by Mike Leon
“Like what? He’s brooding and introspective? Women like that.”
“I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Face it. You’re just jealous.”
“I guess so. I just can’t stop thinking about her.”
“I don’t understand why. She’s not worth it. You should have heard her in the gas station. She’s a dingbat, Gav. Have you seen her purity ring?”
“The Patience Patrol thing.”
“What’s the Patience Patrol?”
“It’s a Christian rock thing. They do concerts where they preach abstinence with hip hop and they sell those rings.”
“It’s for creepy backwoods hicks.”
“I think it’s sort of cute.”
“Because you think you can talk her into sex anyway.”
“No.”
Karen answers him with nothing but a condescending frown.
“Maybe,” Gavin says. “Okay, yeah,” he finally admits. “Why? You don’t think so?”
“Oh, no. I think so. You’re a pretty smooth guy. It’s just—I mean… I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Well, Jenny is kinda taken. And she’s from the land of fishing holes and pickups with lift kits. You’re not. She’s not right for you. And why go to all that trouble and heartache when there’s somebody here who is right for you, and already wants to be with you?”
“You think Summer likes me?”
“No, goofball! Me!” Karen turns away from his surprised expression as an ache rises in her throat and her stomach turns over in horrific anticipation. She doesn’t hear him cutting in with any input immediately so she continues to ramble away explanations that only a frighteningly obtuse person would actually require. “I love you, Gav. I have for years. I just—I’ve been afraid—I didn’t know how to tell you. I—please tell me you feel the same way.”
Karen finally gathers the fortitude to look up from the wood planks, but before she even meets Gavin’s eyes, she knows what is coming. “Aww man, Karen,” he stutters. “I—uh—I’m really sorry.”
“Why? What is it? I don’t understand how you can like her and not—I mean she’s soo dumb.”
“I love you, Karen, but not like that. You’re just not that kind of girl to me. You’re like my sister or something. I don’t see you as some sexy babe.”
“It’s because she’s prettier than I am? That’s what this is?”
“No. I mean—”
“Unbelievable. I thought you were different. All the years we’ve been friends, I thought you weren’t a pig, but obviously I was wrong.”
“Karen…”
“Don’t. Just don’t. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Karen launches herself from the porch swing, sending it flopping around unevenly as Gavin shouts after her. She shoves open the door into the ranch and stomps through the kitchen with hot tears streaming down her cheeks. She doesn’t want anyone to see her crying—not any of these shallow beautiful people. They’ll never understand how she feels. They’ll never share this kind of rejection.
Suddenly, a few feet after passing the two cases of beer and a plethora of liquor bottles, Karen has an urge, an idea that might help make the pain go away. She doubles back to the booze. She has never been drunk before, but it seems to be the method of choice for most people dealing with heartache. She passes on the beer. Beer tastes like urine, and Karen doesn’t want to drink urine. She wants to drink poison. She wants to go to oblivion. She picks up a bottle of Everclear along with a glass from the drying board next to the nearby kitchen sink. Then she goes looking for a room where she can be alone.
INT. AIR DUCT - NIGHT
This is not like Die Hard at all. Nakatomi Plaza had air shafts that were at least air shafts. The thing Lily is squeezing through is more like a tin colon, although it is thankfully not as complicated as the labyrinth of ducts John McClane had to traverse. Lily owes her progress entirely to her tiny frame and hundreds of hours spent pole dancing.
Since she began scraping along the shaft, she could hear the muffled noise of something that seemed to have a melody coming from somewhere outside the vents. However trivial, the possible presence of music gives her hope—hope that someone besides that cannibal monster may be nearby. Squeezing along the tiny passage, inch by inch, the sound becomes louder. It gains definition. It has a drum beat. It has a tune. It has voices. After a bend in the pipe, Lily can see the glowing slits of a vent in the side of the tubing ahead. Now she can hear even the crackling surface noise of the phonograph recording outside.
It is British invasion music.
