MalContents
Page 10
“So this nasty old bag, Nona Bustamante,” Sunny said, “she was some kind of witch?”
The cocky smirk fell from video-Rona’s face. “Don’t you dare insult my Nona! She was a fine, fine lady, and a hundred times the chef you are, whore.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, dear, I’m afraid you’re the one who is about to get fucked up. You think you’re so smart, you and your lousy sunny cooking. Stupid twat, you ain’t all that.”
“Maybe,” Sunny said in a voice so calm that it surprised even her. “But I didn’t steal your shitty recipe. I’m sorry . . . your slutbag Nona’s shitty recipe. She wasn’t the first to take a stab at crab-stuffed criminis.”
“What the hell is a ‘crimini’?”
“It’s a mushroom, you ignorant bitch,” Sunny said. “Baby portabellas, and if you understood half of what you think you do, you would have made it onto the show. But you’re too smart to even consider you might be wrong, is that it?”
“You evil cunt.”
“I’m the cunt?” Sunny parroted, and then she laughed. “Me? Oh, that’s right, I’m the one who had to have my grandmother the witch kill a man rather than deign to think he didn’t worship me. I’m the one who went after another chef with a knife over a shitty stuffed mushroom app recipe. You stupid bitch.”
And then her anger surged. She smacked the laptop off of the counter, using her right hand. The impact sent an explosion of hurt racing up her arm. Right before the pain hit fully, she saw the streak of crimson on the case of the flying laptop and realized she’d opened up the wound on her missing finger. The laptop struck the wall and fell.
“Sunny,” Rona sang. “I’m almost ready. Nona’s mushroom recipe . . . it’s so brilliant!”
Thick tears filled Sunny’s eyes, and breathing through the pain was almost impossible.
“Sunny, you thieving twat . . . I’m almost ready to finish what I started. I’m gonna come up those cellar stairs and hack you into bite-sized bits. And this time, I’m not stopping until you’re dead.”
The rolling boil took forever. Sunny grabbed the stewpot off the stove, holding its handles with the two oven mitts bearing her trademark lemon sun pattern, and carried it toward the open door. She walked across the deck and dumped the water down on the army of crab-things below. The boiling cascade struck three of the nightmares full-on and another two peripherally. The three she’d nailed skittered away, spilling over themselves in their death throes before coming apart in smears of putty. Animated ashes, thought Sunny. The ones she glanced staggered off, injured but not quite out of the fight. An equal number of uninjured soldiers took their places.
Given enough time and water, she might have gained the upper hand. As it was, she stuck the stewpot under the faucet and turned the handle, but a hollow gurgle issued forth in the absence of water. Without electricity to pump the well, the pipes had emptied.
There would be no escaping. She was trapped.
Sunny reached for the burner knob, intending to switch it off. At the last second, she left it on, not sure why. Her eyes fell into the pull of the blue-orange tongues, like the proverbial moth to the flame. In her mind’s eye, Sunny was back in Boston, in her trophy room with the exquisite view of the Charles River. Her eyes roamed the walls. James Beard. Emmy. The Silver Spoon Award. The framed newspaper clippings—“Sunny Shines!”
Suddenly, she was with Joseph again, loving his swarthy pirate’s smile, his painfully handsome face, his sexy, masculine body. She loved his scent, his taste…she loved him. And she hadn’t needed to threaten him with some arcane witch’s spell in order to get him to care about her in return. For the first time in a long while, she genuinely missed being with him. She needed him but, more so, she also wanted him.
And then she was in the kitchen, the one at the network where Sunny sliced and prepared vibrant, delicious meals. Cooking was her life. The flame reminded her of that. She had learned from the best, Grammy Rae, and, sharing what she knew with the world, she had made the world that much better a place. The flame . . .
“Sunny,” Rona cooed. The cellar gave one final croaking groan. “I’m coming for you.”
Sunny blinked. The flame burned an afterimage into her vision.
She loved Joseph, loved cooking. Sunny loved her life and wasn’t about to give it up to a jealous, vindictive, and delusional bitch.
