank. Blonde was jumping up to her feet and turning suddenly, as if to make off into the thick choked vegetation of the undergrowth. She was wearing high-heeled boots, footwear which was completely useless out here in this godforsaken hellzone. They caught in the mud and she went down with a cry and a twisted ankle, ending up sprawled face first in the dank sludgy plants lining the bank. Her ultra-short skirt flipped up around her waist, revealing that she’d opted for a miniscule red thong as underwear. On any other occasion, this wardrobe malfunction might have been a source of titillation for any of the males looking on-unfortunately for Samuel the loudest advocate of such things, his untimely death rendered him ineligible-but right now, all it looked like was a piece of prime rump steak for Marshlands Malice, as the eerie fiend exploded out of the water again.

  He came like a jet-powered, hair-covered, scaly mutant rocket, launching right out of the water and up the bank with gaping jaws that were neither wolf nor crocodile-like, but a bizarre mashup of both, with a little bulldog jowl tossed in for good measure. Those jaws were full of irregular teeth that followed no rhyme or reason whatsoever; some sharp fangs, some peglike stumps, others needle points and they grew not in rows, but everywhere in the yawning chasm of a mouth. They closed with a horrifically audible sound on Blonde’s left buttock and sheared it right off in a welter of blood and the noise of ripping meat.

  The screaming intensified. Blonde attempted an ill-fated scramble up the bank-Brooke’s inane morbidity which was threatening to tip her over into hysteria whispered ‘half-assed attempt’ in her mind-promptly forgetting the spike heel of her boot was still lodged in the mud. Her whole leg went a way human legs weren’t designed to go and the accompanying crack was louder than the grisly flesh-tearing sound of Malice gnawing off a buttcheek.

  The attention of Malice was fixated on Blonde, but Groupie2 was about to discover she wasn’t off the radar. As she scooted up the bank on her rump, shrilling like a panic-stricken banshee, Malice unleashed another weapon. A long thin black whip of a tail that didn’t look as though it even belonged on the malformed mish-mash of irregularities comprising the swamp beast’s body, came lashing up out of the slimy water the fiend’s lower half was still submerged in. It snapped around the throat of Groupie2 and wrapped itself in coils, lashing as tight as a noose, wrenching the luckless lass straight back down the slippery slope she’d tried to abscond up.

  The freakish bastard beast was amphibious, ambidextrous and adept with each and every single limb. The front limbs ensnared half-ass Blonde and the rear ones stabbed claws into the flesh of Groupie2. As more blood spurted onto an already sanguinary mess on the muddied ground, Malice descended back into the water, dragging both his prizes with him. Only bloody bubbles remained, dissipating on the water surface.

  For somebody as obsessed with the whole horror ethos and the often brutal lyrical explorations of Drowning in Gore, Gus didn’t have the fortitude for any of this. He bent double, heaving and dry retching, and then dropped to his knees on the deck, spraying a torrent of alcohol-rich bilious vomit.

  Lonny had switched his what the fuck mantra into a perpetual litany of what are we going to do and it was boring into Brooke’s eardrums worse than any of the screams coming from the people intent on hollering themselves hoarse. Lodge was comatose on the deck there, in shock and bleeding out, and nobody had a clue or inclination to be able to administer anything in the way of first aid. Donita and Penelope were leading the cheersquad of horrified screams, Gus was puking his guts up, the remaining groupies were hanging off the band members as if they knew what to do, Craig looked like he was stuck in a trance state, the boat operator was still vainly trying to get the hunk of junk running and anybody else was just milling around the boat in utter, directionless panic.

  “We can’t stay here!” Benchley issued sharply, the gruff tone returning to his voice and tempering the panic of before.

  “And go where?” Donita howled. “Out there?”

  “Anywhere, but here,” Benchley replied. “If ya thinkin’ you’re untouchable here, you’re dead wrong. This is like a big open can of spam for Malice, he’ll be in here before ya know. Dunno about you idiots, but I ain’t wanna be here when that happens.”

  “The swamphouse!” Crypt snapped his fingers. “We’ve gotta be pretty close to it by now. We’ll get there and hole up.”

  “Until when? The sun comes up or some shit?” Craig asked. “This freak go away in the daylight or what? Or are we gonna be trapped there?”

  “Maybe we can barricade ourselves in,” Jayne suggested. “Until help arrives. Somebody comes looking for us. That’ll happen once people don’t start hearing from us.”

  Brooke didn’t miss the looks which passed between some of the band members and a crippling thought struck her like a fearful lightning bolt. Those alarmed expressions between the musicians spoke volumes to her without saying a word. They’d all be holed up waiting for help to come a lot longer than they expected, because nobody knew where to start looking for them. They were, after all, enroute to the Mystery Recording Location. All of them unaware of where it was until the final minutes. Forbidden to pass the information on to anybody else. No-one knew where they were.

