Nothing appeared in front of him.
It took Rosie four trips before the rack was empty. Whether or not it remained that way once Frank’s back turned, who could predict? Then what? Haul copies until they reached the ceiling? What if it happened overnight during Mitchell’s shift? Frank couldn’t do a vein-bursting thing.
Maybe it was the Russian Mafia in black trench coats. Or Satanist pornographers in black robes. Or Cambodians in black pajamas carrying coconuts filled with gunpowder and baskets of heroin poppies. He’d never let them close him like they had Eddie’s.
“What’re you going to do with ’em?” Rosie asked, awed.
What had started as about a hundred copies had become several hundred, piled not too neatly on the desk. One slid slowly across the biggest hump of the others, slick cover rendering the motion virtually liquid.
“When your mother gets here in an hour, we’ll take ’em home and burn ’em in the furnace,” he replied sourly.
Frank did his best to appear grim so Rosie wouldn’t see how scared he was. He used to be on a mighty, terrible trip, gung ho for the predictable horrors men saw in war. He understood what was measured by a merry bomb maven in so many sticks of dynamite or drops of nitro, the perfect amount of plastique. Or just old-style claymores when nothing better was available. He’d even respected the artful booby traps made from unexploded bombs and stray artillery rounds that tribesmen around the world invented on the spurs of needful moments. Other than their resourcefulness as enemies, he absolutely hated every third world, boondocks-born, superstitious native he’d been hired by any government or warlord to fight. He hated them not because they had separate values or religions or even because they shot at him, but due to the unexplainable funk that went down in witchy jungles or ghostly deserts.
(…the book at the top of the pile slid.)
It was this sort of supernatural foolishness that screwed even the best designed, carefully engineered explosive. What could rip a man from butthole to toejam before he glommed onto the fact that what happened, it just t’weren’t normal.
Frank had placed his last mine under a hut’s floor, as close to the bull’s-eye center of the deserted village as he could measure. Other pressure plate mechanisms were secured under the dirt floors of similar huts out toward the perimeter. Scattered leaves dusted the ground. The occupants had fled to caves, hearing the mercs were coming. It was common in remote mountain regions of Cambodia for entire villages to be part of drug operations growing, harvesting, distilling the plants into rich resins. Lots of Pol Pot’s former commanders had nice, profitable sidelines in the business. Fought each other over the goods, too. Hard to believe some were willing to hire mercenaries (whose ranks contained Americans) to work for them—or that any red-blooded former G.I. would offer services to Khmer Rouge mass-murderers. Especially after Vietnamese invaded the neighboring nation’s southern and eastern regions, restoring order in Pol Pot’s psychotic wake—and Vietnamese didn’t approve of foreign mercs. You ended up dodging practically everybody, not sure whose side they were on.
Recon informed about villagers fleeing that morning, right after a few kids were accidentally napalmed at the river, the load intended to strike workers in poppy fields. Frank was sent in to set the village up to surprise the other team’s mercs…scheduled this way tonight. Or to change the minds of the villagers should they sneak home early to prepare a welcoming party.
He’d been about to leave the hut, standing after gathering his tools, when a burned child ran across the room. It appeared just this side of the wall opposite the single door. One slant eye was wild with bloodshot and flashburns, the other seamed closed with grimy ocher. It screamed in the three or four seconds it took to patter its tiny blistered feet over the top of the buried mine.
Toward Frank, as if running to his arms for safety.
It’s a ghost, Frank’d thought then. Its burns were so severe he couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl. Only half-solid and that from the waist up. The rest was a blur of haunting ether and a wisp of incendiary fuel-fumes. He heard small footsteps on the loosely-packed ground and It’s a ghost was the last thing to flit across his brain before the mine detonated.
When Frank came to, he was but half-solid himself. The rest was a spray of steaming tibia gumbo and femur jambalaya. He’d been blown out of the hut and into the road. Face down, his spine twitched so hard he must’ve looked as if he was trying to fuck mud.
The book slipped further on the pile. Slo-mo. Others fluttered sympathetic edges as the hump tilted. Frank felt it again, the beginning of the destruction of much of himself. Same horrible intuition. He looked around the store, waiting to see a burned child, hear it screaming as it ran 1-2-3-4, with a boom on 5 that Frank underwent instead of heard.
