by Ryan Harding
Internet vendetta?
Im going to find you and fuck you world, you little troll. Peter Griefin my ass, your real name will be mine and then YOULL be mine, you fukc!
In light of the situation, Loonatik411’s (ungrammatical) words now seemed more than an idle threat.
Lolz, Goonatik. When you see my vid on the interwebz immortalizing the various and sundry ways I made you my bitch make sure you give me a thumbs down. Let’s me know the wounds ain’t healed. Lolz!
Lawrence was a Griefer. He learned a game and/or found its hacks, entered multiplayer servers and proceeded to fuck with people and record the ensuing chaos for his and his fans’ amusement. He’d done it for years and been called more names in more languages than the Devil. Loonatik411 was just another player Lawrence trolled under the cloak of anonymity.
Until two (?) nights ago.
While Lawrence injected fun into an otherwise successful (and boring) military campaign by unleashing Rocket Propelled Grenade chaos tempered with some random nutsack sniping, Loonatik411 appeared.
Hey there, Lawrence. Or can I call you Larry?
Nathan called him Larry. Coincidence? Maybe.
Gonna fuck you up, Larry. Dead meat. I know…Where. You. Live. LOLZ.
He found “Larry’s” name and address a couple days before Lawrence wound up drugged in a weird hotel room.
Coincidence? Only if it was the most epic one ever. And if not Loonadick, a host of others who would gladly do this if he leaked Lawrence’s identity to the right people.
But who did these other people here piss off? None seemed the online type except maybe the kid if he snuck games at a friend’s house. Or Marcus—with his ample aggression, Lawrence could see him on a perpetual killing spree with a virtual machine gun. Get some, you punk-ass bitches!
There was daylight ahead. The lobby windows were not blackened. Nathan was first to the lobby and abruptly stopped, hand aloft to signal the rest of the crew to halt.
Marcus probably had a history of ignoring the Man and wasn’t about to start obeying now. He charged ahead, glass crunching beneath his shoes.
I bet he’d call them kicks.
“Oh, shit!” Marcus turned back to Suzanne, his face warped by a grimace. “You don’t wanna see this, baby.”
Four
Just beyond the carport was a traffic island where someone had staked five human heads on poles. It looked like a macabre group picture: The Headeys’ family vacation. Lawrence identified three men and one woman with one unknown because the skull was too mashed. Gender X had been crushed in a vise or the wall-breaker’s hands before mounting and slid halfway down its pole like a flag lowered to half-mast. The lack of symmetry, the lack of aesthetic neatness (the middle pole canted to the left), and the stringy stalactite hanging from male #2 stood grim testimony against Lawrence’s theory of scare tactics.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Ed said. “This can’t be real.”
Nathan held up his hands again for calm.
Let’s not panic, minions, for I have a different plan to proclaim unto you.
He didn’t push his hands this time or his luck, though. Stock in calm wasn’t a hot commodity as prayers, moans, and cries traveled down the line. Lawrence joined in this time. Flies buzzing around the head menagerie suggested something beyond slightly sophisticated shock effects. A prosthetic head tended to look like merely that in a movie if the camera lingered. He had no doubt these would hold up to scrutiny and macabre experimentation.
Most of the group turned away, a few gagging and sobbing. Probably a good thing they found the bloody room to prepare them somewhat for something this horrific, although he had a little catching up to do in trauma as the Doubting Lawrence.
Annette seemed the most likely to melt down, but she took off for the front desk before panic consumed them. Nathan gave up any pretense of motivational speaking and crossed the lobby after her.
Only jagged edges remained in the frames of the windows. Something blew them out with explosive force, scattering glass throughout the lobby and pavement beneath the carport. Some panes were knocked inward and others outward. A bloody path trailed through the shards and out the front door.
“It doesn’t work!” Annette slammed the phone on its cradle at the desk. She gave Nathan an imploring stare, perhaps convinced by the Power Gestures it was his responsibility to free them from this nightmare. He walked past her like she wasn’t there and tried the phone himself, then slammed it down even harder.
“Did you try dialing nine?” Ed asked.
