Suzette visits when she can, but gas prices are high and the car needs a new everything, and bus tickets and motel rooms are way beyond her budget, and her debts are like the big rock that guy in the story has to forever push up a hill.
The ladies at the salon—customers as well as her fellow beauticians—often encourage her to take some time for herself. To get out. To go out, go shopping, go dancing, go to bars and movies, meet men. She’s still a young woman, they tell her, young enough, attractive. It’s never too late to start over, to try again. Why, she has the whole rest of her life ahead of her!
The very idea makes Suzette want to simultaneously laugh and cry.
***
And what about Devon’s parents, Maggie and Dan? We haven’t heard much about them, beyond their plans to make a go of their little bakery/bistro in town.
Which has been a fuckton of work, let me tell you. Opening your own business means long damn hours, no sick days, hassles with loans and inspections, delays, budgets, exhaustion, and toil. Most of them fail within the first year anyway. You’d have to be crazy to try it. Crazy, dedicated, and willing to bust your ass.
They met in culinary school, Dan having washed out of basic training on account of a hitherto unknown heart murmur, Maggie wanting to follow in her mom’s pastry-chef footsteps. Neither were superstars. They busted their asses as required, took whatever jobs they could find, two or three at a time, double shifts, triple. They scrimped and saved, lived in cramped studios, used food banks, shopped thrift stores.
Always with their eyes on the prize. Someday. Some day.
They’re also a mixed-race couple, which shouldn’t matter in this day and age.
A baby was not part of the initial plan. Not then. Not for years, not until they were established, had their own place up and running and successful enough to support them.
It was a tough call. They agonized, but ultimately decided to make the best of it somehow. And, a good thing they did…six years later, Maggie got diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer.
Devon doesn’t know. Not about how close of a coin-flip his own life was, and not the details of his mom’s surgery. He remembers visiting her in the hospital, bringing her flowers. He remembers being her special helper at home in the weeks afterward, feeling proud of himself when he could bring her a cup of tea or her medicine or a book while she rested. He remembers his dad being confident and brave.
He doesn’t remember how wan-looking she was, how hollow-eyed, how often she cried. He doesn’t remember, once, getting up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and finding Dad sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with his face in his hands and his shoulders shaking and a mostly-empty bottle of whiskey at his elbow.
It’s never occurred to him to ask, or even wonder, why he’s an only child. That’s just how it is. Shrug. How it’s always been.
Chapter Seven: Confusion
It wasn’t a stampede at first, Beth would think later. Stampedes involved stupid, panicked animals running the same direction in a frenzied herd
They had the stupid, the panicked, and the frenzied parts down.
But same direction was like One Direction…fuck that noise!
Unlike terror-stricken cattle or bargain-mad Black Friday Doorbuster shoppers, there in Vault 420, the six of them ran in every direction, all directions, more than seemed humanly possible.
Given what they were trying to get away from, more than humanly possible right then seemed perfectly reasonable.
It squelch-lunged toward Brendan faster than fast.
The sounds it made as it moved were worse than the smell, and the sight of it worse than the sound, and the brain-hurting horrible hideous unreality of it was worst of all, worse than anything…except the prospect of its touch.
How it might feel—way, way worse than it looked, sounded, or smelled!
The very idea was exponentially more mind-twistingly horrifying.
Fast. So fast. Faster than fast.
Squelch-lunging toward Brendan.
The size of, and resembling, a cross between a half-deflated football—go, Patriots!—and one of those fuck-ugly Shar-pei pug dogs…but not a dog, not a football…naked mole rats, giant raisins, blobfish…subterranean and deep-sea glowing things…bug larva, gloopy handfuls of fish roe and frog eggs, microscope freakshow magnified a thousand times…
Nope.
Something gave way in her head. Sanity abdicating. A fuse blew, a switch flipped, something visceral and atavistic and primal and raw triggered every synapse and nerve ending with the same flashing neon klaxon message.
ALL THE FUCKING NOPE.
It went for Brendan, luminescent feelers waggling, the wrinkled folds along its loose, wobbly, flabby body parting with moist slurp-smacking noises.
