“What the fuck!” he shouted, veins popping from his forehead. “What the fuck!”
“Hey, Ace. Isn’t this your daddy’s car?” a fuzzy-headed bulldog of a man said. But Ace just pushed him out of the way and locked eyes with Brent, who looked like he was about to dump the contents of his bowels into his shorts.
“What the fuck you doin’ with my daddy’s car?” he demanded. Then, before any of us could say a word, Ace’s face contorted at the sight of all the blood all over us and the front seat. He didn’t waste another second after that, tearing Brent over the door and onto the pavement. He pulled a gun from somewhere under his vest and clicked the hammer with the barrel pointblank on poor Brent’s forehead. “All right, talk!” Ace shuddered with anger, maybe even a little fear at the unresolved fate of his father. He was a tremendous man, but he seemed on the verge of tears as he interrogated Brent. “What happened to my daddy! What did you do to him! Answer me!” he pressed the gun so hard, Brent’s skin turned red.
“I…we…I…” was all Brent could muster, and that only made Ace even more furious. He snatched the Buick’s keys from the ignition and tossed it to one of his mates, a bald biker with even more piercings than Brent. In fact, he looked like Brent, only much bigger. “Pop the trunk, Deuce. Take a look.”
“Please, sir,” I found myself blurting out. “We didn’t do anything to your dad. We didn’t hurt him, I promise.”
“Then where’d all this blood come from? You cut yourself shavin’?” Ace made a joke, but nobody laughed. The entire group of bikers, almost a hundred of them, leaned against their bikes with clenched teeth and hard stares.
“It-it wasn’t us,” Brent, shaking like a leaf in a tornado, gave it a go. “We didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” Ace tightened his grip on Brent’s collar, pressing the gun even harder against his head. “So something did happen to my daddy, didn’t it?”
“Uh…Ace?” Deuce stood at the back of the car, the trunk open, his tanned face as white as a sheet. Ace snapped his head in Deuce’s direction, slammed Bent to the fender, and rushed to his friend’s side in front of the open trunk. I wanted to run. That was the only thing on my mind. But there were too many of them, swarming us like zombies, and I felt them inching forward when Ace let out a mournful wail.
“Motherfuck! Motherfuck!” his tears mixed into a ferocious kind of weeping. Eyes bloodshot beyond description, running his hands over and over through his greasy hair. Deuce had to hold him up, and when Ace’s girlfriend peered into the trunk, she said, “It’s him!” with a screech that sent the rest of them into a frenzy. They rushed the car and ripped us out, shredding my clothes and scratching into my skin. Shannon screamed for Brent and Brent screamed for Shannon. I just screamed. Incoherently and incessantly. I begged. I cried. I said anything and everything that came to my mind that might have gotten them to take mercy on us. It seemed they were going to tear us all apart limb from limb right then and there. Would have, too, if not for a single gunshot, aimed into the night sky.
“No!” Ace filled the silence he’d just created. “Not here...we don’t do this here,” he pushed aside several brutes even larger than himself to get to us. Someone had my hair, my arms and legs. Many others had Brent and Shannon subdued completely. Ace was fighting to keep himself composed, that much was clear. His cheeks twitched and he swallowed back a convulsion in his throat before speaking further. “We’re gonna take these motherfuckers back to the Ranch and do this right,” he said to a raucous round of menacing hollers. It sounded like a legion of demons, howling to Hades and exulting in their impending mayhem. Ace, using the energy from his compatriots as an elixir of resolve, recovered even more from his grief and looked at each of us. “There’ll be hell to pay for this…hell to pay!”
5.
When I was staying at my gramma’s house, I thought Bliss, Idaho, was the most remote and godforsaken place on earth. I was wrong. The Ranch, as the Suicide Kings so affectionately called it, was a good two hour drive from the middle of nowhere. It seemed we drove a hundred miles, on a hard, bumpy road, farther and farther from any type of help. I heard sobbing and thought maybe it was Shannon. But, later, when they dragged us out of the trunk of that Buick and made us stand against the side of an old outhouse, I saw a single tear streaming from Brent’s cheek. It was at that moment I realized I was crying, too. Not Shannon, though. She kept silent and cool. Not a tear. Not a moment of panic or blubbery begging when the stinking, burly bikers tied us together and debated on what to do next.
