Chucklers: Laughter is Contagious

by Jeff Brackett

  Wonderful and Terrible Pleasure/Pain

  Laughter. Pain. Disorientation.

  All Gus’s feelings were jumbled. No. Not jumbled. They were fused. He had realized it on some primal level when the man had smashed him in the face with the metal thing at the wire thing. What was it called? He used to know…

  Zip… something. It was right on the tip of his tongue. He shook his head. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the wonderful and terrible pleasure/pain feelings, and the laughter.

  And the feeling that the man with the metal zip thing had given him was exquisite. He had found plenty of other people here on the big boat, and they had given him some small satisfaction as he and his new friends had played with them. But none had hurt him like the big man had. The big man reminded him of his father. The love/hate feelings were so much alike.

  He needed to find the man again. Find him and thank him properly.

  Chapter 24

  Charles Griffe

  Clowns To The Left Of Me

  “Pick the cruise, Charlie.” Charlie mimicked Felicia’s words under his breath. “We’ve never been on a cruise before.” He trotted down the shadowy, smoke-filled corridors of the Bahama Queen. “Shoulda taken the damn movie tickets.”

  He glanced at his watch. No wonder I’m so damned tired. For most of eighteen hours now, he had played this deadly game of hide and seek with various groups of homicidal teenagers. He’d seen dozens of bodies and dodged several groups of laughing gang bangers. He didn’t know if they were all from the same gang or not. None of them seemed to be wearing any colors. Still, he was certain that was what must have happened. Rival gangs on a cruise liner had somehow met and begun terrorizing the rest of the ship. It was the only thing that made any sense.

  He briefly wondered how Felicia was doing, and imagined her cowering in their cabin, terrified at the chaos in the corridors. He had to admit, he was a little conflicted at the thought. On the one hand, he felt a certain smug satisfaction at the thought. But another part of him realized it was a real dick feeling… like something his dad would say.

  It’ll do her good to go through something like this on her own for a little while. Show her what it’s like to have to face the world without you to take care of her.

  “Shut up, Dad,” he muttered. “You’re just proving my point.” For the moment, he had more important things to worry about than his dad’s warped version of how the world should be run—like how he was going to stay alive. The kids hooted and shouted their laughter as they patrolled the corridors, and Charlie didn’t think he was going to make it down to his and Felicia’s cabin on Deck Seven. Not today, anyway. He was exhausted, terrified, and he’d been playing cat and mouse with the gang bangers all day. Sooner or later, his luck was bound to run out.

  He ducked behind a display case as another group of raucous teens darted across the intersection ahead, banging loudly on the walls as they ran. Once they passed, he eased forward, peeking carefully around the corner. He watched them pass by the dim light of the rising sun filtering through a few windows along the way. Those patches of sunlight and the red glow of scattered emergency lights were the only light available in the inner corridors of the ship. He'd been running and hiding all night, and it was just too dangerous to stay in the hallways. He needed to find someplace to hide and rest.

  He watched as the teens rounded a corner, oblivious to his presence. Once they were out of sight, he jogged down the corridor in the opposite direction.

  The upper decks were smaller, and had been overrun with teens who attacked other passengers without hesitation. Throughout the night, he’d seen too many fights where older, terrified adults had been swarmed and beaten to death by mobs of teenagers. Luckily for him, those fights had also presented opportunities for him to slip out of sight. On each deck he had emerged from the stairwell, trying to slip down the corridor to find some sort of authority figure. Each time, it had taken only a few minutes to find that the gang bangers had gotten there before him and he’d been forced to retreat back to the stairs.

  He’d finally made it down to Deck Twelve. Twelve was the one of the highest living quarter decks, filled with more than three hundred passenger cabins. It was several times larger than the upper decks had been, so he had expected to easily find someone to help him. Unfortunately, it was nearly as bad as those upper decks had been. As soon as he emerged from the dark stairwell, he had heard the screams and knew he was screwed. But with laughter on the stairs above him, he’d had little choice. He had to find someplace to hide.

