by Ryan Harding
“Get back here!” He couldn’t manage much beyond a groan. He sounded drunk to his own ears. “You can’t leave me like this you…you…fuck!”
When had it gotten so cold?
Nathan managed to get to all fours, but not much else. Orange closed the distance with the sort of leisurely march Lawrence could have really used about thirty seconds ago. He thought bitterly of the others, all the time in the world to flee with Nathan and Lawrence as distractions, all of them still with their fucking feet.
Orange would find them, though. They were all going to die. Lawrence just got the message a little faster.
Orange stooped to pick up something in the grass beside the road. It was his bow, evidently cast aside to make it easier to run down his prey, although Orange could have chased him in a one-man band outfit with a tuba and a bass drum and still caught up with Lawrence inside of a minute.
Nathan held his hands out as though to supplicate his executioner, Powerless Gesture #6. Orange slashed in a quick arc. A pile of loose fingers broke off from Nathan’s wave. He shrieked.
Orange sheathed and stepped around Nathan. He slipped the bow string over Nathan’s throat with the bow a black grin behind him and hauled it back. Lawrence was close enough to appreciate the oddity of a man missing half his fingers trying to get his hands under a bow string to stave off strangulation. Only nubs left, half his toes blown apart, and stuck like a pinned butterfly, but still trying to live. Fascinating and awful.
Orange yanked Nathan up until he floated above the ground, legs bicycling, flap of his brogue waving with Orange at least six and a half feet tall behind him. Blood from the missing fingers painted his face an ugly shade of crimson to complement the suffocation. Orange relinquished the bow and cinched his hands around the cord to pull it taut.
Lawrence cringed at the strangled gasping, the world’s longest death rattle.
Suddenly the bow cord chewed through Nathan’s neck with a wet snap. His head dropped, somersaulting through the air and rolling away from his body, which slumped to the ground like a mail sack. A red pool sputtered from the stump of the neck, forming tributaries to join the blood lakes from Lawrence’s legs.
Lawrence looked down with no little surprise to see he’d begun to haul himself away. “Crab walking” would be inaccurate given the absence of legs (and walking), but some kind of survival mode kicked in.
The effort made his arms rubbery and he fell onto his back again, having moved himself approximately five inches toward safety.
Orange shook his bow to clear blood from the string. He mounted it on his back and gathered Nathan’s head on the way back to Lawrence, clutching it by the hair. He crossed half the distance in two seconds, though Lawrence suspected he blacked out for a moment. This close he saw droplets of blood spatter the street from the viscera of Nathan’s neck.
Another time warp and Agent Orange stood over him again, the metal erection of the machete rising.
He licked his lips. He couldn’t let the guy snuff him without some kind of parting wisdom.
“Hey,” he muttered.
Orange cocked his head.
“If you were such a…such a bad-ass in combat…why’d we lose in…in Vi…Vietnam… bitch?”
Yeah. That’s how you went out. Not chump-style, gagging like Nathan.
Orange kicked his boot into the meat of Lawrence’s nearest stump. He’d been on the verge of slipping away, but the lightning bolt of pain shocked him right back into his body like a defibrillator. He screamed, then abruptly sucked in air as Orange booted the other stump. He converted this into his finest scream yet when it all gathered in his lungs.
Orange put his bloodied boot on Lawrence’s chest and pinned him. From down here, the machete looked like some kind of alien spacecraft in the sky, which whipped down to earth in a blur right at his eyes. The blade slammed into his face to form a line like half of an X shape. It ran from his left jaw line to his right eye. Lawrence convulsed. Something that looked like a cloud of black flies unspooled in his good eye. Not flies after all, but the black boot of his executioner eclipsing the sky before it stomped the back of the blade.
It drove the machete all the way through Lawrence’s skull, bisecting his face.
Five
Marcus would have reached the lake houses first if not for Suzanne. She kept up when they first broke off into a sprint, but he had to practically carry her the last bit. Not a good sign.
“Come on, baby,” he urged. “You not hear that screaming back there? That’s us if we don’t move.”
