by S. A. Hunt
“Uhh,” he said again, backing away.
KSSS! A blast of air came out of the floor behind him and he leapt away in fright, shouting, almost falling over the coffee table.
Finding his feet, Wayne saw it wasn’t air—it was a snake, dear God it was a long fat snake, an olive-brown firehose, draped across the black carpet in swoopy cursive. Darker markings like Hershey’s Kisses ran down its smooth, flabby sides. The snake had reared up and now watched him warily, its fat jowls puffing inside its pink mouth, fangs bared.
Damn, thought Wayne, what do I do?
“HELP!” he screamed, or that’s what he tried to do, but it came out a whispery squeak, flitting through the constricted tin whistle of his throat.
Coiling protectively in the center of the Gravitron, the snake kept hissing at Wayne in that low nail-in-the-tire way, barely audible. It lay between him and the front door of the carnival ride, between the boy and any chance of escape.
“Get out of here!” Wayne snatched up a candelabra and hurled it at the snake.
The candle and candelabra hit the floor and broke into two pieces, whipping over the snake’s head. Fsssk! The reptile struck at it as it went by, punching out and withdrawing again.
Wayne stumbled up on top of the creaking-cracking table and pressed himself against the Gravitron wall. The padded gurney-seat behind him was wet and stank of mold.
“Go aw—” he began to scream, but the snake slithered after him, climbing up. Before he could get away, it jabbed in and bit him on the left leg just below his knee, fsst!, fangs stapling through his jeans into the soft meat of his calf.
Startled and confused, Wayne soft-shoed backward off the table in a tumble of candles, skidding, collapsing into the floor. His knees and shoulder reverberated against the wooden platform with a kettle-drum boom-boom.
Coiling on the table, the snake peered up out of the bowl of its chubby chocolate-kisses body, puffy pink yawning, the tip of its tail wriggling as if it had rattles to shake.
Knife-blades from the sun swarmed and clashed under Wayne’s skin, fighting each other in the flesh behind the bite, cutting him to ribbons from the inside. The pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life—burning, pinching, stabbing, angry, it was hot coals and hornets and rusty nails all mixed together, scraping the bone clean with rending red teeth.
He wrenched back the leg of his jeans expecting to find a white bone protruding from his brown skin, but there were only two puncture-wounds, beading raspberry blood.
Cold numbness and needles took over his left foot, prickling his toes, his heel. His calf was beginning to swell.
Tongue, too big for his mouth. Throat, closing up. He turned over on his back and goldfish-gawped at dry air, tears in his eyes. The boxing glove pressing against the roof of his mouth tasted like batteries.
“Heeehp!” he wheezed as loud as he could manage, his lips tingling, and fought for air. His shirt was ten sizes too small, constricting his lungs in belts of cotton. “Huuuk—huuuuuk—”
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, somebody came running up the ramp into the Gravitron. A barbarian giant plastered the far wall in shadow, filling the doorway with his body, and in his thick hands was a mallet with a striker-head as big as a mailbox.
Pete lingered for about two seconds, taking in the scene, and then he charged across the Gravitron and brought the strength-test hammer down on the snake, smashing it so hard the table trampolined the reptile into the air. Someone—a girl?—screamed, but to Wayne it was the muffled keening of a kitten.
The ceiling fell slowly away piece by piece, unmasking an abyss of shimmering red stars.
Big old Pete, good old Pete, Petey-boy, the Incredible Pete, he demolished both table and snake, swearing at top volume, unleashing every swear and curse he knew, even as the blood-galaxy uncovered itself above his head. The huge hammer came down on the snake again and again with an industrial, echoing rhythm.
The night sky glittered with rubies that darted back and forth, mingling like goldfish in a pond. Wayne couldn’t understand any of Pete’s shouting through the cotton in his ears. It was an AM broadcast on a bad signal.
Silky foam seethed out between Wayne’s lips and ran across his cheeks. His stomach churned, but he didn’t have the strength to turn over.