Specifically, it is the 1964 UK chart topping cover of I’m Into Something Good, recorded by Herman’s Hermits. It is vile, putrid, cancerous corporate excrement, shat forth from the anus of the Brill Building into the waiting hands of millions of hapless teeny boppers. For a second, Lily thinks about going back through the shaft to that dank cell and just waiting to die rather than enduring this audio torture, but upon review she decides her escape attempt is still a slightly better option.
As she reaches the vent and peeks through the tiny slits beside her, she spies warm yellow walls and pegboard fixtures arranged into neat rows. The air from outside carries a pungent animal smell. She knows this place, and it is much closer and more familiar than she would have ever suspected. She is in the space where the pet shop used to be—right next to the video store.
The Ghoul stands inside the old square service kiosk near the front of the store, surrounded by cash registers and a few scattered impulse buy items. The towering monster sets a blood dripping meat cleaver down on the counter next to Addison’s mutilated carcass, which is sprawled out along the surface where people once paid for cat toys and doggie treats. The Ghoul picks up a simple black axe which was propped against the counter and swings the hefty blade down against one of Addison’s knees, making a grisly thud which Lily can even hear over Peter Noone’s crackling voice.
“Meat. Meat,” the monster chants as Lily watches it pick up a skinnier knife, one intended to slice bread, and pulls it through Addison’s pulverized knee joint to sever the flesh and separate the bottom of the leg from the rest. Her torso sits alone now, cut off from the rest of her limbs. The record player, a vintage wooden cased job with a bright green thrift store tag still hanging from one corner, sits on the opposite side of the service kiosk next to three milk crates stuffed with old vinyl record albums. As the song fades out, the monster puts the severed leg down and turns to the record player.
In the sudden silence, Lily can hear the monster’s ragged breaths as he feverishly rifles through the records in the milk crates. “Meat. Meat.” He lifts an Arcade Fire record from the bunch. He seems mesmerized for only a second before he pushes the record back into the crate and continues flipping. Angrily, he yanks Morrissey’s Bona Drag from the crate and hurls it across the room screaming like Frankenstein’s monster encountering fire. “Rwwwaaargh! Meat! Meat!” The monster moves to the next crate and flips through several records before he reaches one that causes him to pause. “Baby? Baby…” he says as he slips the black disc from its wrappings and places it on the turntable. The record begins with some slight scratching and then a medium tempo bass drum beat. As the drums are joined by a chorus of wailing male voices, Lily recognizes the tune. It is The Beach Boys’ angsty 1963 classic, Don’t Worry Baby.
Lily wonders if the music is loud enough to drown out the sound of her pushing the vent open and jumping down to the floor. The store entrance is not far. If she made it out of the duct quickly she could probably outrun the Ghoul. He is not renowned for his incredible speed. Still, it seems unlikely she would be able to get through the vent in the time required.
Below, the Ghoul returns to Addison’s mangled body. He picks up a well-chewed hand and begins gnawing on it with his viperfish maw as he turns her corpulent body like she weighs no more than a child’s doll. He slides the knife between her butt cheeks and carves around her rectum like he is sawing a lid out of a pum
pkin. Lily cringes. Once, she might have vomited, but that was in the past. Now she is no more than moderately grossed out. She watches the Ghoul flip Addison back over, then slice all the way up the torso to the frayed patch where the jaw once was. He cuts off Addison’s head with the axe and lets it fall to the floor. Then he begins pulling out her entrails. Lily looks away for that part.
She examines the screws that hold the vent in place, and finds them to be just like the ones she undid in the other room. Albeit, these are accessible from the other side, with the threaded ends pointing at her through the thin aluminum. Lily pinches one and tries to turn it between her fingers. She inadvertently emits a quick grunt, and shifts her focus back to the monster, but confirms he did not hear her over Brian Wilson.