  “Do we have to go in the water?” Gus, threads of bile still hanging from his chin, asked weakly.

  “’Less ya can jump from here all the way ta the bank there, or ya can fly,” Benchley retorted.

  “I’m not going in the water!” Donita shrilled.

  “Then you’re dying here,” Benchley declared.

  “He’s right,” Crypt said. “That swamp motherfucker just took two gals underwater, wherever he goes with them. He’s already taken the drunk guy. This is the best chance we have to move, while he’s occupied. We’ve got to move! All of us.”

  “Fucking A!” Craig said and without warning, launched himself over the edge and into the waters with a splash.

  He wasn’t the only one; others were swift to follow.

  “What about him?” Gus jerked a shaky finger at the unconscious figure of Lodge, sprawled on the deck with a spreading pool of blood circling him. “How are we gonna take him anywhere?”

  Reef reached inside his coat and withdrew a Smith & Wesson pistol from an underarm holster. Before anybody comprehended what he was planning, he stood over the prone slump of his associate and aimed the gun at his head.

  “Sorry, bud, but this is more merciful for you than getting the r
est of your bits gnawed off by that goddamn swamp mutant.”

  A sharp crack issued as Reef pulled the trigger and the bullet punched through Lodge’s temple. A small puff of red squirted out and then more blood begin to trickle down to merge with the pooling mess coming from his dismembered leg stump.

  Donita, voice already run ragged by her incessant screaming, could only stare, aghast, while it was her companion Penelope who unleashed the disbelieving shriek tirade.

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  The waters on the far side of the boat geysered upwards in a torrent that sprayed across the deck and those still onboard. Bursting up with them came the monstrous, misshapen frame of Marshlands Malice, his grotesque hands gripping the side. He hurled himself right over and amidst the passengers, in a tempest of hair, scales and a putrid odour of swamp water and death. Reef was bringing his pistol up when the beast seized his gun arm and wrenched it right off at the socket before clamping those hybrid murderous jaws around his throat and sinking their myriad aberrant teeth into his flesh.

  “Come on!” Tsunami shouted at Brooke, yanking her by the hand to the bank edge. She barely had time to think or to witness the further ensuing carnage as Malice put his hind legs and lashing whip tail to use in taking down Donita and Penelope at the same time he chewed Reef’s throat into gory mush, before she was cannoning over the edge into the foul water.

  It wasn’t as cold as she’d been expecting, but it still hit her with a shock, making her gasp as she briefly went under then came spluttering to the surface. The stench of it was atrocious and she vaguely acknowledged that she wasn’t just immersed in water, but the blood of Samuel and the two women as well. Then Tsunami was half towing, half dragging her towards the bank.

  Screams, splashes, shouts and a whole entourage of horrible sounds that were bound to instigate nightmares for the rest of her life, however brief that might happen to be, chased her as she stumbled from the mire. She lost sight of the others, floundering in the mud and thick vegetation ahead as they peeled off in all random directions. She could only assume that Tsunami knew where he was going, aiming for the swamphouse they’d spoken of, but maybe he too, was as directionless and fearstricken as the rest, just running for the sake of putting distance between themselves and Malice.

  Brooke couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to run anywhere with such panicked haste and the exertion, on top of the impromptu dunk in the swampsludge, was immediately playing havoc with her legs, her arms, everything. Her breath huffed out in ragged gasps, overhanging branches slapped dank clusters of leaves in her face and the muddy marsh sucked around her feet as if trying to stunt her escape and bring her down to the ground.

  The figures of Lonny and Gus suddenly lurched into view, the portly Gus gasping for breath worse than Brooke. They were bobbing in and out of the mess of trees, slipping and staggering through the choke of weeds. Up ahead, through the few gaps that were available in the woods, Brooke could see that the oft-mentioned swamphouse was there, a hulking mass of darkness in the gloom. At least Lonny and Gus, unlike so many of the others, were on the right path.

  Still dragging her like an errant puppy on a leash, Tsunami made a beeline after them.

  Marshlands Malice dropped from the canopy of the trees above, crashing through tangled leaves. His monstrous bulk landed atop Lonny and mud encrusted claws shredded through flesh, scoring it into bloody ribbons. As the luckless fellow went to ground in a screaming heap of splattered gore, Malice stopped Gus short with a tail noose around his portly throat. The guy would have screamed, but all of a sudden his ability to make any more noise than choking gargles was greatly diminished. He spat blood bubbles as the merciless coil tightened around his neck, to the point it was gouging into his skin like a wire garrotte.

  Brooke stopped dead in her tracks, rigid with fear, but Tsunami wouldn’t let her. She too would have screamed if she’d had any breath left in her lungs to muster one up.

  “Come on,” the bassist urged. “Keep going!”