  There was a single bar on the deck, The Grotto. Charlie huddled out of sight behind the counter, trying his best to block out the sounds of screaming and rioting that echoed throughout the ship.

  ***

  A nearby scream awoke him, and he was startled to realize he had managed to fall asleep. He rubbed the sand out of his eyes and pressed the button on his watch. Eight fifteen. With an exhausted sigh, he left the scant safety of his hideaway, creeping through the morning shadows until he finally made his way back to the emergency stairwell. It was dark as hell in there, but it also seemed to be the best way to travel without being seen.

  Carefully feeling his way down the darkened stairs again, Charlie only made it down a single floor before he heard the door above him slam open, the hooting and laughter of several voices was accompanied by the flickering light of a torch of some kind suddenly flooding the stairwell. Had someone seen him enter?

  That don’t really matter, does it? Time to get the hell out.

  Charlie was tired of his dad being right so much of the time. But now wasn’t the time or place to argue the point. He yanked open the door and entered the shadowed hallways of Deck Eleven.

  By the dim light, he could make out silhouetted forms running up and down the hallway, though details were impossible to discern. But over it all, the incessant laughter played, an increasingly horrifying soundtrack to the horror movie that this cruise had become. There wasn’t time to think about it. He had chaos all around, but almost certain death pursued from the stairs behind him. He ran to the hallway on his left and tried a cabin door. Locked. He trotted farther down the corridor, intent on putting as much distance between himself and whoever emerged from the stairwell behind him.

  A few moments later, he slowed and looked back. The emergency stairwell was lost in the blackness behind him. Good enough. If I can’t see them, they can’t see me either. He slowed to a safer trot, concentrating on sticking to the shadows. The sounds of screaming and laughter echoed eerily throughout the ship, and all Charlie could think of was getting out of sight. He had to find a place to hide. But again, each cabin door he tried was locked from within. He moved down the corridor and slowed as he noted a flickering light ahead on the right. Shouting from the same direction caused him to slow even more until he was almost crawling as he came to the railing that overlooked the open air park four levels below. He eased forward, looking upwards at where he had ridden the zip line over the park several hours before. And though the line was hidden in the darkness, he nevertheless shuddered at the memory.

  He looked down at the source of the shouting and lights, and after a few seconds confusion, he shook his head at the sight. There must have been hundreds of them, teens with liquor bottles and clubs dancing and shouting around several large fires. Fires. They had piled chairs, and desks, and apparently just about anything else that they could burn, and the crazy, stoned little shits were actually stupid enough to start fires on a ship! Like it was some sort of insane camping trip! He started to step back into the shadows when outraged shouting below drew his attention back to the macabre party. As he watched, a group dragged a thrashing man into view. He was bruised and bleeding from an open wound on his forehead, but that didn’t seem to slow his struggles.

  “Let me go, you little shit!” he shouted above the jeering of the crowd. “Let me go or I swear to God, I’ll kick your fucking little ass.” Charlie had always found threats like that amusing. D
ad had taught him that they were the mark of a weak man. If he had been in any position to kick anyone’s ass, he wouldn’t have been trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the first place. That didn’t seem to have occurred to him, though, as he continued his rant. “I’ll rip your little throats out and skull fu—” Without hesitation, the teens tossed him on one of the fires. They tittered wildly while he thrashed about in the flames, screeching as his skin began to blister and char, finally rolling out of it and making it to his feet. Screaming in agony, the man ran down the corridor, his burning clothes lighting a path down the darkened halls. Several drunken teens chased after him, and they all ran out of Charlie’s angle of vision. They must have caught the man quickly, because his shrieks increased in volume and frequency for a few seconds before they suddenly came to an abrupt end.