Nathan shook his head as he walked back. “No dice.”
“What’d you expect?” Marcus asked. “They’d bring us here and let us call for help?”
Lawrence moved on shaky legs toward the windows with the growing dread of recognition, glass and broken tiles crackling.
A white Volkswagen Beetle of ‘70s vintage sat in the parking lot beside a rusted Ford pickup of similar age, an old Volvo, and a little farther away a burned-out Humvee, all with flat tires.
At the entrance to the lot, Lawrence saw another traffic island with six more heads. On the left side, more were staked in an overgrown picnic area. He added up nineteen decapitations, trying not to think of it as a “head count.”
Then he saw the thing at the far end of the lot that ended any notion this was a game. The fluorescent orange kiosk which like the Humvee seemed an anachronism, a futuristic device dropped into a place otherwise unsullied by technologies of the last thirty years. This had to be…
“The Morgan Falls Lodge!” Eliza practically screamed it.
Silence fell over the lobby. Pamela looked puzzled but also did not speak. No one moved, the revelation demanding mute reflection. It lasted several seconds before Lawrence heard the sound. Something low and eerie, discomfiting and close. Like a cat in heat, only long, sustained.
“Are you okay?” Adam asked.
Lawrence caught his line of sight and tracked it to Annette who stood rigid, teeth bared, eyes vacant, a guttural moan rattling in her throat like glass. She’d turned down the volume on a scream and left it idling.
“Damn, bitch,” Marcus said. “You need us to put a muzzle on you?”
Eliza rushed to the counter, threw her arms around Annette and whispered something. The vocal cord grinding immediately leveled off. In a strange way, her fit calmed them somewhat. They at least recognized the need to conduct themselves far more collectedly than she seemed prepared to do.
Pamela sensed Q&A was finally permitted. “Wait, what’s Morgan Falls?”
“It’s where Agent Orange is, Mom.”
And there it is, the name said aloud. Richard Dunbar, the crazy Vietnam vet who went apeshit and slaughtered a bunch of people in the early 1980s. AKA The Morgan Murderer, the Sandalwood Slayer.
Lawrence waited for it to feel ridiculous. It didn’t.
“We’re not in Morgan,” Ed said. “We can’t be.”
Not the voice of reason. It was a man asking his doctor to run the tests again. He didn’t have stage IV cancer. No way.
“The hell we ain’t,” Marcus said. “That orange phone booth out there is a Chicken Exit. Someone’s dropped our asses into Agent Orange’s Kill Zone. If we don’t get out of here five minutes ago, we’re fucked!”
“We’re only effed if we panic, Marcus,” Nathan said. “Let’s look at our options.”
Run, hide, or die should just about cover it.
“Why would someone do this to us?” Eliza asked.
Ed curled protective arms around Pamela and Adam. “The government has Morgan and the surrounding area walled off and patrolled by the US Army. There’s no way someone rolled us past them to stash us in the lodge.”
“Man, there’s ways in,” Marcus said. “Dudes sneak in and out all the time.”
“But they’re doing it of their own free will,” Nathan said.
“It’s the government,” Suzanne said. “Nobody else could get all eleven of us in here.”
“But why would they do that, baby?”
“Why would they conduct the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or create HIV, baby? Because they can.”
The Taiwanese girl followed the conversation like a tennis match, pausing only to watch Patrick inspect a light fixture mounted on the wall. Who changed out the bulbs in the Morgan Falls Lodge? Why would it have electricity at all? Maybe Patrick could figure it out with his patented Deep Gaze™.
“Well, we’ve got, what did you call it? A Chicken Exit? The bright orange phone booth over there, right?” Nathan asked. “I say we give it a try.”
It wasn’t a phone booth, more like one of those old open air “dial anywhere in the US for 50 cents a minute” phones Lawrence used to see. As the eleventh fastest person in the group, he wasn’t eager to increase their chances of an encounter with the famed maniac by venturing outside.
“Doesn’t mean the phone’s gonna work,” Marcus said.
“If it doesn’t, we’re no worse off,” Nathan said. “But it should. Those things were put here for people like us.”