Soon, the consensus was clear. They were to kill us. That much was certain. But first, at the insistence of Ace, they were going to have a ceremony.
“Fitting and proper!” he shouted. “For my daddy,” and that roused the loudest response from his gang, a ragged and rugged group. Dozens of them. They took turns hooting and hollering and firing their guns in the air. Every type of gun imaginable. One guy even had a flame thrower, and was having a great time burning a hole in the night.
The place was a scene from some ghost town movie. Situated in dry lowland, surrounded by craggy rock peaks on all sides. There was one big, three story structure that looked like an old farmhouse straight out of the dustbowl. Roof slanting and breaking apart. No windows or doors. Porch falling to pieces. It was amazing anyone used the place. And dotting the land around the house were several other, smaller buildings. One story. Newer construction, but not too new. Unintelligible graffiti all over. They looked more habitable, but barely so.
“What is this place?” my curiosity formed words.
“I think it used to be a migrant work camp,” Shannon answered with no emotion whatsoever. “Now it’s a hangout for these assholes.”
For the next few hours, we were forced to stand there and watch as the Suicide Kings proceeded to lubricate themselves into a drunken fever. Beer was their drug of choice, although I spotted more than a few of them snorting coke off the gas tanks of their hogs, or even off the bare chests of their “women,” as they called them. It was a chaotic and disturbing scene, with some kind of grinding, old heavy metal pounding our brains. And if that didn’t make us deaf, their motorcycles did the trick, each one riding in circles around the dead man, for whom they’d built a burn pile. I refused to accept it. Burn the old man? No way. Then they placed Ace’s deceased dad on top of the pile and started spreading gas all over the place, and even then I couldn’t believe they were going to do it. It was only when they actually lit the fire and stood back and howled to the moon that it really sank in. These guys were like cavemen. Modern barbarians.
The only one in the filthy, dusty, wild group who wasn’t getting loaded and riding his Harley and shouting to the devil was this old guy who kept to himself. Most of the time he kept busy tinkering around in what looked like a shop. He took no part in the boisterous ritual, and even looked a little nervous to be there. Grease smudges on his jeans and shirt told me he was the mechanic of the group, and when he moved around, he hunched over and kind of hopped, like he was disabled or something, only I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what was wrong with him. He was a lot smaller than the rest, and, every once in a while, I’d catch him sneaking a peek over at us through the dust and the haze and the dark of night. For some reason, I got the feeling this man, this tiny, deformed and disabled man, might be our lifeline. It was the way he looked at us. Sad, like watching a puppy that had been run over, writhing in the street. Like he wanted to do something.
My suspicions were validated when, along the edges of the light created by the funeral pyre, the strange guy skirted over toward us. Cautiously, slowly, he approached, mindful both of us kids and the wild men in the midst of their savage ritual. When he finally did come up close, his eyes got crazy, jerking and darting in their sockets at each of us. And when his abnormal sights set on me, he breathed in hard and quick and started squinting at me up and down.
“Y-y-you didn’t do n-n-nuthin’,” he stuttered. “Y-y-you didn’t kill n-n-nobody.”
&nb
sp; “That’s right!” my heart leapt out of my chest. Behind the weird guy, the party raged. Nobody saw him talking to us, and my most irrational of thoughts turned to this man untying us and, somehow, taking us away to safety.
“Y-y-your mama killed ‘im, didn’t she?” he continued. His face twitched as he forced out the words, like it was painful to speak. “B-b-but it wasn’t her f-f-fault, either. It w-w-was…the freezer. Y-y-your mama’s freezer killed ‘im, d-d-didn’t it?”
I was astounded. “Yes!”
“How’d you know?” Brent cried.
He clenched his jaw and his whole body quivered with tiny convulsions. I thought he was having a seizure, but he snapped out of it and said, “I-I-I have d-d-dreams.”
