"What?"
"My mummy's buried here." His mouth became a seizuring mess, spewing laughter.
The hitcher smiled and bit down on her lower lip, tucking her chin up. The driver faced forward, still sniggering—"My mummy. . ." She noticed him looking at her breasts from the side of his face. She looked down, herself, to see her nipples pointing down the road—the cab was pleasantly chilled. She crossed her arms over her chest.
From the corner of her eye, she spotted a silver canteen sitting between them on the seat and licked her lips. The driver followed her eyes. He pushed the canteen across the seat until its cool metal touched her leg.
"Thirsty?" He nodded at it.
"Thanks." She half-smiled and took the canteen. The cold liquor burned down her throat. She opened her eyes wide and handed the canteen back. He took a swallow and wrinkled up his rubbery face. Grunting, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and screwed the lid back on. "Any water?" she asked.
The driver shook his head, then turned his eyes away, staring out the side window into the distance.
"So. . .how far can you take me?"
"Fields of Peace."
"Is that some kinda town?"
He reached down and flicked open the ash tray. He grubbed around and came up with a stoppered glass phial. It was full of tiny colored hearts.
"How far is it?"
The driver gave the phial a proffering shake. "A good trip." He grinned. Shaking a red and a purple heart into his hand, he placed the red one in his mouth and held the purple out to the hitcher. "Be mine." The hitcher glanced down at the candy-sized heart.
"God, it's been so long." Her small, trembling fingers clasped the purple heart and brought it to her lips.
***
The only sound in the cab was of the truck's big, black tires rolling down the sticky-hot pavement. The driver and hitcher both squinted from beneath their visors' veils. The sun smoldered dead ahead; every surface between glowed molten gold. Prodigious shadows crept from the occasional Joshua tree or century plant. Somewhere the moon was getting wide and ready to watch.
The driver turned to the hitcher, squinting through one eye, the other wide. Traces of his reflection interrupted her view out the passenger-side window. "Hey," he said. "Hey?"
"What?" she squeaked, startled from the interruption of silence.
"Why wouldn't the jackal give the vulture a ride?"
She arched her shoulders, eyes wide, childish.
"Because the vulture had too much carri-on."
She burst into giggles, continuing to stare out the passenger window.
"So. . .what'd you do?" he asked.
She turned to look into the mirror, finding her pupils were the size of peas. Then she faced him. "Who? Me?" she giggled.
"Yeah." The driver gave a feeble grin.
"I killed a vulture once," she said.
"What'd he do?"
"He was picking on me," she answered with a sneer.
The driver yelped with laughter. "That's what vultures do," he stuttered playfully.
"That makes it all right? What they do?" The hitcher glowered at him.
"Something's gotta clean up—after things die." He smiled, staring straight ahead.
Her face turned grave. "Do I look dead to you?"
"You look—good." He leered from the right corner of his mouth.
"You wanna see some more?" Her eyes narrowed.
"Yeah."
"Give me another one of those candies, and I'll show you something." The driver quickly shook another purple heart free from the phial and into the hitcher's hand. She placed it in her mouth and closed her eyes. With a deep breath, she opened them again and said, "Let me show you what vultures do." Pulling down her shirt, she exposed the top half of her left breast and a mouth-sized bite scar, inches left of her heart. The depression of mangled tissue was blush red against the pale of her chest. "They try to eat your heart out, alive."
The driver, no longer watching the road, reached across the cab and placed his index and middle finger into the scar pit. The hitcher opened her mouth, to speak, but nothing came out. Her consciousness fluttered.
The station wagon was parked on that dark road in the woods. The pines loomed over each side of the car. She felt herself settling down from the sky, like a leaf, onto the roof of the car. Then, into the car. There was a man with a long, hooked nose and protruding chin. He was smiling at a young woman in the passenger seat. "Tomorrow, we'll see the ocean," said the man as he took off his tan coat. "I've always wanted to see the ocean," the girl batted her lashes, eyes twinkling in the darkness. "Oh, you'll see it," chuckled the man, "but, there is what we talked about, first." He raised his eyes, questioning. "I know," she smiled. "Good." He began loosening his tie. . .
