“End of the line,” Ziggy said. “Nowheresville, USA.”
Josh felt a pain in his stomach—a knot of tension. “You know, you’d think I’d be smart enough to fill-up with gas at a gas station.”
“I didn’t think it was near empty,” Griff said. “I’m almost positive we had half a tank left.”
“Almost,” Tammy said, somewhat archly.
Bronwyn said, “It’s nearly six. I wonder what time it’ll get dark.”
“We’ve got food in the back,” Griff said. “We still have the cooler full of beer, too.”
“And a mummified body stolen from a gas station,” Josh said. “Or did you forget that? Will the beer taste better with a little corpse on it?” Then, he slapped his forehead. “Christ Almighty! My dad told me to get a CB radio in case I ever got stuck somewhere. He told me. He said, ‘Josh, you never know when the car’s going to break down.’ He doesn’t really give a flyer about me most of the time, but this was one of those few times when he did,” Josh said, slowly, softly. “I’m so stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”
“I wonder if the guy at the Brakedown Palace is calling the cops,” Ziggy said. “We stole his big attraction.”
“That piece of crap?” Griff snorted. “He’ll dig up another corpse in some old Indian graveyard around here. And then he’ll have a whole new pile of bullshit to sell.”
Somewhere nearby, in some dark, nearly airless place, a breath was exhaled, and motes of dust and nearly microscopic bits of bone coughed from a jaw that had not opened in a long, long time.
They made a fire in the dirt. Bronwyn’s lighter had come in handy. Josh and Griff gathered some slender sticks of wood for kindling, and then a larger piece of some dried-up gray wood that burned really well. They spread a couple of thin cotton blankets out on the ground, and spent some time making sure there weren’t any creepy-crawlies nearby.
They passed around the contents of the bag of junk food that Bronwyn had bought at the Brakedown Palace. The passed around gas station sandwiches, Tastee-Cakes, and a couple of warm Cokes like it was Holy Communion.
The beer was cool, and they each got a can, and suddenly, as the sun went down in a blaze of pink and gold glory, Josh felt pretty good.
“This is an adventure,” he said, leaning back against Bronwyn’s knees.
“Some adventure,” she said.
“Nope, he’s right,” Griff said. “My uncle told me to have a lot of adventures in college. This could be cool.”
“When we’re completely dried up and burning up in the sun, we won’t call this an adventure,” Bronwyn said. “We’ll call it the last day of our life. And I’m never making it to L.A. I can tell you that.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Tammy asked. “We’re not in any real trouble here. I don’t think.”
Bronwyn shrugged. “Okay. I guess I was exaggerating. I have three packs of Merits left, so I’ll live.”
“Until the cigs kill you,” Griff said.
“Years from now I’ll regret smoking. But right now, I regret nothing, as they say.”
Ziggy kept looking out in the purple darkness. “I wonder if there are wolves.”
“There aren’t wolves,” Josh said. “I don’t think. Maybe coyotes. But we don’t have to worry about them.”
“Yeah, coyotes, rattlesnakes, big black scorpions the size of my wang,” Griff said.
Josh made a sound in the back of his throat.
Griff shot him a look. “Yeah?”
“Your wang always seems to come up, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Griff grinned. “He needs a breath of fresh air now and then.”
“Yuck,” Bronwyn coughed.
Tammy laughed. “Oh, good grief, get a sense of humor you guys. Hey, this is like girl scout camp.”
“Time to make a few brownies, then,” Griff said, heading off into the darkness to do his business.
Bron and Josh both groaned at his gross joke.
“Damn, that reminds me,” Bronwyn said. “Anybody bring toilet paper?”
“I have a ton of tissues in my backpack,” Tammy said. “In the trunk.”
“Good. I hope it’s a ton that will last all of us through tomorrow. Damn. I wonder how far it is to the nearest town.”
“Hey!” Josh said, leaning forward and sitting up. “Naga. That was the name of the town. We can’t be more than, I don’t know. Ten, fifteen miles. It was on the map.”
