Clown in a Cornfield

by Adam Cesare

  “Then she should hand it over,” Ronnie said, her voice going loud for a second. She looked to Quinn, who was still watching the door. “Gimme the gun, new girl,” Ronnie continued, then pointed a thumb to herself. “Miss Kettle Springs Riflery 2019.”

  Quinn looked back, gave Ronnie Queen and her Frendo jumpsuit a once-over, and then scoffed. She looked to Rust to back her up and he shook his head.

  Quinn, a slight smile at her lips, ignored Ronnie’s request and turned back to keeping the rifle trained on the door.

  Ha! Cole liked this girl.

  “What’s in these boxes?” Rust asked in a whisper, indicating the half of the silo that looked like an extension of Tillerson’s garage.

  Cole shrugged.

  “You didn’t check?”

  “Didn’t seem to be anything useful and we had, like, other stuff on our minds,” Cole said.

  Rust shook his head again. “Help me, then. Whether they try breaking down the door or just setting us on fire, they’ll be back soon. Stay on the door, Quinn.”

  “You’re doing a great job, Maybrook,” Cole said, mostly just to watch Ronnie grimace. Ronnie was hugging Matt’s shoulder now, sullen that she’d been denied the weapon, both of them useless.

  Cole helped Rust unstack boxes and random farm equipment.

  “Got to be something useful we can take before we head out the back,” Rust said, pulling open a box of Farmer’s Almanac books that looked like they dated back to the fifties.

  “Head out the back?” Cole asked.

  “How long you been living around farms?” Rust asked, finally some humor in his voice. “This is a grain bin.”

  “I know that. So?”

  Rust stamped his foot on the grating under them, the sound causing an echoing BONG. “It’s old, but not old enough it doesn’t have a loading pit. I can see from here”—he peered down into the grating—“that it’s a conveyer belt and not an auger. It’ll be tight, but we can crawl out the back while the clowns are watching the door.”

  “That’s—” Cole started, a hand on Rust’s shoulder as he worked to unstack another crate. “That’s some good thinking, man.”

  How much had they both changed since they’d been on speaking terms? The skin on Rust’s face seemed aged, lived-in. Cole had been filming prank videos, practicing his alcohol poisoning, and curating his social media presence, while Rust had stayed doing what he’d always done: living.

  Rust’s expression changed.

  “Hey, weren’t there kids smoking in here?” Rust asked, louder, to the room.

  “Yeah, why?” Matt asked, standing away from where he and his girlfriend had been stewing.

  “Probably not the best idea,” Rust said, hiking up a small crate to his chest. The case was a little bigger than a shoebox and had two rope handles.

  “What is that?” Cole asked.

  “My guess . . .” Rust walked back to the dirt flooring of the silo, off the grating, and gently set the box down. “. . . is that it’s the only fishing gear Paul Tillerson uses.” He slid open the lid to reveal a box full of weathered, weeping dynamite sticks.

  “Holy shit, that looks dangerous,” Cole said.

  “Looks to me like our way out,” Rust said, staying crouched. “Who’s got a lighter?”

  “Ronnie?” Cole asked, putting his hand out.

  Ronnie looked at him, frowned, then partially unzipped the front of her Frendo costume, reaching into the pockets under her jumpsuit and producing a cheap gas-station Bic.

  Quinn still had the rifle pointed at the hole in the door, but had backed up to join their huddle. “We made it this far. Please don’t kill us all,” she said.

  Sound advice.

  “I won’t,” Rust said, using the tips of his fingers to gently lift one of the sticks of dynamite from the box. Its side was slick with what looked like sea salt and olive oil, but Cole knew enough to guess it was actually nitroglycerin. “Okay, Cole, find the hatch to the loading pit and get everyone down there.”

  “What about—”

  There was a slam at the door, the ax returning, attacking a different spot from where Quinn had been aiming, old wood cracking.

  Quinn pulled the barrel of the rifle over and fired, doing even more damage to the door. Cole watched Rust flinch, nearly dropping the dynamite.