The screaming lasted forever. Sling Blade went out like a bitch. Marcus didn’t know him and wouldn’t mourn him, but it sounded awful as hell. Marcus could outrun Agent Orange forever if he avoided the traps, but he couldn’t bolt and leave Suzanne. Hopefully Annette would make a good enough distraction to give them a head-start. Dude could have her and Eliza both. They’d acted straight up stupid so far. He heard Annette’s whining now like a homing device while Eliza comforted her with patience she didn’t deserve. Crazy white bitches too dumb to know there was a fear that could keep you alive and a fear that could get you dead, and they were buying up the latter like a sale at Costco or wherever crazy white bitches bought shit.
Everyone was afraid, but at least Suzanne didn’t express it with a lot of screaming and hollering, sending up smoke signals for that psycho to find them.
Most of these people were liabilities. Maybe not Patrick, but the others? Walking corpses. They almost followed that punk-ass Nathan to their graves. If he’d stopped crying long enough at the Chicken Exit to tell them a UFO would beam them to safety, half these fools would still be watching the skies.
It was funny to think of someone taking Marcus out of Memphis to endanger his life. They didn’t cut a brother’s head off in Memphis, though. They might blast it, like that deaf girl who got her brains blown out when he was still in high school, but they didn’t stick your dome on a stake.
“Look!” Gin called up ahead. “We’re almost there!”
A sign with a diagonal arrow read MORGAN LAKE where a side road branched into the woods. They were barely half a mile from where Agent Orange could be making lampshades from Lawrence’s fat ass this minute. Marcus didn’t like the idea of stopping now when they knew he wasn’t off in Westing or Sandalwood. They’d better hope there was a choice cache of artillery in one of these houses, but since this was Sling Blade’s idea, they’d probably be lucky to find a slingshot.
Gin beckoned to them from the road sign, Patrick right behind her.
Like we don’t know to hurry.
If this plan wasn’t agreed upon in advance, their one group might have splintered into three or four, scattering every which way.
Maybe we’d be one he didn’t chase.
Suzanne hunched to her left, wincing with a hand to her side. She’d slacked on her swimming for awhile. Marcus pulled her down the lake road. The whitebread family, Eliza and Annette stumbled behind them. They didn’t have to go far before they saw houses and the lake.
Gin and Patrick slowed at the first house in line, but something caught Marcus’s eye. “There’s a boat!” He dropped Suzanne’s hand and sprinted with a burst of new adrenaline. He blew past five houses on both sides to the end of the road, pulled up, bent over, and wheezed.
He now had a full view of their salvation. It was a houseboat which the owner named The Great Hammerhead. Now past some overgrown shrubbery, he could see it was partially sunken.
More like The Great Disappointment, Marcus thought.
Footsteps slowed behind him. He turned around sharply. Just Patrick. His impeccably sculpted hair had unfurled, but otherwise no sign of inconvenience from their race for survival. He looked at the lake stoically.
“What do you know,” he said. “They had a tire swing out here after all.”
Marcus at last noticed a rope hanging from a thick branch several yards away. The tire dangled in the weeds.
“Let’s check out some hou
ses,” Patrick said. “Maybe they have a boat at one. We need to get out of sight anyway.”
Marcus walked back with him. The rest of the group caught up in the meantime, all accounted for minus Sling Blade and Nathan. They met him and Patrick halfway. Suzanne looked at him expectantly. He shook his head. “There’s a boat, but it’s sinking.”
Everyone’s face fell at this announcement.
Marcus took stock of how the group fared in their flight. Eliza looked close to recovered. Patrick, Gin, and Adam seemed all right. Ed still huffed, but he’d need to go another couple blocks to be in the sorry state of Annette and Pam. Suzanne wasn’t much better, and he’d dragged her half the way.
We might have to try the woods if he shows up again, traps or not. I can’t pull her faster than most of these chumps can run.
“What did he do to them back there?” Annette asked. “I can’t stop hearing it.”
Patrick ignored her. “Come on, let’s try a house close to the lake. We need to hurry.”
