Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories

by Bryan Smith

  “Here, son.”

  Luke gasped at the sound of his father’s voice. He hadn’t known the old drunk could tread so silently. He turned away from the pictures and nodded as he accepted the can of Old Style. “Thanks.”

  Josh opened his beer and knocked back a big gulp, grimacing as he choked it down. “So tell me about this so-called trouble you’re in.”

  Luke popped the tab on his own can and had a tiny sip. The beer wasn’t unappreciated, but he needed to stay sober until he was clear of this mess and safely ensconced back in his own home. He nonetheless had another couple contemplative sips as he mulled over what to tell his father. He wracked his brain for some kind of believable cover story, but nothing came immediately to mind. All he could think of suddenly was the .357 discharging into the pillow he’d held down over Stump Wilhoite’s face.

  The beer can slipped from his gloved fingers, hit the floor, and rolled, spilling beer across the horrible mustard-colored carpeting. The powerful surge of grief and regret took him by surprise and he was powerless to stem the tide of emotion as he dropped to his knees and covered his face with his hands.

  He heard his father heave a sigh of disgust and say, “Ah, hell.”

  Luke’s sobbing continued until Josh Benson knocked him upside his head. This was no love tap. The old man had whacked him a good one. The physical pain shocked Luke out of the emotion of the moment. It was the first time his father had hit him since the year before he got drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. A simmering rage displaced the grief and he got carefully to his feet, his hands curled into shaking fists at his sides.

  Josh sneered. “I ain’t interested in fighting you, son. Hell, I know you could whoop my ass these days. But if you’re really in trouble, you need to pull your shit together and tell me all about it.”

  Luke heaved a breath and let go of his rage. His father was right. And he knew there was no line of bullshit that would cut it in this situation. “I need a ride home. I . . . I . . .” He grimaced. “I killed Stump Wilhoite tonight. And the rest of his family.”

  His father’s face registered mild surprise, but there was no hint of anything like shock or disgust in his expression. The old man didn’t reply right away but instead eyed his son in a curious, contemplative way. Luke had a hard time imagining what was going through the man’s head and his anxiety redlined again as he waited for him to say something. When he finally did speak, the words he uttered made no sense to him. “Did you do it for me?”

  Luke frowned. “What?”

  Josh finished off his beer and crushed the can in his hand. “You heard me, boy. Did you do in ol’ Stump on my behalf?”

  Luke’s frown deepened. “Why in hell would I do it for you?”

  His father’s features took on that quizzical cast again. “To protect me, of course. Am I wrong?”

  Luke could make no sense of the turn the conversation had taken. He stared at his father in open-mouthed confusion for a long moment. Maybe the old man was even drunker than he’d thought and had misunderstood him. But, no, that didn’t seem possible based on his actual words. Luke remained at a loss until a disturbing thought took shape in his head. As soon as it occurred to him, he knew it had to be true. It made a perfect, diabolical kind of sense, and he had to wonder why he’d never thought of it before.

  “It was you,” he said, pushing the words through tightly clenched teeth. “You’re the South County Madman.”

  “Yeah, reckon I am. Hell, son, I figured you finally worked it out and went after Stump for me. Shit, I was almost proud of you there for a second.” Josh laughed. “Well, don’t stand there looking like a damn simpleton. Don’t tell me you’re gonna hold a grudge against your pa.”

  A lot of things went through Luke’s mind in the next several moments. Much of it was a This Is Your Life-style review of highlights from his childhood. The one big constant was the way his miserable, abusive, sadistic excuse for a father had delighted in undermining him in every facet of his life. There was all the physical stuff, for one thing. The savage beatings he’d endured when he’d been too small to fight back. The occasional inappropriate touching he tried very hard to never think about. And then there was the openly derisive way he reacted to anything remotely positive that happened in his son’s life, including mockery for exhibiting pride at earning good grades at school rather than excellent grades. But that had been nothing compared to the humiliating way the old man had taunted him in the wake of an especially cruel rejection by the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Making his son cry had been one of Josh Benson’s great joys in life for a long stretch of years. He honed the skill to a fine edge during that time, systematically destroying his son’s confidence and generally doing much to turn him into the social recluse he eventually became. Dumping the bodies of the dead girls on Luke’s property had simply been the culmination of it all, an ultimate expression of contempt, as well as the most perfect way of fucking with him he’d ever conceived.

  Josh laughed again. His face looked redder than ever. “Should see yourself, son. You look like someone knocked you a good one upside the head.” He smirked. “You used to look like that a lot in the good old days.”

  Luke launched himself at the old man, slamming into him and driving him to the floor in a tangle of flailing limbs. The fight was brutal and touch-and-go in those first few moments, with his father landing a few solid blows despite being caught off-guard. But Josh had been right earlier—he was too old to get the better of his son now. Luke absorbed the worst of the blows easily and soon gained the upper hand, winding up atop the old man as he relentlessly battered the bastard’s face with his fists. He shattered his nose and pulped his lips, broke his jaw and knocked several of his teeth loose. Blood flowed from several wide gashes and his cheeks turned purple. At some point, the old man stopped moving, a development Luke initially chalked up to surrender. But knowing he had won did nothing to dim his fury at first and for a time he continued to slam his gloved fists into the now virtually unrecognizable face of his father. The rhythm of his punches only began to slow as his arms grew tired.

