by L. T. Vargus
Contents
Title & Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Author's Note
CASTING SHADOWS EVERYWHERE
Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus
Copyright © 2019 Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus
Smarmy Press
All rights reserved.
v3.0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
KILLING SOMEONE IS A LOT harder than you’d imagine. Physically harder, I mean. On TV a guy strangles someone for like five seconds and the body slumps to the ground in a heap of dead just like that. In real life, it takes so long you wouldn’t believe it.
See, I saw someone get strangled once when I was nine.
I milled around outside of this Dairy Queen on Park Street on the way home from school. Out of nowhere, Tony Vasser walked up and kicked me in the balls. He was this 13-year-old shithead from the trailer park around the corner from my house, and he absolutely goddamn delighted in torturing the younger kids in the neighborhood. Such as me.
One minute I’m minding my own business, doing pretend kick flips and pop shove-its off this picnic table, and the next thing I know, I’m rolling in the grass clutching my crotch.
Anyway, what Tony didn’t know was that my cousin Nick was watching the whole thing from the parking lot. Nick was seventeen and even meaner than Tony. Not to me, I mean, but you know…
So Tony’s mouth gaped with laughter. He’s one of those slack-jawed people who always smile with their mouth wide open. All I could see was a row of top teeth hanging over a pink cavern that stretched back into blackness. Even in his school picture he smiled like that. Wide open mouth. It’s a dim look.
Mouth breather?
Absolutely.
Anyway, his mouth still drooped into an open pit when Nick grabbed him by the shoulder and slapped him across the face. Open hand. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even take the Winston out of the corner of his mouth. He just slapped. And it was loud as hell.
I remember that seemed pretty funny at first. I mean, I was still buckled over at the waist, hunched over a sack full of extreme ball pain. Obviously, I didn’t mind seeing Tony get blindsided or whatever. But there’s also something so disrespectful about a man slapping another man like that. Dismissive. It’s almost worse than getting punched in a weird way, you know? Someone has to respect you as a threat enough to punch you. A slap is all contempt.
But then Nick’s hands latched around Tony’s throat and squeezed. And it didn’t seem as funny anymore. Tony’s mouth stayed as wide open as ever, but his expression changed from happy to pants-shitting scared.
Nick had this look in his eyes. Like a hawk. Not like he was enjoying it or anything. Just that fierce look like a big mean bird that doesn’t feel anything beyond the aggression necessary to survive. Like he could swoop out of the sky and kill if he needed to. No mushy feelings.
Smoke twirled off the end of his cigarette into his eye, so he squinted harder on one side than the other. It almost made his face look incongruent and scarier. Like some messed up freak like Sloth from The Goonies or something.
He squeezed until the kid’s face turned a dark red like wine, and then he squeezed harder as it faded from purple to a pale blue. It finally went gray like the ash on the tip of a cigarette. Tony’s eyes bulged. His mouth moved like he was trying to scream. His fingernails scraped at Nick’s arms, but it was useless.
I had to pee. I remember that. And I wanted to tell Nick to stop, you know? To leave him alone and whatever. But I froze up. I didn’t say a word. Didn’t even move. Just stood there watching.
And that is me in a lot of ways. I freeze.
It is who I am.
This choking went on for what seemed like forever. A good two minutes, if not more, and believe me, two minutes is suddenly a goddamn eternity when you’re watching someone get strangled to death.
And I was scared. Not of Nick, I mean. Just scared ’cause of how Tony looked all gray, and I knew that this was forever. That at this second in time I could still try to do something, but once it passed I couldn’t take any of it back. No one could.
I didn’t say anything, of course. Did I already mention the freezing? ’Cause yeah. That.
It wasn’t so long before the shock in Tony’s expression faded. He dropped to his knees, and his eyes drooped closed.
Nick squeezed for a few more seconds even after the body went limp. Then he kind of leaned the kid up against the cinder block wall of the Dairy Queen.
We stood looking down on the body in silence. The limp neck tilted his chin down onto his chest. It was so still there. The whole world was motionless.
Then Tony’s torso spasmed. The wind sucked back into his lungs with a creaky gasping sound like sliding open some dried out dresser drawer. His face went back through the progression of colors in reverse.
Nick laughed. He laughed even harder when he saw how scared I looked. I thought Tony was dead for sure.
Instead, he stirred and coughed. His shithead eyes opened.
“Choked your ass out,” Nick said and spat on the ground.
Tony tried to say something, but his voice sounded all scratchy, and I couldn’t understand him. Nick started laughing again.
Then he went and got ice cream cones for him and me. I got vanilla dipped in chocolate.
* * *
Holy shit. I just reread that first entry. If anyone ever reads this, they’re going to think I’m a goddamn weirdo. But if you were there... I don’t know.
