“One more for the freezer,” she said in a singsong manner, smiling at each of us. “Let’s get moving. No rest for the wicked.”
We hauled Tom and old man Glickman into the cellar, then went to work disassembling and stuffing all the parts into the freezer. I can’t tell you how revolting the stench was, or how much my stomach fought against me as I sliced and severed and mutilated. Brent and Shannon felt the same as me, even worse. I could tell. They kept glancing at me, at Mom, at the door. Always on the lookout for an opportunity to bolt. But that opportunity never came. Mom was right there, hovering over us, frothing at the mouth at the progress we were making.
At one point, near the end of our gruesome duty, Shannon gave us all a puzzled look.
“Isn’t this thing going to get full?” she contorted her face, staring at the freezer, its sides bloodied by the whole ordeal. “I mean, that’s, what, like fifteen bodies we’ve crammed in there…when’s it going to be enough?”
“It’ll never be enough, young lady,” Mom’s menacing tone was meant for her, but I felt it too, a coldness deep in my bones.
“That’s impossible,” she flipped open the top and looked for herself, and her eyes bulged. I didn’t want to look. Didn’t need to. I knew what was in there. Nothing but a never-ending chasm. A bottomless pit. Sure, there might have been some severed limbs lining the sides, and the way down was stained a deep, dark red. But, essentially, it lead to the depths of what could only be described as Hell, and I wanted no part in gazing into it again. Even when I was feeding the dead into it, I averted my eyes, conscious not to stare directly. But Shannon had to see, had to have proof, and it slapped her right in the face. Literally. One of the detached hands, fingers contorting into hooks, grabbed her neck and she angled down, down, down, sliding inside. She didn’t scream, though. Instead, issuing a deep breath, she pried the hand away, tossed it in, and slammed the lid closed again.
“Now do you understand?” Mom narrowed her glare at Shannon, then made it plain she was talking to us all. “This freezer will never be full. It’s insatiable. It’s ravenous. And it’s my job to make sure it gets fed,” her attention traveled to the steps leading outside. “Let’s go. We have a lot of work to do.”
She made us heave that old, demonic freezer out of Gramma’s basement. Damn thing was a lot heavier than it looked. It wasn’t that big, either. In fact, it was just the right size to fit in the back of Mom’s minivan, once she lifted the seat. Mom had a pretty nice ride, as far as minivans go. DVD players and multiple screens. GPS and heads-up displays. Heated seats all around. It even had AC power plugins. Pretty convenient. She hooked the freezer up and it started humming immediately. I didn’t like sitting in there with that thing popping and groaning behind me, but we had to. At Mom’s insistence, we all got in the van and she drove away.
3.
Mom, in her enduring and insatiable quest to feed the freezer, started trolling town. What a sight we must have been. Brent and Shannon, tattooed and pierced and splattered in red. I had my own tattoos, only these were from the entrails of human beings, stains all over my face and hands. Worst of all was Mom. She drove about two miles an hour, peering at the side streets like a pedophile. I just wanted the bloodshed to end, and my mind worked overtime to come up with something, some way to fix this terrible situation.
“We gotta get out of Bliss, Mom,” I begged.
“What? No way,” she growled. “With all the food here, we could be feeding the freezer for weeks.”
“Mom, seriously,” I was trying to con her into leaving town, and what I was saying actually held some merit. “Gramma’s already killed so many people here. This is such a small town, it’s bound to raise suspicions, if it hasn’t already.”
Brent followed my lead. “She killed Jackson. The cops’re gonna be looking for him.”
“The cops’re probably on their way right now,” Shannon had a faraway look.
“They’re right, Mom,” I laid it on thick. “It’s not smart to stay here in Bliss. We gotta keep movin’, otherwise we’re gonna get caught, and then who’s gonna feed the freezer?”
Mom breathed heavy and slowed the van to a stop, all while giving each of us the eye individually. “Fine. We’ll go,” she warned. “But if we don’t find more people to put into that freezer soon, I’m gonna shove all of your fucking asses into it…ALIVE!”
So we headed northwest on old US 30, into the Snake River plains, into the advancing twilight. More time. That’s what I needed. Time to think. Time to come up with a plan. I wanted desperately to talk to Brent. Brainstorm. Formulate our next move. He winked at me and thumbed at his cellphone, pecking out a quick text to who knew where. But Mom shot him a steely glance, reached back, and snatched the device. In one quick motion, she hurled it out the window.
“Hey!” he complained. Mom would hear none of it. She confiscated all cellphones and disposed of them in the same fashion, cutting us off from the outside world. I felt physically sick watching my mom destroy my iPhone. Still, it was better than watching her murder another poor, unwitting soul. And it was a hell of a lot better than chopping corpses into little bits and tossing them into a gaping maw from hell. My relief ended abruptly, though, when I saw that sign. REST AREA—5 Miles. All I could do was pray, focus my thoughts on willing Mom to stay on the highway and away from people. My heart jumped to my throat when, at the turnoff to the rest stop, she signaled, changed lanes, and exited.
“Wha-what are we doing?” Brent spoke up.