“Ratchet!” Ace made us all recoil in sudden terror. The nervous, twitchy guy named Ratchet seemed even more scared than us kids. He froze, eyes huge, and just stood there as Ace reprimanded him. “Get yer ass away from them goddamm murderers!” and Ratchet obeyed instantly, stepping aside so we could get a good look at our executioner. Ace. Standing there with his woman on his hip, her heaving boobs falling out of their bikini cups as she rubbed against him and looked at us with smug indifference. In his hands was the biggest, nastiest looking weapon I’d ever seen. It was a machine gun, I swear.
“AK47,” Brent blubbered through his whimpers and moans. “He’s gonna tear us to shreds!”
Ace pointed the muzzle of his metal phallic symbol above his head and let loose with an earsplitting torrent, cracking and splitting and sending a hail of lead into the sky. His band of plastered buddies cried out in malicious glee, letting loose their own storm of gunshots. Muzzle flashes and smoke streamers filled the night, and, as the bonfire died to ashes, as the moon rose in the eastern sky, he set his wobbly sights on us. I found myself looking straight down the barrel of his gun.
“Yea, though we ride the highways in the shadows of death, the Suicide Kings fear no evil,” he grinned. “For the Suicide Kings are the most evil motherfuckers on the road!”
What came next I would have never believed if someone had told me, and I lived it. Ace emptied his clip at us. Must have been at least fifty shots. Dirt flew and metal burst open and ricochets reverberated, but when the dust settled and the shooting was over, none of us kids had been shot. Not once. Ace was so fucked up, and his aim had been so compromised, that he missed completely.
One guy laughed. Ace stared at him and the guy shut up immediately. Then Ace, in a state of fury, ejected the empty magazine and slammed in a new one he had tucked in his waist. With a flick of the charging handle, he had his scary-ass gun trained on us again, and took five steps closer. That’s when I knew for sure our luck had run out.
Happily, I was wrong. It seemed luck had one more card to deal us that night, if you could call it luck. It happened right then, when Ace was an ass hair away from blowing us all away. Brent bowed his head and whimpered some kind of prayer. Shannon took a deep breath, held it, and stared straight at Ace. I tried not to look, and averted my eyes out to the desert. That’s when I saw headlights, dim and distant on the horizon, heading toward the Ranch.
“Who the fuck...” Ace’s words were slurred, and his head bobbed and weaved as he squinted at the encroacher. A general murmur broke out among the drunken clan as they tried to decide whether this new vehicle was friend or foe. I knew who it was. Even before the bluish halogens got close enough to make out the shape, I knew. Then a quick flinch and a heavy breath told me Brent knew, too.
“Is that—” he started, but Shannon shushed him into silence. Bouncing on the rough terrain, it kept coming at us. Rapidly. Steadily. Kicking up a snakeskin of dusty grime ten miles long, easily visible by the moonlight. We kids all knew who it was—Mom.
6.
“What’re we gonna do with the kids, Ace?” was the universal appeal which rose through the ranks. Ace commanded his underlings to shut the fuck up as he kept a keen eye on the unwanted visitor. He watched the blue Honda Odyssey pull right up to the line of Harleys and Indian Classics and all the other customized bikes. He watched Mom climb out of the front seat and walk straight up to him. What he didn’t watch was his woman’s reaction, which wasn’t as welcoming as Ace’s.
“Ace?” she sounded disbelieving, and shook her booming bosoms at him. “You gonna let her just waltz right in here?”
Ace remained silent, smiling with his eyes at Mom’s sultry advance. That’s the only way I can describe it—sultry. I’d never seen Mom act like that. Shaking her hips slightly yet seductively. Squeezing her arms together ever so little, just enough to push her breasts together. My mom was a pretty lady. Seriously pretty. But it made me so freakin’ uncomfortable to witness this change in her behavior. All right, it grossed me out.
But it worked.