  Charlie quickly dropped back out of sight, wide-eyed and breathing heavily from what he had seen. The brutality in the jazz bar had been bad enough, and he’d had no illusions about the bodies lying all over the corridors. But until now, he’d been treating this whole nightmare like some sort of high-stakes game. Granted, the stakes were life and death, but he had never really doubted that he would win. After all, he was smarter than any teenaged gang banger.

  But seeing what they had done to that man on the promenade below had sent a shock through him. To blithely throw someone into a fire like that. Even worse, to laugh while they did it? That was a whole new level of bat-shit crazy.

  It brought back the memories of a night twenty-three years ago.

  And it terrified him.

  That’s ‘cause of the way it all happened, though, ain’t it? You ain’t exactly the innocent little bystander, are you?

  No, he wasn’t. He remembered with crystal clarity how his mother had chased him through the house, waving her bottle as she staggered after him. How even at the age of nine, he had learned to dodge and toss things in her path. How she had tripped, shattered glass and booze spilling across the tile floor in the kitchen. And the candles.

  He hadn’t known what they would do. Mom kept a plate of scented candles burning on the kitchen counter, and Charlie had simply seen it as another object to throw in her path. But suddenly, she was screaming, thrashing about on the floor. Her nightgown and hair turning into a raging torch, her skin blistering, charring… just as the man on the boardwalk below had done.

  And nine-year-old Charlie had run into the pantry, hiding, covering his ears to the sounds of his mother’s tortured screams… trying to block them out with screams of his own. And oddly enough, he recalled kneeling beside potatoes… that the potatoes were just beginning to rot, filling the pantry with their own cloying stench of decay. But he had filled his lungs with their stink willingly, because even that was better than the acrid scent of his mother’s burning hair.

  The rest of the night was nothing more than flashes for him. He recalled Dad yelling. Screaming. Crying. Pulling Charlie from the pantry and into the yard as the house burned.

  The firetrucks and police cars.

  The funeral home.

  The neighbors had sympathized, making all the noises about how she’d always seemed so nice. But Charlie had seen the look in her eyes as she’d chased him. It wasn’t nice that he’d seen in those eyes. It was insanity. And when she had died in that fire, he hadn’t mourned like his father. He’d kept it inside, but he was relieved. And that relief had bred a mixture of guilt and anger that had put him at odds with his father and had haunted their relationship until the bitter old man had died four years ago.

  It had taken years of medication and sessions with various therapists to get past it, but Charlie had eventually come to understood that death itself wasn’t so much the thing to be feared. No, it was the how of death. He’d thought about it a lot—far too much to be healthy, especially for a young boy, and for many years, Charlie’s soul had been tortured with the sounds of screaming.

  And to this day, the smell of rotten potatoes made him puke.

  Really? You kill your mother, and all you can remember is how the damned potatoes smelled?

  Dad’s voice brought him back to the here and now. “Shut up, Dad!” Charlie gripped his aching head, wishing his father would leave him alone. He looked around frantically. Had he said that out loud? Did anyone hear him?

  For the moment, at least, he appeared to be safe. But the smell of burned flesh brought so many memories back. Memories he'd managed to repress for so long. Memories of pain and anguish.

  And of guilt.

  But the sight of those kids throwing that man into the fire had brought it all into focus for him. That will not happen to me. His sudden conviction filled him with purpose. No more taking chances. No more recklessness. All things eventually came to an end. This gang war or terrorism, or whatever was going on was no exception. It, too, would come to an end. All Charlie had to do was outlast it. It was time to find someplace to hide.

  But where?

  Get into a cabin, you stupid little shit.

  It was true, the corridor was lined with cabin doors, but like hotel room doors, they were designed to close and lock automatically. Having tried several of them on this macabre journey through the ship, he could vouch for how well that design functioned. He had yet to find a single cabin door opened or unlocked.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying that, old man,” he muttered.

  Tittering from the darkness in the corridor behind him caused him to jerk to his feet. It wasn’t terribly close, but it was the first indication he’d had that he wasn’t alone in the area. He had to move.

