Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2)

by John L. Monk

  This bugged me a little. My ex-girlfriend, Sandra, was way too close for comfort.

  I’d gotten about as much resolution as I could hope for after learning Sandra was all right and living a normal life in Virginia—with Peter Collins. A jerk, sure, but he was her jerk, and it was none of my business. But now I had a problem. In addition to being my rival in college, Peter was also a former ride. Almost eight months ago, when I’d looked at his phone to check the date, his number was at the top of the display, and my spooky-perfect memory had captured every digit. So it was within my power to call him and find out how he was doing with his little drug problem. If he hung up on me, I knew where he lived. Being so close, I could go there easily and…

  And that’s what I was afraid of. That I’d show up and try to fix her life by scaring him away. Or maybe I’d screw up and wouldn’t just scare him. Though I had no burning desire to harm Peter, I might feel differently if I saw him again.

  Sandra had occupied so much of my existence—from my college obsession to all that guilt for killing myself and leaving my stupid carcass in her room to find.

  I shook my head. That part of my life was over.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you now?” the woman said.

  I unclenched my fist, unbit my lip, slowed my breathing, and looked at her.

  Somehow, I hadn’t noticed that she was good-looking in an older, platinum blonde, blue-eyed, slender sort of way. All the bases were covered: good bone structure, decent profile and all that … But she wasn’t doing it for me. All those checkmarks right down the list, and if she stood too close I’d hold my breath for fear of breathing in whatever was wrong with her.

  A young Middle Eastern gentleman driving a limousine pulled up to the curb. He got out, came around to our side, and opened the door for us.

  “Mrs. Sandway,” he said, courteously.

  “Thank you,” she said, with no warmth, and got in.

  He smiled at me. When I got in beside her, he shut the door, walked back around, and off we went.

  Mrs. Sandway was still making with the angry vibe, filling the space with its tiresome heaviness. To escape that and pass the time, I looked out the window. It was fun watching the different people going about their day-to-day. The tourists, the business types with their building badges, the homeless people everywhere being deliberately ignored.

  Out of nowhere she said, “When the story breaks, you’ll seem more interesting than ever. You might even make CNN. If that happens, our sales will skyrocket. But Ernest.” She gave me a withering look. “Don’t do that again. And seriously, what the hell? Since when do you go hands-on like that?”

  I shrugged. “You only live once.”

  She frowned. “That’s another thing. Don’t challenge me in front of the boys. Stick to the script and everyone’s happy. I’ll tell Jacob … something.” She barked a harsh, scornful laugh. “He’ll probably congratulate you. You need to be the grownup. Another of those lunatics tries something, move away.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  The car stopped. We’d arrived outside a big Marriott hotel.

  “We’re here,” she said. “I didn’t want to be there all day, anyway. Those events are worse than useless. Soon we won’t need them.”

  I nodded.

  “I trust you can get on your plane by yourself without fighting anyone, right?”

  “I’m a big boy now,” I said. “No worries.”

  She smiled. “Jacob and I are working on something big for you. For your next book. Until then, keep to yourself, and when you’re at the airport tomorrow and you’re photographed: be mysterious. It’s expected.”

  The driver went around and opened the door for me. I got out and stepped back. When I peered through the tinted window she was on her phone, head high, talking-talking-talking, not listening, somehow turning even ordinary activities into something dismissive. A black hole of relentless will.

  She saw me looking and tilted her head.

  Before I could wave goodbye, they drove off. And with her departure, it was like this weirdly oppressive weight had been lifted from me.

  The first thing I did when I entered the lobby was visit the front desk. I got out my ID and put it on the counter.

  “I forgot what room I’m in,” I said when a lady came over.

  “I’ll check for you,” she said in a sweet, pleasant voice.

  It was such a pleasure to be spoken to like a human being I almost asked her if she’d seen any good movies lately, or was there somewhere good to eat in the nation’s capital, or did she think people on other planets looked at our tiny light in the sky and wonder if someone was looking back.

