“I’m fine, baby. What’s up?”
Slim closed her eyes, relief washing over her like a calm breeze after a tempest. “Dad, I thought...you said you felt sick. Are you okay now?”
Dad laughed, and Slim felt the tears flow. “I’m great. I told you, kiddo. I ate too much of that damn junk food. Maybe you were right. Maybe I’ll go vegetarian after all.”
Her initial fear for her father dissipating, she pulled herself together as best she could. “Dad, I need you to listen to me.”
“Okay...”
“Dad, there's something going on in town. I don’t know what, but it has to do with the new burger place and its manager. I think he’s poisoning people, lacing the food with some sort of psycho-active drug. It’s making people crazy.”
Dad sounded concerned. “Crazy...how so?”
Slim took a deep breath, “Crazy like...like psychotic. People are...killing each other.”
“Slim, this isn’t funny, baby. Have you and Meg been at that damn weed again? Tell that girl when I get my hands on her...”
“No, Dad! I know it sounds nuts but there are dangerous people out there. You have to be careful. Try and get a hold of Preston and tell him to get home soon as possible.”
“Preston’s here, sweetheart. He’s upstairs on the toilet. Are you sure you’re not partaking, young lady?”
“I wish I was. Look, I’m going over to Meg’s to check on her. Lock the doors and don’t answer to anyone, okay? And I mean anyone.”
“Slim, you’re starting to worry me...”
Slim?
He never calls me Slim.
“Dad, just lock up. I have a key. I won’t be long. We’ll all get in the car and get out of Plainfield. Just wait for me.
She heard her father sigh. He wasn’t buying any of this from the sounds of it.
“Promise me you’ll lock up, Dad. Promise me.”
“Okay, okay. Should I call the police?”
“No! They can’t be trusted. Don’t call anyone. Just sit tight and wait for me, please...”
“Okay baby.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too, Slim.”
He called me Slim again...
“Oh, and by the way, I have some bad news for you, before you go, sweetie,” he intoned, just as Slim was setting to press ‘end call’.
Slim gripped the phone to her ear, “What?”
“Well, I’d rather have told you this in person, but seeing as you make take a while to get here....”
“Yeah?”
“Well, when I said that Preston was here...”
Dread crawled over Slim’s senses. “Yeah?”
“I wasn’t lying...I don’t want you to think I was lying. He is here, and he is in the toilet, but...”
“But?”
“Your brothers kind of...well...dead.”
The phones slid from Slim’s numb fingers, she caught it just before it fell.
Did I just hear that?
Couldn’t have.
Her father went on, his tone light and conversational, like he was discussing nothing more serious than a television show. “Yeah, sorry about that, baby. He had himself a bit of an allergic reaction,” he laughed. “He’s lain up there with his asshole torn apart. There’s blood everywhere. It was quick, though.”
“D-dad...this isn’t funny.”
To her horror, her father laughed again. “Well, come on, it’s a little funny. It’s not like you two got on. At least I won’t have to listen to you two cunts bickering anymore, will I?”
Slim had no words, bile rose in her throat as her vision blurred. “Dad, please...tell m-me this is a joke.”
“No joke,” he chirped. “Dear old Preston’s rotting upstairs in the shitter as we speak. Well...he’s not so much rotting...as being eaten...”
In the background, on Dad’s end, she heard laughter, female.
“And I lied,” he said, conspiratorially. “It wasn’t quick...not at all. He suffered horribly...shit himself to death from what I can gather. Can you believe that happy crappy?”
“D-dad...”
She could hear the smile in his voice, “Oh, relax honey. No great loss. You were always my favourite. Your mum’s, too. Think of it as a lightening of the load. Now, when you coming home, angel?”
The phone finally tumbled from Slim’s hand and fell to the carpet with a soft thud.
She could still hear her father laughing on the other end of the line, just before the call cut off and the phone went silent.
Slim followed it down to the carpet, where she curled into a ball and wept.
“My father’s one of them,” she rasped.
John squatted by her side, holding the phone like it was a poisonous snake. “W-what? You mean he’s like...those out there?”
Slim closed her eyes, images of her brother, dead and being devoured, flashed before her inner vision, like holiday snaps from a vacation in hell.
This can’t be happening.
It can’t be.
In her heart, in the deepest, most human part of her, she could feel it.
The absence of him. The removal of a loved one from the world.
Not one, but two.
Her father was gone.
She had heard it in his tone. That same, uncaring and banal evil that the dead out in the yard had displayed.
Her father was somehow infected with this thing, and her brother was really, truly gone.
Finally answering John, she said, “Yes. Just like those out there. I’ve lost him.”
“S-should we go over to your place?”
The answer came with terrible ease, as in her mind, she saw her father; all love erased from his kindly face, replaced by an unfathomable madness.
She saw him lunge for her, attack her.
“No. We have to get to Meg’s. There’s still a chance she’s alright. I can’t lose anyone else.” Slim rubbed the snot from her nose on her shirt, smearing the blood of her attackers across her chin and cheeks like a bloody mask, and took the phone from John.
He watched her with a mixture of fear and caring that made her love him in that moment.
So many are gone.