“The map you lost?”
“I didn’t lose it. It fell out of my back pocket. I guess when I fell on that little bastard,” he grinned, glancing at Ziggy who kept his eyes on the fire.
“If this town is that close, why can’t we see it?” Griff asked. “I mean, I don’t see lights anywhere out there.”
“I bet it’s north of here. I bet we’re south of where we thought we were. I bet it’s over those hills,” Josh pointed up to the ridge of hills that seemed to have an aura of indigo against the ever dimming sky.
“Maybe other cars will come by. Or truckers.”
“Like Ely,” Bronwyn said, remembering the truckdriver who’d given them a lift.
“Yeah, you guys were lucky. He was cute,” Tammy said.
“He was not cute,” Griff said, coming back into the campfire circle. “He was a redneck.”
“I hope you washed your hands,” Tammy said.
“With sand,” Griff grinned.
“Nope, Ely is high on the lustometer,” Bronwyn said.
“God, I’m all out of brewsky,” Griff finished the last of his beer.
“Lustometer?”
“Yep. Some guys are high on it.”
“You got some weed to share, Zig?” Griff asked.
“I thought we said no pot,” Josh said.
“Ziggy broke that rule at least two thousand miles ago. I bet you scored some in El Paso. Did you Zig?”
Ziggy grinned. “Maybe. Maybe in Oklahoma.”
“Oklahoma? They grow weed in Oklahoma?”
“Maybe somewhere along the road. We stopped in a lot of places. I ain’t sayin’.”
“I knew it!” Griff laughed, clapping his hands together. “Come on. We’re all screwed here. Might as well enjoy it.”
“I’m not into grass,” Josh said.
“Tight-ass,” Griff said.
“You don’t have to smoke it,” Bronwyn said. “Just make sure none of us gets too happy.”
And then, they all got high. Josh eventually joined in, and kept saying, “I don’t think this is right. I’m only doing it because of peer pressure,” and he felt guilty about smoking dope and wondered if the cops were going to descend and arrest them all.
“I got a joke,” Griff said. “Here’s how it goes.”
“You’re awful with jokes!” Bronwyn shouted out.
“He’s great at telling jokes. I love his jokes,” Tammy said. “Tell it. Tell a good one, Griff.”
“Okay. It is really, really good.”
“So you say,” Josh said.
“Okay. This guy goes into a restaurant. And the waitress who is this hot little number with big tits and this great ass, says, ‘What can I get you?’ And the guy says, ‘How about a quickie?’ And the waitress says, ‘You don’t mean that. You mean— ”
Josh laughed, clapping his hand. “You’re telling it all wrong. You’re gonna give away the punchline.”
Griff laughed. “Shit. Maybe I remembered it wrong.”
“Okay, it’s a stupid joke. It’s really stupid,” Josh said.
“Just let him tell it,” Tammy said.
“No, I probably ruined it. You tell it,” Griff said to Josh.
“Okay. But it’s bad. Remember. It’s bad and it’s stupid. Okay. A guy walks into a restaurant. He sits down. The waitress comes over and says, ‘What’re you having?’ and he says, ‘how about a quickie?’ And the waitress slaps him. Then she says, ‘So tell me what you want, and none of this fresh stuff,’ and he says, ‘Well, I really want a quickie. I’ve never had one,’ and
she slaps him again and stomps off. And the guy across from him, he’s been watching this and he leans over and says to the guy, ‘it’s pronounced quiche.’”
No one laughed.
“I told you it was bad.”
“Man, you cannot tell a joke!” Griff laughed. “Man, you just can’t.” And he started butchering yet another joke.
And then, sometime around midnight, after they’d laughed at several nearly non-existent jokes, and the girls had gotten them singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and “Kumbaya,” and then, “Let It Be,” Ziggy passed out on the blanket in front of the fire, and Bronwyn began talking about her plans for the future, while Griff and Tammy went off into the darkness in their too-often mating ritual.