It’s a ghost, conjured to do what it had done to him, turning an unstable yet perfectly natural force against him in an unnatural way. A spell from opiated incense, knotted dog guts, and chanted-over fuses woven into the character of a demon’s name.
What was the difference if it was a burned child’s ghost running across a hut or another spirit pulling the corner of a book?
Neither Frank nor Rosie moved as the book oozed silky friction, swooping off the ski slope of glossy copies. It finally took a header toward the floor, landing with a slap on its back, closed.
Suddenly the pages rustled, flapped crisply, tore—diddled by a sulfuric wind trying to cop a feel. Quick, disturbing glimpses, visions which might be carnage, might be a troubling joke, so fast the impact was almost subliminal. These were augmented by a distant purling of death cries, the book capturing not only verbal and visual impact in its prose and illustration, but auditory effects imprinted with a murderous memory, released upon opening.
The avalanche began, books sliding in every direction. Some sailed across the storeroom, careening at angles. Pages thrashing, screams rising as if heard through stone walls and steel doors: faint, lost, hollow. Some shrieks were linear, short with brief infliction of picturesque pain, others drawn out in faulty spasms of endless torment: fractured, recurrent, interminable.
The laughter was worse. It erupted from the books, with spatters of blood from the pages, with flies, with fireworks that might have been tiny stars breaching another universe.
The shrieking and laughing stopped. Frank eyed the books, all fallen, all opened to a single page.
He saw a woman with purplish hair, nose smashed against her wide-eyed face, snakes clumsily drawn around her. Not nice but, hell, he’d done a lot worse to people. So why was his daughter freaking out?
It was the same picture. The one Rosie’d seen before, herself, a sinuous blonde in ink and Polaroid. The mouth was open, tongue out, showing a wriggly smear of milkish stickum. Suddenly, the stockroom reeked of humid crotches.
Then something else happened. Frank wheeled, spun on staccato ballbearings.
Snakes slithered from the books, serpents of all sizes and a necrotic rainbow of colors. They writhed in twisty knots, tongues flicking to probe scaly skins, orgiastic bundles indulging a venomous love. An adder-snarl stiffened, shooting up on tail ends, a Hindu’s rope trick. Their jaws hissed plumes of thickly acrid smoke—another magician’s trick for the eye. When the smoke cleared, imploding into itself, the serpent column had vanished.
Someone stood in that spot, more vipers swirling around his feet.
There was a stench like cremated Christmas ham, sweet brown sugar glaze turned hardshell candy, bloodscab brittle.
Did Rosie… know him?
Those thick glasses.
Did burns make you look fat? People were mostly water. If it boiled, would the hide puff, blood steaming to form clouds in the circulatory system?
“It’s a ghost,” Frank muttered.
A burned child.
He turned the wheelchair, trying to find a path through the fallen books. The wheels couldn’t roll forward. Frank also couldn’t back up. He was glued, books clinging, fastening the chair with gummy strings o
f spidery paste.
It was a blackened boy, transformed by extreme high temperature into charcoal ruin. Only the glasses were unchanged. The metal frames weren’t warped or melted, lenses thick but clear. Behind them, there were no eyes, only two shiny pinpricks, unmagnified by the soda bottle lenses. They might’ve been flames from two small matches.
The creature opened a cracked sausage mouth, exhaling smoke.
(The coffin smoked, Rosie thought. Smoked.)
What was that swollen thing inside? Burned tongue or mamba’s head?
The snake inside the creature’s mouth hissed at father and daughter.
Frank punched the motion buttons on his chair, no longer pretending to be without fear. Backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards… the chair bounced, dropping the crippled man onto the floor. Rosie ran to him, snakes curling sentient ivy around her ankles. The two meager wicks of the burned boy’s eyes glittered in her direction.
“Ring on your toe—makesssssss usssssss married?” the mamba-in-the-mouth asked, tongue electric on s’s. Then also on z’s as it added, “Poor Chazzzzzzz, died for love.”
Rosie stared at the burned boy with his poisonous oracle. This couldn’t be Chaz—he was dead.