A light rain sprinkled the car, running brown little trails down the dirty windows. The man was between the girl's legs now—she, completely naked, head pushed against the passenger-side door, he with his button-up shirt still on. He was calling her names, all a part of an agreed game. She was Dirty — Sick — Whore. The man was grunting, wrapping his hands around her throat. "Like we talked about," he said. She gasped. "Like we talked about." But the girl was struggling for real. She couldn't breathe. She was clawing, slapping, tapping out. "Good. . .good. . .good." The girl blacked out, head slumped sideways over the seat.
When she awoke, the man's head was buried in her chest. At her stirring, he looked up. She screamed and screamed. His face had become that of a deformed vulture, the beak bloody and smiling—eyes, big and glassy in the gray moonlight. She screamed. The creature screamed back. Blood was running down her chest. It returned to choking her. She slid her hand across the floorboards along crumbs, wrappers, and found something under the seat. A glass bottle. She retrieved it and drew it up toward the ceiling. She brought it down, shattering it over the vulture's head, who shrieked. Blood filled up one of its black eyes, but its hands kept choking her. Still holding the glass bottle, she raked it back and forth, across the face. She didn't stop cutting until its shrieks died away, and its grip on her throat grew slack. The mangled pulp of the vulture's face receded into the darkness, and it slumped back in its seat with a gurgle.
Tears and blood running down her body, the girl grabbed up her pile of clothes and pack, and ran out of the car, into the woods.
***
The driver removed his hand from the scar pit. "Your piece is missing," he said to the hitcher's wordless gape.
Tears spilled over her face. "I had to. . ." She shook her head. "I had to. . .I had to. . ."
"I see," said the driver. In front of them, on the side of the road, she saw a station wagon. A man was standing outside it, running toward them. He had a vulture's face. "No!" screamed the hitcher. "Nooo!" The vulture's face was flayed and bleeding, pieces missing. As they passed, the vulture man slapped his hand against her door. He ran alongside the car, pounding on it again and again, somehow keeping pace. Is he flying? the woman thought, horrified. She hid her face in her hands, pushed tight against her skull. Heaving breaths, she looked into the side mirror. The road was empty: no station wagon, no vulture-faced man. Lowering her head into her hands, she broke into tears. "I'm so fucking tired. He won't let me sleep—not real sleep."
The driver reached over and raked his fingers through her hair. She screamed, and he recoiled. She dug into her backpack and withdrew a knife. She pointed it at him.
The driver held up his hands, steering with his knees.
"Whadda-you-want?" Tears ran down each side of her scowl.
"What-do-YOU-want?" the driver responded, cautiously pointing at the knife tip with his index finger.
"To get clean, to sleep!" she snapped, voice breaking. "How much farther is that place?"
"At the end of the road."
"How far?"
"Before dark."
The hitcher traced the outline of the driver's face with the knife. "And what toll would you exact, driver?" She regarded him with mock sym
pathy.
The driver waved his hands. "I just take care of the dead stuff."
"Bullshit. You're a fucking vulture just like him."
Holding the steering wheel with his knee, the driver made V's with his index and middle fingers, saying, in a jowled inflection, "I'mmm—not a crooked beak!"
"Then what are you?"
"I'm more of a jackal." The driver howled, and then erupted in laughter.
"Yeah?" She smiled, reaching for the canteen. "We're gonna see." Unscrewing the lid, she took a swallow.
***
The sun burrowed into the highway, forming a fat ellipse.
A large shadow, just up ahead, began to dissociate itself with the background. The hitcher wiped away her tears and squinted beneath the veil of sun visor. A massive black shape lay at the roadside. The truck barreled toward the shape. Closer and closer, the shape defined itself. A large beast.
"What the hell is that?" the hitcher gasped. Its long white fangs and claws glinted in the sunset—a shadow with teeth. As they drew closer, it became clearer. "It's got, something. . ." There was a second shadow, beneath the beast. The prey.
The driver squinted indifferently, nodding his head.
