Highways to Hell

by Smith, Bryan

  They feared him.

  Will felt a mad impulse to laugh.

  Shit, you’d have to be a goddamn moron not to fear Hank.

  That, or the Terminator.

  “I’m gonna ask a question, and I don’t want any bullshit. Which one of you stupid meth-heads thought it’d be a good idea to order a pizza right smack in the middle of a home invasion?”

  Silence.

  The bikers and the blond girl squirmed some more, fearing the sure-to-be-terrible wrath of their inquisitor.

  Hank was seething. “Answer. Me. Now.” The veins on his bald scalp stood out, his eyes bulged, and his nostrils flared. His voice was low and hoarse, almost demonic. “I’m going to kill all of you if I don’t get an answer.”

  The blond girl huffed. “J-Dog did it.”

  ‘J-Dog’ was apparently the other biker. He shot an angry glare at the blond. “You lying bitch!” He jabbed a forefinger in her direction and turned his distraught face up toward Hank. “She did it, man! I swear ta fuckin’ God, Hank!”

  Hank shook his head. “You idiots.” He put a hand to his temple, closed his eyes, and appeared to work at summoning a level of calm. His eyes snapped open again. “I guess I don’t care who did it. What’s done is done. However, we’re left with a dilemma.”

  Spike frowned. He looked confused. “Whuh...what’s a duh...duh-lemmer?”

  Hank said, “A conundrum.”

  Spike’s frown deepened. “A condom...drum?” Then his face brightened, and he smiled. “Like a barrel o’ rubbers, huh?”

  Hank lifted Spike off the sofa, placed him in a headlock, and laughed as the biker thrashed uselessly in his grip.

  The blond shrieked. “Don’t hurt my baby!”

  Hank snapped the biker’s neck.

  The body tumbled to the floor, where it twitched a time or two before going still.

  The blond squealed.

  She slid off the recliner, knelt over the dead biker, and turned a tear-streaked, beseeching face up toward Hank. “Whuh-whuh...why?”

  Hank shrugged. “Nobody that stupid deserves to live.”

  Will thought, This is one harsh dude.

  His gaze went to the woman in the nightie.

  She was looking at him, her eyes wide and full of terror.

  Eyes that communicated desperation.

  Supplication eyes.

  Will looked away, unable to bear the woman’s imploring gaze a moment longer.

  Hell, what could he do for her?

  He couldn’t even help himself.

  Hank seized a fistful of the blond’s hair, hauled her to her feet, and dumped her back in the recliner. “As I was saying, we’re faced with a dilemma. Pizza face has seen some shit we can’t let him talk about.”

  J-Dog said, “So? We just waste his ass, right?”

  Will gulped.

  Hank’s girl entered the living room.

  She was carrying the pizza box.

  She caught Will’s eye, smiled, and walked over to him.

  Will liked the way her hips moved.

  She sat down next to him, folded her legs beneath her, and leaned toward him. “Want a slice?”

  She opened the box.

  The top flap covered his lap.

  Which was good, because he didn’t want Hank to get a glimpse of the woody he was sporting. The girl’s bare knees were pressed against his thigh, and his vantage point allowed him an unobstructed view of the tops of her breasts. The plunging neckline of the half-shirt displayed them in a way that made his mouth go dry.

  She removed a slice of pizza from the box.

  Wedged it into her open mouth.

  She chewed lustily, slurping in dangling strands of cheese like noodles.

  Hank helped himself to a piece, too. “Yeah, we could waste him.” He wolfed down the slice like a starving animal in the wild. He smacked his lips and belched. “But then he’d never get back to the pizza place. The other pizza bitches would start worrying about him. Pretty soon we’d be ass-deep in cops.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. Will surreptitiously scanned their faces. They all seemed to be deep in thought, a process that looked more problematic and painful for J-Dog and the blond. Hank was the only one who maybe had an IQ beyond the double-digit range. And he was pure-ass crazy.

