Dirty Deeds

by D V Wolfe

  “They’re gone?” Noah asked. I turned to look at him and I wasn’t surprised to see his face had relaxed and his breath was even now.

  I nodded. “Looks that way.” I stared around at the campground. “The last time I stood here, there were about a dozen more RVs, tents, Town Cars, and every kind of drug known to man, being smoked or snorted and passed around.”

  “Was there…..were they cooking someone on…” He turned to look at the metal grill-plate structure in the fire remains. “...that?”

  I didn’t think that telling Noah the truth at that moment was a good idea, and frankly, I didn’t want to relive the memory out loud of what I’d seen that night and what I’d been unable to stop. I shook my head. “Nah, I didn’t make it out here until post-dessert.” I looked back at the remains of the big cooking fire, remembering the smell of burning flesh. Sadly, the smell didn’t make me sick. Not anymore. I knew that smell. It was a common odor in Hell. Like how Rosetta’s water always smelled like sulfur for the first few seconds it ran. You just got used to it after a while. I scanned the ground around us for any clue as to where the tribe might have gone. Something on the ground caught my eye. Dark puddles. They were scattered amongst the bone and rotting entrails in the dirt. It was too dark to be human blood. I squatted down to study one of the dark puddles. It looked like motor oil.

  “What’s that?” I heard Noah ask behind me. The sound of sloshing water and the rhythmic thump of plastic against his back sounded as he approached. His shadow fell beside mine and I saw the outline of his frizzy hair tilt to the side as he looked at the puddle too. I reached down and scooped up some of the oily substance on one finger. Bringing it close enough to sniff.

  “Ewww,” Noah said.

  I quickly dropped my finger from my face. Not good.

  “Is that motor oil?” Noah asked.

  I shook my head. “Nope. Demon blood.”

  I gazed across the hard-packed clearing at the tire tracks leading away from the circle and towards the pasture road on the far side of the campground. It looked like they had taken every vehicle that would move when they moved out. I looked back at the rocking chair. It was black wood, though hard to see much of it with all the jaw bones that had been strapped around the arms and supports. Only the curved rockers at the bottom were free of bone. If they really were moving camp, why would they leave her throne behind? I’d seen Sister Smile’s RV and she definitely had the best in the fleet. The chair would have easily fit. They had to be coming back. But if they had decided to take the show on the road, how long would that be? They never took the whole tribe on a hunting party. I sat down in the rocking chair to think. Right now, a tribe of supernaturally-charged cannibals was on the loose, and Festus, my accountant, and my friend, for lack of a better word, was in imminent danger. That was if he was even still alive. I let myself think for a moment. What was I going to do now?

  What if Festus was dead and he was downstairs standing in that unmoving line, waiting for a new Empty House. Because he was helping me, I knew he was ‘persona non-grata’ downstairs, basically ensuring he wasn’t going to get ‘cutsies’ to the front of the line. What if he didn’t make it topside before my time was up? And if he didn’t make it back, I wouldn’t know when I’d reached the balance number. And if I didn’t reach the number, we’d all be taking the elevator to the basement level downstairs. To be tortured and to eventually become the things I’d hunted, killing more innocents whenever we clawed our way back up, going mad with…

  Something was glimmering in the dirt just a few inches to the left of my sneaker. Without thinking, I bent down and picked it up. I felt my heart fall through my chest and settle somewhere around my ankles. It was a tooth. A gold tooth with a ruby chip. Festus’ tooth.

  “He was here,” I said to Noah.

  Noah, who hadn’t moved and was looking at me in horror, made no move to approach.

  “Get over here,” I barked at him.

  Slowly Noah shook his head. “Nooope. I’m not going near that thing.” He nodded at the throne. “How are you able to sit in that?”

  I ignored Noah, still studying the tooth in my fingers. A large puddle of demon blood next to the throne caught my eye. Festus’ blood. Was this the spot where he’d died? Where his body had been ripped apart? I could feel the hard tooth in my fingers, but everything below my fingers was numb. Festus was a bastard most of the time. But he had always come through. He had stuck his neck out and he took who knew how many beatings. This is how he’d returned to the pit? Human cannibals, hopped up on demon blood?

  When I hadn’t answered him, Noah had taken a few tentative steps towards me, squinting at what I was holding in my hand. When he got closer, I held it out to him. He didn’t take it but craned his neck to look at it.

  “Is that Festus’ tooth?” Noah asked. I nodded. “So that’s it then,” Noah said quietly, “He’s dead.”

  I nodded my head slowly. “It looks that way.”

  Noah was still. “What now? How will you know…”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “I liked Festus,” Noah said. I glanced up at him. “Some of the time,” Noah added. “Other times, he could be a total dick.”

