by Jordan Krall
The scythe stabbed into the windshield, causing a slight fracture. Drac grabbed his gun, stuck his hand out the window, and fired at Mama’s head. It exploded like a godly sunburst.
“Freak?” Drac said. “I’m not a freak.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I.
Samson pressed the button between the seats and from out of the back of his car came a deluge of white foam.
The vacuum-woman riding behind the car was knocked off her motorcycle by the force of the foam. She hit the ground like a sack of rocks. The vacuum exploded, causing a huge gaping hole in her back. Organs, ribs, and white foam covered the street.
The other two women looked back for just a few moments giving Samson a chance to step on the brakes, letting them pass him. He quickly aimed the blowgun and shot the women off their bikes, their breasts flapping like overused pin cushions.
With a quick turn of the steering wheel, Samson avoided the brick wall and brought the car down an alley to the left only to be confronted with a group of Zoners.
They had hoisted a Yugg above their heads and were about to skin it alive.
“Close your eyes, kid,” Samson said. Paulo slapped his hands over his face.
The car plowed into the Zoners. Several heavy thumps rocked the car. One of them hung onto the hood, staring into the windshield at Samson. He was a particularly ugly Zoner with a patchy beard and bug eyes. With one hand he was holding onto the car and with the other he held a handful of Yugg flesh which he held up to the windshield.
“Is this your lunch?” he said to Samson. He put it to his face and sniffed flakes of flesh into his nose. “Once you get used to it…it just clears the sinuses!”
Samson slammed on the brake and the Zoner went flying forward, his skull hitting the ground and opening like a wet pumpkin.
Paulo uncovered his eyes and stared out at the corpse. He watched as the asphalt bubbled like a bowl of black pudding and swallowed the dead Zoner. The road let out a monstrous burp.
Samson put the car in reverse. “Now you know why it’s called the Zone of Dead Roads.”
II.
Drac drove down the halls of the school, his tentacles ripping the lockers off the walls. The element of surprise was out of the question and now he just wanted the gasoline. Killing Lord Bing Bong was second on the list of priorities. If the man was willing to let Drac drain the reserves, then his life might be spared. After all, they did know each other. Bing Bong just might let Drac have the gas for old time’s sake. If not, well…
The man would just have to die.
“Pure road hell brutality,” Drac said over and over to himself, gripping the steering wheel and letting his anger take control. It was an anger that forced him to delve into his psyche, his gasoline-laden memories, and pick through painful scenes. An image of his body being melted into another. His limbs being doused in sludge. An oil-soaked trapezohedron.
A rock hit his windshield, knocking him back into reality.
He slammed on the brakes and set the car in reverse, passing a classroom with a small man standing in the doorway. The man was wearing a football helmet and a navy uniform that was splattered with neon liquid. His face was covered in a mask of concentric wrinkles, a whirlpool of age engraved in between intense eyes and a fat-lipped mouth.
Drac stopped in front of the man and stuck his head out of the window. He laughed a high-pitched sound that reverberated down the hallway. The sight of little Lord Bing Bong was quite humorous.
“Dunwich, you better have a good reason for being on my train,” Lord Bing Bong said, his bulbous lips dripping bright drool.
“Train?” Drac realized the man had gotten more insane since the last time they had met. “No train. But listen. I need gasoline. I assumed since we had done business before you might be inclined to…”
“ASSUMPTION IS THE MOTHER OF ALL FUCK UPS!” Lord Bing Bong screamed, getting close to the car and sticking his head inside.
The two men stared at each other, Drac smiling slyly while Bing Bong frowned sloppily.
“So are you going to give me the gasoline or what?” Drac tapped on his temple with his finger. “I don’t like getting this close to empty.”
“You need to get off my train before I kill you,” Lord Bing Bong said.
Drac leaned back in the driver’s seat. “You know who I am. You know who my father was. You and I, we’ve done business.”
“I don’t care who your father was.” Lord Bing Bong punched his football helmet with both hands. “I don’t fucking care!”
“Listen, Lord, I know you have a lot to handle, taking care of all the Zoners and dealing with the Yuggs and all that but I’m asking as a favor.”
“A favor? In this world of shit you ask for a favor? Let me tell you, since you are so concerned with who your father was, let me tell you who my father was.”
“I’m not concerned with that.”
“If you want me to consider a favor, then you will be concerned with that. Understand?”
Drac shook his head.
“My father, he was a man of respect, you know that, moved us from Palermo when I was just a boy. You know what my first lesson was when coming to this shit country?”
“What?”
“My father took me to a train yard and locked me in one of the cars, told me I had to think about how grateful I should be, to be in this new country with new opportunities. I thought about it alright, I thought about how I wish I was pouring cement in Palermo, putting my father in that very same cement. Let him suffocate slowly, let his lungs harden up. That’s what I thought about in there, locked in the train car for two days with nothing to keep me company except for a fucking comic book I had in my back pocket. Spent two days thinking about killing my father and reading about a fucking cartoon donkey.”
