Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  I gave him a friendly wave as I drove toward him.

  He flipped me the finger and . . . his finger fell off.

  So I laughed.

  Big mistake.

  The biker spat maggots onto the windshield.

  I turned on the wipers and the maggots flew off. I guess some must have landed on the bikers and riled them, because they saddled up and followed us. Soon they were driving on both sides of the Ratmobile. One of the bikers kicked the side of the car.

  And to make matters worse, a glance in the rearview mirror revealed that the undead rodeo clowns were still chasing us, rats hanging from their arms and legs.

  I swerved the old squad car onto the opposite side of the road and made a quick right. My tires screeched all the way as we headed down a dark alley piled high along the sides with sacks of garbage.

  Two of the bikers collided trying to switch lanes, but the remaining three kept trailing us.

  I stomped on the gas pedal. My rearview mirror was filled with bikers and clowns. The car hurtled faster and faster down the alleyway labyrinth.

  Then I slammed on the brakes.

  The sudden stop caused me and the rest of the passengers to be flung forward. The bikers tailgating us crashed against the trunk.

  I surveyed the damage inside the car. I’d banged my head against the steering wheel and was pretty sure my nose was broken. Trash’s knife was buried in the dashboard. I didn’t see what had happened to his block of wood. Garth’s cigarette was crushed against his lips, and a couple of his front teeth were missing. Fiona’s lipstick was smeared all over her face and a side window.

  All three bikers were thrown from their motorcycles. I shifted into reverse and pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The engine spluttered and coughed smoke. Then I ran over the bikers and their vehicles, savoring the crrruuuunchy sounds beneath my wheels.

  The clowns stood about twenty feet behind the car, watching and laughing.

  I pulled forward, stuck my head out the window, and yelled, “Hey, you clowns. These bikers told me you’re all just a bunch of pussies in girly makeup. What do you think of that?”

  “Pussies?” a fat, one-eyed clown squealed, raising his long-nailed hands in the air. “Why, I’ll personally carve them some fine deep pussies of their own.”

  I hit the gas. Behind us, the clowns amused themselves by attacking the crushed, squirming carcasses of the bikers. The alleyway opened onto a main road. “So where the fuck are we now?” I shouted. The last thing I wanted to do was drive aimlessly down every rat-infested street in the Land of the Dead.

  “Look around,” Garth said. “This must be Gargoyle Road.”

  He had to be right. Every building had stone gargoyles perched on it, like Notre Dame in Paris. There were demon-winged gargoyles with lurid grins. Fallen-angel gargoyles with lost heavens in their eyes. Crouched lizard-like creatures and coy, scaly devil babies. Monstrous art meant to keep evil out, but here it looked like it kept evil in, stewing within these blackened architectural pressure cookers.

  “Up ahead, take a right at Bloodstone Road,” Garth said. “We’re almost there.”

  Bloodstone Road lived up to its name. This path was covered in bricks that oozed fresh gore. Just as Garth had said, I had to follow the bloody brick road . . .

  Brick is a bitch to drive on when it’s wet, but when it’s saturated with blood, forget about it.

  The Ratmobile slid around like a pat of butter in a frying pan. I slowed down but couldn’t keep it going in a straight line. So I pumped the brakes a little, working to keep the car moving slow but steady, and finally I got it under control.

  There was only one building on the block. It was a huge abandoned factory. All boarded up. End of production. No more deadlines. No more last-minute shipments. Out of business forever. Totally lifeless except for a bright red light. Like a beacon in the darkness, the flashing neon sign read Purgatory with an arrow pointing at the entrance.

  This was the place.

  I was going to say something like, “Is it the right time for a nightclub to be open?” But I didn’t, because time was lost in the Land of the Dead. Night and day merged into a prolonged unhappy hour between sunrise and sunset, darkness and gloom, with no hope for tomorrow. I suppose the place was always open.

  I parked the Ratmobile at the curb. And for a moment I just sat, not saying a word, building up enough nerve to leave the safe confines of my car to venture into that hell building.

  Everyone else sat motionless as well.