  For the first time, Will began to consider the prospect of his death as an imminent event. He supposed that’d been the case from the beginning, but he was only now fully conscious of the reality of it. There’d just been too much else going on, too many grotesque revelations for his brain to process.

  Now, however, the likelihood of his own death displaced all other concerns.

  What would it be like?

  Would it hurt?

  He considered the severed head in the frying pan, then willed the vision away, because the answer to his question was plainer than a blackhead on a teenager’s nose: Yep, it’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt like a sumbitch.

  He realized he was shaking, but he was powerless to quell his body’s involuntary reaction to possible death by dismemberment.

  And what did it really matter?

  Shit, he wasn’t supposed to show fear?

  He could only hope they wouldn’t take their time snuffing him.

  Better to die fast and relatively easy.

  A litany of prayers started running through his head: Please, God, forgive me for my sins. I haven’t been such a bad guy. Sorry I knocked over my goldfish bowl that time I was stoned. I loved that fish, man. I didn’t mean to kill him. And I’m sorry about the porn. I know I watch a lot of it. I know it’s sinful. There’s just something about lesbian porn, ya know? But I’m sorry, I know it was wrong. The body is a temple. I shoulda been more respectful of the holy creation that is Woman. Ahh...oh, hell, I’m just sorry, sorry as can be, God.

  Hank was scowling at him.

  Will blinked. “Uh...was I saying any of that out loud?”

  His girl giggled. “I like all-girl porn, too.”

  Will’s face reddened. “Er...”

  Hank made a noise of disgust. “Stop flirting with the dead-meat, Starlene.”

  Starlene mimicked the noise he’d made. “I ain’t flirtin’ with the boy, Hank. I’m just havin’ some fun with him. I like messin’ with ‘em before you kill ‘em, you know that.”

  Some of the tension drained out of Hank’s face. He nodded. “Yeah, I know you do, hon. You just get a little too into it sometimes, worries me.”

  Her lower lip puffed out. “Baby, you know I only got eyes for you.” She spoke in a tone of mock-hurt. “Don’t you know how much I love you?”

  Hank grinned. “Shit, yeah, I know that.”

  He reached into a pocket of his leather pants, removed a long folding knife, and snapped open a gleaming blade. Will’s shaking worsened as the big man approached the sofa.

  This is it, he thought.

  He pictured the blade punching into his throat.

  Pictured blood jetting out of the opening.

  But Hank didn’t stab him.

  He took hold of one of Starlene’s hands, folded the knife handle into it, and kissed the back of the hand. “You keep an eye on pizza face, baby. I gotta take me a shit.”

  Starlene’s eyelids fluttered. “Baby, you’re so romantic.”

  He smiled, then he kissed her on the mouth and was gone.

  The room’s occupants remained silent until they heard a door close in another room.

  The blond let out a big breath. “He’s outta control, Star.”

  Will watched the good humor seep out of Starlene’s face. “I know, y’all.”

  J-Dog said, “I hate to speak ill of ol’ Hank, but he’s scarin’ me. The way he killed Spike...” He shook his head. “That was plain uncalled for.”

  Will wanted to say, “Oh, yeah? Unlike the guy with no head, eh?”

  But he kept his mouth shut.

  The blond said, “So whatta we do about it?”

  Starlene sighed. “Dunno.
I’m thinkin’.”

  Well, this was an interesting development. Hank didn’t have his followers as cowed as they allowed him to believe. He was just a room away, and they were in here plotting his undoing. A flicker of hope flared to life inside him.

  “Um...why...” He paused to clear his throat. “Sorry, I’m scared shitless. Why don’t you guys just ditch him?”

  They seemed to roll their eyes as one.

  Starlene said, “Because he wouldn’t rest until he’d tracked us down and killed us. He is absolutely unrelenting, a fucking human killing machine.”

  Will’s eyes became narrow slits. “Say...what happened to the cornpone accent?”

  She grunted. “An act. I want him to underestimate me.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  The blond chuckled. “Her name ain’t Starlene, either.”

  ‘Starlene’ glared at her. “Too much information, Crystal.”

  “Sorry.”

