Roughhouse

by Dan Cummings

  Frogmore had stopped moving, his slender muscles still locked and ready to twitch at a moment’s notice, but he spectated the feral youth with a deep wisdom. Staubach drooped down to his knees, a trail of slobber beginning to hang from his chin.

  Frogmore wasn’t sure if the lame-brained animal could still understand his words but decided to give his message anyway, hoping they might be the final words he ever understood, whirling the dark fathomless void of his burnt-out mind along with his consciousness. ‘It’s a game of chance. For all of the mad doctor’s good work, the odds of a Playmate answering your call are slim to none.’

  Staubach looked confused, the briefest flicker of panic and bewilderment taking root behind his washed-out gaze. He started to giggle like a loon, the gun falling from his twitching hand as his other tried to push away some unseen interloper. The sniggering gave way to a spine-tingling shriek. Still on his knees, he trampled along in a fashion which might have seemed funny under different circumstances; as it was it just looked pitiful. Trying to run away on his knees he didn’t get far, thrashing his arms behind him to strike at something, pleading with things unseen to leave him alone. His fight slowly died out, his pupils constricting into pinheads in a dummy’s eyes. The occasional whimper and spasmodic shunt continued, however. Frogmore turned his back to the terminally brain-damaged man, and almost sighed as he looked at Neil and Lindsey, standing close together, holding hands and shaking.

  Neil appeared to reach some drawn-out internal conclusion and took aim, clenching his jaw and swallowing his fear. It was all posture, he knew. Staubach had experience with firearms, as did that whole houseful of scumbags, and all they could hit was furniture and each other. He let the gun fall to his side again. ‘Let Sam go. It’ll be just you and me. Best friends,’ Neil sobbed, the weight of current events demolishing everything he held dear, ‘I promise.’

  Expectations were flipped on their heads as Frogmore seemed too drained to comment, doubt or rejoice. Instead he simply seemed to shrink into himself. ‘How did I allow it to get so bad? My rash actions cost me an easy ride with you. That’s my fault, Neil. But if only you weren’t so squeamish. It would have been so much easier if somebody like your nemesis over there got hitched to me instead. Imagine the chaos that could have wrought. The best I can do is hop around with the Lily Pad, stare in from the outside at my realm. But I guess beggars can’t be choosers. I’m stuck with you, Neil, in this delightful world. You’re all I have, so of course I’d kill for you. I’d do whatever it takes to keep us together.’

  Neil hung his head. ‘That’s not friendship, Froggy. You accused me of using you…you’ve been doing the exact same thing. Obsession can deceive us into thinking it’s something more pure, friendship? Love? But it’s just weakness and fear in disguise. All this death just because you have never learned any other way to exist in this world.’

  ‘There is no other way for my kind to exist. It’s our nature.’

  ‘Fine, you return Sam and I’ll leave this place with you. I’ll keep you company. We’ll find another Lily Pad, somewhere far away from all this damage. Away from the people I care about. Another country if need be.’

  Lindsey was waiting for some type of signal or plan, a way to assure her that this was all a ruse to come out on top but Neil appeared to be sincerely broken. The air began to ripple, slowly at first, building into a whirlpool, blurring the ether, as several more of the glowing spores escaped from that mysterious conduit and joined the others. Frogmore wandered inside, vanishing, then quickly returned, guiding Sam out without need for hostility or roughness. Sam staggered out mesmerised, glancing around the pond like he had just come back from outer space. He quickly embraced Neil and Lindsey in a group hug. The whirlpool continued to revolve, the tunnel beckoning.

  ‘Neil, shoot him,’ Lindsey muttered with alarm, their heads close together.

  ‘I won’t hit him, and he’ll just kill you two,’ he admitted with tears in his eyes. ‘There’s no fighting him. I have to go.’

  ‘You can’t be serious…’ Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You talking about going in there? How long? We can make a run for it, we can get you your old medication. It blocked him out last time.’

  Lindsey nodded like there was a loose spring in her neck.

  A brave smile pushed through Neil’s fear, the look of bittersweet memories. ‘Didn’t anybody tell you drugs are gateways to worse things?’ Sam didn’t even smirk at the woeful levity, he was too worried about his best friend’s expression. ‘I’m proud of you, Sam. You’ve got the potential to go far. Don’t waste it.’ Neil hugged him, feeling a heart-wrenching tug.

  ‘Neil, please, don’t go with him.’

  Neil patted him on the shoulder and turned to Lindsey before he lost his nerve. ‘Our time was too short. I think I was starting to fall in love with you.’

  Lindsey’s lip trembled. ‘Me too. Please,’ she sobbed, ‘there has to be another way?’

  Frogmore continued to watch them patiently, relishing the necessity of his selfish action.