  It was like the four of us were frozen, travel-sick vacationers in a lost snapshot, an almost-but-not-quite-forgotten memory, a recurring image lingering deep inside the crevices of the mind.

  Finally Garth lit another cigarette and said, “I need a drink.”

  The silence was broken. The bad karma was cast away. Leave now or forever hold your peace.

  I saw some black birds circling the rooftop. They were way too big to be crows. Soon they flew lower. Black plumage, featherless heads and necks, and elegantly creepy ruffs of downy white.

  Vultures.

  Vulture culture. Black as cancer spots on an X-ray and flying around in their death circle-jerk.

  This was a bad omen. A very bad omen indeed.

  There was a steel door in front, the kind of door you’d expect to see leading to a gas chamber in a prison.

  On the sidewalk outside the club sat an obese snake charmer on a Persian rug. He blew into his bagpipes to control a cobra as it wriggled out of a dried dog carcass in time with the annoying, droning music. Like the rodeo, without the fear of death being involved, it was simply boring. I tossed a dollar into the basket to be courteous. The snake charmer thanked us. We followed Garth inside the club.

  There was a bouncer sitting on a big metal chair. The man was enormous; he had to weigh over three hundred pounds. He was decked out completely in leather—greasy black jacket, black pants that had probably required the skins of a herd of cows, and a biker cap. He had a long ZZ Top beard, and his eyes were glazed over.

  “Hey, Fleetwood,” Garth said. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Same as always. To the left and down to my knees,” the bouncer said with a laugh so dry and hoarse it gagged him. He gave Garth a wave and let him pass through. We followed his lead and filed downstairs.

  There were no overhead lights in the brick stairwell, only a few sputtering black candles mounted in metal holders shaped like clenched hands. The lower we descended, the more gaping holes we saw in the brick walls, revealing the black, oily dirt behind them. When we finally reached the bottom, we found ourselves in a huge, dank chamber where the dirt walls were supported by rotted timbers and rusted barbwire and chicken wire.

  Then the music started. If you wanted to call it that.

  Lance Anderson, an old friend of mine, once took some ’shrooms and listened to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, a double-disc set of clanks, bangs, and booms. He said the trip was more boring than visiting Western Playland in El Paso with his parents and uncle. I listened to the CD myself, and it sounded like someone banging on an anvil for over two hours with R2-D2 and C-3PO as backing musicians.

  That was what this music sounded like—except worse. It didn’t even pretend to sound like music.

  On a stage protruding from the far wall an undead band performed. The guitarist, a grayish-green zombie, played a guitar made from a tyrannosaurus’s spine, strung together with barbwire strings. The drummer, another zombie but with yellow flesh mottled with purple, banged on drums fashioned out of huge toxic waste canisters. A shriveled old woman played a piano-shaped coffin, but all the strings were tuned to the same dreary B-minor chord. A flabby, half-rotted corpse blew furiously on a trumpet that was actually an old tornado-warning siren. Tornado’s coming. Run for the cellar, Dorothy.

  Center stage was the singer, a long-haired skeleton, screaming off-key. The group’s performance sounded like a demented audio version of a battle from War of the Worlds, complete wi
th explosions, sirens, screams, and alien war cries.

  The few dancing zombies clapped when the song ended. The rest of the crowd kept sipping their dark drinks, murmuring among themselves quietly. Like the rodeo, it was a real dead audience. About as enthusiastic as an allergy sufferer at a cat show.

  “Thank yooooouuuu,” cried the skeleton lead vocalist. The bony baritone took a drink out of a glass filled with reddish-brown liquid, but since he didn’t have any skin, the fluids leaked out from the bottom of his jaw and spattered onto his feet. “Our next number is a song off our third CD, Tomb It May Concern. This is my favorite composition, an opus called ‘Custom Car Parade,’ and it’s for all you freaks out there who just can’t get enough of the open road.”

  The music started with a slow funeral procession pace, but then the guitarist played a wailing solo. The music returned to the rhythmic beats, and the undead vocalist stepped up to the microphone and bellowed forth his song.