He abruptly turned and jogged to a two story which seemed to have way too many windows, but the other houses on the street looked to be a product of the same architect. No point living by the lake if you couldn’t be reminded of it from every room in the house, apparently.
“Those screams,” Annette droned. “I can’t get them out of my mind.” As usual, Eliza gave her validation instead of telling her to shut the hell up, they all heard the damn screams.
The neighborhood looked like one of those empty Detroit suburbs or a web slide show of “Top Ten Abandoned Places” that could double as a post-apocalyptic movie set: 28 Years Later. People planted hedges against a house, not trees. You’d have to mow the lawn with a bulldozer or, in keeping with the general whacked-out Vietnam vet theme, use napalm and start over next year.
They gathered where Patrick waited for them, the spot with the least amount of weeds on the lawn. “Let’s try the back,” he said. From Nathan, it might have seemed a challenge (We’re trying the back, no debate, go now, bitch!) but with Patrick it merely seemed the logistics of survival.
“Watch for traps. Try to step where the concrete is visible.” Patrick led by example, stepping from one exposed section to another as he traversed what used to be a driveway.
Marcus hadn’t needed the warning. Sling Blade’s death would have been a solo act if Nathan hadn’t blown a hole in his foot.
Alongside the house where the trees and bushes prevailed, Patrick took care not to break the small branches jutting in their way. He carefully handed off the limbs he couldn’t avoid rather than let them snap back and shed leaves. AO could probably spot the white of a freshly broken branch a football field away. Good thing Sling Blade wasn’t around to do the damage of his namesake.
Patrick paused at a wooden stairwell, assessing for traps or sturdiness. Or maybe to decide which way to go. A short flight led to the upper deck with a longer stairwell below. There was probably a walkout basement in the rear.
“Why aren’t we moving?” Annette asked.
“There might be a trap,” Ed whispered back.
Annette issued a high-pitched nasal drone.
“Turn off the dog whistle!” Suzanne snapped.
Eliza put a comforting hand on Annette’s shoulder. “She can’t help that she’s scared!”
Marcus leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m about to give her some help.”
Annette stopped.
Patrick at last opted for the upper deck. He alternated each footstep toward the stringers rather than the middle of the treads. He skipped the third step altogether, noting it for Gin, who pointed Marcus to it.
“Watch this third step,” he whispered to the others.
It looked no more rotten than the other steps and he wondered what he wasn’t seeing. Several of them groaned under his weight.
Sling Blade would have wound up at the basement no matter which way he went.
It sounded worse on the actual deck. The boards creaked like a boat at sea, buried beneath years of dirt and fallen leaves as though part of the forest’s reclamation project with the overgrown bushes and trees and the thick bed of ivy plastered to the walls.
Marcus wondered how many people the deck could support before disaster.
What do we even hope to find here?
Weapons, yeah, but why? AO supposedly had the fortitude of a maniac high on bath salts with the added stubbornness of not staying dead if you managed to kill him, so what the hell would anything short of a bazooka do? They might scrounge some kitchen knives, but Marcus wouldn’t trust any of these chumps to have his back even with a far better arsenal than that. He and Suzanne should have tried to swim to the other side of the lake. Maybe she couldn’t run well, but she’d have no problem reversing the speed disparity in the water. She went to college on a swimming scholarship, which he hadn’t realized anybody did.
Coulda been halfway to the other side by now.
He looked at his stupid-ass pants and imagined them waterlogged.
Okay, maybe she coulda been halfway to the other side by now.
The enormous green-hued window overlooking the deck at one time would have provided a hell of a view of the lake. All the new trees made it hard to see anything but glimpses now. For the best view you had to go to the far corner to see over the tops of the shorter trees. He tested the rail and leaned against it for a better look out.
The other side of the lake had a marina with a network of boat slips. Three boats roughly the size of The Great Hammerhead showed only their upper decks, the rest of them submerged. The fourth looked to have been steered on a suicide mission to take out the main building of the marina, now permanently wedged into the structure. Hundreds of yards from the marina toward the center of the lake another house boat seemed intact, probably anchored. Marcus was willing to bet the paint spill down the side of the hull wasn’t actually paint at all.