  He let his arms hang limply at his sides when it was over. They each felt like they weighed about a million pounds. For a while he just sat there, breathing heavily and staring at his father’s ruined face in a numb state of shock. When he belatedly understood that Josh Benson had died, the numbness went away and he let out a strangled gasp followed by another round of violent sobbing. It went on for a while.

  Luke’s father had been a worthless piece of shit, but he had also been his last living relative. In those first starkly bleak moments in the aftermath of it all, beating the old man to death felt like the perfect capper to a perfectly crappy life. He had no one left in the world who gave a shit about him, even in a twisted, hateful way. No more family. No more friends. Only his dogs loved him. He cried and cursed the old man, letting out a lifetime’s worth of frustration and regret, as well as helpless grief for the life he might have had if he’d been raised by people who were decent.

  When the explosion of emotion at last subsided, he got up and commenced a careful search of the house. He hadn’t come this far to fail now and damned if he was going to let the old man get the last laugh. He found the first part of what he needed in a lockbox Josh Benson had kept under his bed. Inside it were gruesome Polaroid photographs of his victims, along with other sick mementos of his crimes, including locks of hair, various undergarments, ID cards, and a small piece of rotted flesh wrapped in a clear plastic bag. Luke’s face twisted in disgust at the sight of the latter, which he was pretty sure had been someone’s nipple.

  He carried the box out to the living room, removed some of the items from it, and arranged them carefully on the coffee table. The intent here was to make it look as if the old man had been consumed with nostalgia during his last night on earth. Once he was satisfied with the placement of the items, he went out to the garage, where he found his father’s shotgun. Back inside, he fetched a chair from the
kitchen and put the old man’s corpse on it. The chair had been positioned so that where he’d already bled on the carpet would fit with what was about to happen.

  Whether he would get away with what he had in mind was questionable. But Luke figured he’d already staged one crime scene tonight, so why not go for a second one? The odds against things working out in his favor were higher than ever, but he was damn well going to do his best.

  He wedged the barrel of the shotgun up under his father’s chin and got his hands wrapped around the stock of the weapon. It was tricky and took some doing, but he eventually managed to make it happen. The blast of the gun made him cringe and momentarily deafened him while making a suitably messy wreck of his father’s head. The grisly tableau was sickening, but he refused to allow another surge of emotion to paralyze him.

  His getaway came courtesy of the old Indian motorcycle Josh Benson had kept in the garage next to his Mustang. The bike was rarely used and its absence wouldn’t mean anything to the lawmen investigating the scene. If anyone asked him about it later, he would just claim the old man had given it to him months earlier.

  The ride back to his isolated trailer was even more uneventful than the ride into town earlier. He didn’t cross paths with even a single vehicle from the sheriff’s department. The rush of the warm night air felt good against his face as he left Murfreesboro behind and cranked the bike’s engine to a high rev, feeling freer than he ever had as he sped down the dark rural roads en route toward whatever the future held for him.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS/AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  The author would like to note the title tale of this collection is in no way anti-hippie or anti-counter culture. The title is merely a play on a common pejorative view of people in that scene in conjunction with rotting zombies. A joke, in other words. Thanks to the following for the usual reasons: Jennifer Smith (world's number one rock and roll babe), Jeff Smith, Keith Ashley, Brian Keene, Tod Clark, Paul Goblirsch, Ryan Harding, Matt Hayward, Lashon Miller, Carrie Nicely, and Andersen Prunty. Thanks also to my Patreon "super supporters": Brian Keene, Brian Picard, Sr., Christian Wood, Jordan Lindsey, Joseph Branson, Scott Berke, and Tim Feely.

  CREDITS

  Some Crazy Fucking Shit That Happened One Day first appeared as an ebook original from Bitter Ale Press. It appeared as bonus material in a limited hardcover from Thunderstorm Books. This is the novelette’s first widely available print appearance.

  “The Restless Corpse”, “Chainsaw Sex Maniacs from Mars”, “The Thing in the Woods”, and “A Slasher’s Dilemma” originally appeared on Bryan Smith’s Patreon. This is the first official publication of these stories.

  “Pilgrimage” was originally published in the themed anthology Welcome to the Show from Crystal Lake Publishing.

  “We Are 138 Golden Elm” originally appeared in the themed anthology Chopping Block Party from Necro Publications.

  “The Barrel” originally appeared in Cut Corners: Volume 3 from Sinister Grin Press.

  Six of the stories in Seven Deadly Tales of Terror were originally an ebook only publication from Bitter Ale Press. Their appearance here marks the first widely available print publication for most of the stories. “South County Madman” originally appeared in the collection Set’s Quartet from Thunderstorm Books. “The Implant” later appeared in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2 from Comet Press.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bryan Smith is the author of numerous novels and novellas, including 68 Kill, Slowly We Rot, Depraved, The Killing Kind, Last Day, Dead Stripper Storage, and Kill For Satan!. Bestselling horror author Brian Keene described Slowly We Rot as, “The best zombie novel I’ve ever read.” A film version of 68 Kill, directed by Trent Haaga and starring Matthew Gray Gubler from Criminal Minds, was released in 2017. Bryan lives in Tennessee with his wife Jennifer and their many pets.

  Follow him on Twitter at @Bryan_D_Smith and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/bryansmith

  Get access to exclusive Bryan Smith fiction at Patreon. Includes serialized novellas and novels, excerpts, short stories, and behind-the-scenes essays. http://www.patreon.com/horrorauthorbryansmith

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