"I’m going to tell you a story," Tamara said. "When I’m finished with my story, you can have me one last time. Do whatever. I don’t care. Then we’re going to walk into that bar, you’re going to buy me a drink and then you’re going to leave. You won’t ever have to see me again. Is that a deal, Reddick? Is that a good deal, Reddick?"
He moaned. "Oh, don’t make me pop in my pants, baby."
"Then, hush," she said. "And listen."
IV
Folklore
ON THAT COLD misty Wednesday night, Tamara Ogle sat with Reddick Boyle in his car in the parking lot of the Highlander Lodge. She looked him squarely in the eye and she told him a story.
***
WHEN MY PEOPLE first came down into the Keep from the mountains, the people who lived here were afraid of us. We didn’t know why. We were peaceful, not aggressive. We never attacked anyone or stole anything. We were not skilled in the ways of war or deception. My people were farmers and hunters.
The people of the Keep became afraid of our men. They were taller than the other men, stronger, and their skin shone darkly in the moonlight. Although we kept to ourselves, the people of the Keep felt the best thing to do was to kill our men. Our men were naïve, innocent. We didn’t have guns and our men didn’t have an understanding of them. Their lack of experience was their downfall. They were picked off, hunted down one by one, leaving our women and children alone and unprotected. It didn’t take long, either. Soon, the men of the Keep were the only men in the Keep. All of our men were gone.
"Survival of the fittest, baby. I would have done the same thing."
"That’s because you’re an asshole, Reddick," Tamara huffed. "Don’t interrupt me."
Our women then became something they had never been before: victims. Knowing we were defenseless, by ourselves in the fields, the men of the Keep stole into our camps. Soon, our women were screaming in the night and their bellies swelled with the bastards of the Keep. The Church got hold of some of the children and sold them outright to different people in different towns. This was known as "adoption." Our women began showing up in the homes of local women, wearing aprons and saying, "Yes, ma’am." They weren’t called slaves, of course. They were "maids" or "domestics."
"What the fuck’s a ‘domestic?’" Reddick asked. Tamara glared at him and he quickly closed his mouth.
My great-great-grandmother was called Chula. When she began to fully understand what was happening to her people, she became furious. Chula prayed nightly to her gods, for she knew that no man would heed her cry for justice. She built the ritual fires, she made the proper sacrifices but no answer came. The women kept disappearing and more children were born with the eyes of white men.
One night, Chula had a dream. She would not reveal the full contents to anyone, but she told my people the answer lie in the mountains from which we came. She gathered some wood and a blanket and trekked off into the wild, back up into the ridges and hills, into the dense green forests of the mountains.
The legend says Chula spent the first four nights alone. She ate and drank nothing, but simply sat by her fire, humming softly to herself and waiting for the answer to appear. On the fifth night, everything changed.
As the campfire burned high and bright against a moonless sky, Great-Great-Grandmother hummed and waited. The wind shifted slightly, softly grazing Chula’s cheek. Intrigued, she turned towards the breeze. The smell of warm rain and lavender filled the air, and she closed her eyes, imagining that wonderful cloudburst. When she opened her eyes again she saw, through the crackling flames of her campfire, a brown bear, the kind she knew could be terribly ferocious if agitated.
"Are you the one I am waiting for?" Great-Great-Grandmother asked. "Are you the answer I seek?"
The bear closed its big eyes, shook its head and walked away.
"This fairy tale shit’s getting old," Reddick said. "Take that dress off."
"Relax. I’m almost finished."
The wind shifted again, and Great-Great-Grandmother turned her face into the breeze. The smell of sweet grass and wild onions filled the air, and she closed her eyes, reveling in Nature’s kiss. When she opened her eyes, Great-Great-Grandmother realized that on her right side, maybe about eight feet away, lay a puma on the ground, eyeing her curiously.
"Are you the one I am waiting for?" she asked the puma. "Are you the answer I seek?"
The puma closed its green eyes, shook its head and walked away.
"There are no pumas in these mountains."
"Yes, there are."
