by Brian Hodge
"Is everyone safe?" Denny hollered at her. But she was too terrified to make sense of anything, and he had to grab her by the shoulders and brace her. "Is everyone safe?"
She cried and shook her head and tried to lunge for the porch.
"Where's my father? Listen to me. Where's—"
"He must have gone inside. He was here, but he went back for something."
The words were barely out of her mouth before Denny Bryce was vaulting up the steps.
She tried to follow. Making it as far as the parlor, in fact, where the wallpaper high in the corners was starting to curl and turn brown while fire raced down the seams. The last thing she saw was the yellowed sweatshirt the younger Mr. Bryce was wearing, throbbing white against the archway as it collapsed on top of him.
Chapter 37
She didn't remember coming back outside, but she knew she was waiting to die. Only it was taking forever for the flames to reach the painting in Mr. Bryce's wardrobe.
He must be dead now, old Mr. Bryce. His son too. And where was her mother and Mr. Olson? Half in shock, her emotions hardening into the armor of aftermath, she walked slowly to Mr. Bryce's car and got in the passenger's side.
A pack of cigarettes sat unopened next to her and she focused on it as if it had profound implications. Did Mr. Bryce smoke? The question hung sealed up in her wounded mind like the cigarettes sealed in the pack and the people sealed in the house and her portrait sealed in the wardrobe, and it suddenly slipped into her mind without a breath of emotion that the metal wardrobe might somehow be protecting her picture, even though the house must be hot enough to melt it.
Casually she got out of the car and casually she walked toward the back of the house again, pausing for a moment in the relatively cool shade that the basswood provided where it eclipsed the conflagration of the house. But the top of the tree was already on fire, and burnt leaves and flaming twigs were drifting down. She moved away. She continued toward the back of the house, and when she reached the windows she had broken, she saw it.
At first she thought it was a piece of uncharred debris from the roof, but no, it was a picture frame. And as she sprang forward, she knew already that it was hers—her image, her salvation, her life—lying facedown where old Mr. Bryce must have thrown it out the broken window. He had saved her, saved her for real this time – his “Tiffany.” But why hadn't he saved himself? The house was collapsing in showers of cinders that drove her back, and there was no way he could be alive now. Why hadn't he just fallen out the window or something? He had wanted to die, but to just give up like that, like he was too tired to care …
She was standing far enough away from the house so that the heat no longer blistered against her skin, and she turned the picture frame over and gazed at the likeness her mother had painted. She didn't understand how people could not want to live. The Taron pygmies or the other residents or Mr. Bryce. She was going to live, and not just an ordinary life either. Because she was the daughter of a painter, and she was going to become a painter. Then she would paint a world around her to her liking. Maybe she would bring back Sir Aarfie, and maybe the Taron pygmies, and certainly she would bring back her mother. Give her another chance. But she would have to do it in a way that her mother couldn't be in control. Amber Leppa was going to be in control.
The firemen found her like that, standing in a rain of white ashes drifting down like lost souls or feathers from the moon. A portfolio bag hung from her shoulder, which she would not relinquish to anyone. The only other thing standing was a blackened lightning rod sprouting from the earth, as if it were trying to touch the finger of God.
THE WEIRD ONES
By Steve Vernon
Dedication
It takes a lot
Table of Contents
Plague Monkey Spam
Gnarly Ho-Tep Hoedown Two-step
Hunger Time at the Midnight Mall
The Last Curl of Gut Rope
Afterword
Plague Monkey Spam
* 1 *
A man can find god in the damnedest of places. There's just no telling how an epiphany will play itself out.
There's an order to life, and it runs like this. Hum along if you don't know the words. Sometimes things happen because you make them happen. That's called karma and it is the favorite four-star rated, two thumbs up, sundae topping of choice for any god you care to mention. The gods invented karma for its stickiness. It clings to you like freshly flung monkey dung. On the other hand, sometimes things just happen for no particular reason at all. That's called life – a process of dumb-fuck-luck that starts and ends like any other story.