Revealing orifices within. Slippery, glistening orifices. Orifices lined with fleshy sea-anemone polyps that undulated, flexed, extruded, retracted. White-tipped, then pinkish, shading to crimson and a deep throbbing purple.
As gag-worthy as the initial stink of it had been, once it smooched open those wet, gaping, sloppy, labial apertures—
Because what wafted from them, warm and steamy, were scents almost enticing. Evocative. Intriguing. Scents of baking bread, simmering gravy, tropical flowers, meat pies, perfume, hot fresh buttered popcorn, bacon, and sex.
Not a stampede.
A crazy fucking mosh-pit melee free-for-all.
Slamming into each other, into furniture, into walls. Tripping over all the random shit they’d left on the floor. Stepping on candles that rolled like skates beneath their feet. Into puddles of wax like cartoon banana peels. Falling. Scrambling. Screaming. Pushing and pulling and flailing.
Someone kicked the dog-dish and it flipped like a tooth-marked tiddlywink, pinwheeling more droplets of noxious slime. The stalled 4:20 clock got knocked down, clobbered Spencer, damn near flattened him—they built them heavy in those days, solid, industrial. The sheaf of printed-out papers were footprint-squished into the sludge and salty ashes. Marty tangled himself up in the Shop-N-Go bags and went into a thrashing epileptic seizure-dance. One clip-lamp shined askew at the ceiling. The second swung around in a crazy spotlight.
Jake and Devon were each trying to push the other one out of the way as Beth elbowed between them; all three went over in a jumble of limbs. A head mashed into her boobs and she didn’t know whose and didn’t care because her palm slid-skidded on the floor and for the most fleeting but awful instant of her life, she felt a mucoid slithering squirm under her hand and—
ALL THE FUCKING NOPE!!!
Brendan, on the floor, howling and shrieking.
It was on him.
It was on him!
Quavering. Pulsating. Rippling.
She thought of partly-filled water balloons and partly-drained waterbeds and understuffed beanbag chairs and those weird water-wigglie toys like supple alien dildos, and that reminded her of some nasty gelatin-egg thing on the internet and glorpy Futurama brain slugs and leeches and jellyfish and—
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE!!!
Then Spencer, reeling and staggering, incoherently bawling his entire repertoire of filthy words, blundered against the door and somehow fumbled it open.
The sputtering jaundice-yellow light from the ancient still-working fixture was a glorious golden beacon, a heavenly-choir radiant salvation, as if the strains of Ode To Joy cascaded in an angelic crescendo.
And then it was a stampede, a chaotic but purposeful surge, Black Friday Doorbusters let us the fuck out of here, charging and bottlenecking, logjamming in the doorway, fighting their way through in a crazy-blind mob.
Out.
Out into the hall. Out and fucking away, which way any way didn’t matter just move your ass GO!
Just go, go, go.
No stopping no looking back no nothing only run.
Coach, had he still been coaching, would’ve been impressed. His winning track and field teams couldn’t have made better time in whatever
sort of clusterfuck obstacle course it became. Sprints and hurdles and relay-race, not so much a handing off of batons as slapping, goading, and shoves.
Stairwell. Stairs. Pounding up them, and if her foot caught under the metal lip of a step she’d be lucky to only shatter her chin lose some teeth bite off her tongue break her nose gash her face open split ear to ear like the fucking Joker why so serious and maybe to be really lucky she’d snap her damn neck crack her skull open and die because dying might be preferable to having to deal with…deal with what…deal with that…what she’d seen what that was what they’d done!
The stairs, up and up, to the top, through the hole in the wall, the pee-smelling chilly tile of the long-abandoned men’s room and the echoing madhouse clamor of their voices.
Screaming and swearing and wailing and laughing the loon-laughs of lunatics gone completely bugshit around the bend.
Chapter Eight: Rationalization
Women and children first, they said.
To which Spencer replied, “tough fuckin’ titty!”
He burst out into the dark park and almost slammed right into a bunch of people gathered near the building. With a crazy arms-flailing yelp, he tried to leap straight backwards while still running full-tilt straight ahead.