My mother.
My brother.
My father.
All lost to me.
I can’t lose anyone else.
I can’t.
She dialled her best friend.
Waited for ten endless rings.
No answer.
Please, let her be safe.
She handed John the phone.
“I have to get to Meg’s. I want you to come, but if you have to get back to your family, I’ll understand.”
Slim knew all about John’s rough upbringing. Like her, he had lost his mother many years ago, but unlike hers, his father had toppled from grace and found his sanctuary inside a bottle, whereas her father had been strong enough to fight on and raise his children well.
Until now, a tiny voice whispered in her mind, with insidious intent.
Though she had never met John’s father, the man’s vile reputation preceded him. His nature was often writ large in the bruises and lacerations that John so frequently wore to school.
The man was a monster, even before the whole town went to shit.
“Fuck him,” was all John said.
It was all he needed to say.
Slim forced her agony, her despair and her heart into a box, and buried them deep down inside.
“Let’s go get Meg.”
Slim’s father let the phone slide from his blood-soaked hand and drop to the carpet.
“Who was that?” Lyn purred from the adjacent couch.
“No one important. Just a little excess baggage I can jettison later.”
He paused to take in the naked Lyn’s voluptuous form.
Quite a looker.
Better looking than my dear-departed wife, that’s for sure.
“I really did marry the wrong sister, didn’t I?” he groan
ed, as he lowered himself between her spread legs and buried his face in her moist folds.
“I’d say you did, big boy. I’d say you did. Still, my sisters long gone, and now I’m all yours.”
He slid his tongue along the lips of her sex, savouring her flavour as she grabbed fistfuls of his hair and urged him closer.
Moaning, she asked, “So, what do you wanna do now, handsome?”
He smiled. “The neighbours are still home. We could pay them a visit...”
“Oh, sounds like fun!”
“We’ll need to be quick, though. My darling daughter is out there somewhere. I’d like to find her, if I can,” he said; grinning from ear to ear.
“And we wouldn’t want to miss that, now would we?”
CHAPTER 16
The girl wailed as he twisted the pliers, crushing and twisting the tender, sensitive areola. Blood oozed from the nipple as he gripped the tool’s handle tighter and squeezed hard as he could.
“Please!” she howled, helpless to defend herself from the agonies being inflicted on her exposed body.
“Begging’s not gonna help, sweetheart. Not one fucking bit.”
He withdrew the pliers from the mangled nipple, which now resembled a crushed, bloody grape, and tossed them aside. Reaching down to the bed-stand, he ran his coarse hand along the assortment of tools he’d previously laid there for completion of his work. His hand wavered over a screwdriver, stopped, and picked it up. “That said, I do find it pretty damn entertaining, so beg away.”
The girl thrashed on the bed, desperately fighting to release her arms from the ropes. She was bound too tight. There was no escape. Her legs remained untied, though, and she kicked out uselessly at her abductor.
He laughed at her attempts.
Without warning, he drove the long metal spike into her thigh, the skin popped with hardly any pressure, as the driver sank into the meat and muscle. She howled in torment, but it fell on death ears.
“I gotta tell ya, sweet thing, some days my work can be a slog. A goddam nine-to-five nightmare on wheels. It’s not every day I bag me a prize like you, he ignored her pleas for mercy as he withdrew the driver all the way from her flesh, leaving a perfect circular hole that pooled then overflowed with warm blood. He carefully laid the driver down and, with a carefree sigh, he sat on the edge of the bed, his back pressed against the twisting, writhing teenager.
“Settle down, bitch. There's a long ways to go yet.”
Reaching into his faded leather jacket, he pulled out a pack of smokes, fumbled for a lighter, and lit one up, savouring the taste as he inhaled.
“As I was saying...some days are a real fuck up. Hell, some months are a fuck up. I’ve gone nearly four months before, without so much as a sniff of your kind. I mean, that’s a whole lot of searching and waiting and watching and sucking on a bottle of good ‘ole Jack Daniels, to pass the ticking of the clock. And it’s not as if this work pays well. I make jack shit. There’s no one subsidising this here little obsession. Just me, my wits, and whatever damn food and booze I can lay on the table. It’s thankless, man...thankless.”
Taking his time to enjoy his smoke, the man turned to the girl. Her eyes pleaded, her full lips trembled, tears washed the sweat and blood from her pretty eyes, and he felt nothing but satisfaction.
“You wanna beg some more?” he asked, smiling.
“I just want t-to go home, mister.”
The man frowned in mocking sadness, “I know you do, sweetheart. I know you do. And guess what?”
“W-what?”
“I’m gonna let you go...”
Those luminous blue eyes flickered with something close to hope. “Y-you are?” she whimpered.
“Yup. I promise you. You have my word. You’ll be on your way back to the homestead just as soon as you tell me what I need to know.”
She screamed, “I don’t know anything!” Spittle sprayed his face.
He wiped it away with a wry smile.
“Cute,” he said, getting back to his feet and letting the cigarette fall to the carpet, where he crushed it with a huge boot. “But we both know that ain’t quite the whole truth and nothing but the truth, now don’t we...?”