  Ducking low in the darkness, he crept up the corridor, occasionally stepping over small groups of corpses, constantly aware of the low laughter in the corridor behind him. As he left the noisy bonfire party behind, he kept trying the handles of cabin doors, each time with no more luck than the time before. It was difficult to judge in the darkness, but he figured he had made it more than halfway to the fore of the ship when he heard more laughter ahead. He froze. The lines to an old song came unbidden to his mind;

  Clowns to the left of me,

  jokers to the right…

  Turning back the way he had come, Charlie listened carefully for movement in the darkness, but the pounding of his heart made it impossible to concentrate. He knew there was someone behind him. He just didn’t know how far back they were. He was fairly certain they were farther away than the new threat ahead of him, though. He started moving back aft.

  Within a couple of minutes, he could hear the sounds of the laughter to the fore of the ship fading, but the group aft was getting closer. A deafening bang sounded from farther down the hallway, followed by the sound of something large breaking into smaller pieces. Desperately, Charlie tried another door, then another. All of them were locked. Sticking to the shadows, he moved through the dark corridor away from the noise, trying to balance the distance between the laughter before and behind. With each passing moment, both sets drew closer.

  Looks like your luck’s run out, boy.

  “Fuck you, old man.” Charlie frantically tried each door he passed, and just as he began to fear his dad might be right, he stumbled over his salvation. A leg stuck out from a cabin door, holding it ajar. It was hardly the first body he’d come across, but he hesitated a second at the smell of this one. The stench of urine and feces in the hallway indicated that the interior of the cabin was likely to be much worse, and he didn’t know if he could stand prolonged proximity to such a disgusting odor. Then laughter sounded from the darkness behind him, and Charlie decided there were worse things than a foul-smelling cabin. He pushed again at the cabin door, struggling to shove the dead weight of the body out of the way.

  He strained mightily against a door that didn’t want to budge, the body evidently wedged against something inside.

  Come on, you little wuss. Put your back into it.

  He put his hands to his ears and shouted at the voice at the top of his lungs. “Shut the hell up!” The are
a all around him was suddenly silent for a brief second, and his eyes widened as he realized how his shout echoed in the corridor. Suddenly, the laughter resumed, sounding almost frenzied now as it drew rapidly nearer.

  “Damn you, Dad. Now see what you did?”

  Still blaming me for your fuck ups, huh? The voice dripped sarcasm.

  Stealth was no longer an option, and Charlie threw his weight into the door over and over again, moving the body inch by inch. He made enough headway that he could get his head through the door now, and looked forward into the darkness. The cabin was nearly pitch black, and he saw nothing. But he could hear rapidly approaching laughter from outside. Behind him, he heard a shriek of hooting laughter and jerked his head back out. Less than fifty feet away, three dark shapes ran drunkenly toward him. With terror, Charlie recognized the one in the lead. The kid’s purple hair identified him, and it was obvious that they had seen him.

  Charlie screamed and slammed into the door again and again until he suddenly felt something give and he stumbled inside. He turned to close the door and panicked when it wouldn’t shut. He slammed it twice, and each time it stopped before hitting the door jamb. The laughter was almost on him when he looked down and noticed the dead man’s shoe blocking the door. He kicked it away and shoved the door closed, throwing the thumb latch for the privacy lock just as it shook with the impact of something, or someone, slamming into it. He jumped back, heart pounding, steeling himself for another blow. For a second nothing happened, and he leaned in, listening. Then he heard a scratchy, high-pitched voice. “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” Purple Hair seemed to find himself amusing because he started laughing again.

  It sent a shiver over Charlie’s skin. In the back of his mind, Charlie had thought that anyone capable of committing such atrocities as he had seen had to be insane. Something about that voice eliminated any doubt.

  Boom!

  Charlie yelped and jumped back as the door shook again.