  The muffled sound of a toilet flush emanated from the distant bathroom.

  The brunette said, “Hush, everybody.”

  Hank ambled back into the room. He seemed more relaxed, less manic than he’d been prior to moving his bowels. He rubbed a hand over his crotch. “I don’t know about you, J-Dog, but my tractor’s about ready to plow some new fields.”

  J-Dog chuckled.

  The chuckle sounded forced to Will’s ears; then again, Hank hadn’t been privy to the mutinous conversation, so he probably didn’t pick up on the subtlety of tone.

  The brunette said, “Hank, goddammit, I thought you was my man. Now you’re gonna fuck that wrinkly ol’ wifey-poo bitch.” She harrumphed. “Ain’t right, baby, ain’t right at all.”

  Hank stared at her.

  The stern expression on her face wilted.

  “No more lip from you tonight, Starlene. I’m warning you.”

  He lifted the bound woman off the floor.

  “Excuse me, girls, I’ve got business to attend to.” He leered at the brunette, then his gaze slid toward J-Dog. “Come on, J, let’s show this hoochie mama a good time.”

  J-Dog rose slowly from the sofa. “Sure thing, Hank.”

  There wasn’t much enthusiasm in his voice.

  Hank glared at his girl again. “You and Crystal watch the pizza bitch whilst me and my amigo make proper use of the master bedroom.”

  Hank took their silence for acquiescence.

  He walked past the sofa on his way out of the room.

  Later, when the burst of adrenaline had faded and the violence of the moment was over, Will would try to remember whether there’d been any conscious formulation of a plan on his part.

  Not that it mattered.

  Only the results were important.

  What he did was simple—he extended a foot as Hank walked by, and the big man pitched forward, the nightgown-clad woman spilling out of his arms. It was an awesome sight, like watching a mountain collapse.

  Will liberated the knife from the brunette’s hand before she knew what was happening. He moved with a speed surpassing anything in his experience.

  One moment he was on the sofa.

  The next moment the knife was in his hand and he had a knee planted squarely in the middle of Hank’s back.

  A fraction of a moment later the blade was buried to the hilt in Hank’s neck.

  Hank spasmed.

  Tried to rise.

  Will yanked the knife out and put it in him again, this time through the ear.

  He gave it a twist and yanked it out again.

  The knife rose and fell several more times. Hank was dead after the first few thrusts, but Will wasn’t inclined to stop butchering the behemoth’s body. Adrenaline was part of it, but the murderous fury was also fueled by paranoia, by a conviction instilled by a lifetime of watching bad movies on late night TV.

  He imagined Hank rising from the dead like Jason Voorhees.

  Crazy.

  Thing was, Will could just see it.

  It would be a defiance of reality every bit as absurd as the notion that he’d managed to successfully vanquish the monster that was Hank.

  So he kept stabbing him.

  After a while, he rolled the big body over and stared at the dead man’s unseeing eyes.

  A chilling sight.

  But then Will experienced another flash of inspiration.

  He grinned. And he started cutting again.

  Daylight.

  The house and immediate vicinity was crawling with cops and evidence techs. The authorities had been summoned by the concerned night manager of a Pizza Zone restaurant. One of their delivery boys had gone out on a run last night and never returned.

  Detective Mitch Roth suspected no one would ever see the pizza boy again. He was officially missing, but he had a feeling his body would be discovered in a ditch or ravine sometime in the coming hours.

  He leaned against the archway leading into the blood-splattered living room.

  He was trying to stay out of the way of the evidence techs—Lord knew they had their hands full with this one.

  He heard footsteps on the hardwood floor behind him.

  Detective Cooper moved into his field of vision. “Looks like some shit out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  Roth nodded. “Yeah, what they did to the one guy, the big one in the leather pants...you just don’t want to believe people capable of sick shit like that are out there.”

  Cooper grunted. “You know they are, Mitch. The world’s fulla scum.”

  One of the evidence techs gagged behind his mask.

  Another tech leaned over his shoulder, grimaced at what he saw, and looked at the detectives. “You guys should see this.”