His hand hovered over the bed-stand again, this time settling over a small buzz-saw; the kind used to perform autopsies on the recently deceased.
The girl thrashed some more, and he winked at her, “This is gonna get real messy, real soon. You got anything you wanna tell me, bitch?”
“I-I told you m-mister, I don’t know a-anything!”
Still smiling at her, he clicked the ‘on’ switch. The small circular blade whirred to life, spinning so fast its serrated edges dissolved in a blur of motion.
“Last chance, buttercup. What’s he using?”
Confusion creasing her pretty features, the agonised girl whimpered, “I s-swear, I d-don’t know....I just work there!”
“Okay doke...”
He lowered the whirring blade just above the puncture wound he’d inflicted with the screwdriver, its motion blowing the blood from the wound in all directions, causing pretty little patterns of red to fan out and spread across her pale flesh like roads on a map.
“Say buh-bye to your leg, pretty thing...”
The girl’s pleading stopped.
The fear in her eyes dissipated.
It was replaced by a black and feral hatred.
She gritted her teeth and exhaled a growl; far removed from her soft, weakened whimpers of the previous moment. Her beautiful, oval eyes drew into slits, emanating pure malice.
“He’ll find you,” she growled, in a guttural, ancient voice, less than human. “He’ll find you and he’ll tear your spirit to shreds! You’ll be food for his worms! All of you will feed them!”
Worms.
The man raised his eyebrows as she let forth a roaring, bellowing laughter; her sweet breath transformed into a vile, stomach-churning stench that smelt of death and decay, rot and ruination.
“There you are...” he smiled. “Nice to meet you.”
“He’ll find you!” she roared again. “You’re a dead man, priest!”
The man unzipped his leather jacket, revealing a muscular chest adorned with a tight t-shirt. On the shirt, an image Jim Morrison in his famous ‘young-lion’ pose, looked down on the thing on the bed.
“You see any goddam collar on my neck, bitch?”
The girl-thing growled, low and maleficent. “Then what are you, that you think you can stop Him?”
“I’m just a Doors fan with a hard-on for sending you fucks back to the boss.”
He lowered the spinning blade a faction closer to her flesh. “And if you think you’re gonna get to shoot your pea-soup at me, you got another thing coming, Harriet...”
The bedroom echoed with the girl’s rage and torment, as he began to cut, whistling as the saw sliced through skin, muscle and bone, like Moses through the red sea.
CHAPTER 17
Slim and John did all they could to stay in the shadows, as they made their way the three blocks to Rosenthal Street, and Meg’s house. The walk was short, but every step felt a mile, the weight of the journey lay heavy on Slim’s heart.
An eerie silence filled the streets. The occasional wail of a distant siren punctured the uneasy evening, sounding to Slim like a twisted suburban requiem. Twice, both she and John had come to a dead halt, pressed against the head-high bushels of unknown houses, holding unknown threats, as screams filled the air, raising in tremor only to die on the gentle wind as quick as they begun. Testaments to the chaos, the malignance, that was slowly pulling Plainfield into the abyss.
She held John’s hand, felt it tremble, and understood he felt the same dread. Whatever evil had come to their sleepy Midwestern town was slowly passing through its people like a virulent, hungry virus. Though the streets were all but dead, tell-tale signs of violence dotted the moonlit landscape, mocking the quiet lies of civility that the sycamore lined streets whispered into the wind.
Here and there, puddles of blood stained the tarmac, looking like oil under the watchful moon, a toppled over tricycle, peppered with tiny bloodspots on its pink handgrips held a terrible mystery that Slim struggled to push from her mind, an old Chevy 69, that she recognised as belonging to Harold Peers – the kind and gentle retired navy seal who was as much a part of the town’s beating heart as its founders – sat abandoned. Its driver-side window smashed inwards. As they silently passed by the dead vehicle, Slim saw ragged clumps of bloody grey hair that clung to the jagged glass like meat in the jowls of a rabid dog.
She thought of metal tombs. She thought of Harold, and in her minds all too vivid eye, she saw him pulled roughly through the broken glass and dragged off into the darkness to whatever terrible fate awaited him at his unknown attackers hands.
She shuddered, inwardly; feeling sick to her stomach.
How many people had been affected by this madness?
Half the town?
More?
And where was everyone?
Each house they passed by seemed to reach out with grasping, insidious intent. Her eyes rarely left the rows of windows as they travelled on, and though she saw no one in windows, either lit or in darkness, Slim thought of black widow spiders; of baleful, watching eyes and evil deeds behind every all-American picket fence and lovingly tended rose bush.
Plainfield was no longer a living, breathing town. She could almost hear its heartbeat, slowing, slowing down.
“We’re here,” John said, drawing her attention from a house to her left in which only one window was lit – a bedroom – and from which she could hear quiet childlike laughter.
She was glad of the distraction.
Looking up, she saw the driveway to Meg’s home, and her feet stopped moving. John turned, concern etched on his face.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine. I just...I’m scared of what we might find in there. If anything’s happened to Meg...”
“Don’t think about it. She’ll be fine. If her sister is one of these...people...then I’m sure they can handle her. She’s just a little girl.”
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