A force lifted the boy up—Aliens, he thought, as he rose toward that malevolent universe, they’re taking me away into their purple spaceship, they’re gonna cut me up and do tests on me—and then he was gone.
14
Dinner was done and eaten, the plates were stacked in the sink, and Robin and Kenway were in the garage downstairs playing cornhole.
It was about as boring as you’d probably think it was, but Robin had a good time humoring the big blond lug. Throwing with her left hand instead of her right made it look like she couldn’t aim for shit, it was nice to have him right behind her, big bear-man mitts on her forearms, guiding her through repetitive underhand motions.
“Here, you want more forward momentum,” he was saying over the smell of his cologne, swinging her arm back and forth. His beard tickled her ear. His breath carried the dank pocket-change scent of beer. “You don’t want to lob it straight up into the air.”
“Like this?” Robin asked, lunging forward and flinging the beanbag toward the cornhole board. It slapped against the wood and slid right off the back end onto the floor.
“Not quite as hard. Just kinda … chuck it.”
She chucked it. The beanbag whacked into the crevice at the bottom where the board lay on the floor. Why don’t you just fling it straight into the hole? After all that knife-throwing and hatchet-throwing, you know you can. Or are you afraid you’ll hurt his feelings?
“You’ll get it.” Kenway went around gathering them all up.
“Fun,” Robin said, lying through her teeth as she helped. They deposited the beanbags back on the drafting table, but she kept one of them, fidgeting with it. “You know, I’ve got an idea of something you might like.”
“Oh yeah?”
She tossed the beanbag onto the table. “Come with me.”
She led him through the dark vinyl studio with all its computers and printers and half-glimpsed figures pasted to the walls, pushing through the front door. Down the sidewalk, toward the dentist’s parking lot. Her plumbing van. Robin unlocked the back door and threw it open, climbing inside. Behind the seats was a small collection of “boffers,” practice swords made with PVC piping and foam pool noodles, all wrapped in duct tape.
“Really?” asked Kenway, as she handed him one. “I didn’t know you were into LARPing.”
“What?”
“LARP. You don’t know what LARP is?”
“No,” she said, pacing around the parking lot, flourishing her own foam sword.
“A couple of my buddies in the military were into it. Live-Action Role Play. Bunch of folks dress up like knights and wizards and shit, and go out in the woods to role-play and beat the hell out of each other with these things.”
“Sounds like a laugh riot.” Robin sighed. “Sorry, between getting the Clockwork Orange treatment at the mental hospital and getting the Full Metal Jacket treatment from the guy that broke me out, I didn’t get much pop culture in my life. Until I struck out and started doing my witch stuff.”
“How many movies have you seen since the 1980s?”
“I plead the Fifth.” She dove at the big man with a clumsy swing. “En garde!”
He scooted backward, whipping the boffer sword to the left, catching her blade just above his hilt. An awkward move, an underhand parry just barely strong enough to stop her blade.
She slapped him on the shoulder with the boffer and he half-heartedly tried to knock it aside with his elbow.
“I haven’t seen a whole lot,” she admitted. “Haven’t really had time to catch up on movies or play video games. Just train. Heinrich had a VCR and a few movies on tape. Fist of Fury. Cleopatra Jones. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Drunken Master. Foxy Brown. He
was into that older stuff. I think the newest movie I’ve seen is Kill Bill.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
She smacked him on the leg, but Kenway didn’t flinch.
“Come on, play with me,” she said, smacking him again. “You’re not gonna hurt me. And if you do, I promise I won’t hold it against you.”
* * *
After they burned a few hundred calories whacking each other with pool noodles, the two of them sat on the tailgate of his pickup truck watching the sun go down. Kenway dug around in a cooler full of ice water, coming up with two beer bottles, opened them both on the edge of the tailgate, and handed one to Robin. A crow stood on top of the power pole in the corner of the parking lot, eyeing them quietly.
“So you really do this, then?” Kenway asked, after the crow had flown away and the sunset had crept below the rim of buildings across the street. The sky was a soft gradient of orange and purple clouds, and the moon was already visible behind them, a gray coffee-cup stain on a blue paper twilight. “Hunt down witches?”