Oh, people like us, who don’t remember how the hell they wound up in Morgan?
Lawrence had seen the movies, played one of the games, watched the survivor stories on Dateline NBC and similar programs, read harrowing tales in magazines and newspapers, and read some of the hundreds of books on the subject, so if people were ever abducted and transferred here, he’d have heard about it. They were pioneers, or worse—and more likely—this happened before and no one lived to tell.
The bulk of Richard Dunbar’s victims came from killing sprees in the 1980s when he repeatedly butchered Morgan Falls campers and town folk, and/or those in nearby Sandalwood in semi-annual campaigns of terror. It always ended with Dunbar’s temporary death, but somehow he always returned to kill again. Miraculous? Supernatural? Impossible? All of the above. Theories as to how and why were as common as the “experts” who made the rounds on news and talk shows. Theories ranged from his exposure to experimental Agent Orange in ‘Nam to dying on a cursed Native American burial ground at the end of the first spree. In reality, no one knew.
The government built huge walls around the abandoned Morgan town and lake to contain him. There were rumored to have been classified containment experiments including imprisonment, cryogenics, and an expensive rocket launch attempt, but it was like murder was the only thing that sustained him, and without it, he popped right back up in the Kill Zone. With him free to wander his hunting grounds with impunity, the massacres stopped for a while and the victim class changed from unsuspecting innocents to those who willingly challenged the walls. It replaced Aokigahara as the destination du jour for Japanese suicides, and daredevils added to the death toll while outside the wall the Agent Orange tourist trade boomed in Sandalwood.
The walls held until 1996 when Agent Orange broke through and painted snow-covered Sandalwood red just in time for Christmas. The town emptied faster than Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster and more walls were erected, swallowing Sandalwood along with the Morgan Memorial, the Agent Orange Museum (since relocated to Marshallville), and a military barracks. Lawrence remembered the internet scandal of ‘97 when memorabilia scavenged from the Kill Zone—including still-wrapped gifts left beneath Christmas trees during the rushed Sandalwood evacuation—showed up on online auction sites. People known as Stalkers could get curiosity-seekers in and (sometimes) out unharmed for black market collectibles, a cutthroat market on both sides of the walls.
“But if we test the phone, we’ll be in the open,” Eliza said.
“If we’re really in Morgan Falls,” Ed said, “it’s huge—”
“Over seven thousand acres,” Adam said. “Three towns.”
Westing was blocked in a 2004 expansion, making it the third and most recent town abandoned, but hardly anyone lived there by then.
“Three towns. So the chances of him being close would be like lotto odds if we’re really in Morgan...which we’re not.”
Suzanne laughed. “If you wake up in some field during a storm with an iron bar glued to your hand, obviously someone wants you to be a lightning rod.”
Marcus stood by his lady. “Yeah, fuck your lottery odds, man. You know what they say…someone’s gotta win.”
Nathan pounded a palm in his fist again, chiseling the stone tablet of his commandments. “We need to get an evac chopper while we still have daylight and we’re better off sticking together as a group. Are you with me, folks?”
Mumbles. This time he had no immediate takers except Adam’s family, hostages to Ed’s straw-clutching denial of reality. Adam flashed a pleading look at the Vietnamese chick and she followed, too. The moment caught Lawrence off guard. Did Adam have some sort of personal stake in the girl?
Ugh, don’t think about stakes with all those heads outside.
Patrick started after them, too. The man of mystery’s endorsement made this seem like less of a suicide run.
Before Nathan stepped through the front door, he said, “For those staying behind, please do us a solid and scream really loud if he shows up.”
Eliza gave him the finger, thus being the first to invoke Power Gesture #1.
Nathan smirked at her. “Careful if you follow through the glass. You’ll cut yourself.” He ducked through.
“I don’t want to go out there,” Suzanne whispered. “But I don’t want to stay here either.”
Marcus rolled his eyes. “Got fucking Barbara from Night of the Living Dead up in here with Rain Man. Let’s go.”
How am I Rain Man?