Josh, less stoned than the others, heard the noise from the car, first.
“What was that?”
“What?” Bronwyn asked, sleepily, her eyes barely fluttering open.
“That noise.”
“Probably a coyote. Don’t worry,” she said. “They don’t get close to the fire.”
“That was not a coyote,” Josh said.
Then, the noise got louder.
“That’s metal.”
She sat up on her elbows. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something kinky that Griff and Tammy are doing.”
“That was the scrape of metal, Bron. It came from over there.” Josh pointed toward the Pimpmobile. Then, he noticed just how far away they were from the road. To get to the car would take more than a minute. For some reason, this bothered him. It wasn’t exactly a quarter mile away, but the car was far enough off in the darkness that it bothered him.
As if he had never been passed out at all, Ziggy sat straight up so fast that it freaked Josh out.
“It’s that little bastard.”
“What?”
“Ziggy, don’t be silly,” Bronwyn said. “You’re high. We’re all a little stoned.”
“Maybe,” Josh said, weighing this as a possibility. He sniffed the air. It had a curious mix of the dusty road and mesquite to it. But there was something else. Something that reminded him of a church smell. He wasn’t sure what that was, but he assumed it was in his head. All of it, in his head.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Bronwyn said. But she said it as if she were trying to deny something even to herself. “I mean, I heard something. Just not something that seemed strange. I bet it’s because those two are going at it. They’re probably breaking the seats. They’re going at it in your car.”
“I don’t think so,” Ziggy said. “It’s that little bastard. That’s what it is. It’s that little rat bastard.”
Bronwyn pulled her knees into her chest and looked at the fire. She puffed away at her cigarette, and didn’t seem bothered by the noise. It’s because she doesn’t want to think about them, Josh thought. She doesn’t want to think about Griff screwing Tammy. She loves Griff. There’s no way around this. He hits girls. He’s stupid. But he looks good and girls want that. They want to feel they got the football hero. They want to feel like they won some prize. Just like guys want pretty girls, no matter what the girl is on the inside.
She’s never going to look at me the way she looks at him. And he’s a complete jerk. But she doesn’t notice that. She just knows she wants him.
He scootched over in the dirt, and sat next to her, crossing his legs in front of him. “You okay?” he asked.
She shrugged, holding her cigarette aloft as if she could write in the sky with it. “Life just sucks, that’s all.”
“I’m here,” he said, looking at her, trying to make her see him. Really see him.
She turned her face toward him, and had an inscrutable look. “Don’t cozy up to me if you just want something from me.”
Ziggy pushed himself up from the rock on the other side of the fire. He stood there, beyond the crackling flame, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “What if it’s all true? What if we brought that thing to life?” He balanced his weight on one foot and then another, and looked toward the car nervously. “It’s dark over there. I can’t see anything. But I heard that.”
“Sit down, Zig,” Bronwyn said. “It’s okay. You’re freaking me out. Just calm down, have a smoke or something. I promise you that Scratchy-poo isn’t coming out of that trunk.”
Josh laughed. “Scratchy-poo.”
“Scratchy-poo,” Ziggy repeated, but didn’t laugh. He just kept watch in the direction of the car. “You know, I heard that sometimes these things have special powers. I mean, there are stones in England that Druids put together and they have ceremonies there still. And there’s a place in France where there are these caves and they found these bones. It was some ancient religious thing. And I saw on National Geographic about this temple in India where there’s this cult—”
“Zig,” Bronwyn said. “What’s your point?”
He looked at her, and the flickering from the firelight cast his face in a brilliant yellow and red shadow. “People believe in things. They do. And maybe if they believe in them bad enough, maybe those things can be real when they don’t seem like they should.”
“We should never have dragged you to Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Halloween,” she said. Turning to Josh, “He screamed like a baby the whole time.”
“You never know what stuff is like until it happens to you,” Ziggy said. “You never know. People go missing all the time. Bad things happen to people and no one can explain them. I heard in Oregon that two kids got lost in the woods and got torn up, and they thought it was a tiger only no one could see how tigers could be in Oregon.”