“Yeah.”
He took a swig of beer. “You like what you do?”
“Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” She looked down at her hands, chuckling. Calluses on her palms, and scars across her knuckles. “Which has almost happened a time or two, actually.” She looked up at him, her smile refusing to fade. “I like you.”
“I like you too. You’re pretty cool.”
“I mean.…”
“By which I mean you’re really fucking cool.”
“I don’t know.” She kicked her legs and drank some beer. Bitter, metallic, with just a hint of banana on the back end. “You make me feel normal. I haven’t had that in a long time. Feel like I’ve known you forever, and I’ve never met a guy that made me feel that way—normally I just intimidate all the guys I try to date. Or they just want to talk about boring, inconsequential shit. Whatever boring stuff they’re doing at work. Or drama they’re in the middle of—their neighbor, their family, their coworkers. Who freaking cares? There are immortal hags out there kidnapping and eating kids, and sucking the life out of entire towns, and I’m the only one out there fightin’ ’em, and Bob thinks I care someone’s eating his lunch out of the break room fridge, or he got in an argument with some asshole customer about gun control laws.”
“That’s what you get for dating muggles.”
“Muggles?”
“Civilians. John Q. Public.” He emphasized each term with a toss of his hand. “Maybe you needed to go out with somebody like me. We’re both—”
“Kinda fucked up?”
Kenway laughed.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” she said, trailing off. She added in a singsong voice, “If you’re fucked up and you know it, clap your hands.”
“I was going to say ‘fighters,’ like, we both know what it’s like to be in the shit, you know?” Kenway shrugged. “Kind of thing can drive a wedge between you and the rest of humanity. Once you’ve seen the kind of things we’ve seen, done the kind of things we’ve done, it puts you on a whole ’nother level. Makes it hard to relate.”
“Makes you a ghost?”
“Or an alien, maybe. Some ancient extradimensional being just too old and too weird for people’s boring bullshit. Or maybe like we went to Narnia, had a bunch of adventures, and now we’re back on Earth, but now we’re part elf or something, and we’ve got this magic sword, and we know what it’s like to fight centaurs, and, just, nobody around you can understand that shit, so you keep it to yourself, and you hold it inside you so tightly it twists you, makes you weird.”
“Makes you wild. Like a wild animal.”
He cocked his head.
“A wild animal,” she repeated, “we’re feral, y’know, we’re not domesticated anymore, we’re not tame. The shit, the suck, the fighting, it changed us. Made us wild animals. We’re wolves in a land of dogs. We belong out there, and people can sense it.”
“Maybe.”
“Kinda fucked up.”
Kenway laughed, and they both said in unison, “Kinda fucked up.” He shook his head. “Wolves in a land of dogs,” he laughed. “You are so full of shit. You’ve been making those YouTube videos for too long, you’re starting to sound like a bad B-movie horror writer.”
Robin butted him with a playful shoulder.
He gave her a sidelong look. “You let me win when we were playing cornhole, didn’t you?”
“I must plead the Fifth once again, your honor.”
The sun sank a little bit more, until the moon began to take over in earnest, gilding the sky with diamonds. She wondered if she should start considering the decision to stay or drive back to Miguel’s.
“I didn’t tell you the whole truth of why I came here,” said Kenway. He spoke away from her, toward the sky, as if confessing to the stars. “And why I stayed. If you’re gonna tell me your story, I might as well tell you mine.”
Cool anticipation trickled through her at recognizing the veiled pain on his face.
“I was—am a combat medic. Sixty-eight Whiskey. That’s the role I filled overseas. When I lost my leg, it was my buddy Hendry, Chris Hendry, pulled me out of that vehicle and put one of my own tourniquets on me. He was in the vehicle behind us. First one to get there.”
Kenway rubbed his nose, pulling on it as if he were about to take a deep breath and dunk himself. He massaged his mouth, the beard grinding in his hand like dry grass. Fidgeting, wool-gathering. “But he couldn’t save everybody in there. Just me. Really messed him up he couldn’t save the others. After we got home, he didn’t do so hot. Had a lot of nightmares that year. Hard Christmas.