As a result, his feet shot sideways on dew-damp grass, flipping him half a cartwheel and landing him on his side in a jarring impact. A split-second later, Beth, who’d been steamrollering along damn near up his ass, kidney-kicked him, tripped over him, and went fuckin’ flying like Supergirl.
In the moment before she bellyflopped, the screen-glow of her phone illuminated a group of straggle-bearded bums in ratty coats. Then, wha-boom, she was down too, breath exploding in a whoof. Her phone spun a ways further through the grass and came to rest almost at the bums’ toes, underlighting them like gantry-zombie-scarecrows from a scary movie.
Oh his fuckin’ kidney oh that fuckin’ hurt!
Spencer almost wished he’d gone ahead and pissed himself in terror while they were still below in Vault 420. Embarrassing as that would’ve been, at least then he wouldn’t have been pissing blood…which he’d probably now be doing for the next week.
The bums, clutching depleted booze bottles in brown bags, nicotine stains on their fingers and scabs on their knuckles, made no aggressive moves. They just stood there, apprehensive but curious lookie-loos drawn by the ruckus.
“Sweet holy mother-of-god,” one said. “What have you kids been up to?”
“What you kids on?” asked another. “Drugs’re bad shit, dontcha know?”
“Should stick t’ booze an’ smokes, better for ya,” said the third. “Got a cig? Rollies? How ‘bout a butt? Or a dollar? Ya got a dollar?”
“Shut it, Al.” The first one, tall and skinny, bald as a baby’s ass, shuffled a concerned step forward. “You all okay there?”
“We’re fine,” came Jake’s voice. In that tone guys used after any stunt gone wrong; didn’t matter if they had fuckin’ broken bones sticking through their skin. “We’re cool. It’s all good.”
“The fuck we are!” Spencer heard himself reply, his own voice a thin, pained wheeze. “Did you see that fuckin’ thing? What the fuck?!”
Beth groaned as if stunned, then rolled into a crab-walk scuttle, trying to look everywhere at once. “Where is it? Where the hell is it? Did it follow us?”
The second bum, who’d cautioned them about drugs, nodded sagely. “On some bad shit, a’right. Must be.”
“We’re okay,” Jake said. “We’re okay, c’mon, chill.”
“You think someone’s been following you?” said the skinny baby-ass-bald one.
He sounded like he was trying to talk down the nutjobs, an impression strengthened by the way his buddy Al stood back and shared twirlyfinger-at-the-temple gestures with the fourth, a small pudgy guy lost in an oversized parka. The parka’s hood, trimmed with a mangy crust of fake fur, was pulled up to hide most of his head, but Spence was pretty sure he could see the dull gleam of crumpled tinfoil as he indicated silent emphatic agreement with Al.
When the local literal tinfoil-hatters thought you were nutjobs…
Though maybe the local literal tinfoil-hatters had a point.
He did not feel, right now, like a sane and stable person.
Okay, so he rarely did, but this was fuckin’ different!
“It’s gonna get us oh jeez oh jeez don’t let it get us it got Brendan didn’t it did you see it got him what did it do to him what did it dooooo?” That was Devon, the new kid, hugging himself, dancing in place, gibbering like he was about to cry.
At least, until Jake stepped up, caught him by the upper arms, and gave him a shake. “Dev!”
“Did it get him? Where is he?”
“Dev, chill, huh?”
“Leave him alone,” huffed Marty, collapsing onto the bench of a wooden picnic table. “Leave him alone, huh? He’s freaked, and can you blame him? Seriously, what the hell?”
“Where is Brendan?” Beth asked. “Oh shit, he isn’t still down there, is he?”
“Fuck him if he is!” Spencer staggered upright, hands pressed to the small of his back like a goddamn geezer. “His fuckin’ problem!”
“Whatever trouble you’re in,” said the first bum, still in that talk-down-the-psychos way, “I’m sure it’s nothing to work yourselves up over. Take a minute, some deep breaths, and tell us what’s wrong.”
“Crap’s sake, Nelson,” Al said to him. “Ya wanna play group therapy, go on ahead, but me and Howie wants none of it.”
Again, the silent one with the crumpled tinfoil skullcap under his hood agreed emphatically. The two of them retreated to watch from a distance.