  “You’re in 512,” she said.

  “Thank you very much.”

  I took the elevator to my floor and followed the arrows to my room. There was a room key in Ernest’s wallet and it worked when I tried it. On entering, I found the bed tightly sealed in sheets and blankets. A laptop case and a suitcase were stacked on a sofa chair in the corner.

  Someone had delivered a huge bouquet of flowers and four bottles of champagne on ice. I didn’t care about the champagne, but the flowers helped banish the hotel smell of air conditioning and chemical freshness. A card was tucked into the bouquet, thanking me for choosing Marriott.

  I searched Ernest’s bags but didn’t find an airline ticket. I felt a brief moment of panic and then forced myself to relax. I wasn’t Ernest Prescott—I was Dan Jenkins. Dan Jenkins liked hotels and was afraid of airplanes. Not the whole dying part—the about to die part. All that screaming, having my fate taken so completely away from me for a short ride down to Earth in a giant hunk of metal. No thank you. If I needed to go somewhere, I’d rent a car.

  I grabbed the hotel phone and called the front desk. A man picked up on the first ring.

  “Guest services, how may I help you?”

  “This is Ernest Prescott,” I said. “Would you please confirm my checkout date?”

  “Certainly, sir,” he said, and the sound of a keyboard carried over the phone. “Tomorrow morning, sir, but you don’t need to check out. Just drop the pass in the box at the front desk and we’ll take care of everything.”

  “Actually, I wanted to extend my stay a few days. Is that possible?”

  “I’ll check,” he said, and I heard more clicking. “How long did you want to stay?”

  “Two more days?”

  “Thank you,” he said, and subjected me to more clicking. “If you don’t mind moving your room tomorrow, we can put you up for the remainder of your stay just down the hall. King-sized bed, non-smoking. How’s that?”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Certainly, sir. Just call Guest Services before moving and we’ll set you up with new room keys and help you with your luggage.”

  I thanked him again and hung up.

  Rather than fly and risk dying in a fiery crash, I’d rent a car and drive to Ernest’s address in New York in style. In two days. For now, I was in charge of my destiny and it felt great. But something told me Mrs. Sandway wasn’t going to be happy with me.

  Chapter Three

  I stayed in my room for the remainder of the late afternoon and evening, hoping to catch up on television. There were a lot of great movies to rent. But as I was scrolling through all the stuff I’d missed since my last ride, I felt a small, halfhearted tug from my conscience. I’d made a gentleman’s agreement with the Great Whomever that I’d work a little harder when I was back in the world—me being the gentleman. Now I was extending my stay in DC, when whatever Ernest had done was likely buried in his garden at his New York address.

  I remembered my disastrous ride as Nate Cantrell, who lived not twenty miles away. I’d been so busy spending Nate’s fortune and fornicating with his fiancée I’d gotten the poor guy shot. I partially blamed the Great Whomever for that one—none of my other rides had been good people, only Nate. Well, Peter after that—barely (drug habit, stole my girlfri
end)—but Nate had been a major departure from the rinse-and-repeat cycle of life and death I’d become accustomed to.

  With a feeling of dejection and a sense I should do something, I flipped through Prescott’s book. What could be so great that it had capitalist rivetheads mingling with strange old ladies and knife-wielding maniacs? Despite my aversion to horror, I turned to page one and began to read.

  It opened like an eighties slasher movie: college cheerleading squad en route to a competition, forced to detour through a creepy town filled with religious fanatics. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, shockingly, surprisingly, their bus breaks down in the middle of town, and the only mechanic in a hundred miles is a limping leering inbreedy guy. He offers to fix it if they’re willing to “pay the price.” Which, of course, they agree to pay—anything to get them back on the road the next day so they could make it in time for the competition.