Bobby Kaye's life story ended and started with an e-mail from hell.
Hello good friend. In all heart I write to you, offering you this chance in one of your lifetimes. E-mail me here, at hanuman.org/con for an opportunity your eyes will fall out to believe. Drugs, all kinds, you will want everything. Gods will it, sending soon. All you have to do is ask.
ARdeth99.
"Damn!" Bobby swore. "There it goes again."
"What's wrong, honey?" Maggie answered.
Bobby looked up. Maggie stood there in the doorway of his home office, wearing her blue flannel bathrobe and the pair of fuzzy gray monkey slippers he'd given her for her last birthday.
"Have you broken another keyboard?" she asked. "It would serve you right for monkeying around with that old computer of yours before even saying good morning to your loving wife."
Her smile hung just a little off center, like her sense of humor. Bobby smiled back. Her grin was that contagious and he never wanted to find himself a cure.
"It's just this damned spam," he said, pointing at the screen. "It doesn't even make sense. Look, here's another one."
He read the second spam out loud to her.
"Hello good friend. It may be of surprise to see me writing two you, I em Prince Wakanda Nazerie of Nigeria, and I and my family of fifty eight apostle raised children and..."
It went on and on for some time but the gist of it was fairly predictable. Send money. Send a bank account number. Send the name of your first born. Prepare to make sacrifice.
"See what I mean? It's always the same sort of thing. Either a sales pitch or a heartfelt plea from his royal fecundity Prince Wakanda of Nigeria asking for my bank account number." Bobby rolled his eyes. "Fifty eight kids? What kind of Viagra do you think he takes and what website does he order it from?"
Maggie laughed. She always laughed at Bobby's jokes. She swore that he had subliminally imbedded the habit within her genetic make-up as a part of their wedding vows, and Bobby never argued. If something wasn't broke, why the fuck would you want to try and fix it?
"The web is a scary place," Maggie said. "I wish you didn't have to hang around it so much."
"Scary for sure. It's way scarier than zombies and witches and reanimated buffalo. It's scary like cell telephones, the way it connects us all, like we're all just dancing in some mad spider's mucilage snare." Bobby raised his voice to a Vincent Price - Mickey Mouse castrato. "Help me, help me."
Maggie shook her head. "Shouldn't you be writing this down?"
"I'll let your memory capture it for me. In later years when I've gone to that old writer's home in the sky to creak in my haunted rocker right next to HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Hisownself Poe, you can repeat my wisdom for generations to come."
"Suppose I'm dead by then?"
"Impossible. You are my young trophy wife. It is your destiny to be my memory, thesaurus, and bearer of piping hot caffeine."
Maggie laughed and Bobby laughed along, and Maggie laughed harder in a perfect loop. If God was looking down he should record it and file it under good things that he had created, as far as Bobby was concerned.
"It's just this spam. I keep thinking that it has to mean something."
"It sounds like a conspiracy to me," Maggie said, arching her eyebrows in a perfect Groucho Marx brow-waggle. "Somebody better alert Mulder and Scully."
Bobby stared at the spam, lying there flat and plain on his screen. He couldn't let go of his irritation anymore than a fat bearded lady could let go of her last candy frosted sticky bun.
It just stayed stuck.
"It makes me angry, is all."
"Maybe it's time to get a brand new computer," Maggie suggested. "With a great big firewall. You could leave it in its packing box and not even plug it in. Then you'd be sure of never getting any spam."
Bobby made a face. "Have I ever told you how much I appreciate you razor keen sense of sarcasm? Remind me to rub a little lemon juice into the paper cuts you've carved onto my delicate psyche."
"You do need a new computer," Maggie pointed out.