“Me neither,” said drugs-are-bad-m’kay. “They’re on some mean shit. Maybe dangerous. Maybe those bath-salts, turn kids into zombies.”
“We’re not on fuckin’ bath-salts!”
He squinted at Spencer. “Hang on. You Hannah Bodean’s boy?”
Spence bristled. “The fuck is it to you if I am?”
Again, the sage nod. “Meth, then. That’d ‘splain’ it.”
Kidneys? What kidneys? What pain? “Listen to me, you shithead old fuck, I’m gonna feed you your own ass and—”
Beth grabbed him before he got more than a couple steps in his rabid-weasel lunge at Mr. Just-Say-No.
Baby-bald Nelson put himself between them, hands held up, knobby wrists and several inches of scarred forearms showing below his threadbare cuffs. “Let’s not have a problem, here, all right? Tater meant no offense.”
“Tater? His name’s fuckin’ Tater?! Fuckin’ Mashed Tater when I’m—”
“Get lost, would you?” Beth shouted at the bums.
“We’re going. See? Going now. Come on, Tater. Let’s go.”
They went, and at a good goddamn clip, too. As they should. Shit-talk his mother? Yeah, they better fuckin’ hustle!
When the bums and their scum-bum butt-buddies had vanished behind the bleachers to their shitty shanty-town, the blunt corkscrew of pain twisted into Spencer’s kidney again. He hissed through his teeth.
Beth released him, but looked ready to grab again if he showed any signs of haring off after Tater. He attempted, with vague handwaves, to indicate he was cool, he was cool.
Jake released Devon, who also seemed to have gotten his shit semi-together. Marty heaved himself off the bench. Nobody saying anything. It was like fuckin’ shellshock or something, all five of them.
Five. Still only five.
Slowly, they turned to look back the way they’d come, at the concrete building housing the restrooms.
There was no sign of Brendan.
Suddenly, Jake smacked himself in the forehead and cried aloud, “Oh, that son of a bitch!” In response to their baffled looks, he elaborated. “You guys thought I was pulling some stupid trick or joke. But it wasn’t me. I really believed…”
“What?” asked Beth.
He shook his head. “Forget it, it’s too dumb. Point
is, the one who was fucking with us was him! Brendan! Must’ve been!”
“Huh?” said Devon.
“That dickbag bastard!” Spencer said. “I bet you’re right! I bet he’s down there right now, laughing his ass off!”
Marty frowned. “So, it was a trick?”
“Well, what else could it be?” Jake kicked disconsolately at a clump of weeds. “Damn it. I feel like such an idiot.”
“That’s because you are,” Beth said. “But what’s the deal? What do you mean? You can’t have sincerely expected that demon-summoning shit to work.”
His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Wait, wait, whoa,” Marty said. “Brendan did all that? With the candles and the special effects? The stinkbombs? Oh, man! I almost puked! And that…that…thing…that whatever-the-fuck-that-was?”
“You know it, the smarmy ass-licking fuckstick.” Spencer glared in the direction of the restrooms, fists clenched as if he might give Brendan a double helping of the knuckle sandwiches Beth hadn’t let him serve Tater.
Fuckin’ Tater! The alky-wino-boozer D.A.R.E. bum.
“But why?” asked Devon. Poor dumbshit new kid, still wanting to think the best of everybody. Look who he hung out with, for fuck’s sake! “I mean, there’s joking around, yeah, but...”
“That was too far,” Beth said. “Way too damn far. I knew he was a douche, I’ve been saying so forever. This, though, this takes the douche cake.”
“We could’ve got hurt,” said Marty.
“Could’ve?” Spence pressed the small of his back again. “Speak for yourself, Mart-O. Bethany here playin’ fuckin’ kickball with my kidneys—”
“It was an accident! And in case you didn’t notice, I damn near killed myself tripping over your klutzy ass!”
“Look,” said Jake. “It wasn’t me. I sure don’t think it was any of you guys; you were as freaked out as I was.”
“Were?” said Marty.
“Are. Whatever. But it makes sense now. He’s the one whose dad had all those movies, he helped me do a lot of the internet research, he’s got money—”
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