  “Stop her,” Rust looked up and said. “One spark and—”

  “You missed, girly,” a voice taunted from the other side of the door.

  Cole crossed to Quinn. “You’ve got to stop shooting,” he whispered. “We don’t have ammo to waste. We need you.”

  Cole watched her expression slacken as she turned to him. Cole’s father had avoided Vietnam, but he had a brother who hadn’t. Cole had never met his uncle, but Arthur Hill spoke highly of him, said it was a shame he’d gone crazy shooting. Cole never understood that expression—gone crazy shooting—until right now, looking in Quinn’s eyes. A few minutes ago, if Ronnie had tried any harder to take the gun away from Quinn, it wouldn’t have ended well for Ms. Queen.

  “Come on,” the voice outside said. “They probably ran out of ammo.”

  “Get back or we’ll blow you all up!” Matt yelled.

  They looked at him, Rust swearing under his breath.

  “What? I’m trying to buy us some time,” Matt whispered, and shrugged. If they made it out of this, Cole decided that he was punching his lights out again.

  Outside, there were two quick pulls of a ripcord and suddenly the familiar buzz of a chainsaw.

  “Now, Cole, now,” Rust yelled. He was twining the short fuses of two sticks of dynamite together, lighter pinched between his teeth as he worked.

  Cole didn’t hesitate; he dropped to the floor and started yanking at the grating until he found a three-by-three section that pulled up with a rusty O-ring.

  “Everyone get in there,” he said. Ronnie didn’t need any urging. She went first, stepping down carefully given that there was only about two and a half feet of clearance between the grating and the floor of the pit.

  She looked back up at Cole, her hair somehow still in a neat ponytail. “Now what?”

  Somewhere behind them, chainsaw bit into wood and sawdust began to flow, turning the inside of the silo into a snow globe.

  “Crawl! Up the belt,” Cole yelled, pushing Ronnie’s head down with his shoe. “You’re next, Maybrook,” he said, pressing Quinn toward the hole, needing to use force as she started to plant her feet.

  “What about Rust?”

  That was a good question. What about Rust? The ancient dynamite didn’t seem to have much of a fuse.

  “I’ll be fine,” Rust said, looking up to Cole from where he was crouched, working frantically. “Really.” Rust’s eyes were locked with Cole’s, pleading. Lying. “You need to go. Now.”

  Cole understood. And it killed him to understand.

  “Yeah. He’ll be fine, now get in there,” Matt Trent said, then smiled: “Or I’ll give you back that punch I owe you.”

  Without being able to tell Rust goodbye or good luck, Cole Hill was shoved down into the pit.

  Matt followed after, the boy in the clown suit making sure Cole went.

  Twenty

  Quinn had never been scared of the dark.

  And for her, tight spaces didn’t mean claustrophobia.

  And before tonight, she’d never even thought to be afraid of clowns.

  Quinn’s fears tended to be more specific. Most of them more to do with whether her dad was going to be okay when she left for college, or whether she was going to let her team down during a volleyball game.

  But under the silo, crammed into a situation where she needed to crawl through a shaft only as wide as her shoulders, in total darkness, she better understood some universal fears.

  “I can’t see anything!” Ronnie said. Her voice was muffled, even though she was only inches in front of Quinn.

  “Just keep going,” Cole answered. Quinn could feel one of his hands on the bottom o
f her shoe. He was steadily applying pressure, pushing her forward. She would’ve done the same thing for Ronnie, but she had to keep her grip on the rifle and use her other hand to claw herself up the incline of the conveyer belt.

  “Please don’t shoot me!” Ronnie said, prodded with the end of the rifle. Quinn hadn’t done it on purpose, but . . .

  Would it make you crawl faster?

  The small, cramped passageway smelled like dry corn and earth, but there were metal treads clattering against their feet and elbows. Rust had been right, this cramped passageway had to be leading them to the surface.

  Something with a lot of legs—a roach, a centipede—crawled over the back of Quinn’s hand. The creature felt like a small feather duster, playing across her knuckles. Along with clowns, the insect rounded out the list of fears she hadn’t known she had until tonight.

  “Keep going,” Cole urged.