  ‘We’ll never get away. He’ll catch us and kill you. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a haze of drugs to keep that bastard from walking this place.’ He kissed her softly but passionately, not wanting their lips to break away. But they had to. A tear tickled his cheek and Lindsey dabbed it with her finger, wanting to keep some part of him no matter how transient. These were the last two people he had in his life. Memories of his parents spun in his head, a tapestry of fresh pain searing in his chest. Their endless support and encouraging smiles, the insulating bubble of safety they had offered him. He didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. All he had to hold on to was the hope that they didn’t suffer. ‘Take care, I love the both of you.’

  The pair tried to hold on to Neil, but he gently shrugged off the restraints and moved towards the quiescent Frogmore. ‘I’m ready,’ he sniffled, not daring to look back at Sam and Lindsey for fear of doing something stupid which could get them hurt or worse. Something seemed off with the frog. His colour had paled some, the rich pigmentation of his face, throat and belly slowly leaking into an almost albino flush. ‘What’s—’ Neil started to ask, when Frogmore almost fainted, his hat tipping onto the grass.

  The doorway trickled out of existence. ‘It can’t be.’ Frogmore’s voice was as weak as he looked.

  Over in the dark periphery of the lights, Staubach had regained some vigour. He was still stir crazy, cackling at nothing and physically enfeebled yet he seemed to direct his joy towards Frogmore. ‘My other friends left,’ he giggled like a stoned child, ‘they said one was good company. Two’s a crowd.’ He let loose a long wet laugh, then his adoring eyes became magnetised on Frogmore. ‘You’re my friend too, now. Right?’

  Neil looked stunned, unsure of how to take this. Was this shared bond somehow leaching the life force from Frogmore? Would it kill him? Frogmore was crouching down again in the amphibian’s natural pose, but with great difficulty he looked to be crawling towards Staubach. To kill him? Frogmore’s actions lacked pace and finesse.

  ‘Shoot him!’ a voice cried with desperation behind him. It was a mingled chorus of Sam and Lindsey.

  ‘Idiot,’ Frogmore called over to the giggling mess with a gasp of exertion. ‘I can’t be your friend too. I won’t. You’re sapping my energy.’

  Pointing the gun at Frogmore’s tweed-coated back, Neil found it curious that he still lacked that urge of red and black rage to finish this creature, this ill-begotten parasite of a friend. The barrel wavered. Frogmore seemed to sense Neil’s motivation and awkwardly looked over his shoulder at him, his large right eye diminished of its righteous cruelty, leaving only a blubbery apology in its wake. Frogmore nodded softly, knowing what was coming, what had to happen. The blue lights had started to vanish slowly, fading out like blue ethereal fireflies.

  Will this kill me too? Neil thought. He clenched his eyes shut and put two rounds into Frogmore’s wide back, small geysers of red an
d green goo erupting outwards. Frogmore’s outstretched hand abandoned its quest to silence Staubach and the pale frog lay dying on his left flank. The hand reached up again, this time for Neil but whether it was for gratitude, mercy or hatred Neil didn’t know. He just watched that bleached web of digits strain for his touch, a final comfort.

  Neil thought of Matt and his parents.

  And put a bullet straight through Frogmore’s right eye in a burst of fluid. Staubach wailed in discontent, mortified that his special little friend had just been taken away from his feverish playtime. Neil dropped the gun, grabbed Frogmore by the ankles, and dragged him to the water’s edge. With one final moment of — respect was too strong a word, pity maybe — he pushed him off into the still body of the pond. The Escalade’s headlights framed his floating passage like a bridge of light, a battery powered Viking funeral. In the middle of the deep body of water, Frogmore’s bullet wounds absorbed enough brackish liquid to pull him into the turbid depths of vine-meshed darkness.

  Lindsey and Sam practically tackled Neil, almost carrying them all into the water. They stayed there at the edge for a long moment, basking in the finality and relief of this horrendous episode in their blossoming lives. The unmistakable scent of wood smoke wafted to them on a dark breeze, a mysterious portent from an indeterminable direction. Sniffing the air, they were about to voice their curiosity when a calamitous explosion rocked the still night, sending a bone quaking fright through each of them. Staubach giggled like creaking, hot timbers in the wake of the boom. The charcoal cloud bellies flashed red and gold above the tree tops. Grainger’s den of dirty deeds was being returned to hell. Their mouths were fixed in circles of puzzlement like gawping fish. The noise of another motor murmured somewhere off to their left. It was a car, taking a winding route through another dirt access road from Grainger’s burning plot of corruption. The three of them were preparing to race for the safety of the Cadillac, any sense of well-being shattered.

  ‘Wait!’ the driver called out from his open window. The voice seemed to ring a bell but the clang was lost somewhere in the corridors of stress and trauma for any of them to identify. All they could make out was headlights. ‘Karp! Sam!’

