William Zatel woke to the smell of vomit. The bitter stench of the vodka-tinged mess in his lap caused him to be sick again. He heaved until his chest hurt.
“Ohfuck,” he said, fumbling with the door lock mechanism. He would never be able to stop gagging. Not while he was covered with this shit. “Ohfugh—” He leaned across the gap between door and ground unsteadily to empty the remainder of his stomach’s contents.
“Tommy,” William said. “We need…urp…home.” There was no reply. It took a moment for this to register in his pathetic state. “Tommy!”
William looked around. They were still at the fucking titty bar! What if Nina saw him puking all over himself like some drunken high-schooler? He shouted for his brother again before stumbling from the car. The parking lot was empty except for a few cars. William was baffled. He had to lean against the car to steady himself, trying to make sense of his newfound predicament. He reached instinctively for the heavy bulge of his gun in its shoulder holster. Drunk and without Tommy in his direct line of sight, William felt vulnerable there in the dead of night. The presence of his shooting iron at least offered some bit of reassurance.
And then it hit him. Tommy had gotten pissed at him for getting so drunk and must have decided to teach him a lesson. He laughed at the idea. Imagine that, he thought. It was like being attempted to be outwitted by a five-year-old. Shit, how long had Tommy been waiting for him to wake up? It couldn’t have been that long, he reasoned muddily, if the parking lot still had a couple cars in it.
“Tommy!” William shouted, making mockery of feigned distress. “Oh, Tommy boy. Where ever have you gone? What will I do?” He examined the tree line at the edge of the parking lot. His brother was hiding among them, he knew, waiting to get a rise out of him. William wasn’t falling for it. Yet, still there was no response.
“Oh, I wish I wasn’t such a drunk asshole. I’m sure sorry about it.” This he said with slightly less sarcasm. He got up from the hood and crossed a few yards of parking lot to examine the forest’s edge. “Come on, Tom. I said I was sorry. I almost mean it, too.”
Now he was getting irritated. The remaining booze in his system helped to shorten his temper. His mouth was raw with stomach acid and it irritated his throat to yell. “Alright man. Enough of this horseshit. I’m sorry, alright? Now get your big ass back over here and take me home so I can get cleaned up.”
And then he realized that the ground beneath his feet was shining with wetness. He followed the slick, foot-wide trail with his eyes into the pine needle-littered ground at the end of the lot. It looked like… Puzzled, he leaned down and brought up a finger coated in crimson syrup. William’s stomach tightened.
“Jesus,” he said. It was blood.
The trail looked like something had been dragged out of the forest. So quick he staggered, William spun toward the car, reaching for his gun simultaneously. Indeed, the trail of bodily fluid led right back to the tail end of the continental. His heart bounced madly in his chest. William Zatel found himself wishing at that moment he’d had six or so fewer drinks that evening.
“Tommy?” he said, softer now. Suddenly, his confidence of a practical joke waned. There was too much blood on the ground. Something big had been opened up and bled out. With his own pistol gripped tight in hand, William made his inspection of the car. Besides the large pool of blood, there was no sign of his brother. The trunk itself was empty.
He found Tommy’s handgun on the front seat and winced. The air in his lungs felt heavy, not breathable. William could not remember the last thing that had happened that evening. He had no recollection of how he’d even got back to the car.
The bloody path drew his eyes once again. Its very existence stirred the unsettled state of his stomach. And then he understood the error of his initial diagnosis. Something had not been dragged out of the woods. A chill nibbled at the edges of his will. What the hell was going on here? William tucked his Tommy’s gun into his belt, took a deep breath, and thinking of his missing brother, felt anger flush his cheeks.
“I’m coming, Tommy.”
From the road hazard kit he had so wisely purchased three months prior, William removed a small, plastic flashlight with a weak beam. In his hurry, and for the thoughts of a drunk man, it was better than nothing. At least it worked.
Adrenaline did a fair job of rousing William toward alertness, though his head still felt a little slow. He stopped at the pavement’s end, taking one last look at the congealing trail and listening. He could see nothing in the depths of the trees. His meager light cut across the darkness in a thin, yellow strip, but showed him nothing.
The dirt and tree leavings at his feet had been disturbed recently. He followed the tracks until they faded almost completely, hidden by the soft ground. There was no further evidence of blood, or even that of a struggle. Tommy’s a big boy, he told himself. Ain’t no puny little shit that could put his brother on the ground, much less cut him bad enough to leave such a mess in the parking lot. And then he remembered Tommy’s gun in his pants.
“Fuck,” he whispered, trying his best not to let panic set its hooks in. It was a struggle he was not winning. “Where are you, man?”
Unable to contain himself any longer, William shouted for his brother. He called so loudly it threw him into a coughing fit. His throat hurt terribly. He stopped and listened.