"No, there aren’t. I would have heard about that shit on the television."
The wind shifted again, and Chula could smell honeysuckle and clover. She closed her eyes and turned her face into the breeze, breathing deeply the beautiful aroma of the flowers. She pictured what they must all look like together in full bloom.
When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing seated around the fire with her. She did, though, feel moist breath on the back of her neck. She could smell something rank and wild. Great-Great-Grandmother started to turn around, but she stopped when the thing behind her put a paw on her shoulder. Its claws were extended just a little, just enough to cause slight pain and be a threat.
"Are you the one I am waiting for?" Chula asked.
The creature did not respond in words, but licked her neck with its hot flat tongue. Great-Great-Grandmother was startled, but not afraid.
"Are you the answer I seek?" Chula asked.
The creature did not respond in words, but pushed her face-forward onto the ground. Chula was nervous but not afraid.
The creature mounted my Great-Great-Grandmother. The legend says the yowling and howling, the spitting and scratching, and the cries that were neither ecstasy nor pain, could be heard from Elders Keep to Greenbrier. They lasted from midnight until daybreak. No one slept, not in our camps, not in the houses of the Keep.
"So your Great-Great-Grandmother fucked a mountain lion."
"Something like that, yes. Maybe a little more mystical."
"Good to know freaky runs in the family."
When Chula came down from the mountain, she did not speak of what had happened. She told the women not to fear, but to be watchful. She told the children to stay with and look after their mothers.
Sometime after that, on a night with no moon, men from the Keep came under cover of darkness, just as Chula knew they would. They were hoping to take back one or two of the younger girls, knowing they could get a better price for fresh meat, as it were. Only one of them made it out alive. He limped back to the Keep, talking about a monster, a hideous creature that looked like a cat with a woman’s face. He wept and jabbered about fangs and claws and blood, about slipping around in the entrails of his friends, about how the women in the camp laughed and pointed at them, smacked them on the backs with lit torches while they tried to escape from the cat creature. Suddenly, the appeal of dragging our women away from home and into the Keep waned. The men of the Keep left us alone, for they knew our people were protected.
Things changed later, of course, and we began to mingle with the people of Elders Keep by choice. Fear diminished. Times change, peoples and ideas change. We loved them, slept with them and married them, much to the chagrin of the Church. The bloodline thinned, as it always does when there is inter-breeding. Now, you can’t even tell that we’re different, except when you hear our stories. That’s just about all that’s left of us now; our stories, our heritage and the lineage of our women. We’re a myth. A tall tale.
"Well, that’s fan-fucking-tastic," Reddick said, rolling his eyes. "What kind of fucked up natural selection bullshit is that? Is there a point to that story besides boring me to tears?"
Tamara nodded slowly. "Of course, Reddick. There’s a point." Almost instantly, Tamara’s seat belt was off and she was straddling Reddick, staring him down, face to face.
"The point, Reddick, is that history is carried in the blood," Tamara said. Reddick thought for just a moment that he co
uld smell something strange and tangy on her breath, something coppery.
"The point, Reddick, is that you can’t dilute history from the bloodline," Tamara said. Reddick thought for just a moment that her eyes had changed from their normal grey to a bizarre wide yellow.
"The point, Reddick, is that Chula changed that night in the mountains. And that change became a part of her history. That history is carried where?" Tamara asked.
"In the blood?" Reddick replied haltingly.
Tamara stroked his face. "That’s right, baby. In the blood. The blood that ran in her veins carries all the way down to mine." Reddick thought for just a moment that her fingernails on his face felt thicker, rougher.
"Okay, cool," Reddick said in his bad-ass voice, trying to regain control of the situation. "Whatever, Tamara. Your Grammie was into bestiality. So what? I got hours of footage of that shit at home. Let me know when your second cousin, twice removed, gets DP’d by a shark. I can sell that. Now let’s go in, get a drink and get the hell out of here."
"What’s the matter, baby?" Tamara asked, her voice an octave lower than usual, almost like a growl. "Don’t you want to get freaky?"