After squeezing and straining at the screw so hard it feels like she might grind her fingertips down to the bone, the screw loosens. This is good. If she can loosen all of the screws most of the way, she can probably punch the vent cover out in one good hit and then make a dash for it. She glances back down at the Ghoul as he dumps Addison’s oozing red guts into a tin bucket. The intestines overflow and writhe their way to the floor like a slinky, but the monster grabs the end and packs them into the tin. Then he begins yanking Addison’s other organs from her body cavity. Lily starts work on the next screw.
She gets the next screw loose in time to see the Ghoul plop a set of lungs down on the countertop and plunge his huge black gauntlet back into Addison’s chest with gleeful exuberance. “Baby!” he bellows. “Baby!”
For a second, Lily has some peculiar notions as she studies his actions with macabre fascination. A baby? Did he find a baby? Was Addison pregnant? That does not seem likely. These possibilities melt away as the Ghoul pulls out Addison’s black dripping heart and holds it in the air. “Baby!” he shouts. Then bites into it with all the enthusiasm of a blood drunk fifth century berserker. He chews slowly. His eyes roll from one side of his head to the other. He sniffs the heart. He chews a bit more. Then he grunts out a low growl. “Not baby.” His eyes grow wild and angry as he screams those words again. “Not baby!”
Oh no. Lily wants to scream when she understands the connection he just made. Without hesitation, the monster whips his head around to the door at the back of the pet shop—the door to the old stock room she just escaped from. The Ghoul stomps toward the stock room shouting “Not baby! Not baby!”
Lily begins bashing her elbow into the vent cover. She has only seconds until that murderous abomination realizes where she went, and then he’s going to be back here stabbing every manner of pointy object into the vents attempting to skewer her. She smashes her arm into the flimsy vent slats again and they fold outward as one of the screws pops out and falls to the floor. She bashes it one more time, with all the power she can muster and the vent falls free of its doorway.
Lily scrapes through the opening from the duct and tumbles out onto the floor. Her legs ache and she feels lightheaded as she stands, side-effects of crawling for so long. Ignoring that, she moves for the door, half stumbling as the muscles in her legs awaken. The front windows have been blacked out completely, probably the monster’s doing, but she has no desire to wonder about that now. She pushes on the front door, with its paper covered glass and obsolete store hours sign, but the door is locked. She finds the bolt, a mechanism exactly like the one they used to lock the video store, and she turns it to unlock the front entrance. Lily pushes open the door and emerges into the parking lot as the monster appears from the stock room at the rear of the pet shop.
“Meat!” he screams, pointing a massive machete across the length of the store at her as the door swings shut on him.
“Fuck!” Lily yells as she charges out into the night. She thinks about going for her car, which should still be parked around back of the strip mall, but she doesn’t have her keys and doesn’t know if she’ll be able to find them. It may be best to go back there anyway, just to turn a corner and make the monster guess which way she went. She runs parallel to the building for a few yards, hoping to lose the monster, but then she sees lights in the street, coming toward her from the distant darkness. Lily changes course and dashes for the two-lane blacktop in front of the strip mall.
As she gets to the street, she can see the bright white headlights and many other little orange bulbs that suggest the outline of a large vehicle. Lily jumps up and down in the middle of the street, waving her arms and screaming excitedly. The lights slow their movement and the huge tractor trailer becomes more than a framework of disembodied bright dots. As the truck stops, the pet shop door opens like a rectangular portal to glowing sunlight in the middle of the empty black. The warm glow lasts only for a second as the giant black form of her pursuer shuffles through the door, and then it closes.
A tall man, more of a featureless shadow than a person, steps down from the semi. “What’s the problem, honey?” says the trucker. “What happened to your pants?”
Lily completely forgot she has no pants on. “We need to go now!” she shrieks, trying to climb past him into the truck’s cab. “He’s coming! Just kick it in drive and go!”
“Who’s coming?” the trucker grumbles. “What are you talking about?”
“Meat!” the Ghoul bellows as it comes around the rear of the trailer. “Fresh meat!”
The truck driver turns and stares at the massive creature, mostly undetailed in the darkness, and he does not take the proper course of action.