She was right. He needed a new computer but evolution scared the hell out of him. He'd written for so long with pen and ink and then with an old Brother typewriter. When he finally broke down and bought himself a real honest-to-Bill-Gates computer he grew unnaturally attached to the thing. It became a kind of good luck charm, and even though it was now sadly obsolete he believed in that good luck so much that he couldn't imagine replacing the old beast. He wasn't up for the sacrifice such a revolution would entail.
Still, the old machine was dying. Every day it worked a little slower. Just last week Maggie warned him that the computer was degrading.
"I'm a writer," he had told her. "I'm used to degradation."
"Poor baby," Maggie had said. "Am I that hard on you?"
"Do you know how often and in how many different ways your mother asks me when I'm going to give up this writing foolishness and get myself a real job?" I asked.
"I've never heard either of my parents say any such thing."
"Your mother never says anything directly. She's like advertising - subliminal, downright insidious, only worse. She gets in and around the cracks in a man, kind of like mildew."
"Face it Bobby, you're about as cracked as they came. You just plain hate change."
"That's not true. I'm incredibly flexible."
"Ha!" Maggie pointed around the room. "You packrat your manuscripts in a filing cabinet that'd take Godzilla, a case of industrial strength steroids, a half a hundred hernia and a nuclear-powered Jesse James pimped-up forklift to move. You single handedly generate enough paper to feed a platoon of hungry mutant wasps. Your paperbacks are double stacked on every bookshelf in the house - and that cobweb," She said, pointing up at the ceiling lamp. "How long are you going to leave that hanging there?"
Bobby looked up to the veil of cobweb that was tented across his ceiling lamp.
"I've left that broom down here, hoping you'd get the hint," Maggie pointed at the broom lying beside his desk. There were cobwebs around the broom, as well. Bobby hoped she didn't notice.
So he shrugged to camouflage the clutter. "I haven't the heart to sweep it."
"Why not?"
"My Welsh grandfather told me that spiders and cobwebs brought good luck. I believed him. Writers need that kind of faith."
It was a good try, but mostly pure bullshit. The most that Bobby's grandfather had ever said to him amounted to "Bring me that belt, boy." followed closely by "Bend over and catch hold of your toes. I'm going to learn you your scripture, good and proper."
Maggie made the sound of an over-ripe road-killed strawberry. She wasn't buying his bullshit one damn bit.
"It's just this damned spam," Bobby went on, trying to change the subject. "It's plaguing me. Everyday there's some new variation crammed into my mailbox, and yet they're all so banal. Not one of them shows the slightest spark of creativity."
Maggie smiled at that.
"Do you really want creative spam?" she asked.
"Why not? At Cannes every year they hold a festival for the world's greatest commercials. A whole weekend of nothing but commercial watching with no television to get in the way. They sit and they watch and they select the world's top commercials and award them lions."
"They give them lions," Maggie said, with a question in her voice.
"That's right. Lions. Gold, silver and bronze lions."
"It makes sense to me," Maggie said. "Giving lions for lying, why not?"
"I'm just saying that if somebody is going to waste time printing up this sort of spam, then why not get a little creative? There are dozens of ways to say send-me-money. Why don't they find something new?"
"Perhaps you've found yourself a brand new career? Spam writer for the cyber-gods. Did you ever stop to think about that?"
She said it so seriously that Bobby had to laugh.
"I couldn't write this stuff," Bobby said. "I'm a fiction writer, I don't do ad copy," He had tried several times before, in one of his habitual let's get practical moments. "It's inevitable. Whatever I write, sooner or later I have to make up a story. I am a raconteur at heart."
Maggie laughed.
"What you are is a consummate bullshit artist, but fortunately you've figured how to make that pay."
I grinned at that.
"Is there any other kind of artist? We are nothing more than a pack of over-educated monkeys, blindly flinging our feces against the canvas of life, and calling it a masterpiece."
"I wasn't really serious," Maggie said. "But you do have a point."
"Neither was I. It just bugs me, is all."
"Honey, it is just spam. It rhymes nicely with scam and flim-flam," Maggie said. "It's just something to play on your greed."