  Quinn could no longer hear the chainsaw. Above and behind them, the clowns were likely still carving into the silo door, but she couldn’t hear much beyond her own hot, ragged breathing.

  The corn silo was no longer in use, so what incentive was there to keep the conveyor belt functional? If there was no exit, if it had been boarded up or cemented over years ago, then it felt very possible they would all suffocate down here.

  Quinn tried not to think about it, kept fighting for the inches of progress she was getting.

  “I feel something!” Ronnie yelled, stopping short. Quinn’s reaching hand touched the skin of the girl’s calf, pushing up the clown jumpsuit. “It’s the end, it’s . . . ,” Ronnie stammered. “It’s dirt!”

  “So dig, then,” Quinn said, Cole patting her on the shoe to indicate he agreed.

  Matt said something, but Quinn couldn’t quite decipher it.

  “Can you fucking calm down, Trent?” Cole said. “We’re all cramped. Take deep breaths.”

  Quinn could hear Ronnie straining against something, digging, wincing with exertion.

  “I’ve got it. No more dirt. It’s grass!”

  “Keep going!” Quinn said, trying to encourage her.

  A second later, a dirt clod fell into Quinn’s open mouth. She shut her eyes against the rain of damp soil, the blackness just as complete as the tunnel around her had been.

  Then she smelled it: not sweat or corn or exhalation, but fresh air, rushing in and filling their small tunnel.

  Suddenly Ronnie was no longer in front of her. Quinn surged forward, and a grime-flecked hand reached down to help her out of the tunnel.

  Quinn sent the rifle up first and let Ronnie take it, before crawling out of the dead grass and dirt hole like she was being born again.

  Standing, knees shaking, Quinn helped Ronnie pull out Cole, then Matt.

  “Where is he?” Quinn said down into the darkness.

  “We’ve got to go,” Cole said.

  Quinn knew he was right; the tunnel had deposited them less than ten feet from the base of the silo. Quinn could hear the chainsaw, even though she couldn’t see any clowns.

  The group retreated to the edge of the corn before Quinn stopped.

  “We have to get to the road,” Ronnie said.

  She was holding the rifle. Quinn’s rifle.

  “No. We need to wait for Rust,” Quinn told her.

  “Ronnie’s right,” Matt said. “The road. We need to get help.”

  “Why the road? If we can make it to Tillerson’s house, we can use their landline to call for help,” Cole said.

  It was the connection that Quinn had been trying to make earlier. If the Tillersons were gone for the weekend at a farm convention, they’d be no help, but they would still have a phone. Shelter of some kind.

  “And you know how to get there? You know for sure what direction it is?” Ronnie asked Cole, daring him to disagree. “If the road doesn’t work, we can follow it back to the house. Let’s let that be plan B—”

  “Give me my gun back,” Quinn said, interrupting her, tired of this shit.

  “Your gun?” Ronnie asked, the emphasis all wrong, looking down at the weapon in her hands.

  “Yeah . . . my gun. I want it,” Quinn demanded, amped up, ready to fight Ronnie for it.

  But then the silo exploded.

  The air was almost solid in its heat and rush, the warm hand of a god gently pressing everything flat as a fireball turned night into day for the span of a few seconds.

  It didn’t feel like Quinn had lost consciousness, more like a long blink.

  She lifted her head, looked around them, and saw that the corn had been pushed flat by the blast, every plant bent at the base of the stalk by the force of the explosion, and Quinn, Ronnie, Cole, and Matt had been bent down with it.

  Quinn groaned, struggling to sit up, and when she managed, she could see that Cole was already sitting, watching where the silo had been and sniffling.

  Ronnie’s hair was smoking, but there didn’t seem to be any actual flames threatening to burn away her hair product. Quinn crawled over to the girl and took her rifle back.

  They blinked at each other for a moment, watching the hole in the ground where the silo had been. There was no way Rust had gotten out of that alive.

  “Well, he did it. He blew them up,” Cole said, more to himself than anyone else. “Crazy fucker sacrificed himself to stop them.”

  “Not all of them,” Matt said, pointing.