  I saw it coming a mile away. I wanted to shout at Rhonda, the head cheerleader who was secretly a lesbian, to stay out of the shower, but she wouldn’t have listened. When it comes to taking showers alone in strange old hotels, cheerleaders are like moths to a bug zapper. Rhonda got in the shower, blood shot out of the showerhead, she screamed, and then she ran out. Or she tried to—the door wouldn’t open.

  The same thing happened to the rest of the showering, weed-smoking, boy-crazy cheerleading team, and all of them got locked in their rooms just like poor blood-soaked Rhonda.

  By around the third naked cheerleader, I was getting into the story. Prescott, for all the clichés he was tossing around, had an engaging way with words, and his characters were funny or sad or human in all the right ways.

  The story took an even darker turn when the doors to each room proceeded to open, one at a time, and that’s when I got my first taste of what made Prescott such a popular horror novelist.

  * * *

  Veronica entered the dimly lit ballroom gripping the knife in front of her, desperately trying to remember she was the co-Captain and not some spineless freshman flinching through basket tosses and hurting people.

  Suddenly the overhead lights came on, momentarily blinding her. When her vision cleared, she saw them. Unlike the other rooms she’d tried on that floor, hoping to find the girls so they could escape, this one had been unlocked. Now she knew why: the ballroom was filled with people.

  There was a woman with red hair wearing a nurse’s outfit, standing stiffly with her arms at her sides. Veronica’s eyes widened and she stifled a scream. The woman’s face looked to have been removed and then stitched back onto her skull. Except … no, that didn’t make sense. The photograph displayed on the easel next to her had the same red hair, but the face was different. A caption under the photograph read, “Vice.”

  A few feet away, the mystery of the missing face was cleared up when Veronica saw it stitched on another woman. Beside that corpse was a portrait captioned, “Versa.”

  Two women with their faces removed and switched. Vice Versa.

  Veronica began to cry. She couldn’t go back the way she’d come. The manager was out there with his suped-up cattle prod and electrified body armor. She needed to keep moving, but he’d strung a twisting pathway of razor wire through the room. From each jagged steel blade, a sinister unknown substance glistened, daring her to try and slip past.

  Corralled by the deadly barrier and unable to turn back, Veronica moved forward through a parade of people preserved through taxidermy. They were all female, their faces masks of the terror they’d experienced before death.

  Each woman was propped and positioned to awful effect:

  A young woman with her musculature removed, turning her into a human stick figure with a normal-sized head. Her title read, “Bug.”

  An older woman suspended by a wire, her legs and arms sewn to her stomach so that they hung down. This one was titled, “Florero.”

  Another woman had been literally turned inside out in a red, gory display of viscera. Next to her was a photograph of an old black lady shopping in the produce section of a grocery store. Her caption read, “Healthy.”

  As Veronica went through the makeshift gallery, the razor wire narrowed to less than three feet wide, forcing her progress to a crawl and pushing her closer to the gruesome things.

  It soon became apparent the manager had gone through a transformation over the course of his career. Near the back of the room, closer to the exit, the corpses were better preserved. Unlike Vice Versa, these had no accompanying portraits. Each had cardstock signs hung from their necks with names like “Audry” or “Waitress” or “Bookworm.”

  Sometime later, having reached the far exit, Veronica blinked dazedly. She’d come upon the last corpse in the collection.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  She sank to her knees, paralyzed with fear, revulsion, and pity for the doll-like figure of a young girl with platinum blond tresses. The manager had posed her daintily in a frilly white chiffon dress. Unlike the bodies of the women, there wasn’t a mark on her. No hideous stitches or anatomical modifications. Her skin was white like porcelain, preserved through the awful alchemy of a master at the height of his talent.

  The girl’s sign read, simply, “Missing.”

  * * *

  Despite my dislike of literature where children were hurt, I kept reading. The author focused his attention primarily on the college-aged cheerleaders. To my shame, he kept me reading throughout the night and into the early morning, when I eventually closed the book a little more than halfway through.

  Sick to my stomach.