She reached toward the knife block, right as the first creaking footstep sounded on the staircase. The blade came free with a cutting, musical note. She passed the handle from her right hand to her left, then back to the right.
Creak . . .
“Boo!” Video-Rona said.
The door opened. The thing standing on the other side was an approximation of the human form, gray-skinned, naked, hairless. The lumpen collection of limbs bore fingers and toes. A gap in its flesh formed a mouth. It had black eyes, breasts, even a discoloration marked by bristling hairs, a mushroom’s mole. It was Rona Bustamante, reincarnated in fungus.
Sunny’s grip on the knife tightened.
“Time to die, bitch,” Video-Rona said.
The thing lunged. Sunny dodged, swung. She jabbed the knife’s blade into the mushroom’s side. The clean slice was like trying to stab at marshmallow and yielded no blood, not even any appearance of pain. In one fluid motion, the thing spun around, nailing her with a punch. The blow didn’t feel like being pummeled by fluff; it was like being clobbered by concrete.
She staggered back, still clutching the knife.
“Oh, you can’t stop me that easily,” the bitch on the laptop taunted. “This is one recipe where the food eats the chef.”
And then she started to cackle, and Sunny remembered the flame, and in the madness of everything happening around her, a glimmer of sanity crossed her mind. The recipe. The crabs . . . boiling water had destroyed them. What could destroy a mushroom?
The Rona-thing lunged, grabbed hold of Sunny by the collar of her shirt, and clouted her hard enough to send her flying across the kitchen. She lost the knife in the fracas, and then her balance when she tried to stand. The room spun. Only the certainty of what she needed to do in order to return to the life she loved kept her from surrendering to the brilliant eruption of pain.
410. The numbers loomed in her thoughts stronger than her fear, stronger than the Rona-thing, which now blocked her path. “You,” she said, tasting fresh blood on her tongue.
The Rona-thing made another grab at her. Sunny almost avoided it cleanly, but was a second too slow. The Rona-thing hauled her into its clutches, squeezing an arm around her throat. Sunny kicked to no avail. She planted an elbow into the nightmare’s gut. When that failed, she bit and chewed, tearing meat off the Rona-thing’s arm. The taste of raw mushroom filled Sunny’s mouth, sickening in its pungency.
The creature let go. Sunny pulled free. Video-Rona chuckled.
“This is fun. A real kitchen competition. None of that Slice and Dice horseshit.”
Sunny reached the stove and dialed the oven’s heat controls up to 410 degrees. The rush of gas coming on sounded. Sunny yanked open the door and hauled out the middle rack. The Rona-thing lunged at her. Sunny turned and slammed the rack into its face with a flying swipe.
“You’re no match for me in the kitchen, bitch,” Sunny said.
“You think so?”
“I know it.”
She danced around the Rona-thing and grabbed anything off the counter worth swinging. A marble rolling pin sailed. Then she hit it with a metal meat tenderizer, again and again, bashing the soft gray flesh of its head. The Rona-thing flailed, attempting to regain the upper hand. Reaching behind her, Sunny yanked another knife out of the cutting block, a fish knife. She ran it into the mushroom’s right eye.
The Rona-thing reached up. The oven’s timer pinged. Screaming to the limit of her lungs, Sunny danced around, lined up the mushroom with the oven, and drove all of her weight into its chest. The Rona-thing toppled. Its head hit the oven’s down door. Sunny pushed
with her shoulder, and its head went in.
A scream issued out of the laptop. Sunny shoved, forcing more of the lumpen mass into the oven. Its girth stopped it at the shoulders, and its bucking limbs eventually tossed her hard, into the lower cabinets. The smell of seared mushrooms filled the kitchen.
The Rona-thing started to pull away from the oven, only to stop, halfway out. The flesh of the nightmare’s shoulders had gone from gray to caramel-brown. The mushroom ceased moving. The smell intensified. When Sunny glanced behind her, she saw that the laptop’s screen was dark. Noxious smoke filled the kitchen, foul with the burned-sugar stink of scorched food left for too long under high heat. An incinerated, hollow shell poked out of the oven and across three or so feet of the kitchen floor. Holding onto the counter for support, Sunny walked over and shut off the controls. The outline of the Rona-thing collapsed into blackened ashes at her feet.