Drac could see Lord Bing Bong unraveling in front of his eyes. The wrinkles on his face transformed into obscure sigils and his lips turned deep red.
The two men stared at each other.
Finally Drac said, “I’m not sure I understand your point.”
“When my father finally came to get me out, you know what he said? He said that I should be grateful. That he did me a favor. A fucking favor. So please pardon me if I’m not partial to that word.”
“I apologize if I hit a nerve but what if I said I had some books in my trunk, books I’d let you take a look at for a possible trade.” Drac smiled widely, showing yellow teeth. “Rare books.”
Lord Bing Bong’s frown lessened and he moved his head out of the car. He put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what I’d say. It would depend on what you had. Let me see and maybe I’ll let you take some gasoline off my train.”
Drac reached down, pulled a lever, and popped the trunk. He nodded with his head for Bing Bong to go check it out. “I think you’ll find something of interest back there. I traded with a Yugg for some pretty obscure texts.”
Bing Bong’s face turned red. “I’ll bet you your goddamn car they’re my books that were stolen by those ugly abominations. Two weeks ago my copy of the Abgrund Abschaum went missing. Books don’t just get up and walk away. Then this week someone took the Yonimani Yantra Fragments…..right from underneath my nose! I bet you it was those fucking Yuggs!”
“I assure you, I do not have any stolen books in my possession,” Drac said. He motioned to his trunk. “But feel free to check for yourself.”
Lord Bing Bong grunted and made his way to the back of the car. He put his hand on the trunk and lifted it.
A tentacle shot out and impaled him.
It waved him into the air while he screamed. “You stupid fucking bastard! You think you’re getting out of my train alive now? You think my Zoners are going to let you leave? You son of a bitch!”
Drac watched in his rearview as the tentacle flapped the man around, banging him against the walls so hard the football helmet cracked into his skull. With brains pouring out of his head, Lord Bing Bong spoke.
“That
is not dead which can eternal lie,” the dying man said. “And with strange engines even death may drive.”
III.
“Where are we going?” Paulo said. He was visibly shaken from witnessing the asphalt devour the Zoner.
“To the finishing line,” Samson said. “Atlantic City.”
“We’re not going to kill Bing Bong?”
“Nope.”
Samson was driving fast through the streets of the Zone, marveling at how ominous the buildings looked now that he had a glimpse of the horrors beneath them. Were the rumors true? There were many stories about the Zoners and their mixing Yugg remains in with the tar when they repaved the streets. It was strange to Samson how they could take something as common as road-paving and turn it into something morbidly perverse.
There were still people watching him from inside the buildings and televisions were still playing the same movie. On the streets there were Zoners smoking large cigars made of Yugg scalps. The smoke from them rose slower than normal smoke and twisted into shiny spirals.
Some of the Zoners were wearing backpacks and looked like overgrown college kids whereas others were dressed in filthy, military attire. They were all armed and all looked preoccupied with something, almost meditative in their demeanor.
As he drove down the streets, Samson realized something. No one was trying to attack. He had expected there to be perhaps some more topless motorcycle women or some zealous Zoners on foot who would want to strike but there was nothing but distracted inhabitants.
“What’s wrong?” Paulo said, seeing the worry on Samson’s face.
“I don’t know, kid. I guess I was expecting more, you know, danger, people trying to kill us. Now everything seems so……”
“Quiet?”
“Yeah, quiet. But I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
IV.
After draining Lord Bing Bong’s gasoline reserves, Drac drove away, leaving Lord Bing Bong’s shredded body in the hallway of the “train” and the football helmet still hanging off one of the tentacles.
As soon as he was driving the streets, Drac noticed something different. The Zoners weren’t attacking, or making a move to see what had happened at the school. It was as if Bing Bong’s death had destroyed any motivation they might have had. That was fine by Drac. He didn’t need any more trouble.
One thing that caught his eye and worried him was that the buildings seemed taller than they had been before. Each one reached into the sky like a finger aching to scratch it open in the hopes of letting in a deluge of some long-awaited apocalypse.
Drac shook his head. Why was he always so paranoid? It might have had something to do with his father. It might have had something to do with…with what? The memories were there but they weren’t clear, weren’t enough to let him have any substantial amount of introspection.
But he had to focus. He had to drive out of the Zone of Dead Roads and get to Atlantic City. The race had become something he had to win. It wasn’t that he was necessarily worried about the supplies or even the gasoline (his tentacles find plenty of that on the road). It was something about that city that had risen off the coast.
R’lyeh.
Something about it was familiar. Had his father talked about it? Was it in one of his books? There was a sense of ecstatic danger like what a child would feel in front of roller coaster for the first time.
But there was the problem of Mr. Silver. There was something wrong with that man. It wasn’t just his bloodthirsty exploitation of his fellow survivors of the war. There was more to it than that. That was an unholy confidence in Silver that Drac had only seen in one other person: his father.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I.
Five Years Ago
Long before Samson was approached by Enzo, he had already earned himself a reputation as one of the fastest drivers in New Jersey and the surrounding wasteland towns. It had all started as an accident.