My point was that it must take for-goddamn-ever to actually strangle someone to death. I just Googled it. Dude, that shit can take up to ten minutes. Can you imagine strangling someone for ten minutes? Unbelievable. I guess it’s pretty common for people’s hands to cramp up before they can actually kill the person, too, so they have to, like, stop and massage their hands before they go back and re-strangle ‘em. What a nightmare.
Anyway, I was kind of wondering if I subconsciously started right out talking about Nick ’cause I want people to think that I am like him. Not that anyone will read this, of course, but the audience in my head, I guess. We’re all the main character in our own heads, right?
The truth is that I am nothing like him. Nick, I mean. I am the one who froze up. The one that will never get the girl. The one that wet the bed up until the age of fourteen. The one who gets picked on and pushed around. I mean, come on. Nobody would fuck with Nick.
* * *
So I hung out with Nick today. It’d been a couple years since I’d seen him. My mom doesn’t want me around him anymore since he got arrested for s
tealing a twelve-pack of Budweiser from a 7-11 a few years ago. Spent three months in the county jail and lived out of state for a while after that. I guess now he’s a “bad influence.”
Whatever. What Mom doesn’t know I could just about squeeze into the Grand Canyon.
So Nick is 24, and he has his own apartment in town now. Well, he has this roommate, Donnie, so they share the place. The point is, there are no adults or parents or whatever. It’s rad. I mean, the place is a dump, but you know...
Mostly I sat on the floor watching Nick and Donnie play Playstation. Donnie told some hilarious stories.
“Then there was the time I tried to shit off the bridge. You know that overpass that goes over West Street? I squatted off the edge of that. Tryin’ to flop a sloppy deuce on some unsuspecting Buick Skylark or something, you know?”
Donnie tilted back his head and poured most of the contents of a can of Wild Cherry Pepsi down his throat.
“I missed,” Donnie said and then burped.
“The shit, I mean. My shit missed the car. I didn’t have the push I thought I would, so it smacked the road way the hell after the car had already passed,” he said, shaking his head.
He had a wistful look in his eyes like he was still disappointed to this day.
“Loudest slap I ever heard, though. Like my turd was belly-smacking West Street.”
See? Hilarious.
“Somehow the cops showed up pretty much immediately, and I had to run like hell with my pants half off.”
He turned the Pepsi can upside down and shook the last few drops of high fructose corn syrup into his mouth before tossing the can in the general direction of the kitchen.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I gotta make a run for the border.”
“You work tonight?” Nick said.
“Indeed,” Donnie said. “I’m lookin’ at eight hours of repeating this motion.”
Donnie stood up and pantomimed something with his hands that looked sort of like a shotgun. He squeezed the trigger over and over and swung the barrel of the invisible firearm left and right.
“What’s that?” I said.
Donnie looked down at his hands and then back at me.
“It’s my gun,” he said.
“Your Taco Bell gun?” I said.
“It’s my sour cream gun.”
I felt my eyebrows stretch as high as they could.
“Sour cream gun?”
Donnie nodded.
“It’s like a caulk gun that splooges just the right amount of sour cream onto each Burrito Supreme,” he said.
He did another series of hand movements, maybe like he was loading a second gun.
“And this here is my Guacamole Glock.”
“Glock-amole?” Nick said.
Donnie just grinned. He aimed both guns at me and motioned like he was firing them.
“Is there a refried bean gun?” I said.
Donnie chortled.
“Oh, lord no. The beans get made in a giant stainless steel sink. We spray boiling water into this bean powder and then bam! Sink full of refried beans.”
He holstered his condiment weapons before continuing.
“It’s all very scientific over there at Taco Bell. We weigh each bag of food before we give it out to ensure that every chalupa and double decker taco has been crafted to precise corporate specifications.”
So after Donnie left, it was just me and Nick. We sat on a couple of disintegrating La-Z-Boys, one gray and the other light green, relics of some upper middle class den circa 1986. Donnie had found the pair on the side of the road. The recliners had roaches in them that had miraculously died out without becoming a bigger problem in their apartment. One of the few perks of never having any food, I guess.
Without Donnie there for comic relief, the conversation dried up some. We played video games in relative silence for fifteen minutes before Nick spoke up.
“Did you hear about the stiff they found above Broad Street?” Nick said.
My mind tried to process this sentence and failed.
“Stiff?” I said.
“You know... the stiff. The corpse. The dead body. The fuckin’ cadaver they found in the storage unit above Broad Street Market the other day?” he said.
“No.”
He nodded.
“The guy that owns the store had been rentin’ out the storage space in the attic to some guy. I guess once the guy’s wife kicked him out, he just started living up there. Him and his dog. It was just this tiny attic, you know. No floorboards in some areas. Just pink fiberglass insulation and shit.”
