Dirty Deeds

by D V Wolfe

  “Hey,” I heard from somewhere in the vicinity of Mastick’s RV. I moved around the woodpile and met Gabe’s eyes as he came around the RV, smiling. His face was starting to tinge purple and beginning to swell, one eye, already half-swollen shut. We just stared at each other for a moment while my heart rate returned to normal. He cleared his throat and winced as he lifted his arm. “Found your sawed-off.” I took the gun from him.

  “Thanks, I’m,” I looked him in the eyes. “Kind of attached to this one.” I quickly looked down and opened the chamber, ejecting the empty shells.

  “I thought so,” Gabe said. “By the way, the RV behind this one, the one that fell over earlier?”

  I snapped the sawed-off closed and looked at him, nodding. “I think there’s someone inside it. I heard something when I went by it. Now it could have just been whatever shit was rattling around in there, settling after the fall, but, do you want to check it out?”

  I couldn’t speak so I just nodded and followed him. I was going to have a heart attack with all this adrenaline. Maybe Festus and Joel were inside. Gabe leaned against the capsized RV’s roof and made a cradle with his hands. I shook my head, “You’re hurt pretty bad. If you lift me, you’ll make it worse.”

  “Shut up and step on my hands,” Gabe growled. There was a spark in his eye when he said it that made me smile as I gingerly stepped into his hands and then crawled onto the side of the RV. Luckily, for whoever was inside, it had fallen with the side-door facing up. I yanked on the warped door handle, courtesy of Vince’s flamethrower earlier this morning, and heaved. The door gave enough for me to get my weight under it and flip it open. A horrible smell almost knocked me backward off the RV.

  “Holy shit,” I coughed, moving to the end of the RV, trying to suck in the summer air around me to replace the air from inside the RV in my nose and lungs that smelled like a mass grave in a sewer pipe.

  “You have no idea,” a voice muttered from the depths of the RV.

  It wasn’t Joel.

  “Festus?!” I yelled, moving back to the door to look in and then stumbling back again at the next wave of stench.

  “Yeah,” Festus barked. “Some assholes shot up this hellhole and then it fell over, and guess where all the shit from the bathroom went? And do you know why cannibal shit smells like human decomposition? Because THAT’S WHAT IT FUCKING IS!” I was at the edge of the RV and I looked over at Gabe, eyebrows raised.

  “Any ideas for getting him out?” I asked.

  “Not off the top of my head,” Gabe said.

  “Any time now,” Festus growled at us. “I’m ready to end my vacation in the Wonderful World of Cannibalism.”

  “Hang in there, Sparky,” I called towards the open door. “We’re working on a plan to get you out of there.

  I moved towards Gabe. “Maybe we should find some kind of rope and we can pull him out.” I sat down on the edge of the RV.

  Gabe reached up and grabbed me around the waist to lift me down. The breath caught in my chest. “And then a hose to spray him off.” He finished, grinning at me. I nodded, unable to speak. He let go of me and we started searching the trailers around us. On the third one I searched, I came up with about fifty feet of clothesline cord. Gabe tied one end around his hips and then helped me back up. I dropped the end into the door hole while I held my breath and then backed away and told Festus to tie it around himself.

  “Ok,” Festus said, unsure. “I tied it. Now what?”

  “Go,” I called to Gabe.

  Gabe moved backward and Festus started screaming as he was heaved up and out of the hole. He was covered in shit from head to foot and he kept reaching out a hand to me for me to steady him. I had my arms crossed and I was standing as far from the door hole as I could get. Finally, he braced himself on the door frame and rolled to the side. Gabe was still moving backward and he ended up dragging Festus to the edge before he heard us yelling for him to stop.

  I went to the edge and stepped into Gabe’s hands to get down and Festus followed me. He turned to try to put his foot in Gabe’s hands too, but Gabe stepped away. Tags and Stacks had Noah hobbling between them and they’d come around the RV to watch the spectacle. I saw Vince and Mick poke their heads around Mastick’s RV to watch too, their dog heads grinning from ear to floppy ear.

  “Let it rip!” I yelled to Rosetta and Gabe and I moved away.

  Rosetta had someone’s garden hose with the nozzle set to the ‘scouring-bird-shit-off-the-driveway’ setting and she hit Festus full force starting with his head and moving down, brown water spraying off of him in every direction and making the rest of us run for cover.

  “Turn around!” Rosetta yelled at him. Hilda was standing next to her, leaning against the trailer, one hand on the faucet and grinning.

  “This is humiliating,” I heard him mutter, but he turned.