"Oh, my God," the hitcher gasped. The prey flailed its legs, pale hooves gleaming. "O my God, O my God, O my God. . ." The hitcher pulled at the skin of her face, tension mounting in the muscles that connected her lids to her sockets. The beast's long jaws opened like a steel trap and snapped down onto the prey. Thrashing its head this way and that, it ripped and shredded the meat. There was a final kick of hooves as the prey was rent into flying pieces. The truck arrived just in time to be speckled by the kill. The hitcher screamed, subconsciously grabbing the driver's arm. She turned to him, emitting a strain of unintelligible cries. The windshield wipers smeared blood across her view.
He turned to her, leaning in. "Sh-sh-shhh. It's past." Even in the chilled cab, sweat ran over her face. Her brain was throbbing against the inside of her skull, her heartbeat and vision a pulsing blur. And then, darkness took her.
***
The hitcher woke to the sound of something flapping in the wind. She stared straight up at a brown, rippling ceiling. Her mouth was parched, though her body felt sticky and wet. She struggled up onto her elbows, naked. She lay on a long wooden table, which was covered with strange instruments. Her eyes swam around the room. A brown tent—its walls billowing in the song of the wind. A hanging lantern swayed from a large shepherd's hook. The light moved back and forth over the interior of the tent. The instruments on the table twinkled in the lantern light. She rolled over the edge of the table and attempted to stand. Her legs buckled like stilts of rubber, her head reeled, and she fell into the sand. Holding onto the edge of the table, she tried to raise herself up. Her nude, sand-covered body wobbled violently to its feet. Then she fell again, harder. Her eyes circled the tent, searching for a way out. A flap fluttered in the wind, glimpses of the moonlit desert beyond.
With a full breath, she crawled forward, each push a surge of nauseousness. The sands whispered consolingly through the tent flap. A delirious grin lit across her face. The flap whipped open violently. No one there. She sighed in relief, and crawled farther. Again, the tent flap opened, washing her path in moonlight. Then, the opening became eclipsed by a dark shape. She gasped, tried to scream, but could only manage a dry cough. The figure stepped through the moon-glow and into the lantern-light. It had the head of a jackal, the body of a man—naked to the waist, where a sort of apron covered his trunk: a mass of dried blood-matted animal fur dangling down into hooves that hung just above his feet. Upon his hairy chest, a golden ankh hung from a chain. The beast bent down to the hitcher. She slapped at his hands as he gently scooped her up into brutish arms and laid her back on the table. Bringing a wet sponge up from a bucket, he washed her. Her arms wormed over the table, eyes rolling in their sockets. In slow spirals, he washed the sand from her flesh, dipping and wringing the sponge. "God. . .," she muttered, ". . .save me." Melancholy human eyes stared at her from the static jackal-face.
He delicately retrieved a long, thin instrument with a hook at its end. "Please," she growled. The man put his left palm over her forehead, partially over her eyes, and pushed the back of her head against the table. She gurgled, arms flopping. Through half-closed eyes, she watched the hook's descent. It hovered in the air, poised.
She saw the condemning eyes of her mother—the empty air where her father might have stood before he left. Her thumb in the air—smelled the sick smell of strangers. Starving on the side of the road, like being gutted—using flesh as a bargain—trapped, scarred—blood, death, and: never the same. A cavalcade of shab rooms—needle parties—sex for drugs—drugs for travel—sex for travel. Begging, begging. Hopeless. One last pain, she wished, and over, gone.
The hook went in. There was a shellfish-like crack and the tear of soft tissue. A wet suck and release of air. The jackal gasped raggedly, eyes rolling heavenward. The hitcher's eyes flickered, her face spasmed. Her arms shot off the table, rigid in the air. The jackal leaned over, puckered his lips and took a guttural suck of air. His eyes came back into the mask. Squinting, he stirred the hook, pulling it in and out. The hitcher's arms slapped like dead fish onto the table. She felt herself floating upward, a leaf in the wind. The colors of her world bled out, leaving only shades of gray for her new eyes. She spiraled away toward the top of the tent, looking down, without pain, at herself, which stared up at nothing.