  Who knew we’d make it this far

  already

  who knew that our hearts wouldn’t wear out

  so much sooner than this

  that the big one was this far off

  that we could spiral down this far

  without hitting bottom so hard

  it knocked our guts out through the back

  We’ll drive this little car with the top down

  and the birds will shit on it

  and the sun will fade you and the snow will freeze you

  and the rain will soak you

  and we’ll trash this little car

  we’ll drop jujubes under the dash

  and stuff French fries between the seats and

  shove bills in the glove box and forget to pay them

  and leave town so they’ll never

  find us anyway and mostly

  it sucks

  and the birds dump on it

  and the rain rusts it,

  but sometimes . . .

  sometimes it was so

  worth it

  No

  we’ll just drive the hell out of it

  until it putts itself to death

  until the wheels fall off while we’re driving along

  until the engine falls out in the middle of the desert somewhere

  until the little car can’t go another inch

  and then we’ll push it off a cliff and

  then—?

  About two dozen other corpses danced listlessly to the brutal beat. Above the stage, a rusted cage was suspended by a thick black chain, and inside the cage was a go-go dancer. I thought that kind of thing went out with the sixties, but apparently it was still hot stuff here.

  The dancing dead lady was attractive in a weird dancing-dead-lady sort of way. She was tall and incredibly thin, like a model or a heroin junkie, with long, cascading red hair and enormous breasts. Apparently silicone went to the Land of the Dead along with its owner. Her sheer top had its work cut out for it, trying to contain its bouncing burdens.

  I must have ogled the dancing lady a little too long, because Fiona gave me an icy stare. Was she actually jealous? Boy, did I know how to pick ’em or what? First a middle-aged boozehound, then a possessive dead chick.

  I walked on and the rest of the group followed. Next to the stage was a doorway of heavy beams leading into another chamber, so I hurried through to escape the earsplitting assault of that dreadful music.

  Fortunately, the next room was the bar.

  Unfortunately, all the drinks appeared to be bloodred or shit brown. Not what anyone would call tempting.

  There were at least thirty thirsty dead folks clambering around the bar, but Frank was nowhere to be seen. The search was becoming maddening. It seemed each path we followed to find Frank led to a dead end. An appropriate enough destination in this realm of corpses and blood.

  Suddenly I saw someone I recognized: Darrin Wagner, my dead lawyer. He sat in a corner, nursing a curdled red drink. His bluish-gray face was drawn into a long, moping mask of sadness. Of course, everyone looked depressed in the Land of the Dead—megagrim, slice-your-own-wrists depressed.

  But Darrin appeared even more doom-ridden than all the others.

  “Wait here,” I said to Garth, Trash, and Fiona. I walked over to Darrin’s table. “Hey,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “Frank Edmondson,” I said.

  “Darrin Wagner.”

  “So why aren’t you in the room with the go-go dancer?” I asked. “You look like a guy who loves the ladies.”

  “Too down for that,” he said.

  “Why so glum, chum?”

  Darrin was silent for a moment. Finally he said, “An old client of mine is going to be burned at the stake pretty soon. He was kind of fucked-up among the living, but now he’s really fucked-up here. I guess he pissed off the wrong people. I never knew he was such a hell-raiser.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Jeremy Carmichael.”

  I wanted to scream, “What the fuck are you talking about?” at the top of my lungs. Instead, I managed to say, “What’s his story?”

  “I feel pretty bad about him,” Darrin said. “When I was alive, I screwed him over. I was helping him with an insurance case, but the other guy’s insurance company and his attorneys paid me to drag it out. You know, so maybe he’d give up.”

  He let loose a huge sigh, filled with phlegm. “I just wanted to get into his stepsister’s pants, so yeah, dragging it out sounded good to me. Right after that, my doctor told me I had cancer of the nuts, and both would need to get sliced out. That was about the time I went bankrupt. The shit was hitting the fan two shovelfuls at a time. Jesus Christ. A man with no nuts ain’t a man. I couldn’t handle the idea of having no nuts, no money; I had no fucking reason to live. I’d once read in the papers about a cop in my town who’d killed himself, because he had prostate cancer. I forget his name. So I figured I ought to do the same.”