“That’s right, bitch,” Sunny said.
She opened the front door. Smoke billowed out of the house, but outside the choking gray haze had evaporated, and sunlight spilled down through the trees. Nothing clicked or clattered around the base of the stairs. The mushrooms growing everywhere not an hour earlier were dying everywhere. A gentle breeze stirred the lessening mist. It was over, and she had won.
Bleeding, filthy, and bruised, Sunny faced the sky. The sun was up there again, no longer blocked by ash clouds. She drew in a deep breath. Even the noxious humidity was being driven apart in the aftermath of her private war with Rona Bustamante. Somewhere on the island, a bird called out. Another answered.
That last chapter, Sunny thought, was about to be written.
She walked back into the chaos of the cottage, her former retreat from the pressures of the world, but stayed only long enough to fish her car keys out of her purse. Methodically pocketing them, she marched down to the dock and scanned the water. Nothing moved beneath the surface. The pond looked as clear as the distant shore, where she could see the red planks of the boathouse and something the size of an ant she knew was really her car.
Sunny waded out into the water and began to swim. She paced herself, sustained by thoughts of Joseph and her career. When she reached the shore, exhausted but still very much alive, she rose up from the water, feeling baptized and reborn.
CHOOSE
by Ryan C. Thomas
When there’s a gun to your head, every single heartbeat that pumps in your ears, every blink of the eye that snaps the world from white to black and back again, every single goddamn second that your brains aren’t splattered on the floor like last week’s spaghetti feels like an eternity.
Seconds.
Too small to make decisions.
Just enough time for a single thought.
I’m still here, you think. Tick. Another second gone. When is he going to pull the fucking trigger!
The anticipation is worse than the thought that the next world might not even exist. It plows through you like a bullet more powerful than the ones in the gun kissing the hair above your ears. It’s outright torture.
If the gunman has done his homework, he knows that your brain is fixing to have itself a breakdown. And this, of course, becomes part of the game. Because maybe if you get desperate enough, if you just can’t stand the waiting anymore, well then maybe you just reach up and help him with that trigger.
Tick. Tock.
I was teetering on the edge of such a breakdown that Monday morning in the small back office of my computer repair store, some disgruntled customer’s revolver pressed hotly to my temple. A big gun at that, the kind Dirty Harry would be envious of. The kind that could stop a stampeding elephant, and maybe take out the trees behind it in the process.
He was a young man in a silver, shark skin business suit and white cowboy hat who’d been outside the door at nine o’clock waiting for me to open the store. Said he wanted to talk to me about some work I’d done on a computer, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea who he was. He’d kept his head down, staring at his shoes, his big hat blocking out his face. I figured he was afraid to meet my eyes out of embarrassment; I see lots of things on people’s hard drives—most of the viruses that cause computer crashes come down through hardcore porn sites. I’ve seen everything from nasty scat photos to foreign rape scene to bestiality videos that’ll make bile rise in your throat, but hey, who am I to judge? It’s a free country, right? People have their kinks. Told him I’d go through my records if he gave me ten minutes to fire everything up. He nodded and followed me in.
Before I could flip the lights on, I was on the ground begging for my life.
His voice became a graveled mix of phlegm and Marlboro Reds, and he gave me a kick in the spine to make sure I didn’t try to stand up. “Stay down,” he ordered. “Don’t make me any madder than I already am.” Oh, he was mad all right, mad like a man who gets into arguments with post-it notes and peanut shells; that kind of mad. The kind where I knew he was loving every minute of making me cry.
The seconds passed in silence. I could smell my own fear as I shook with uncertainty. I felt that gun against my head, saw the shadow of its massive barrel on the floor. He was watching me sweat, enjoying it.