  “He had his moments,” I said, with a small smile. I closed the tooth in the palm of my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Noah said.

  “He’ll be back in the pit now,” I said. “I guess that’s a silver lining for him. Unless the cannibals are using Solomon’s Spice to season them before they eat them, when Festus’ Empty House died, he should have been sent back to the pit to get in line for another Empty House.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Noah said quickly. “He could be back…”

  I looked up and met Noah’s gaze. “The last time I needed a new Empty House, it was four years in topside time before I got one.” I shook my head and looked back down at the tooth. Festus had been so proud of it. “I’ll be long gone before he gets a new suit. If he gets a new suit.”

  Noah stood still, watching me. At the moment, I felt like I was back in my last Empty House. Run-down and tired. Festus had been more than just my accountant. He’d been an ally, a spy, a friend.

  “Hey,” Noah said. I looked up at him. “I’ll help keep score.” I wished it was that easy. I nodded and gave Noah a small smile. Noah looked around. “Well, they’re gone. Can we go too? This place is giving me the creeps.”

  I stood up. The kid was right. There was nothing here. They’d moved on. The one obvious lead I’d had on finding the tribe had disappeared in a blood-smeared Winnebago. I pocketed Festus’ tooth and picked up my sawed-off.

  Noah had already turned and started back across the campground towards the path. I started to follow him, my head down, thinking. I kicked an empty malt liquor bottle and turned to watch it skip over the dirt beside the throne. Then I paused. The dirt was cracked in random patterns all over the dry flat area. But there was something drawn in the dirt, beside the platform where the throne sat, that looked different. Intentional. I changed course and went to stand over it, looking down at it.

  “Seriously,” Noah called. “What? Are you evaluating property values?! Can we please get the hell out of here?”

  I didn’t answer him. The deep lines looked like they’d been drawn with a stick or an ice pick. I shuddered, remembering how some of the tribe preferred to kill their prey: ice picks to the temples like corn on the cob holders.

  The symbol looked like a backward, lowercase ‘f’ but with a loop closing the top of the ‘f’ and a loop on the top of the right arm and the bottom of the left.

  I heard Noah approaching next to me. “What are you…”

  I pointed down at the dirt. “Do you recognize this?”

  Noah looked at the symbol. “No, should I?”

  I squatted down next to it, my back to Sister Smile’s platform. I flipped through the mental list of symbols I’d drawn, or seen Rosetta draw during all of her rites and rituals, and I came up empt
y. The top loop had a dot in the middle of it, almost like an eye. I couldn’t place it, but I knew I’d seen this symbol somewhere before.

  There was the sound of ground shifting and I assumed Noah had moved to stand somewhere just behind me. Something snatched the back of my shirt and I lunged forward automatically to pull away. I felt the scrape of claws and boney fingers on my skin. I twisted around to look back at what had a hold on me.

  “Wasted flesh! You will restore me!” I sprang to my feet and was able to break his grip on the back of my shirt. I stared down at the pale and milky-white body lying half in the shade under the platform, and half sprawled across the cracked earth. He looked up at me with hollow eyes and his pale white skin was a stark contrast to the bright red and black blood smeared over the bottom half of his face. At the corners of his mouth, there was an oily smear of black and when he spoke, more black oil oozed from between his lips.

  “You will sustain me! I will carry the mantle of my tribe.” He feebly tried to move out from under the platform towards me. He reached out with his empty right hand and he clutched a sharpened fork in his left. He made it a few inches and collapsed to his stomach, breathing hard.

  Now that the shock of finding one alive had worn off, I actually felt embarrassed for this guy. It was pretty pathetic.

  “Yeah, well, while you’re coming after me and picking up the mantle or whatever, tell me what happened here,” I said to him.

  The man was still breathing hard, dust particles blowing in little puffs around his mouth as he lay in the dirt. “the de...demons. They had such power, such...rich...blood. He...he blessed the offerings, to make us strong. He...he ignited us ....with strength...we’d never felt...before.”

  “He?” I asked. Did the guy mean Festus? Or another one of the demons? The man wheezed in pain. “He? The demon?” I asked.

  The man nodded. “Mast...mast…”

  I motioned with the sawed-off for him to hurry this up. “Mast, what?”

  The man was quiet for a moment and then, he started to cry softly. He was moving again, crawling slowly out from under the platform and into the sunlight. There was a trail coming from him, staining the dirt beneath him as he moved. This wasn’t good. The man flopped onto his back and I heard Noah turn and heave beside me. When the man had turned over, what looked to be most of his digestive tract and his organs had stayed on the ground. The man was shaking uncontrollably now as he twitched in the dirt. “I was…” he rasped, red blood, probably his own, leaking from his mouth with every syllable, “weak.”