“Next summer I came out here to see how he was doing. He was living in Blackfield and working at the mill. Had a Vicodin habit he was trying to kick, said he hurt his back in the, ahh—the incident. He had a job but it was on the rocks. No girlfriend, as far as I know. I got the idea in my head to take him out on the lake for a week, see if I could get him straightened up, right? He wasn’t too bad off yet. Not bad enough for rehab, I think. Maybe I caught him in time.”
As he spoke, he twirled the beer bottle on its butt, staring down at it. His voice was low, introspective.
“We spent a couple days out on a pontoon boat, fishing, telling stories, had a good time. He looked good. He was laughing and making jokes. I thought he might be leveling out. Then one morning—that Wednesday—I got up, made coffee, and I was making breakfast when I went in to wake him up, and when I put my hand on him he was fuckin’ cold.”
Ice ran down Robin’s spine. She didn’t know what to do, or what to say, and suddenly this enormous man seemed so vulnerable and dark. He became an emotional hot potato in her hands.
“It was ninety-five degrees that morning, and like, almost noon when I went in there. He was cold, colder than ninety-five degrees. I remember the temperature because of that giant round thermometer on the cabin porch. How do you get colder than that? He felt like somebody stole him and replaced him with a ham. Right there, in that bedroom, I thought he was playing a prank on me and had put something under his blankets. And he was hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out and laugh at me.”
The stupid visual made him smirk darkly, but then he retreated into himself again.
“He brought the Vicodin to the cabin. Nothing left in the bottle.” Kenway shrugged slowly. “I reckon he died during the night. Probably took it all before he went to bed.” Closed his eyes, pressed the bottle against his mouth and tilted his head back, letting the very last drop of beer trickle down the glass onto his tongue.
Kenway put the bottle down and licked his lips, holding the bottle in both hands and staring down at it as if it were a precious heirloom. “I made breakfast and drank coffee while the man that saved my life was dead in the next room. And I—me, a fucking combat medic!—I didn’t do shit about it.”
“Oh my God,” said Robin.
Kenway sat up straight and rolled his neck, squeezing his shoulder.
“And I’ve been here ever since. That was about three years ago.” He shot the bottle into a nearby Dumpster with a bang and a rumble. “I don’t know, it just didn’t seem right to leave, you know? Felt like I was turnin’ my back on him. Walkin’ away from him. I couldn’t do it.”
Thoughts of hugging him occurred to her, but actually doing it seemed inappropriate. Instead, she reached over and squeezed his hand.
His eyes met hers and he smiled sadly.
“I’ve been over all my woulda-coulda-shouldas,” he said, patting her hand. The palm of his bear-paw was rough, leathery. “You spend a lot of time in your head when you’re painting. I try to distract my mind with music, or I have TV on in the background, but I think—ahh hell, this … this isn’t really great after-dinner conversation, is it? I don’t know why I had to tell you that messed-up story. You … I dunno, you seem like a good listener.”
She smiled up at him. “I do a lot of talking to a camera. I like having someone to listen to for a change.”
15
Sent at 9:36pm
B1GR3D: hey
Received at 9:42pm
pizzam4n: what u want stepchild
B1GR3D: nice pictures. U look good
pizzam4n: thanks
pizzam4n: you don’t look so bad yourself, ol man. I am diggin that red hair. Always wanted me a wild irish rose
B1GR3D: old man? haha
B1GR3D: what you doin
pizzam4n: gettin off work, u?
B1GR3D: bored
B1GR3D: i want sum of that goodlookin body
pizzam4n: boy you wouldnt know what to do with it
B1GR3D: I bet I can figure it out. Why dont u swing by on the way home an let me hit it
pizzam4n: let u hit it? Lol
pizzam4n: oh ho ho you aint even gonna buy me dinner first. I see how it is
B1GR3D: if you want dinner I got plenty of food here. hell I’ll cook u a steak if you want. damn good steak. Bake potato, whole 9 yards