“Hey!” the trucker says. “You beatin’ on a little girl, bud?” He turns back to Lily. “This motherfucker hit you?”
“He eats people!” Lily screams.
The trucker pulls a big shiny revolver from his jacket and points it at the Ghoul. “Awright, motherfucker! Get on the ground now! Get on the fuckin’ ground or the Judge is gonna have somethin’ to say, and you won’t like it, no sir.”
The Ghoul gives zero fucks about this puny man and his gun. Lily climbs into the truck cab as the monster stomps forward. The trucker fires off a single shot, and then is unsurprisingly perplexed when the monster does not immediately drop. He fires off more shots. Lily doesn’t even bother to look and see if that did any good. She knows it didn’t.
“What the hell are you?” the trucker says just before the Ghoul swings the machete into the top of his head and out through his groin. Lily closes the door and finds the gear shift, which has an intimidatingly large group of numbers printed on its head. She presses down on the clutch and pulls the stick to first gear. She hits the gas and the truck begins to plod forward at a snail’s pace. Even pressing the pedal all the way to the floorboards, with the engine screaming like a stock car, the truck refuses to go much faster. She mashes the clutch and shifts to second. The gears grind like a chainsaw through a load of gravel, but the truck goes faster.
The Ghoul’s giant machete erupts through the door beside her, cracking the tempered glass window and nearly piercing her septum. Lily screams. The Ghoul roars into her ear through the spiderwebbed glass. He levers the blade back and forth through the hole he made and Lily crumples down into the seat to avoid the sharpened steel whipping around just over her head. The monster punches out the rest of the glass just as a telephone pole scrapes him from the side of the truck along with the driver’s side rear-view mirrors. Lily can hear him punching at the trailer all the way down the side of the vehicle.
She has only a loose notion of how to drive a truck this size. The transmission is manual, but has twice as many gears as her Challenger—at least. She can’t actually make sense of the diagram on top of the stick shift to determine how many. She grinds the engine all the way to fifth gear as she rolls on down the road looking for absolutely anything or anyone that can help her. What would that be? Other drivers? The police? No one can help her fight that thing. Her only chance is to leave it in the road. She looks in the remaining rear-view mirror to see if she can spot the Ghoul in the street behind her, but she sees nothing.
Even in fifth gear, which looks like the hig
hest gear, the tachometer is pushing into the red and the speedometer is still under thirty. Lily looks to the road ahead, which she has been down a thousand times. It is all straightaway for about two miles, she thinks, but gets both bendy and hilly after that. She wonders if she should downshift, or at least slow down. She has no idea.
Suddenly, something pounds down on the roof above her. It has to be the Ghoul. Lily leans to the right to make herself short just in time to avoid the machete blade as it punches through the roof above the driver’s seat. The very tip digs into her hip and she squeals and jerks the steering wheel. The truck swerves sharply to the left and the monster thumps along the roof to the right side of the cab, where he appears in the passenger window, clinging to the side mirror so he isn’t thrown from the vehicle. “Fresh meat!”
“Fuck you!” Lily screams. The monster punches through the glass in one shot, then reaches for her head. She pushes the machete blade out of the way as she bobs back to an upright position and the Ghoul’s gauntlet slips through her long hair without getting a grip. She glances through the windshield and screams. All she sees ahead is the reflective shine of a guardrail in the headlights, and the empty black of the night sky beyond.
Lily grabs the wheel as the truck barrels through the steel barrier and goes airborne. She is blind and weightless in the dark, with no way to tell if the ground is a few feet below the wheels, or hundreds of feet down, waiting to kiss her pulverized body as she slams into an instant and fiery death.
INT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - DEN - NIGHT
“Gavin won’t pay any attention to me,” Summer whines into Jenny’s ear. Jenny could not possibly care less right now. She has a comfy spot on her favorite couch in the den. She has Rihanna’s Work (Derp Derp Derp Derp) cranked on the stereo. She has the world’s best boyfriend as a backrest. Summer’s problems are the last thing from her mind.