Just shoot me already! I wanted to scream. But I didn’t want him to really do it. Of course not. I wanted to live. I’ve got a wife and daughter, was all I could think, and I need them and they need me. We’ve got a nice home and live a good life. Very nuclear-family kind of shit, which some might find boring, but it’s good, secure. I wanted more than anything, just to wake up and start the morning over, have my cereal and coffee again, watch the morning news about the politician who got caught wearing adult diapers while he banged his maid. I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to be driven insane either, although I was getting close to the last one.
“How’s it feel, huh?” he asked, giving the gun enough of a shove to send shockwaves of pain behind my eyes. “How’s it feel to be this close to death?”
I couldn’t speak a word. My tongue was far too dry to move.
“You thought you were a man of respect, huh?”
Man of respect? Sure. No idea what—
“Thought you’d go about your business, huh? Thought you could just ruin my life and everything would be hunky dory? That’s why this country is in the shitter. People like you don’t care about anyone but themselves. Love thy neighbor is just a folk song from the past they teach to kids in history class. Well, maybe I squeeze the trigger now.”
The gun bucked into my head. Oh God!
Tick.
“Or maybe not. There’s more hell in the anticipation. Man, don’t I know.”
Sonofabitch.
“Let’s say we count to ten, and then I pull it. Sound like a fun game? Okay? One . . . two . . . three . . .”
Tears cascaded down my cheeks, their coldness reminding me how just last week my daughter Mandy had gotten the best of me in our backyard snowball fight. I hadn’t suspected a fourteen year old could throw so hard, but she’d knocked my glasses clean off.
“Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . .”
Tick.
Oh Jesus, it was too much to bear. When was he going to actually do it? Was he going to actually do it?
I fought for my voice. “Please . . .” I said feebly around a mouthful of snot.
“Please what? Please shoot you? I don’t think I’m ready yet. I don’t even think it would make up for what you did to me.”
“I don’t know who you are.” The tears ran into my mouth and continued down my chin, plopping on the floor. A warm, wet stain was spreading out beneath me.
“Well, smart guy, you’ll know now then, wont you?”
“What do you want?” I started to rise, wanting to plead with the guy, was on all fours now, like a dog. Beneath me the puddle of my own drool and tears reflected the pathetic visage of a grown man sniveling. This is what you look like dying, I thought. You don’t look like a man, that’s for sure. You look like a joke.
Suddenly, I was yanked t
o my feet, bent over a small laptop I keep on my desk for record-keeping purposes.
“Turn it on,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
My fingers shook as I hit the power button. It took a lifetime for the startup screen to boot up. The desktop photo was a picture of my family taken just ten days ago at Christmas, my daughter holding her new Macbook in her hands. My wife’s hair was tied back because she was in the middle of cooking a turkey for the dinner; her parents drove down from Flatwood for the day. All in all it was a good time.
“See that?” my captor said, still behind me. “See those faces? Happy. Perfect. Faces. I’m gonna give you a choice now, which is more than you did for me. Listen close, because I’m only saying this once.” He spun me quickly to my right, bent me over and forced me to look down next to the filing cabinet where I kept a small safe. “There’s a gun in your safe there. Shoots pretty accurate for a .357. Loaded with those .38s I bet it barely bucks. Take it out. Bring it home. And make a choice. Either your daughter or your wife. One of them goes. Tonight by midnight. Bullet in the head. I’ll be keeping tabs on you, and if I see them both still alive even a minute after, then they both go. Got me? It’s one or both. And you gotta choose? You take one of them out and our business is done. You can try to run, but it won’t help. I’ll find you no matter what. I’ll show you I’m a man of my word.”
If this whole situation made no sense before, it sure as hell made no sense now. “What?” I asked. And I was being serious. It was a universal what the flying fuck was going on? Who was this guy and what the hell was he getting at? He wanted me to kill my family? Was he fucking serious? Was I still asleep? Was Allen Funt hiding in a closet?
“What nothing,” he replied. “Kill one of ’em. It’s your choice. When you’re done, maybe in the future you’ll learn to have some guts, make decisions that matter, be a man.”