  “I can’t!” Brooke moaned.

  “Yes, you can. He’s preoccupied with those two. Hasn’t even seen us. You can do it.”

  Tsunami moved, swiftly, his hand holding tight onto hers. It was move with him or be yanked right off her feet, and though she wasn’t fond of either option, the first one just edged out the latter. Her heart thudded like a jackhammer and felt like it was in her mouth, and her lungs felt like they were about to explode. Nonetheless, she ran.

  The body of Lonny was just a raw ragged steak; a welter of blood on the swampy ground, and as she fled on the heels of Tsunami, she saw the demise of Gus in gruesome detail. She only caught a snapshot as she ran for her life, but that one fleeting moment was all she needed to lodge a hideous image in her memory for eternity.

  The tail of Malice, squeezing vicelike around Gus’ throat kept constricting tighter and tighter, eventually shearing right through the skin, the flesh and everything inside. The fat kid’s head popped right off, shooting up like a released champagne cork, followed by a bloody spout straight up in the air. Then it was all behind them and Tsunami was racing her towards the dark bulk of the swamphouse.

  Obviously Tsunami wasn’t just blindly feeling his way along, he had no issue getting inside the ramshackle construction at all; ducking in through what she guessed was the back of the place, through a loose collective of boards that barely comprised a door. As they entered, Brooke realised they weren’t the first ones there.

  There were myriad sounds in here; incongruous sounds, things that sounded alien to be hearing amidst this nightmarish tableaux. Raucous laughter, gleeful voices. Things that just sounded wrong.

  “Man, what a fucking rush!”

  “Damn, that was fucking intense. We’ve got footage for days, the cameras on the boats, the ones we lined up in the woods, this shit is going to blow people’s minds. What do you think, maybe be enough good stuff there that we can literally make a video clip for just about every track on the album or what? Drownatics are gonna be creaming their pants with this. This is our masterpiece, boys. Best bit? It’s all as real as fuck and idiots are gonna be blowing their loads over how unreal the ‘special effects’ look!”

  It was dark in here, but not pitch black. Windows and abundant cracks in the old slats of wood used to create the joint spilled plentiful light inside. Brooke already knew from the conversation that it was the other three members of Drowning in Gore, and as she stumbled forward she saw that confirmed. They stood in the centre of the dilapidated old room, high fiving one another and singing each other’s praises. They all saw Tsunami and Brooke just after she saw them.

  “Jesus Christ, Tsunami! You brought one of them here? What the fuck? They’re the meat for that unholy fucking swamp sonofabitch out there. Nobody walks out of here. They all get immortalised in the Drowning in Gore musical legend, that’s the deal, that’s the end.”

  The makeshift door where they’d entered busted open in a spray of shattered wood and the brutish bulk of Marshlands Malice exploded into the swamphouse, a giant snarling mass of ferocity and ungodly ugliness. Rather than launch straight upon the ensemble in the room, he prowled around them, issuing a low demented growling sound Brooke hadn’t heard before.

  His freakish body was splattered with mud and blood, and flecks of flesh still hung from his jaws, but evidently his hunger wasn’t yet sated.

  “Okay, okay!” Nash called out. “We’re all done now, you can call this ugly ass thing off now, please? You get your money, you even get a cut of the profits from the sales and the merch and everybody’s happy. Send this sonofabitch back to the swamp!”

  “Naw, see here’s the thing. Since this here house is mine and my niece Jayne’s here, I figure that gives me the right ta keep movin’ the goalposts.” A familiar voice sounded and through the front door of the derelict old shack stepped Benchley, accompanied by the girl from the boat, Jayne. “Ain’t interested in ya damn record sales or none of that shit, and I got
ta thinkin’ out there and changed my mind about the whole deal. It’s a better idea if nobody claps eyes on old Malice and your damn video extravanganza is just gonna mess everythin’ up. So, here’s the new deal. You assholes can join the rest of those poor fools ya brought out ta die. That girl gets to live provided she gets accustomed to living in the marshlands real quick. As for us, well ta begin with, we were thinkin’ that getting’ outta the swamps and callin’ it a day on this lifestyle was the way ta go, but ya know, we were wrong. This is where we belong. Just Jayne, Malice and me. And well, that new girl too. So, go on Malice, chow down, buddy.”

  Brooke didn’t realise she’d collapsed until she looked up and saw Jayne standing over her.

  “You got lucky,” Jayne grinned, with an uncanny resemblance to old Benchley. “Welcome to the family.”

  All around the swamp shack, screams reverberated, as Malice leisurely went about his business of tearing the band members to fragments of shredded flesh and gnawed bone. Soon enough, their chosen band moniker had never been more appropriate than it was right now. As Benchley and Jayne crouched down alongside Brooke to help her to her feet, the floors of the swamp shack were left, drowning in gore.