  When Rosetta was satisfied that he was as clean as she could get him, she dropped the hose and turned off the faucet. “Can I come down now?” Festus spat. Gabe and I helped him down. He still smelled like shit up close but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been.

  “So are they all dead?” Festus asked, looking around at the fallen cannibals.

  Tags nodded. “As far as we can tell.”

  I shook my head. “I was pretty sure you were being digested by a good chunk of those cannibals. They had black eyes and Mastick…”

  “He was a Carrion,” Festus said, unbuttoning his suit jacket and taking it off, glaring at it as if it had wronged him.

  “Suitcase?” I asked.

  Festus rolled his eyes. “Oh Bane, how I haven’t missed your sass.”

  “I knew it!” Stacks said, fist-pumping the air.

  “What’s a carrion?” I asked. Looking from Festus to Stacks.

  Festus was working on his tie now, after laying his suit jacket across the edge of the RV. “A Carrion. A step lower than a demon, like a demon want-to-be. They’re a bit like dogs with rabies,” Festus said, glancing over at Vince and Mick. I looked up to see them scowling back at him. “When it comes to the smell of blood, they tend to lose their heads.”

  “Interesting choice of words,” I said, turning to look back at Mastick’s corpse.

  Festus was shaking his head. “Embarrassing that he was the one who took me.”

  “So the Red Moon Rite,” Stacks began.

  “Was political posturing,” Festus said. “Mastick, as all Carrions are apt to do, had already sucked the life force and will from his hosts, his slaves,” Festus looked around at us as if we were idiots. “The rest of the tribe. You probably noticed that they weren’t really ‘there’ anymore. They were just drones doing what he told them to do so when he died…”

  “They all did,” Gabe finished, looking around.

  “What a mess,” Festus said, spitting on the ground at his feet.

  I turned to look at him, “You think this is bad, you should have seen St. Louis after Mastick’s crew left.” Festus raised an eyebrow at me. I shook my head. “You have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “So where’s Joel?” Noah asked.

  “He’s not in the other RV,” Stacks said, “I just looked through there.”.

  A thought hit me. “Noah, were there any kids here? There’s a school bus…” I started, pointing over my shoulder.

  Noah shook his head. “Bane, it’s June. School’s out. No,” he looked down. “They caught some poor stiff out practicing. He kept yelling that he’d just gotten hired when they were ripping him off the bus. They had him with us for a little bit and then they took him…” Noah turned to look at the layer of ash under the fresh logs that formed the new woodpile. “And then the screaming stopped and they started the fire.

  “What about the folks who live in this trailer park?” Rosetta asked, worry etching her wrinkles even deeper.

  Noah shook his head. “I never saw anyone who wasn’t a cannibal, well besides Hilda and Joel.”

  “Well we better shake a leg then,” Rosetta said.


  I looked back at the trailer. “I should probably do something about Sister Smile. I can’t just leave her in there.”

  “In where?” Rosetta asked.

  I frowned at her. “The trailer,” I said, pointing back at it.

  Now Rosetta was frowning. “She’s not in there.”

  I took off, moving over fallen wood and bodies, stumbling back to the trailer. I stood in the doorway, trying to ignore the stinging pain in my legs. The trailer was empty. There was a door standing open at the back that had been closed. I pumped the action on my sawed-off and moved into the room. It was a back bedroom. There was blood on the bedspread and bloody ropes tied to the headboard and footboard. They’d been cut. There was an exterior door off the bedroom that was banging gently in the Oklahoma breeze. I went to the door and pushed it open. We were at the back of the park, facing the brush and waist-high weeds that Noah and I had trekked through the night before. Sister Smile was gone. And so was whoever they’d had tied up in the back bedroom.

  “Is she here?” Noah gasped, hobbling inside.

  “Gone,” I said, coming back into the living room. I pointed at the back bedroom. “Was that where they kept the bus driver?”

  Noah shook his head. “No, they kept him with us. I never saw who they kept back there, but Mastick would go back there and the guy in the room would scream and cry, and then Mastick would come out.”

  “Did you ever see Joel?”

  Noah shook his head and then he froze, as realization dawned on him. He met my gaze. “Joel was back there.” Noah pushed past me and shoved the bedroom door open.

  “He’s gone,” I said, heading for the trailer door.

  The others were standing around outside the trailer, looking confused.

  “Spread out,” I said. “Sister Smile is gone. She can’t have gotten far. Look for Joel too! Search every trailer!”

  We searched. And we found nothing.

  “Sorry Bane,” Vince said, returning to the middle of the campground, shaking his head. He was the last one back. “She and Joel are gone.”