“What do you think?” Mom said, but it wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t her, and the whole time, all I could do was try to come up with a way to get to her, to reach her and get her to come back out.
My heart sank more and more the closer we came to the rest stop, which was an oasis in the desert, really. A large green space with tall trees (a rarity for that area), an information center, and, of course, a restroom building—men on one side and women on the other. It all sat in between two separate parking lots, one of which was pretty big, and had several eighteen wheelers parked diagonally in a row. Truckers, camping out for a few hours of shuteye.
The smaller parking lot was nearly empty, and Mom, to my complete relief, opted for that one, pulling the minivan into a space in a dark corner near the only other vehicle in sight—a classic Buick convertible. The top was down, and it looked like nobody was inside. That made me feel better. No victim. No horrible death. No gory, messy chore for me and Brent and Shannon. But I was wrong. Boy was I wrong.
Mom got out quickly, so quickly I didn’t even see her grab the knife she’d taken from Gramma’s kitchen. To my horror, and to a round of hellish screams from Bent and me (Shannon, to her credit, remained still and rather quiet—possibly from shock) Mom opened the driver’s door of the muscle car. A man sat straight. I could tell he was quite alarmed by his reaction, and by what he said.
“Hey!” he shouted, and from his thin voice it was obvious he had a few years on all of us. The lights from the rest area didn’t shine too well in that tucked-away spot, so I couldn’t tell if he had gray hair, but he was balding pretty good. “What the hell—” he stopped short when he saw Mom, and he must have liked what he saw initially, because his wide eyes narrowed and he smiled sideways at her. “Hey, little lady…looking for some…company?”
“No,” she growled low and gravelly. “I’m looking for fresh meat!” and slashed from the side, where she’d had the knife concealed from his view, slicing his face pretty bad. Blood splattered all over that beautiful car’s white interior, and the old man put up a fight. He fended off her furious attack with his hands and elbows and feet even. But she was a rabid animal, and wouldn’t be stopped. It wasn’t long before the man succumbed to his wounds, and the three of us kids watched horrified as he wheezed out his last breath, cursing Mom to Hell.
“She’s already there,” Shannon said with the most monotone voice.
Mom had us drag the body to the back of her minivan and ordered us to, once again, d
ismember it into small enough pieces.
“Feed the freezer,” she said, then set her sights on the large parking lot on the other side of the greenspace. “I’ll be right back.”
Brent waited until she was out of sight, then rushed to the Buick.
“C’mon!” he was about to jump into the driver’s seat when Shannon stopped him.
“We can’t just leave this guy!” she stooped over the mangled old man.
“He’s dead,” Brent sounded incredulous.
“I don’t care! We just can’t leave him!”
Brent dropped his shoulders and exhaled loudly, but, after Shannon shot him a shameful stare, he acquiesced.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s take him,” and they carried him and placed him in the trunk. Then, with the convertible top down, they both hopped in like the Dukes of Hazard. Brent started the engine and revved it up.
“Wait!” I didn’t get in yet. “I can’t go!”
“Why the hell not?” Brent looked both terrified and mystified.
“I can’t…I can’t leave my mom…I need to-to help her.”
“Help her what? Kill more people? What’s the matter with you, Eddy?”
“No! I want her to stop killing…don’t you see? That’s not my mom…that’s some kind of monster…a monster controlled by that!” I didn’t need to point at the freezer. Inside the back of the van, it began to jump and twitch and rock on its corners. It issued a sound I never want to hear again, like a thousand dying people screaming all at once, and it shook so hard the lid popped open and bounced shut over and over.
“Go, Brent,” Shannon in a low tone.
“What’re you gonna do?” Brent nodded at Shannon as he questioned me. “If you stick around, she’s just gonna kill you, dude!”
“Brent, go,” Shannon repeated a little louder.
“No,” I tried to convince him, but, really, I was trying to convince myself. “If I leave, she’s gonna be killed. I can save her. I know I can!”
“Brent!” Shannon got even louder.
“But how?” Brent revved the engine again. “How do you plan on—”
“BRENT!” Shannon’s became the dominant voice in the group. “GO!” and at that Brent put it into gear. I had no time to think about it. They were right. No matter how much I wanted save my mother, no matter how scared I was for her, I was that much more aware that her homicidal spree would, inevitably, include me. I didn’t want to believe it, but the truth kicked me in the nuts. So, as the Buick took off, I ran alongside. Just before Brent really punched it, I leapt into the backseat and we hauled ass out of that doomed rest area.
4.
The first thing we did, aside from fly down the highway as fast as that car would take us, was search everywhere for a cell phone. Since Mom had confiscated and threw ours out the window miles back, we needed to locate another one. We found nothing. The car was immaculate. Clean as a whistle.
“No cellphone?” Shannon complained, rifling through the crevices in the seat. “What was this guy, some kinda Luddite or something?”
“What’s that?” Brent shot her a confused look, his hands firmly on the wheel.
“What?” she shot him back the same look.
“A Luddite?”
“Shut the fuck up,” she shook her head, then went back to turning the car inside out. “Score!” she yipped with glee.