After his wife had taken his car, Samson spent his time walking from town to town, doing small jobs for colonies of people hoping to begin anew. He mostly helped dig for well water, harvesting crops which were mostly mutated beyond safe consumption. But he didn’t mind. He did whatever it took to get his mind off his son Jack.
At one point Samson decided to venture into the Pennsylvanian Wastelands. There were large towns there, mostly nuclear slums, radioactive ghettoes, places where the black market was thriving with anything one would need to replicate pre-war normality. Samson had heard about a town called Dogunville that had been constructed out of cement blocks by a man named LeRoux who had spray painted each block with elaborate and violent scenes. LeRoux had told people the scenes were from movies and comics featuring demonic heroes and tortured villains, perverse power plays involving fetishistic psychodramas. Childhood trauma was imprinted upon cement like vivid flashbacks. After LeRoux had set up the town, he retreated into a yellow bunker full of canned foods and DVDs.
Samson heard the stories and had been tempted to go there, to indulge in the bizarre theater of Dogunville so he mustered up the energy and hitched a ride in an old man’s truck. They road for five hours, luckily dodging a gang of marauders who were more interested in getting drunk off their newly acquired bottle of antifreeze to bother with Samson and the old man.
When he was dropped off at Dogunville, Samson gave the old man a small can of vegetables as payment. The man accepted the trade and gave him one warning. He said, “Whatever you do, watch out for the guy with the cars.” Samson nodded and walked into the heart of the town.
The rumors had been true. The city, every building and every house, was made out of cement blocks each with a different scene painted on them in bright paint. Samson thought it was refreshing after the dark, dull, and bland towns that were being rebuilt in New Jersey. Dogunville seemed to be more alive, more in tune with the human imagination. Still, it was a post-apocalyptic town like any other so he knew he had to be careful.
The people looked friendly enough. They appeared dirty and exhausted, probably from trying to build yet another cement structure. Their tired faces reminded Samson of the pictures of his great-grandparents taken before they immigrated to America from Sicily. Life had been difficult, it had beaten them daily, but they had found a latent pleasure in the struggle.
Samson walked to the main square of the town where an ancient man was arranging half-rotten fruit on a table. It was at that moment, while looking at a few neon-green pears, that he realized there was no good reason why he had come to Dogunville. For him to hitch a ride from a stranger and go that far simply because he had heard about some bizarre art painted on cement, well, that just wasn’t like him. But as he looked at the pictures, he felt like an internal switch had been flipped. It was as if the pictures he saw were memories.
There weren’t the memories he wanted. Samson wanted to cherish the memories of his son and the times they had played games together, had told stories to each other. From a very early age Jack had always been good storyteller. When he was five, he made up a tale about cannibalistic dwarves from outer space that came to earth to help the United States fight in the Vietnam War. Samson had been amused by the story but, as always, his wife had disapproved of such a grotesque use of creativity.
Gruesome as they were, those stories were what Samson wanted to remember. It reminded him that his son had not just been his offspring but a separate person with thoughts, dreams, and a vivid imagination. Samson cherished that. It made him want to track down the men who took his son. But where would he have looked? Tomato Joe and his gang could have been on the West Coast Wasteland for all he knew.
Samson pointed to the pear and asked the man how much it was.
“Whatta ya got?” the old man answered.
“Just a few things. Looking for anything in particular?”
The old man grinned. “Oh, I could really use some toys, you know, to entertain the kiddies. They’re sick of looking at the cement.”
Samson opened his sat
chel and looked through his supplies. Aside from dried meat, canned food, bottles of water, and some magazines, he did have a few toys.
Jack’s toys.
They had been in his bag ever since Jack had been taken. Earlier that day, his son had asked him to carry some of his Matchbox cars and Samson had no problem with that. But now there they were at the bottom of the satchel all alone with no child to push them along.
“I don’t have any toys,” Samson said. “Sorry.”
“Oh?” The man leaned his head forward and widened his eyes. “Well, that’s too bad for you, eh? This fruit is, how do I put it? Delicious. But maybe you’d like something else, something cheaper? I might have some…….tomatoes.”
Samson could see something in the man’s face, something that revealed secret and sinister knowledge. He was about to inquire further but then a hand gripped his shoulder.
“Don’t listen to the old man. He’s a fucking loon.”
Samson turned quickly to look at who had touched him. Standing there was a clean-cut young man, someone who looked like he didn’t quite belong in the town. His hair was short and looked like it had been washed recently. Bright blue eyes stared out from a handsome face. The man’s clothing was also unusual: a silver jumpsuit with a black sun insignia on the right shoulder.
“Hands off, okay?” Samson said, moving himself away from both men. The old vendor muttered a curse but the young man followed him.
“Hey, meant no harm. Just trying to help you avoid trouble. Looked like you were about to hit him,” the young man said.
Samson kept walking. “Well, I wasn’t going to.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll be honest with you. I was hoping we can make a trade.”
“What?” Samson stopped. He should have known that’s what this was about, a goddamn trade. Everything was a trade or a gamble or a con. “A trade for what?”