  Roth and Cooper exchanged wary glances.

  Both men started moving toward the techs.

  The first tech said, “Careful where you step. Stay off the marked areas.”

  Roth said, “So what is it?”

  They were looking at a pizza box.

  The lid was emblazoned with the familiar red and green Pizza Zone logo. Someone had scrawled PEEK-A-BOO across it in big letters with a marker.

  A tech lifted the lid.

  Cooper shuddered.

  Roth could barely breathe. “Oh...Jesus...”

  The remains of a barely-eaten pizza were at the bottom of the box. Stretched from crust to crust was something that resembled a mask.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Cooper said, “It’s the big guy’s face.”

  There was more.

  Two bloody orbs that had to be eyeballs had rolled into the corners of the box.

  Roth couldn’t suppress what happened next. He upchucked all over the box and coffee table, tainting a shitload of evidence and soiling his new suit.

  He tendered his resignation later that afternoon.

  Will Hopkins’s body wasn’t discovered in a ditch or ravine.

  He was very much alive—more alive than ever, in fact.

  He rode off into the night with ‘Starlene’ (whose real name turned out to be Nicole), Crystal, J-Dog, and a woman in a nightgown they jokingly re-named Patty.

  As in Patty Hearst.

  The gang had many adventures together in the coming years.

  Will avoided the dreaded fate of a life in mundane suburbia.

  And they all lived happily ever after.

  The same could not be said for some of the people they encountered on the endless highways and byways of the land of the free.

  Now that it was done he wished he could take it back. Now that the surge of adrenaline had passed and he was no longer in the heat of the moment, he wanted to roll back time and choose another course of action.

  It wasn’t possible, of course.

  There was no ‘Undo’ button for bloody murder.

  The blood-spattered cleaver slipped from Jack Roth’s numb fingers and fell in a smooth arc toward the hardwood floor, where the exquisitely sharp blade embedded itself with an emphatic thunk.

  Jack was
alone in the room.

  Now.

  The only other humans in the room had recently ceased breathing. And dead people didn’t count as company. Jack didn’t know the guy’s name, but he recognized him from the coffee shop down the street, Mondo Java, where he worked as a cashier. Lorene, Jack’s now-deceased fiancee, was always raving about their lattes. Visits to Mondo Java were a long-established part of her daily routine.

  Now, of course, Jack knew the attraction was about more than coffee.

  Attraction he understood. That was something you could forgive. Monogamy didn’t render a person blind. There was a place for benign, purely aesthetic appreciation of the opposite sex. But to take attraction one step further and betray the trust of a committed relationship just wasn’t something he could let pass.

  Still.

  Probably he’d overreacted.

  If things had gone according to the night’s original schedule, he wouldn’t be standing in the middle of this charnel house of a room with blood all over his nice clothes. He’d been set to spend the weekend in another city on business, but he’d only gotten as far as the airport lounge. Luke Riggins, a senior VP at his company, called Jack’s cell number to inform him the scheduled round of meetings had been canceled. Jack, who’d been none-too-happy about spending yet another business weekend away from Lorene, decided not to call her.

  He wanted to get a bouquet of roses and make a romantic, surprise return.

  She’d been surprised, all right.

  “Surprise” was a mild word for what Jack felt upon seeing Lorene and the coffee shop guy writhing about on the sofa in a state of partial undress. She’d been on her back, with the guy kneeling between her knees and fumbling with the clasps of her bra. When Jack opened the door to their penthouse apartment, the shirtless guy shrieked like a woman, grabbed his shirt, and began mumbling apologies as he headed for the door.

  But loverboy never made it to the door.

  Jack knocked him to the floor with one blow to the throat. Lorene opened her mouth to scream, but he moved to subdue her just as quickly. Then he went into the kitchen to get the cleaver.

  And now Lorene and Mr. Java lay dead on the floor.

  In pieces.

  Lorene’s head was in a flower pot on the coffee table.

  Mr. Java had been posthumously castrated.