“What? What?” Brent’s confusion morphed into curiosity. I was curious too. “Did ya find a phone?”
“No,” she produced a smashed box of Marlboro Reds from the seat cushion. “But we have smokage!”
“Oh, thank god!” he heaved. “I need one of those right about now.”
Shannon had to bend way down to the floor to get their cigarettes lit. She offered me one, but I refused. All I wanted to do was watch the road behind us. I was torn. Part of me wanted to go back. That was my mom back there. My mom. I loved my mom, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, possessed by the devil or not. Another part of me was terrified I’d see headlights behind us in the growing dusk. I pictured Mom, gritting her teeth and cursing the day I was born, punching that minivan and chasing after us with unrelenting evil on her side. She could have done it, too. I just knew it. She’d somehow get that stupid mommy van of hers into NASCAR mode and run us down. But all I saw was darkness, a black strip of asphalt and a dotted yellow line, straight and true, fading into the mountain ridge on the horizon.
“My mom,” I kept moaning. “We can’t just leave her.”
“We’re not going back,” Shannon insisted without looking at me. The summer wind whipped through the open convertible and gave me a little chill. Shivering, I just gazed at the road behind, wondering, dreading what was happening back there. Regretting my decision to run.
Then, something in the distance pushed my pulse rate into overdrive. Lights. Barely visible, but definitely there. I wasn’t imagining. I wasn’t dreaming. Someone was coming.
“Guys,” I said, not loud, but not calmly, either. “Guys?”
“Forget it,” Shannon and Brent both said in chorus. Then Shannon took over. “I’m sorry, Eddy, but you were right. That’s not your mom anymore. And there’s nothing we can do to help her.”
As I watched the lights on the highway get brighter and brighter, I couldn’t say anything more than, “But…but…”
“I mean it!” she lost her composure at me. “Your mom’s a psycho bitch from Hell, goddam it! We’re not going back there, so stop—” she terminated her sentence the second she saw what I saw. Headlights. Gaining on us.
“It’s her!” she screamed, then punched Brent in the arm. He scowled and said, “Hey!” but then saw our alarm, looked in the rearview, and panicked right along with us. “Go!” Shannon ordered. “It’s her! Go!”
“How do you know!” he hit the gas and I felt the car lurch. “How do you know!”
“I just know,” she was confident. “It has to be her. Whoever it is, they’re flying…and it’s not the cops…no red and blues. If it was the cops, we’d see their red and blues.”
She had a point, and it made me feel like vomiting. But I kept my eyes peeled on those lights, way back there, but not far off, really. And getting closer every second. Then the lights got weird. There weren’t just one pair of headlights, but several. Then they started weaving and moving apart. No way were they a minivan. And it wasn’t the cops either. Shannon was right. Soon, my subconscious brain must have put it together, because I realized it wasn’t a car, or several cars. It was a group of motorcycles. A gigantic group of them.
“Can’t you get this thing to go any faster?” Shannon barked. Brent kept flashing his sights from the road, to the mirror, back to the road. The wind tossed around his countless studs and rings and even the bone in his nose quivered. The old V8 roared and we bucked in the seats. That car had a lot of balls. Tons. But not enough. Those bikes were faster, and it didn’t take much longer for them to catch us.
Seeing the obvious idiocy in running, Brent let off the gas and slowed substantially, letting the bike gang, and it was a bike gang, overtake us. Harley Davidsons are fucking loud. Just one of them revved to the redline can pop your eardrums. Now imagine fifty of them, filling both lanes of a two-lane highway, surrounding you. I thought I was going deaf, and I didn’t want to look. But it was too late. Stupidity forced me into eye contact with one of them, denim and leather with a bandana over his ponytail and a black ace tattooed on his exposed bicep. A scantily clad, completely stacked woman clutched onto his back. They wore sunglasses, even in the approaching dark of night, and I could tell they were checking out our car.
Like a swarm of bees, the bikers encircled us, slowing down to our speed, studying our car, casting questioning glances at each other, staring at Brent. And Shannon. And me. Finally, and eliciting a screech of terror from all of us kids, the one I’d noticed first twitched his wrist and slung ahead of us, then did the power slide from Hell. Burnt rubber and smoke choked us into coughing fits, and B
rent slammed the brakes.
I hit the front seat, when the car screeched to a stop. The bikers all stopped, too, revving their motors and gritting their teeth at us. I’d never seen so many huge, hairy people in all my life. And so many bikes. Long, sleek choppers with chrome skulls and barbed wire—real barbed wire—around the frames. Stout and short relics from the past with funny handlebars and fire painted on the gas tanks. And all the riders wore denim jackets with different playing cards sewn in the chests. On their backs, emblazoned in red, were the words, Suicide Kings.
Even the women were hard. Tough. Mean. And they stared at us with looks that could kill. Not a one of them said a word, and that unnerved me even more than if they’d started yelling, or even commenced beating the shit out of us. All they really did was scrutinize the car. One guy, the one with the ace of spades on his jacket, even went so far as to get off his bike, walk to the front grill and check out the license plate. Then all hell broke loose.
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 5