(He died for love.)
She looked down. Where were her sneakers? Now she stood barefoot, the gold rosebud ring back on her toe.
“Chazzzzzzz wasssssss ssssssstruck dead by the goddesssssss of whoresssssss for being a porky prevaricator,” the snake informed.
Yet the snake uttering this last remark wasn’t the one in the mouth. It was a serpent undulating between burned legs, where a dick ought to have swung.
Rosie felt a punch in the solar plexus, every gram of her breath belched out, then lifted and heaved to the storeroom’s opposite side. She landed hard on a box of instant coffee, jars breaking beneath her. Had he struck her?
The burned boy hadn’t moved except for the way his skin rolled, image in heat mirage. He’d been standing, hands behind his back. They hadn’t come forward to hurt Rosie.
(No, Chaz had never really hurt her. Not as much as the batshit boys who now tormented her. This notion was reinforced with an image of the twins displaying their inches at the counter.)
The snake at the burned boy’s groin dripped jizzy venom.
“What do you want?” Frank mewed, trying to pull himself away on books that wouldn’t stay still. None of the serpents bit him, merely spit mouthfuls of what smelled like a man’s seed.
The boy hadn’t seemed to move. One minute he stood there, next he’d flickered, re-appearing across the room, scooping Rosie up as if she weighed no more than smoke. He hugged her in a breast-flattening embrace, then kissed her, mouth open, mamba tongue forced past her lips.
Rosie tried to cry out but the serpent’s head blocked her throat, choking her. It scorched her gums, blistered the roof of her mouth, stretched her jaw until it almost unhinged… just as snakes could do. She felt the flitting of its own little tongue, fangs grazing her teeth, tasting a cheesiness of venom reminding her of thick cum.
Chaz finally penetrated her. She squeezed her eyes shut to keep from looking into the double matchheads of his sockets. A triphammer pounded in her chest, mamba thrust down her throat to take a bite from her heart. Flares went off behind her eyelids, fizzing into pure darkness.
Her bile couldn’t bubble up because of the snake. It doublebacked in her esophagus, burning acid in liquid rivets. She was damned, hot, the world behind her lids wall-to-wall blacktop.
The snake withdrew, leaving viper’s spittle in her mouth. Chaz dropped her to the floor and put his hands behind his back again.
Rosie gagged on slimy caramel venom. She leaned forward and let it fall from her mouth, too weak to expectorate it. The discharge puddled in a steaming lump, dappled in jaundiced jelly pocks like the coloration of a barely hatched reptile baby. It jiggled as it flopped, then inched away like a clotty treacle worm.
Chaz moaned behind the mamba’s head in his mouth, fat gut swaying as he rocked on the charred stumps of his feet. The serpent between his lips and the one at his groin laughed and wept, voices decidedly feminine. He brought his hands out from behind his back, clenched in curious red fists.
They were enormous matches. He struck them against the cinder blocks of the storeroom wall until they sparked, catching fire. He held his arms high… boy with a match… boy with two matches. He lit the books littering the floor. They didn’t burn fast.
Frank yelled, “Get out, girl!”
The burned boy became a column of fire as the fist-matches caught his arms and flames rushed across his torso. Rosie ran past him, across the burning heap of pages and snakes. A cobra pulled itself up, hood flared with flames. It snapped as she tried to reach her father.
“Goddamn it, Rosie, run!” Frank cried.
The cobra bit deeply into the old merc’s face, jaws fastened to either side of Frank’s skull. Others, who’d shown no earlier inclination now attacked every part of him.
Rosie batted past flames and hurried out of the storeroom, sucking needles of air. Were her clothes afire? Oh, God, my clothes… She had no clothes, only smoldering rags where Chaz burned them as he squeezed her. She tasted blisters popping around her mouth from his hideous kiss.
She stumbled into the store. The aisles were long tunnels. She didn’t know how she made it to the door. Passing the book rack, she saw it full again and spinning.
She streaked past the counter. That basket of old Easter eggs was hatching from the O-collection. Baby snakes crawled out, patterns of bright scales down their backs in tiny X’s.