  The manager turned out to be an insane taxidermy hobbyist with a plan to add the cheerleading squad to his collection, posing them with their severed heads and teased-out hair as pompoms. Awful stuff, but that wasn’t the worst. The girls were electrocuted before they were stuffed—the voltage calibrated to kill slowly without setting them on fire. As the manager said, “The better to preserve your peppy beauty, my dears.” In a special twist of psychological torment, he offered to spare anyone who volunteered to throw the switch.

  Prescott’s descriptions of the eventual torture of the switch-throwers, and the cutting and stuffing of the manager’s “electro-cuties,” were incredibly real—right down to the rainbow sheen of fried human skin floating in puddles of blood and urine. In my mind’s eye, I saw each girl snuffed out while her friends watched in horror, awaiting their turns.

  “Man,” I said, getting up.

  I put the book over on the table next to the TV and wiped my hands. Then I went and brushed my teeth again, feeling tainted and somehow used. I regretted having stuck with the book so long, because now that nasty stuff was in my head forever.

  How anyone could write such books, let alone read them—avidly, adoringly, and then say they were “amazing”—was beyond me. Whoever read Electro-Cute wasn’t doing so for the contrived cheerleader story, either. When Daphne told the girls she broke up with her boyfriend because “it just wasn’t working out,” nobody would confuse that with high literature. Ernest’s stock and trade was snuff, pure and simple. Blood, gore, and humiliation. Terror, torture, and despair. And death. Up close, macroscopic, eyeball to skin.

  Mrs. Sandway said she and Jacob had discovered Ernest—built him up, made him successful. I wondered what kind of people would willingly set loose something so awful into the world, and if I was expected to do something about it.

  These weren’t 3 a.m. questions. Besides, it was 4 a.m. I was tired and wanted to sleep, but I needed to get all the icky out of my head or I’d have nightmares.

  I turned on the TV and flipped around for a while. Pundits arguing, infomercials, reality TV, music videos—I barely registered any of it, and the TV was still on in the morning when I woke up.

  Yawning and feeling achy, I rooted through Ernest’s suitcase and discovered he didn’t have much in the way of variable attire. Black socks, black pants, black shirts, and nary a polo in sight. I supposed it went with the whole death and torment vibe, but i
t seemed a bit dull. After careful consideration, I chose a black shirt and some black pants, then went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and enjoyed four eggs, six strips of bacon, two Belgian waffles, and four tiny glasses of orange juice.

  Halfway through my meal, a boy of about thirteen walked up and said, “Excuse me, sir, can I have your autograph?”

  Mingled feelings of flattery and disgust warred within me as I contemplated the sandy-haired boy. He had a mesmerizing mohawk haircut. I’d always wanted a mohawk, but Mom hadn’t wanted me to be cool so I never got one.

  “You read my book?” I said.

  “Well no, not actually,” he said, then seemed to realize the potential for insult. “Sorry. But I totally saw Sliced. Way cool special effects. Don’t worry, though—my mom made me close my eyes for the naked scenes. It’s R-rated, so…”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  A woman in her forties came up behind the boy and said, “Hi, I’m Trish—it’s so wonderful to meet you. Everyone at the office is reading your books. I hope Bobby’s not bothering you?”

  I shook my head.

  Bobby held out a piece of paper and a pen—which I took, because that’s what you do when people hand you pens and paper and stare at you with hopeful eyes. I signed it and handed it back to him.

  Trish’s voice grew stern and responsible. “What do you say, Bobby?”

  “Thanks a lot, sir,” he said.

  “Anytime,” I said.

  When they left, I glanced around and saw everyone in the hotel restaurant staring at me. Some obliquely, some openly, but all of them collectively. It was a feeling quite unlike any I’d ever had before. In high school, I’d wandered the student-packed halls, unseen—a chubby ghost in no-name shoes. Every morning, before the bell, I’d arrive at class with moments to spare—as if hanging out with my friends had nearly made me late again.