  I knew there wasn’t much time. I reached back and drew the .45. I flipped the safety off. “Where did they go?” I asked. “Where did the tribe go?”

  His body shook and I recognized the final muscle spasms and knew he wasn’t going to answer me. I flipped the safety back on the .45. The convulsions stopped and the man’s eyes grew glassy. He was gone. I stared down at him for a moment, wondering if he’d been raised in this life or if he’d come to it on his own. If this had been his choice, what had caused him to make it?

  I turned away from the body. I wished I could have felt sorry for him, but at the moment, I was more worried about the folks that were about to have a tribe of cannibals, high on ‘demon-blood-PCP’, drop in on them.

  I crossed to Noah who was bent over, facing away from me, his head down. I clapped him on the back as I passed. “Let’s move out.”

  I heard him start to move behind me and neither of us said a word the rest of the way back to the truck.

  “That guy was just…” Noah finally said as I helped him take the sprayer off his back. “It all just... fell out of him.”

  I nodded. “Probably the victim of some squabbling over leftovers.” I felt something twist my insides. Possibly over Festus’ leftovers.

  Noah still looked pretty green. I fished a dusty water bottle out of the toolbox and handed it to him.

  Noah took it and then looked at me with an expression that was part anger, part suspicion. “Why didn’t it affect you?”

  I shrugged. “It did. I’ve just seen it before.” It was true. Disemboweling was a favorite form of torture downstairs. Usually, I’d just hear about it in the holding cells, but I’d seen it happen to a couple of poor bastards right before they were ‘relocated’ to the floors below. I did my best to swallow back the realization that in less than five months, I’d probably be experiencing more disembowelment, first hand. I pulled my cell phone out of the seat as soon as we climbed back into Lucy.

  I punched Rosetta’s number on the speed dial and turned Lucy’s engine over.

  “They’re gone,” I said as soon as she answered. “All of them. It looks like they made it back here, had some festivities, and then vacated again.”

  I heard Rosetta heave a sigh of relief on the other end of the line. “How do you know they came through there recently? ….Maybe they broke camp before St. Louis and haven’t been back since. I mean, why would they go back if...”

  “Rosetta,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I found Festus’ gold tooth and...they left scraps behind.”

  Rosetta was quiet for a minute. “So he is dead.” She paused. “I’m so sorry, Bane.”

  I didn’t have anything to say. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a battle with an empty gun.

  Rosetta asked quietly. “Did the scraps have anything interesting to say?”

  “The demon blood had made them strong, but judging by the mental state of the scraps, it might also be driving them insane. Of course, maybe he was always like that. Poor bastard had been disemboweled and I got the feeling it was probably a dinner table argument, maybe over Festus.”

  “Shit,” Rosetta breathed.

  I nodded. “That about sums it up…”

  “Gabe said they might be heading south. I thought he probably just meant the campground,” Rosetta began.

  “That would be my guess,” I said.

  “You could just call him and see if he’s heard since….” Rosetta started.

  “You call him,” I said. “I’ve got a tribe of psychotic cannibals to find before they make a Food Network TV show out of their little road tour.”

  I hung up. I wasn’t really mad at Rosetta, but I wasn’t in the mood for her badgering me to call Gabe. I felt my annoyance turn inward when I realized I hadn’t mentioned the symbol and I’d just hung up on, and likely pissed off, one of the only people who could probably help me track it down.

  I felt around the side pocket of my door for a pen. “Hey,” I said to Noah. “Help me find something to write on.” Noah dug through the trash at his feet.

  I laid the crumpled McDonald’s food sack across the steering wheel and sketched out the symbol. I stopped to look at it, trying to remember if anything was missing.

  “Looks right to me,” Noah said, looking over at it. “But there was a dot in the top loop. Kind of looked like an eye.”

  I added the dot and after a nod of approval from Noah, I handed him the pen and the sack and he stuffed them into the glovebox. I turned Lucy’s engine over and we motored back through the trees. I drove slowly down the path, not sure which direction I would turn when we made it back to the main road. I was flipping through a web of possibilities in my head as we drove, trying to think of why the cannibals would have broken camp so soon after they had arrived. I highly doubted it was because they were worried about something coming after them. They probably would have been celebrating if that was the case, waiting to welcome us with open arms and jaws. What was the other possibility? They were leaving to go somewhere, go after something? Why had Festus’ tooth been left behind? Why wasn’t it currently nestled in Sister Smile’s rotten maw along with the other tooths she’d taken over the years? Had Festus told them something? Steered them towards more demons? Had that been what had happened in St. Louis? He sent them to the Johnson Meredith building for dinner, telling them about the ‘power’ and the ‘strength’ they would find from snacking on demon-filled meat suits?