Hearing nothing, he called again. “Tommy!” Had his brother been attacked at the car, surely his attacker would not have just left William alone, helpless and snoozing in the front seat. After all, had it been a professional job, he thought arrogantly, they wouldn’t have gone for his shit-for-brains brother. But still, perhaps they hadn’t been finished. Maybe they were coming back for him. Could they be stalking him at that very moment, listening to his clumsy footsteps and following his belligerently stupid howls?
He spun to his rear, letting the flashlight glean what truth it could from the night’s deceiving blanket of darkness. Nothing stirred. A soft breeze whispered through the tree boughs, sending a shiver across the sweaty nape of William’s neck and tickling his spine. Atop its current, the rolling gust ushered forth imaginary whispers.
The ghostly whispers began to grow, rising and expanding in William’s ears. He rotated in a fervor, letting the light lead his gun to the sound that now consumed his thoughts. Nothing was visible. Still, he could not see through the loitering trees. And then the harsh rasp came to a sudden stop.
William’s hand was shaking. In all his years, he had never felt the utter despair of loneliness as he did in that very moment. This killer of men was so stricken with panic that he could not hammer down a single line of thought. Words sped round in his skull, unable to be grasped by the consciousness that would have granted them order.
Again the rasp sounded behind William and he turned his trigger hand with lightning speed. The sight that greeted him stole his breath.
There in the diffused darkness stood a nearly avenged Jimmy Gums. His body was ravaged and filthy. Clumped blood offered stunted reflection from every surface of him that was not still slick with toxic chemicals. Around his neck, he again wore his trophy string, which was now much fuller. The solitary lidless eye watched William from his monstrously wrenched head. Behind him, he hauled Tommy Zatel’s immense form by a shattered leg: the source of the whispering noise, in symphony with fallen pine needles.
With a shaking hand, William put the light on his brother’s face. Eyes wide, frozen in a final moment of terror, Tommy’s head was a bloody pulp. No, not his head: his mouth. His jaw hung limp, torn from one mandibular hinge to rest like an empty horseshoe swinging from a bit of flesh.
For the second time that evening, William’s stomach purged itself involuntarily. There was nothing left to give.
“You…you fuck,” he whispered. He pointed the muzzle of his pistol at the lumbering wretch. “You sick fuck!”
Jimmy Gums dropped with the first shot, dead to the world. But William fired until every bullet in the wea
pon had been spent. Then he used Tommy’s. Only when that too was emptied was he satisfied that the returned killer was dead. If the man’s body had been a bloody mess before, it now lay a pulverized mess of shredded meat. Trace amounts of the dump’s oozing sludge came to rest in fresh wounds, accelerating and reviving expired cells.
William fell to his knees at his brother’s side, unable to bring his gaze above the Tommy’s stomach.
“Shit, Tom. Ohshit. What’d I do?” He rested a hand on Tommy’s arm, again feeling the urge to be sick. “What the fuck were you doing out here? Why didn’t you wake me up, you fucking idiot?” He delivered a solid pound to the dead sibling’s chest and growled. “Why?” His blows intensified as tears worked their way from his eyes, rage and frustration and loss clawing their way out of him.
“Why, you fat bastard?”
Had he not been so focused on his grievous beating (and were his ears not ringing from the shots fired), perhaps William would have noticed the arm, the final functioning part of Jimmy Gums’ anatomy, before it could reach out and vise his neck just as it had done of the younger Zatel.
Following a gargled scream, the forest was at last silent. The trees watched on and the night was sated, having claimed the flesh of its share of killers for one evening.
Notes
Hi everyone. Thanks for reading this story. I’m happy to have been able to share it with you.
If you enjoyed this one, please check out my most recent story collection “Chasing the Sandman,” from whence this particular story came. I’ve also got the three novels “The Sensationally Absurd Life and Times of Slim Dyson,” “The Missing Link,” and “Dead and Moaning in Las Vegas,” and the horror novella collection “The Graveyard Shift,” all of which were co-authored with my best friend, Bryan Pedas. Together we also co-write the humor blog/web-comic www.abeerfortheshower.com.
If you have any questions, comments, or love/hate mail you’d like to send, you can always reach me at [email protected] .
Cheers,
-Brandon
About the Author
Brandon Meyers lives and writes in colorful Colorado. He is author of the horror short story collection Chasing the Sandman and co-author of the novels The Missing Link, The Dead Don’t Play Slots, The Sensationally Absurd Life and Times of Slim Dyson, The Graveyard Shift and the humor blog/web-comic A Beer for the Shower. Someday he will grow up and get a real job. Brandon can be reached at [email protected] .
The Untimely Death of Jimmy Gums Page 2