She stopped at the ceiling, gliding along like a helium balloon. The man's work was a blur of movement, bent over the corpse: cutting, scooping, plopping piles of innards into animal-headed pottery; stuffing the gaping body with brown packets; stitching the skin back together and, re-sponging the body clean.
When sunlight's first gray crept in the door, the man was lowering the corpse into a pit full of slushy salt. He packed the salt around her, over her, submerging the body. The jackal-faced man erected himself breathing heavy, and walked to the opening of the tent.
She floated over the tent ceiling, following him to the entrance. He stood there a long while before stepping out into the goldening light. She followed him into the open air.
The sun poured platinum over the desert, defining a vast, wide-open field of rectangular mounds. Hundreds of them.
. . .how far can you take me?
Fields of Peace.
The Matthew Lee Bain ship is slowly but steadily approaching its thirty-second year at sail on this dreary and otherwise uncertain sea of life. . .
Other than that, he writes fiction, studies literature, and practices Tae Kwon Do.
—SLEEPLESS EYES
by Tim Waggoner
It's 1:38 a.m. on a Thursday night, and you're sitting at a small round table tucked into a dim corner of an all-night coffee shop. A steaming mug of hot liquid sits before you, and you know it'll be at least another fifteen minutes before it cools enough for you to drink. To pass the time you glance around at your fellow late-night caffeine addicts. One of the main reasons you came—besides suffering from insomnia—is that this place, especially at this time of night, is usually a prime spot for people-watching.
The barista at the counter, a raven-haired woman in her early twenties, asks a customer, "Would you like aqueous fluid drizzled on top of your whipped pus?"
The customer nods the middle of his three scaled heads, and the barista leans over his drink and squeezes her right eyeball as if it were a large ocular pimple. Clear fluid spurts out of a fissure in the organ and splatters onto the yellow-white mass floating atop the customer's drink.
You turn to look at the fireplace in the corner opposite from where you're sitting. One of the employees has recently added fresh fuel to the fire, and the severed arms and legs—the small, delicate limbs of children—sizzle and pop as the fat beneath the blackening skin cooks. Sitting in a cushy chair next to the fire, an obscenely fat man— naked, completely bereft of body hair—methodically inserts long sharp needles
into his testicles, one after the other, as if his balls are fleshy pin cushions. As he works, he chats with a woman whose entire body, including her face, is covered by tight black leather. Only her mouth is visible through an unzipped slit, and you can see she has no teeth in her swollen, bleeding gums.
Over by the window, a pair of exotically beautiful conjoined twins—Asian, high cheek bones, straight black hair down to the middle of their backs, jade-green minidresses sans panties—are masturbating each other with dildos fashioned from metal rods wrapped in steel wool. As the women moan in ecstasy, blood runs down their well-toned legs and pools on the tiled floor beneath their table. An old woman that reminds you a lot of your grandmother, except for the pulsating lesions covering her skin, kneels next to the twins, her head lowered to the floor as she furiously laps up the twins' blood-cum with a tongue encrusted in fat, happy ticks.
Your attention is drawn by screams coming from behind the door to the men's restroom. The screams stop, and a few seconds later a man walks out. He's probably in his thirties, wearing a white turtleneck and jeans, and he looks okay, if you don't count his ashen skin and uncomprehending expression of stark terror. He manages to take three steps before bloodstains begin to show through his turtleneck. Pieces of his body begin to fall off and hit the floor with meaty-wet plops. Just a few at first—an ear, a nose, a lip—but then more and more, until there's a veritable rain of flesh, blood, and bone, and the core of the man's body collapses into a heap. A cheer goes up from the crowd and everyone—the barista, the three-headed man, Pincushion-Balls, Leather-Girl, the Steel-Wool Twins, Grandma Tick-Tongue, and all the others in the coffee shop—race toward the grisly mound and fall upon it, grabbing slick handfuls of viscera and jamming them into their mouths.
"Now that's good eatin'!" Grandma Tick-Tongue exclaims around a mouthful of kidney. Her fellow gourmands grunt their agreement.
Horror Library, Volume 4 Page 14