Bronwyn raised her hand. “Oh, pick me. I know! I know!”
Josh cracked up, laughing.
“What’s so funny? It happened. They said the woods were cursed. They got torn up,” Ziggy said.
“Zig, it was because of marijuana farms. That same weed you smoke doesn’t come from nice Midwestern farmers. Some of them use tigers and mountain lions on their property to scare off—or kill—intruders.”
Ziggy looked at the joint in his hand.
“What, you think the marijuana is grown by Old MacDonald? That the Feds don’t raid the plantations in Hawaii and the Northwest? That nice people run them and everybody’s stoned and happy? They’re drug lords, Zig. You smoke that stuff—hell, so do I now and then—and we’re ultimately supporting people who would be happy to cut our throats if we stole an ounce of their stash. I know about those kids. I read about it. They were hiking where they shouldn’t have gone hiking,” she said.
“You know everything, don’t you?” Ziggy said, an edge to his voice that wasn’t quite sarcasm but was close to it. “You know everything. Well, maybe we’ve gone where we shouldn’t go hiking. I saw that thing. It’s a sacred relic. I believe someone at that gas station stole it from where it was meant to rest. It’s from some old religion that we can’t even begin to understand. I believe people used to believe in it. And they died because of it. They laid down their lives in sacrifice. It freaks me out. It does. I think we’re like those kids in the woods, off the path. And that thing is a tiger. Maybe a sleeping tiger. But sleeping tigers wake up. And when they wake up, they get hungry.”
“Sit down,” Bronwyn said. “It’s the two sex fiends doing the nasty in the Pimpmobile.”
Griff and Tammy hadn’t made their way to the car until after they’d been up against a big flat rock that they’d stumbled across in the dark. Griff had his shirt off fast, and then was unbuttoning his shorts, which dropped to his ankles and he did what Tammy called his “penguin walk” over to her and nearly tore her top off to get to her breasts. Their lips locked, with tongues tickling, and Tammy kept whispering things to him when they weren’t kissing, and it all turned him on more. She had left the condoms in the backseat of the Pimpmobile, and so she had to disengage. “I’m all dirty,” she said.
“I feel that way, too,” he said, grabbing around her back to keep his fingers on the nipples of delight, but she peeled his fingers back.
Tammy jogged to the car, opening the back door. “My bag is in here somewhere. We just used them last night. Where’d I put those Trojans?” She kneeled on the seat, bending over to check the floor for her handbag.
“Maybe it’s in the back,” he said.
“The trunk?” she said. “Oh, maybe. Go pop it for me,okay?”
He wanted to pop more than the trunk, but he went around to the driver’s side, opened the door and found what he hoped was the lever for the trunk.
It popped open slightly.
“I’ll look,” he said. He shut the door and went around to the back of the car and lifted the trunk up.
The light hadn’t come on in the trunk, so he rooted around in things, and threw a couple of suitcases out on the dirt. He reached into a pile of clothes, but they felt funny. He wondered why they felt so ragged.
Then, he felt the top of Scratch’s head.
He nearly jumped when he felt it. It was bumpy, but he knew he was touching bone. He laughed to himself at the slight chill he got from the contact. It was kind of gross having a dead little guy in the back even if it was about five hundred years old.
Then, he thought he found Tammy’s little round suitcase, and as he reached for it, something grabbed him by the wrist.
It wasn’t just a grab. It felt like razors on his skin.
For just a moment he thought he’d stuck his hand into one of the other guys’ shaving kit, and somehow, someway their razor blades were all laying in a circle, like a bracelet on his wrist.
Then he felt a pain that shot from his hand up his elbow and finally ended at his jaw.
Something had scraped skin off his wrist.
He tried to bring his hand out, but whatever had it, gripped it tight. It was like a bear trap on his wrist. His mind wasn’t working right as he tried to see in the dark, among the piles of crap. Then, the razors dug deeper and he screeched.
Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror) Page 21