Out the door—outside it?—a woman, a nun with arms outstretched. Before Rosie even made the connection in her brain, she’d passed right through nun. She felt a ripple as if she’d been submerged in a vat of sore muscle cream, only much more intense. Through her bones HOT, COLD, HOT, COLD HOT HAIL MARY, FULL OF GRACE COLD…
The flames in the storeroom multiplied. Frank had been bitten over and over again, crawling with them hanging onto him. He pushed against the box of Soldier Forever with his shoulder. It tipped over and he thrust his hand inside, digging out a grenade. Then he rocked onto his back again, holding it in his mangled hand, the other pulling the pin.
He lobbed the grenade at the ghost kid in flames. One arm snaked out, no longer on fire, no longer ending in a matchfist. It had a hand, and it deftly caught the grenade.
It was no longer Chaz Chisholm/Jizz Jizzum but a half-melted Cambodian child, sex indeterminable in the gaseous haze from the waist down. This being tossed back the grenade, which then exploded into other volatile mementos Frank Bunny had collected from his incendiary past.
Rosie was halfway through the parking lot when the In-N-Out blew bricks, concrete, walls of glass, plaster. All she heard was a black wind’s roar as falling beams of thunder blotted her under a violent weight. She didn’t see the gang with the crow-smiles as they scurried up, even as glass and dangerous concrete rained down.
They looted a thing or two, mouths drooling what looked like blood but smelled spicy sweet.
When the nuns approached, the gang split. The ladies knelt around Rosie and said a brief prayer.
For Sister Sophia Rose.
“…blessed art thou among all women…”
The only nun not kneeling was the one Rosie had seen at the store’s doorway. The ash falling around her took on the radiance of stars shaped like X’s and O’s.
She opened her habit to reveal full breasts which ran first with milk, then blood, finally an inky blackness. Two tiny serpents crawled up from inside her robe to suck at her nipples.
– | – | –
Chapter 13
GET YOUR KICKS
CONFESSING YOUR SICKS
Horse appraised the words he’d rendered across an iron shutter on the building he knew housed X-IS-THE-DARK. He stood outside, waiting for any temptress to show herself. He’d seen women in ads on late night TV, mostly while getting high. Not that he normally paid
much attention, such awesome creatures seldom available to anyone in Nubbing Cove. But these luscious ladies were close enough to drool on. Eventually they were bound to go to and from the office.
But Horse hadn’t seen anybody in his week plus of recon. He’d tried entering the place, but the door was always locked. None answered when he shouted wheedling niceties and raging obscenities. There was no way to see inside, the windows all had iron shutters. Listening at the seams produced no hints of internal noise.
It frustrated him—being so close, wanting to see this prime booty pores-right-up-against-his-eyeballs. He wanted to introduce his handsome well-hung self. His name wasn’t Horse for nothing, though folks generally assumed the nickname came from his peddling heroin.
Not as if these ladies were out of his league. Hadn’t he been Renae Hawthorne’s boyfriend before she left The Cove and started making movies? Mostly young-guts-on-vacation epics. Fuck/Butcher/Slurp sprees. Although he’d liked The Nietzsche Worm. Helluva political statement, if you asked his opinion.
Horse often watched her on The Goth Channel, with her black dress and eyeliner trip. She dragged around the grieving bit, mourning by wearing a heart on her sleeve. (A black heart, in honor of her mother.) He wasn’t a deather; he did it to see Renae, and because the cable channel showed the best gross-out movies.
Horse hadn’t seen Renae since the real grosser when he brought her home one night to find her psycho dad had strewn her mom all over the apartment, jerking off in a funky bit of anatomy not even as big as his cock. Horse knew there were family problems but… shit… dude! Woah! Who in The Cove—or anywhere else for that matter—didn’t spring from dysfunction these days? But everybody on their damn block made the sign of the cross when they walked by the Hawthorne’s window. Mr. Hawthorne might’ve been a screamer but it was Mrs. Hawthorne who carried the spook streak. Had the evil eye, even when sporting a shiner under it. Whispered words you couldn’t make out, especially when her lip was split. She had this mole on her face, just above the back of her jaw. Shaped in an X. What Horse thought they used to call a beauty mark.
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