***
REDDICK BOYLE HAD watched a lot of vampire movies because vampires were fuckin’ cool. They were suave. They knew how to get people on their side and throw them away when they were no longer needed. It was nothing to a vampire to drain someone’s lifeblood, leaving them nothing but a shallow husk, like a scarecrow. Their victims always screamed and put up a token fight, but he could tell when it got down to it, those bitten chicks dug it. His personal theory was that they all came like bitches when the big chomp came.
When Tamara Ogle sunk her teeth in Reddick Boyle’s throat, it did not feel good. He did not have a spontaneous orgasm. She ripped and tore, chewing as she did, like she was trying to gnaw through his neck. He was aware of these things. He was aware of streams of blood hitting the inside glass of the driver’s side window so hard, it sound like a drunk, finally breaking the seal and pissing into an empty punchbowl. While shards of pain rammed themselves into Reddick’s brain, he found himself strangely detached and observant, as if he were watching someone else being murdered in his car.
She pulled her face away from his savaged throat. "You ought to be nice to girls, Reddick Boyle. You just never know who you’re going to piss off." She calmly reached up and pulled part of a vein from between two of her teeth. She examined it briefly before placing it in the ashtray.
Woozy, Reddick caught a glimpse of her right hand. It must have been the sodium arc lights in the parking lot that made it look yellow. Surely, it was just the loss of blood, making him see things.
Tamara reared back and clawed Reddick’s stomach open through his smarmy silk shirt. Three distinct lines flayed him open from his shoulder-blade to his soft belly. "Look," she said. "It’s your insides, Reddick Boyle." She scooped out a portion of his intestine and raised it up high, so he could see it. Steam rose from his guts and from the space in his belly where they used to be.
"You’re nothing but chitlins, Reddick Boyle," she said, grinning. She poured them from palm to palm, like wet sand, for a moment before hanging them in a double loop from his rear-view mirror.
So this is dying, Reddick Boyle thought. It’s kind of boring. After all, there’s only so much it can hurt. Once you hit that point, there’s nothing to do but watch yourself bleed out and wait for The Great Black to cover you. This theory came from his observer self, which was hovering about a foot above Reddick, watching all the grisly action. He conceded to himself that he probably should have come up with conjecture about the afterlife before he began the act of dying.
"One more thing before you go," Tamara said. Reaching down, she took hold of Reddick’s genitalia through his new jeans. She wiggled her fingers back until they were rested against the place where his scrotum joined the rest of his body.
"They say more than a handful is wasted," she growled. "Not a problem here. So cute and tiny." She squeezed. Tamara squeezed and her nails poked through Reddick’s blood-soaked pants, into his skin, carving gashes into connecting muscle. It looked like she was trying to pull a doorknob off. She grunted with the effort, twisting, her ragged fingernails working like an augur. Fresh blood cascaded over her hand as she worked. Was Reddick already dead? Did it matter at this point? Tamara had a point to make and she was bound and determined to make it.
Push and pull, push and pull, cut and tear and saw. This must have gone on for five minutes. Reddick’s skin, already compromised began to relent and tear more easily. Then she realized she could touch her fingertips together. Everything that could be cut through had been cut through. She roared with joy with the realization. One good final yank should do it. Tamara didn’t feel tired at all, but it took all her strength to make one final effort, one last move.
One last hard jerk and her elbow flew backwards, hitting the gore-covered steering wheel. In her hand, she held Reddick Boyle’s penis and scrotum. She stared at them for a moment, oddly foreign and out of context, like relics from another time. "Just a couple more things," she said to Boyle’s mangled corpse. "Then I guess it will be over. I’m sorry, Reddick. It just wasn’t working out. And I don’t think we’ll be able to stay friends, either."
***
HALF AN HOUR later, Tamara Ogle opened the passenger-side door and climbed out. She held her pretty black clutch in one hand. She made sure the vehicle was locked, because that’s how Reddick did things. She was terribly thirsty and had a bad taste in her mouth. She hoped the Nine Back made good strong drinks. She strode through the oddly refreshing mist and entered the bar.