This psycho swims, too? Fuckin’ A.
A private dock extended from the deck below them but he couldn’t tell if it continued unbroken to the lake since the woods engulfed it. He followed the shoreline and saw a similar dock a short distance away that originated from the house next to them. A canoe hung on a rack by the edge of the water. Not far from there was The Great Hammerhead.
Suzanne approached him. “Marcus?”
“Canoe down there.” Marcus lifted his eyes from Suzanne to Ed to Pamela to Eliza to…Annette was the only one who had seen his momentary excitement. Her eyes lingered on Marcus as if she’d heard something, but she went back to her freaky white bitch nod.
Marcus acting strange…does not compute, he thought to himself in a robot voice.
The others filed into the house. Suzanne and Marcus were the last two into the den. Ed played doorman and closed it after them.
“Can’t believe it was unlocked,” Pamela told her son, still whispering. “Thank God for small miracles.”
Yeah, a miracle they found an unlocked door they’d have kicked down anyway. Several times he’d seen Pamela with her eyes closed, muttering prayers for deliverance. Marcus knew the type; the smallest good found in the eye of the shitstorm was a sign of divine intervention. If Marcus had a direct line to God, he’d ask for more than an unlocked door. Screw that. Where’s the soldiers roaring in to rescue them on speed boats? That’s some shit you could believe in. Hey God, where’s the chopper?
“Where’s the phone?” asked Annette.
“Damn, she’s got a steep learning curve,” Marcus whispered to Suzanne.
“Don’t lock the door,” Patrick said.
“Huh?” Ed asked, having done just that.
“He’ll know we’re here.”
Ed smirked and left the lock engaged. “You think he remembers which houses are locked?”
“Yes, I do. We should leave everything as we find it.”
“Maybe we should lock it in case you’re wrong,” Ed said.
Patrick’s stare said they weren’t moving another step until Ed gave in.
“Shit, just unlock it,” Marcus snapped. “Won’t stop him anyway. You saw that hotel room.”
There were a lot of houses and they would be easier for Orange to sweep if he only had to try the knobs. Maybe he’d try this one and move on—provided they left no tell-tale signs. They hadn’t bushwhacked their way in so maybe they were golden.
Ed sighed and popped the lock.
An olive-colored couch with a herringbone pattern sat against the back wall of the room where people once relaxed and watched the television beneath the large window. The TV was one of those ‘70s jobs with oak veneer and probably weighed a ton. Put it in front of the door and that sucker wasn’t opening, but Orange had three hundred windows for an alternative.
Great place to hide.
“This place isn’t any safer than the lodge,” Eliza said.
The couch was flanked by two more impossibly ugly chairs, the one nearest the hallway stained dark with blood. Someone came in here with a hell of a wound and bled out. Pam, Eliza, Adam, and Annette stared at the matted carpet in front of the chair.
Patrick sidestepped the blood trail and headed to the kitchen, followed by Gin. Marcus paused for Adam to fall in behind Gin but his mom cockblocked him.
“Adam, wait.” He stopped in his tracks like they were playing Red Light/Green Light.
Marcus went around him, shaking his head. Kids were sexing it up younger than ever these days, but not this boy. They should get him a promise ring so at least it seemed like a choice.
To get to the kitchen they passed through an intersection with a dining room on their left. The dinner table had been flipped and two of its legs broken off. The six chairs were in a state of disarray, two knocked on their sides, one crushed into pieces beneath several holes punched into the wall, the other three chairs stashed in a corner. The hallway to the right ended at a door.
The blood trail led straight to the place of mauling. Someone had tried the drawers for a weapon and found a surprise instead. One of the cabinet doors had blown across the room along with someone’s leg, amputated below the knee. AO may have taken the body, but not the leg. What remained of it still wore an old Converse All-Star beneath the kitchen table. It had dried out and didn’t even stink anymore. Holes of varying sizes peppered the wall behind it, almost indistinguishable from the long-dried blood spatters.