Ace didn’t see a thing coming when Mom, after striding straight to his chest and pushed aside his girlfriend, locked her lips onto his. Confusion reigned for a second. Then, as Mom and the biker maintained their sick, slobbery lip-lock, hoots and hollers resounded through the crowd of tattooed, denim and leather wearing freaks. The catcalls ended pretty quick after that, though. Like I said, Ace didn’t see it coming—Mom’s next move—which was quick and precise…and deadly. Somehow she snatched Ace’s AK out of his hand, and, with two quick bursts, sent him flying backward into the dirt. The shock of such a sudden and unexpected turn of events had every one of those mutants frozen, and Mom, with stunning accuracy, swept them all down like action figures. She started with Ace’s girl, who was the first to fly into motion and try to retaliate. She had no chance. The AK was an expedient killer, and, set on full auto, pushed her back the same way it did Ace. A few of the more hardened guys recovered from the surprise and took aim at Mom, but she was a gunslinger, man. Swift. Steady. Deadly. She killed them all. It must have been a double clip or something, because I don’t remember her stopping to reload. And when she was done, and the bodies were lying on the ground bubbling over with blood, she dropped the gun, headed straight for me, and pulled me by my hair toward the back of her van.
“Goddam KID!” her voice was like a thunderclap. “I told you not to FUCK with me!” she threw open the rear door, and, inside, the freezer bounced on its casters, almost like a frothing dog drooling in anticipation of a tasty treat. “What did I say! What did I say! I said I’d feed you to the freezer—ALIVE!” and she hoisted me, with overpowering strength, up and in the van. But I fought back.
“Mom! Mom! No!” I screamed. “We weren’t trying to run…we were trying to get you more food for the freezer!” and she stopped shoving me toward the now open freezer, looking me up and down.
“What’re you talking about?”
“We were just trying to reel these guys into your trap,” I started the story, the lie, and Shannon, astute as ever, took over.
“Yeah, yeah,” her eyes were wide, and I could see Mom’s brain working. “We saw these guys back at the rest stop and thought you’d like to kill them.”
Suddenly Brent understood our ploy and joined in. “We weren’t trying to run, honest,” he gave Mom an innocent little grin. She huffed and huffed and stared at each of us. I knew I had to drive the point home.
“You don’t wanna kill us…not yet…look at all these bodies,” I pointed at the fresh slaughter on the desert floor. “It’ll take you all night to get this fed into the freezer. We can get it done in a jiff, that way you’ll have a lot more time…and that means you can feed the freezer more.”
Mom’s angular expression got even sharper as she considered my words. She was evil. No doubt about it. But somewhere inside she still had a mother’s sensibility, and knew a logical argument when she heard one. So she let me go, and I slipped back out of that van in a heartbeat. We were relieved, the three of us kids, but not at all ready for the grueling job in front of us.
Those biker dudes were humongous, and getting them to the van, even with all three of us helping, turned out to be a backbreaking affair. And there were a bunch of the sucke
rs! Then came the worst part—the processing. I call it that because I don’t want to remember all the gory details, and calling it what it is would bring back too many nightmares. Let me just say it wasn’t something you ever want to do. Ever. We sure the hell didn’t want to. But we did, and I can tell you more than once I thought about grabbing one of the many guns laying around and just ending it, either with a bullet to my own head, or one to Mom’s. She was too smart for that, though, and as Brent, Shannon and I were busy hauling dead bodies, she collected the firearms and found heaps of other weapons, ammo, and even what looked like explosives in a green metal crate, which she quickly and eagerly loaded into the van.
When we’d gotten to the very last body, a rumbling in the near distance caused a shocked reaction from each of us, even Mom. In the darkness it was near impossible to see, but then lights flickered and the rumbling became a sustained roar. A motorcycle. One of the bikers had made it. He must have rolled his ride silently to what he’d considered a safe distance before starting it and making a mad dash out of there. The red taillights started getting smaller, and Mom sprang into action, cursing up a storm and snatched the AK, aimed, and fired off several rounds in what had to be record time. But, much to my surprise, she failed to land a direct hit on the distant target.
Freezer: The Complete Horror Series Page 6