Nick paused the game to light a cigarette.
“So one day he’s sittin’ up there, and his heart pops. Massive heart attack. He’s dead before he can even take three paces to get out of his little cell. He never told nobody he was livin’ up there, though. Nobody found the goddamn body until maggots starting rainin’ down from the ceiling into the store a few weeks later.”
Nick hissed a laugh between his teeth.
“Can’t you just imagine some old lady perusing the fat free dairy section when maggots start fallin’ from the goddamn sky?”
“So what, his body like rotted through the floor or something?” I said.
Nick squinted.
“I ain’t sure,” he said. “Musta been something like ‘at.”
He tapped his cigarette on the rim of the ash tray and twirled it in his fingertips.
“You know what the worst part was, though?” he said.
“What?”
“The dog. The dog was trapped up there. Padlocked into this tiny room. No windows or nothin’. No way out.”
He shook his head.
“The dog ate part of the body, but... Must’ve whined and yowled like crazy, but I guess nobody could hear it. It starved eventually.”
We were both quiet for a long time.
Chapter 2
I TOTALLY GET THE WHOLE bully thing. For the dumb people — the lowest common denominator — the whole world is made up of aggressors and their victims. You can only be one or the other, so you better be on the attack. They spend their days probing their peers for weakness. The aggressors find a wimp that won’t stand up, and they proceed to push them around so they can feel some sense of power in the world. Control. It’s a struggle for control that’s so small. So meaningless...
Troy Summers is like the King of the lowest common denominator clan. Just look at his goddamn name! He sounds like he was born to play quarterback and be a total dick, right? Exactly. Well, he is at the top of the food chain, so he doesn’t usually get hands-on with the actual losers. He gets to torment the other bullies, see, whom in turn have to take their aggression out on the rest of us.
Does anyone get any real satisfaction out of spitting in a kid’s mashed potatoes and making him eat them, though? Is there real power or control in calling a fat kid “bitch titties” in the locker room? Or pissing in some kid’s shoes while he is off in his gym clothes? Or writing “fag” with a sharpie on someone’s locker?
Of course not. I have no control. You have no control. Troy Summers has no control. It’s all bullshit, so who cares?
But then I stop myself. I think maybe this is just what I think because I am a victim. Not that I’m the victim of something or someone in particular. I mean being a victim, like the archetype. Like I was somehow born to play this victim — predestined to be susceptible and weak — and it will shape how I see myself and how others see me forever. Almost like the runt of the litter, you know? I have a mark to me. It’s invisible, but everyone can still see it somehow, like, subconsciously or something. Or maybe it’s a smell. Like pheromones or whatever. A stench.
I am the one that always flinches.
See, I never take action, so I only have words. I can use them to convince myself that this whole struggle for control means nothing, but why do I never act? Why do I always freeze up? Does the world really work the way they think it does, and I’m already stuck on the losing
end of the deal?
Is my destiny already etched in stone? Is it coded into my DNA? Like, biologically, I’m just a complete pussy and always will be?
I have to piss.
Back.
So what I was getting to was this: Today I was Troy Summers’ victim. Yes, the King stooped low to rough up one of the mere peasants for once.
Don’t get excited. It was nothing too elaborate.
We passed in the hall, and when I least expected it, he pushed me into the lockers. Yeah. Troy Summers is known for two things: upper body strength and the element of surprise. Anyway, I crashed into the cold metal so goddamn loud, my books flying everywhere.
See, I’m kind of big for my age — like 6’2”, 190 or so — and sometimes the bullies, the jocks like Troy, in particular, don’t like the idea that I’m bigger than them, so they lash out. They have a lot of pent up hostility from being cursed with being handsome, super popular and getting all the girls, I guess.
It was weird, though. For that first split second, I thought about attacking him. It flashed in my head — a quick lightning bolt of violent intent. But I looked up, and Troy glared back with that hawk look in his eye — maybe not quite as mean and dead-on-the-inside looking as Nick, but something like that. So I just went about gathering up my books, and he moved on. He didn’t say anything, but his friends all laughed.
Good times.
* * *
I can’t stop thinking about Troy and getting pushed over and all of that. Actually, I should say that I can’t stop thinking about that moment afterward. The moment of aggression welling up inside of me.
I don’t know. I’ve never really felt anything quite like that before. It was like this crazy call to action. I mean, I didn’t answer the call or whatever, but I think what scares me more is that looking back I think maybe I should have. There was violence in my heart, and I kind of wanted it there.
Yeah, yeah. I know everyone is a tough guy after the fact within the safety of their bedroom with a damn pen in their hand, but I don’t know... I probably should just keep my head down like always and not think these things, right?
Right.
* * *