V
The Toxic Shock Mountain Blues
IN WAS DARK in the bar, and cold. It felt good against her skin. The place was empty. Tamara knew that was bad for business, but it was good for her. After all, she had just gotten out of a complicated relationship and wasn’t much in the mood for conversation.
The bartender was pouring a shot for someone. "When you get finished with that, can I get a Puerto Rican screw?" Tamara called. The bartender just about jumped out of her skin at the sound of Tamara’s voice. Tamara tried not to laugh.
"Oh, Jesus," the bartender said. "I didn’t even see you come in. I’m sorry."
"That’s fine, honey. I guess I kind of snuck in on you." Tamara had been planning on Reddick paying for drinks tonight. She rifled through her clutch looking for a credit card or some cash. At least she had remembered her cigarettes. Now, if she could only find a lighter.
"Listen," the bartender called. "I’ll be right back, okay? I just need to run this drink out front."
"Take your time, honey," Tamara said. "I’ll be here."
The barkeep, who seemed friendly enough, left with a shot glass in her hand. Tamara fiddled around with her little purse some more. Oh, there was her lighter. Good, she thought. She stuck a cigarette between her lips and sparked the flame into being.
In the glow of the small fire, Tamara noticed that her hands looked red. That was strange. They felt raw, too, like she had kept her hands in hot dishwater for a long time. Had that happened? Tamara couldn’t remember. She smoked faster, as if it would help her memory.
The bartender was back. "Sorry about that," she said.
"It’s fine, love," Tamara responded, hoping the girl wouldn’t notice the shakiness in her voice. She knew she was at the Nine Back. She had been there a few times before, mostly on weekends, hanging out with a couple girlfriends. Damned if she could remember why she was there tonight, though. Was she supposed to meet someone? Had she driven? Her car keys were not in her clutch.
Panic was starting to set in. She liked to drink, make no mistake, but Tamara had never been a blackout drunk. She didn’t even remember opening any liquor at home.
"One Puerto Rican Screw," said the bartender, suddenly right at the table and too close for Tamara’s comfort. She was measuring her breathing and consciously keeping her hands from shaking. It was not easy.
"Thank you," Tamara said, and she grabbed the glass and drained it in one extended swig. The orange juice did not mix well with the strange taste already living in her mouth, but the silver rum managed to cut through it a little. She could stand five or six more of those.
"May I get another one of these?" she asked. "A little stronger this time, please."
The bartender cocked an eyebrow and smiled a little. "Sure thing," she said, and hustled off to make another drink.
Tamara briefly considered splitting right then, just ditching the bill and getting the fuck home. But how would she do that? She didn’t have her car with her. She couldn’t see any vehicles in the parking lot from her vantage point.
But she did have her phone. Tamara almost cackled with relief when she remembered that. She could call a taxi or maybe one of her friends to come get her. Maybe someone could help her piece together the last couple hours. She hadn’t forgotten the code to her phone, and she unlocked it with no problem.
She checked her text messages right away. Nothing from today. The last message she received was three days ago. It was from someone named Reddick. All it said was, "be there at 9 & this btr b good." What did that even mean?
She stared at her phone and saw a red streak on the bottom of the touchscreen, where she had unlocked and slid it open. Where did that come from? She got her lighter back out and fired it up. Her hands weren’t inflamed; they were covered with something red and sticky.
Tamara looked towards the bar and saw the bartender examining her drink glass. She must have smeared the red stuff on that, too. Weirdly enough, it looked like blood.
Blood.
Tamara curled her fingers and looked at her arms. Everything, practically every inch of her body was covered in thick drying blood, yet she knew she was not injured. It started coming back to her then, and she remembered everything at once, from start to finish like recalling, as an adult, a book read many times as a child. She wanted to reassure the bartender; Lord only knew what she was thinking and Tamara had a feeling she was going to need as many friends as she could get.
Black Friday: An Elders Keep Collection Special Edition Page 7