  I shook my head, anger flashing hot in my belly. “It had to have been an act,” I said. “She was pretending to be so out of it.”

  Hilda shook her head. “No, Mastick was using her for his protection spell. It must have broken when he died and she took off.”

  “It looks like either Joel got free and left, or…” I couldn’t finish.

  “You think Sister Smile took him?” Stacks asked. I nodded.

  “But why?” Vince asked. We were all still, trying to think.

  “Well, we’re not going to find the answers just standing around,” Rosetta barked. In five minutes she’d given us all our marching orders. We piled bodies into Sister Smile’s RV and crammed as many as we could into the Town Cars. Gabe and I were dragging two bodies to the last Town Car parked behind the warehouse that had been parked next to Joel’s Subaru, but it was gone. That’s when I saw the tire tracks.

  “There was another Town Car right here,” I said, stopping in the spot. “I saw it when I first got back here. She got away.” I dropped the body and kicked the side of the warehouse, leaving a dent.

  “You’ll catch her,” Gabe said. “She doesn’t have a tribe anymore. She has to start over. You’ll catch her.”

  I looked at the blue Subaru. “What should we do about Joel’s ride? We can’t just leave it here.” I moved over to the Subaru and peered in the window. “The keys are hanging from the ignition,” I said. A sad smile formed my face. “He always did that. Trusting nature.”

  Gabe moved to stand next to me. “Probably wanted whoever made it back to the car to be able to get out if they needed to.” Gabe put a hand gently on my back. “I’ll bet Tags can drive it back to Rosetta’s. Then it’ll be safe until we find him and can return it.” I nodded. Despite all the miracles of the day, losing Joel put a severe damper on the relief. I turned on the spot, searching the flat horizon around us. Where did they go?

  “Come on,” Gabe said. “We better finish up corpse clean-up before Rosetta adds shit detail to our to-do list and we have to deal with Festus’ RV. I’m not sure where we’d even begin.”

  “Fire,” I said. “Lots of it.”

  I followed Gabe back to get the last of the bodies. We’d had a seventy-five percent success rate on the rescuing side with three alive and one missing. We’d all made it out alive, which was a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes.

  “Hey!” Noah called from the doorway of a trailer he and Stacks had been searching. I shielded my eyes from the sun and tried to see what he was holding up. “I found the ten-gauge!”

  “Good!” I yelled. “Now find my .45!”

  “Yes!” Rosetta said. “Find hers so I can have mine back.”

  Gabe cleared his throat and held Rosetta’s .45 out to me, butt-first. I sprang away from him. “You’ve got it now.”

  “She’s going to yell at me,” Gabe muttered. “You’re like the daughter she never had. She goes easier on you, just put it in your jeans.”

  “You’ve never seen her go off on me, have you,” I said.

  “Just do it,” Gabe said. I rolled my eyes and stuffed the gun down the back of my jeans.

  “Wimp,” I said.

  We had all back-burnered our pain and injuries, working on adrenaline and a clock with ‘Heir Rosetta’ barking orders at us. In a half-hour, we’d gotten the place somewhat cleaner. There were twelve Town Cars stuffed with six bodies each, we’d thrown what was left of Mastick and another ten bodies into Sister Smile’s RV. We’d done our best to clean up any messes in the other trailers that might permanently scar the owners. We were going to have to burn the trailer that the captives had been held in with the blood-stained carpet. We made sure everything else was done. Stacks had even found my .45 on one of the bodies that had fallen between two trailers. We’d found the other flamethrowers and decided unanimously that it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave them behind. Rosetta, Tags, and Stacks each wore one now, waiting to burn the trailer down. We’d done a sweep to make sure there were no personal belongings that would be caught in the flames. We’d found a shoebox of papers and photos and set them on the kitchen counter of the trailer next door. I’d even been able to find Hilda’s pig hat on one of the corpses and I’d put it back over her wiry gray hair.

  “Thank you,” Hilda said, straightening it. “This was always my favorite.”

  “Definitely worth saving then,” I said, ushering her and the others back from the trailer.

  When we got beyond the RVs, we heard a whoosh behind us and I turned to watch Rosetta, Tags, and Stacks lighting the trailer up. Festus stood by them, holding two, now empty gas cans.

  I introduced Hilda to Gabe and Hilda was in the middle of telling Gabe about my bat, which had gotten stuffed down my shirt and miraculously made it through the whole ordeal when we heard yelling behind us.

  “Hey!” We stopped walking and looked up to see Stacks, Rosetta, Festus, and Tags hustling towards us. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Tags said.

  “What’s…” I started to ask. Then I heard it, faint and in the distance.