Lawrence followed Patrick. Fitting through the mostly empty glass pane wasn’t an option so he shouldered open the door. The ensuing squeak raised Nathan’s shoulders and he whipped his head around angrily to stare him down, like Lawrence blew the platoon’s position in a rice paddy.
This isn’t the Vietnam War, you dickhole, Lawrence thought, face burning.
More glass crunched. Marcus, Suzanne, Eliza, and Annette gave up the hotel vigil. Eliza helped Annette shield her eyes from the heads.
“Just ignore them,” Eliza said.
“And keep your spastic ass quiet, like our lives depended on it,” Marcus said.
“Ignore him too,” Eliza added.
Annette looked on the verge of catatonia. If Agent Orange came after them maybe she would lock up, buying Lawrence a chance to beat a hasty exit—well, as hasty an exit as he could.
Her psychodrama is probably as real as my Tourette’s. First sign of trouble and she’ll throw up a dust cloud like the Road Runner.
Ed, Pamela, Adam, and the Mongolian girl followed Nathan. Marcus had Suzanne. Eliza and Annette had a weird mother-daughter thing going. It made Patrick and Lawrence the odd men out, but Patrick obviously preferred it that way. Lawrence had to ingratiate himself with them or he’d be flat-out left behind when the shit hit the fan. Did he have anything to leverage? He’d seen a lot of the Agent Orange movies—who hadn’t?—but the most recent video game could be his ticket. It was based on actual town layouts with a virtual replica of the landscape. He knew how to get to the lake from Morgan Falls Lodge.
The object of the game was to sneak into the Kill Zone and retrieve the key to a safe deposit box from a house in Sandalwood. The player had to break into the Sandalwood Savings and Loan to claim an unknown treasure while evading Agent Orange and random military patrols. The game hadn’t been Lawrence’s cup of tea and he only spent five hours playing, but no one had to know. He’d watched the walkthrough on YouTube…okay, he’d watched the walkthrough of the last five minutes of the game because he wanted to know what was in the safe deposit box, and it turned out to be nothing more than a riff on the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.
It was quiet out here, with a light breeze. Lawrence saw a deer amble onto the pavement at the other end of the parking lot. He pointed. Eliza looked at it and then looked at him in a way that said, “So?” His smile faltered.
The Chicken Exit was so named for the idiots who got themselves in he
re and then had second thoughts about sticking around. The CE enabled a quick call to the US Army which had a chopper on standby for such emergencies. A stiff fine, community service, and public ridicule probably seemed a small price to pay when you spotted your first head ornament.
“—called Lakewood,” the Filipino girl said to Adam. Yeah, a town in Washington and she studied nursing at Clover Park Technical College. Lawrence had asked her where she was from, meaning in Asia, and she gave him the same answer. In perfect English. Adam clung to every word, his parents momentarily forgotten.
Poor Pamela. She’d lost her son’s hand and would probably lose her head next.
The kiosk was mounted on a small concrete slab in a traffic island. The overgrown grass and weeds swayed in the breeze. No staked heads here, thank God. The kiosk had a huge dent and leaned to the left but the phone still hung on the cradle, with instructions beside it in twenty different languages. Stay calm, pick up the phone, press the red button, state the location when asked (this was number 15), answer any questions, stay calm.
Nathan fist-pumped. “All right, gang, let’s get the fuck out of here.” He hurried the final steps to the phone as if it would fly away on them.
Lawrence turned to watch the deer, comforted by the thought it could not occupy the same area as an inhuman killer. Eliza had missed the point.
The pop of a loud firecracker snapped Lawrence’s attention back to the group.
Nathan grunted and fell sideways, knocking the phone loose. Wisps of smoke rose from the ground, but there wasn’t a visible hole. He rolled, clutching his right foot. Gobs of blood dripped from the shoe, seeping through his fingers. The top of his brogue had opened from the inside out.
“What the hell, man?” Marcus said. He and Suzanne backed away to the cracked asphalt. “Was it a mine?”
“Toe popper,” Patrick said. “A buried shell that goes off under enough pressure. Careful…there could be more.”