  ‘Dodd?’ Sam asked, still in a facsimile of a sprinter’s pose and ready to shift it.

  The car stopped twenty feet away, perhaps to avoid any unintentional intimidation. Dodd jumped out, sheepish and whipped as normal but empty-handed. ‘Karp.’ Dodd walked over with his hands out. ‘I don’t know what you heard, but your mom and pop are fine.’ Dodd only just appeared to notice the gun in Neil’s hand and shied away. ‘I promise, I didn’t do it. They wanted me to burn your house down.’ He gestured towards the conflagration beyond the wall of trees, ‘I found a better use for the gas.’

  Neil felt like he could breathe again, unrestricted. He tried to process the torrent of joy and glory which was surging through him but knew that such a powerful feeling was too broad to understand in such a short space of time.

  An inane chuckle came from off in the darkness, behind the Escalade.

  ‘That Shit Storm?’ Dodd asked, his face lifeless. No one answered. ‘That’s why I’m here. I heard the shots from Grainger’s. Figured it was that bastard.’ Dodd stared into the stitches around Neil’s eye then back to the unintelligible layers of shadow hiding the laughing form. ‘There’s something else I need to do.’ He kept one hand held out in a gesture of peace as his right hand pulled out a Beretta M9 semi-automatic. ‘Please, I know I don’t deserve anything from you. I’m nothing but a coward, that’s what my old man always said. But I took this from his collection—’ he showed the military sidearm again, ‘—like the one he had in the service. Maybe there’s something I can do to help make this right.’ He turned away from them with a sad smile and left the crossing intersection of headlights, walking stoop-shouldered into the darkness, towards the giggling. After ten steps he glanced over his shoulder. ‘You guys should get out of here.’ Without waiting for a response, he continued forth.

  Neil, Sam and Lindsey watched his silhouette get swallowed by the night then hurried to the Escalade. Bringing the engine to life, Neil spun the wheel and put his foot down, carrying them away from all of this. The rear view mirror reflected nothing but the black featureless field and the shrinking trees sprinkled with glittering bronze light. A brief flash of light broke the darkness, collecting the damaged soul of Russel “Shit Storm” Staubach. After a few seconds of unbroken silence within the car, a second gunshot scared off the darkness for another all too brief moment.

  Lindsey looked at Sam sprawled across the backseat like a sailor shipwrecked on a dark and hostile shore. ‘You okay Sam?’

  Sam took a moment to answer that before blurting out a choked laugh which found its rhythm, becoming a high joyous celebration of gallows humour. ‘I suppose it’s too late to go back for my pinkie.’ It took a long moment but Lindsey snickered, her eyes wet in the gloom, joining Sam in an exorcism of their terror and the triumph of their survival. When they both got themselves under control, they noticed that Neil had grown quiet and distant.

  ‘Neil?’ Lindsey touched his shoulder.

  ‘How much Fable do you think was in the lab?’ He took his eyes off the road and searched her bright gaze, spotting a small fissure of fear crack open. ‘You think the wind will carry the smoke far?’

  Lindsey tried to wall up her panic, ‘The heat will probably burn up the chemical. Destroy it.’ Neil still hadn’t returned his attention to the dark field before him, he was treading water in the brown depths of her irises, needing an assurance that this horror story ended with a period and not a question mark. She gave him a confident and wise nod and then gestured to the approaching tangles of wood, sap and shadow rearing up to claim them.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Neil agreed, but his nod lacked conviction. The prospect of having to bury a friend, once the police found Matt’s body, dug into his fragile thoughts like a grave digger’s shovel. ‘We owe Matt a good send off.’

  A muffled sob blended into wet words from the back seat, carried on a rueful smile, ‘Damn right. We always bought the beer anyway, it’ll be like old times.’ Sam glanced at his throbbing stump, grateful for the darkness and pain numbing shock. ‘Except, I guess my rolling days are over for a while.’

  Neil choked back a hot, dry lump of grief, hiding behind a brave smile. ‘Didn’t anybody ever tell you drugs are bad for your health?’

  Tired and pained, Neil guided them the rest of the way to civilization and safety in silence, knowing that they had a wealth of trauma to work through of the body, mind and soul. There was nobody else to corroborate these unlikely events which had befallen them. It would be their shared dark secret, a story of violence and terror which had taken them all to the edge of the abyss. They had a lot to talk about, and a story to get straight before they got back home. They would use these events to bond them further, to lean on each other and offer strength. At least that was their unspoken plan. Neil knew dark secrets, when not confronted, had a way of floating back to the surface of even the deepest water. But not anymore.

  He drove towards his future, leaving Rawlins Pond far behind him.