  And there, in the middle of the clearing, another Frendo the Clown stepped through the smoke and fire toward them.

  He wiped his long, curved machete on the side of one pant leg.

  Peering through the smolder, the clown smiled and pointed his blade to them.

  What other choice did they have: they ran.

  Twenty-One

  Glenn Maybrook had driven across the country, taken a job in a town he’d never heard of, never even visited, upended his daughter’s life, and possibly forever damaged her trust in him. Yes, he’d done all of that and he’d done it to preserve his own sanity.

  In retrospect, he could say all he wanted to about a fresh start for both of them, but, in reality, moving had been a selfish decision.

  He’d done all of this so that he wouldn’t have to practice emergency medicine for one more goddamn day.

  And yet.

  And yet he was losing this patient.

  “How do you expect me to treat her with nothing but tweezers, an old scalpel, and a shitty first-aid kit?” he asked the darkness surrounding him, then pushed his luck: “It’s not even sterile!”

  “You didn’t have any medical supplies at your home. We had to make do. Just do your best,” the voice said.

  “My best? Someone shot off her fucking hand!”

  His patient moaned. She was still wearing her clown mask, breathing heavy against the plastic slit. She’d screamed at him when he tried to remove it.

  Another clown, a big man who’d also been wounded, buckshot in his shoulder, had been the one to bring her in and usher Glenn out of his cell to help.

  “I don’t care what the man on the speaker says,” the big clown hissed. “If you don’t save her, I will kill you.”

  After the threat, the clown left, climbing up the steel steps, leaving behind Glenn and the crude operating table.

  Glenn was alone in here with the patient, though he was still being watched. But from where? Was there a camera, somewhere above him? Did that mean his jailer was in the next room, or was he two towns over? Could Glenn run up those industrial-looking stairs and get away?

  No. No, he couldn’t. Like it or not, there was a woman on the table in front of him who would die without his help.

  “Can you feel this?” Glenn asked, poking the end of the tweezers into the middle of the wound.

  His patient moaned, but he couldn’t be sure if it was in response to anything he was doing. She’d been moaning a lot.

  He looked at the smudges on the tweezers. He’d have to be careful with how much he was handling his operating equipment. He’d tried to wi
pe his hands the best he could with the pitiful roll of gauze he’d found in the kit, but his fingers were still caked with a putrid slurry of corn and rat shit—everything about him was far from sterile. Even if Glenn could stabilize her, she’d need most of the antibiotics in the Midwest to stave off infection.

  “This?” he asked again, poking, and the woman gave a high-pitched shriek through her clown mask. She was breathing her own air in there, and it was going to take more and more effort to draw breath as she dipped further into shock.

  Someone had placed a plastic zip-tie around her wrist, cinching off the blood flow. It was crude but efficient. Might have saved her life. Had at the very least prolonged it.

  Over his career, Glenn Maybrook had seen plenty of gunshots, but very few as messy as this. First of all, shotguns weren’t exactly popular in Philly. Second, the blast had been from such a close range that the meat of this woman’s stump had been . . . cooked? He frankly didn’t know that was possible from a muzzle flash.

  Before removing the zip-tie, Glenn would need to cut away the charred skin with his scalpel, remove any pellets he could reach, then throw on as many sutures as she would allow him to with the small loop of cotton thread and no anesthetic. There had been a Motel 6 sewing kit tucked in the white plastic first-aid box, which would have been laughable if it wasn’t the only thing right now standing between his patient’s life and death.

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Frrrrr—”

  The woman tried, struggling through what must have been blinding pain.

  “Frendo,” she said finally, then maybe the strangest part of a strange night: she laughed.

  “Okay, Frendo, I’m new in town, so I’m going to take off your mask. You need to be able to breathe properly.”

  Being back in an operating room—of sorts—made Glenn braver than he should’ve been.

  “Doctor. I wouldn’t,” the voice above him said. The voice on the speaker was no longer using the Darth Vader distortion. It didn’t matter, as the voice wasn’t familiar anyway.

  “I’m going to do what I need to do to keep this person alive.”