  He blew his nose into a soggy cocktail napkin, then continued. “I went over to Jeremy’s place one day, drunk as a skunk, to apologize. And I just couldn’t do it. A man whose nuts were set for the chop, having to apologize to a real dude. I couldn’t handle it. So I killed myself in a really cool car. Better to die with my nuts still in me, like a man. Anyway, if you want to see the big event, it’s going to be just around the corner at Spider Square.”

  I wanted to punch him in the face or maybe rip his fucking head off, but there would have been no point to that. He was already in the Land of the Dead. What was I going to do? Kill him again for good measure?

  I ran back to Garth, Fiona, and Trash and yelled, “We’ve got to get to Spider Square right now.”

  “Why?” Trash asked.

  “They’re going to burn Frank—and my body—at the stake any minute now.”

  PART SIX

  THE END OF THE ROAD

  ROAD FLASHES (PART TWO)

  You drove on and drove on,

  the night a blank atwixt the empty anonymities

  of life spent always between destinations

  and sudden death.

  You seem to be going so fast now

  even though the gas gauge has read empty

  for a torment miles,

  the zero being two rictuses bent upon one another.

  The night is not black because it is burned

  but pieced through by the headlamps

  like an assassin’s truth.

  You almost don’t mind anymore

  that they will soon welcome you,

  these husks of the highway,

  for you’ve gone too far as a vagabond and gypsy

  and they have been only waving you past

  like the Department of Public (Safety) guardians

  of any confused wanderer,

  as the trail of embers who lead you home.

  —Charlee Jacob

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BURNOUT

  We ran out of the club, hurrying to
Spider Square. I felt like the whole world had fallen on top of me. I was being smothered, crushed like a baby ant under the wheels of a semi.

  “What’s happening?” Fiona asked.

  “Yeah, why are they going to burn up Frank?” Trash asked.

  “For being an asshole. Why else?” I replied.

  “Wow. Usually they just hang folks to discipline ’em,” Trash continued. “Or maybe pull some of their guts out. But burning the body? That’s some pretty serious shit. Worse than boiling them in oil. Or the iron maiden. Frank must have fucked up big-time.”

  “That sounds like Frank,” Fiona said.

  “You could’ve let me finish my drink,” Garth said, exasperated. “Why are we taking the car?”

  “Duh. We’ll need a getaway vehicle,” I shouted as we loaded into the Ratmobile.

  Spider Square wasn’t that far away. Just around the corner, like Darrin had said. The anticipated burning, like the rodeo, only drew a handful of bored spectators. Bodily destruction simply wasn’t a big attraction.

  Frank, ever the defiant one, was singing “Light My Fire” by The Doors. I was impressed that he knew the words. I wouldn’t have figured him a fan of hippy rock. But he sounded groggy and giddy, not like his usual hard-assed self, and I realized he was drunk or doped up. Maybe the authorities had drugged him.

  He was tied by ropes to a rotted telephone pole, about five feet off the ground with an enormous pile of wood under him. They didn’t fuck around when it came to burning somebody up.

  A half-decomposed Asian man in a black robe read from a sheet of paper. When he finished his official spiel, the audience clapped; something was about to happen. The man pulled a lighter out of his pocket and moved toward a pile of rags at the base of the woodpile. I guessed the rags were soaked in gasoline.

  On the other side of Spider Square a huge steam-powered vehicle—a sort of chunky, clunky tow train—hauled Monster away. The train was powered by chunks of dried-up mummies thrown by a flabby zombie into a flaming boiler. Frank wouldn’t need the Barracuda anymore, since he was going to end up extracrispy. They were most likely taking it to a junkyard for the robot rats to eat.

  I floored the Ratmobile and raced toward the scene of the burning. The car fishtailed over the gravel and dirt in Spider Square. I sped along as fast as the car would take me and swerved into the telephone pole, scattering wood everywhere and knocking the Asian man on his ass. Most of the burning rags landed on top of him, and he began squealing like a rat on a sun-baked sidewalk.