"You'd think if this scam was that successful the con artists behind it could afford to hire an editor to proof their copy before they send it out. Jesus Christ, even Stephen King uses an editor now and then."
"Anne Rice doesn't," Maggie pointed out with an evil grin.
"Well maybe she ought to."
Writer jokes. They were the brick and mortar of Maggie and Bobby's marriage. Maggie had worked as a copy editor in a local newspaper for the last eight years. Her veins ran blue-black and gray. The two of them shared a bond of common and constant communication.
Bobby wrote horror. He'd been writing horror for the last sixteen years. It took ten years to get to the point to where he almost didn't need to worry about ever getting a "real" job. That was a good thing. Writing was a habit he just couldn't break. Every morning he woke up and tiptoed down to his basement office. He didn't stop for coffee. His writing was all the caffeine he needed.
Not that it was that bad of an addiction. With the royalties rolling in from his last three books, and an advance on a movie deal he'd lucked into, coupled with the occasional strategically timed short story and come-by-chance foreign rights deal, Bobby and Maggie had more money coming in then they needed. The fact was they couldn't spend it all if they'd tried. They were too busy being too happy living their lives.
Someone should have warned them that happiness like that can be an awfully tempting target.
* 2 *
"So what are you working on today?" Maggie asked.
"A new novella. I just hammered out a deal with Graveyard Waltz."
"That was fast."
"I'm in demand."
It was a good thing to be in demand. Bobby enjoyed being asked for his stories. It sure beat sending them out over the transom. These days there were too many publishers who were scared about accepting unagented submissions. There were far too many folks scared about opening a boxful of Anthrax and catching something worse.
"Is it going to be a good one?" she asked.
"They're all good," he told her. He was lying, of course. The last book hadn't felt all that true to him. He was pumping them out, trying to keep up with his contracts and commitments and it was beginning to show. The sales figures were still sky-rocketing, but the editors were a little less careful with his work. He was the zombie-man.
He could do no wrong.
The e-mail signal lit up.
"There's another, I bet. Another damned spam. I wonder what I did now to earn that sort of a gift?"
"Oh honey," Maggie said. "Spam like that is entirely random. A comp
uter program generates each message and shoots them off gatling gun style."
"Well why does it keep hitting on me?"
"Dumb luck?" she shrugged and laughed.
"I prefer animal attraction," Bobby said, thumping his chest with a questionable Tarzan vigor.
"So go dance the dirty boogie with a lovesick bull gorilla," Maggie joked. "Honey, it's nothing personal. They don't aim this stuff, you know?"
"Are you certain?" Bobby asked. "I am a successful horror writer, you know."
"The next Stephen King."
Maybe not that big, but Bobby was getting there. He had developed a following. He was becoming a name brand author. Folks couldn't wait for the next Bobby Kay horror novel.
It hadn't always been this way. Five years ago he'd been nothing more than one of many semi-successful small press writers hanging out on the message boards, trying to reach folks that he never saw, plugging away doggedly at story after story, hoping and praying that something would catch.
Then he got lucky. A zombie novel of his skyrocketed into minor league success. Two sequels brought the movie deal and the rest was happening right now. If Stephen King was the McDonald's of horror literature than Bobbie Kay was the Chuck E. Cheese of zombie novelists, with twice the fat count and nearly half as nourishing.
Maggie smiled. "You don't really think those spams are typed up by actual people, do you?"
"Actually, I'd always pictured a room filled with drunken giddy monkeys, shot full of crack and itching powder, hammering blindly away on a long line of computer keyboards. I r riting 2 U."
"What an imagination. You ought to give writing a try."
"Imagination?" he looked shocked. "You mean there is no Prince Wakanda of Nigeria, with eight million dollars that he's looking to deposit in my bank account?"
"Probably not," she grinned. "It's just a blind draw. Random computer generators shotgun-pumping spam out into the ether-world, one a minute every minute, twenty four hours a day. They call it blizzarding."