by D V Wolfe
“Because then they’d have to call them ‘mucks’?” Noah asked.
I shook my head. “The name ‘Mucks’ doesn’t have a good ring to it for marketing purposes. ‘Get Mucked’ might have some problems.”
“Or ‘Muck you’?” Noah asked, a smile attempting to form on his lips. The truck cab was filled once again with the annoying high-pitched ringing. I dug in the crack of the seat and fished the phone out. I squinted at the tiny screen and smiled at the number before flipping it open.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You hear about the thunderstorms?” A familiar voice croaked on the other end.
“Good morning to you too, Rosetta. You calling to give me a lecture? I’ve almost hit my lecture quota for the week but I wouldn’t dream of depriving you.” The line was silent. “Rosetta,” I said, raising my voice. “Can you hear me?”
“Hello, Bane? Something’s happening, I can’t….” The phone crackled and then a childish singsong voice spoke from the static.
“Too late to save her…” The line went dead.
I tossed the phone into the seat between Noah and I and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. I didn’t even hear Noah’s bewildered shrieking until we were twenty miles further down the road.
“Bane!” He finally shouted.
“What?” I asked.
“Who was on the phone and why are you trying to kill us now?”
I passed a truck and glanced back at the phone. “That was an old friend. We’ve got a pit stop to make and the road between here and there is getting in the way.”
Noah braced his feet on the floorboards and his hands on the door and the seat, gasping as I weaved in and out of slower motorists on the highway. Rosetta had been a hell of a hunter in her day. She wasn’t one to let her guard down. Innocent or no innocent, the kid was stuck with me for the moment. We didn’t have time to make another stop.
I shifted up to fourth and glanced over at Noah who was now muttering to himself, his jaw clenched. “What are you yammering on about?” I asked.
“Oh nothing,” Noah grumbled. “Just evaluating my decision-making paradigm. Trying to figure out how I always manage to get myself into these situations; setting people on fire, climbing in trucks with psychopaths, running from cannibals, killing Rawheads...”
“Don’t forget shooting the ‘psychopath’ who saved your ass from said cannibals.” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the raw pockmarks on my cheek where the rock salt had dug into my skin. Yeah, as soon as I knew Rosetta was ok, he was going on a bus.
“Point is, now we’re barreling down the highway, heading somewhere, with nothing but cryptic sound bites from you as to where we’re going or why I’m going to die in a fiery car crash today.”
I snorted. “Well, just tell me how you really feel.” He shook his head. “Ok,” I said, snatching up the cell phone and handing it to him. “Do me a favor and look up Rosetta Wesson in this thing and call the number. If you hear anything weird on the line, repeat it to me and after it hangs up on you, keep calling her back. Got it?”
“What do you mean something weird on the line?” Noah’s voice had lost its sarcasm.
“You know anything like, ‘She’s toast, you can’t save her, it puts the lotion on its skin, I’m wearing her wrinkly hide to the demonic prom.’ Anything like that.”
Noah just looked at me. “Seriously, who the hell are you?”
“Hop to it now,” I said. “Get to dialing and lean forward.” Noah flipped the phone open and started pushing buttons while automatically slouching forward in his seat. I fished the ten-gauge out and set it on the floorboards between us. I set the sawed-off on the seat next to me and with my free hand, I pulled the wooden box from the rack behind my head. I popped the latch and flipped it open.
“By the power of Greyskull,” Noah breathed, looking down into the box.
The box contained a silver-plated Smith & Wesson 27, surrounded by rows of silver .357 bullets, a .45 caliber Colt Government with ammo, and a set of knives; flint, brass, bamboo, black steel, stone and gold-plated. Under the knives there was a pouch and with my right hand I started to tug at it. I managed to keep from knocking the knives out of the box but a glass flask caught on the corner of the sack and flew through the air.
“Catch it!” I barked at Noah. With reflexes like a spastic cat he managed to let the bottle slip through one hand and bat it with the other directly into the dashboard where it shattered. Lucy’s interior was splattered with blood, along with Noah and myself. I cut my eyes to him.
“Sorry.” He said, reaching down to pick up the glass.
“Don’t touch the glass now,” I said.
Noah paused. “Why?”
“Because it’s cursed.”
Noah shot me a look. “But you told me to catch it before.”
“Yeah, before it broke. After doesn’t constitute catching it, and when it broke, the curse was released.” He just stared at me. “Here,” I said, pulling a dirty oil rag from the door pocket.
“It’s not really cursed, is it,” Noah said, taking the rag from me.
“Could be. It all depends if you’re hematologically sensitive.”
“Hemata-what?”
“Or a vampire.”
“Now you’re just making stuff up.”
I just smiled and changed lanes. I had to admit, it was kind of handy having Noah there. Light from the rising sun poured through the windshield as I steered Lucy around an interchange and onto Interstate 64 South. My eyes blurred momentarily and I ground my teeth at the familiar sharp pain in my head. The visions were getting worse again. I could hear them screaming and now they were running at Lucy, just like they had that day. In front of the truck, a small boy with a pale, dirty face appeared, running right at us in the road. Without thinking, I quickly swerved to miss him and the semi next to us laid on his horn.
“What the shit, Bane!” Noah screamed.
“Sorry, thought I saw something.” Damn it. This wasn’t good. I blinked and set my jaw at the sight that was now torturing me. They were all there. We were going seventy-five miles an hour but I could see them all plainly as if they were keeping pace ahead of us. All six hundred and seventy-nine faces split in anger and pain, running right at us, bursting into smoke when they made contact with Lucy and then starting over, further down the road. The burning in my head was getting worse. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and pinched the bridge of my nose. When I opened my eyes again, they were still there, but now their skin was being ripped piece by piece from their bones, by the flames, and they were still charging right at us.
“Bane?” Noah asked. “Are you alright?”
I took a deep breath and gave myself a little shake. “Fine as sunshine. Any luck with those phone calls?”
Noah shook his head. “The line is dead. I just keep getting this weird feedback when I dial the number.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I muttered. I focused on the asphalt and did my best to ignore the burning bodies breaking like waves over Lucy’s hood and grille. I really needed more pills.
It was almost noon when I let off the gas and we took the switchback exit towards Ft. Hope, West Virginia.
As we approached the town, I turned and took the dirt road that skirted the city limits. As we passed behind the First Presbyterian Church, I glanced over at Noah. He was almost catatonic in the seat next to me as if the events of the last night were just catching up with him.
“Hey,” I said. Noah didn’t respond. “Hey!” He gave me the blank look I’d started to realize was Noah trying to keep himself from browning his drawers.
“What?”
“I’m not sure what’s got her, but I think it’s probably going to be a lot worse than a Rawhead.”
“Shit,” Noah said, almost to himself. “I knew it wasn’t the mushrooms. I really wanted it to be. Fuck.”
“Sorry it wasn’t the mushrooms,” I said with a sigh. “This shit is real and it wants to kill you.”<
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“Two days ago, I was running away from home because people wanted to kill me and now I’m barrelling down the highway with a crazy woman towards even scarier shit that wants to kill me.”
“Well, we all have to go someday. Would you rather be running away or rushing in?”
“Fools rush in,” Noah muttered.
“Better to be a fool than a coward,” I said, automatically. I wedged my knee under the wheel and started loading the silver .357.
“Easy for you to say,” Noah said, putting a hand over his eyes as we narrowly missed a dumpster that was blocking part of the road. I drove across a patch of someone’s backyard and paused at the end of the alley before flicking the gun’s cylinder closed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Noah shook his head. “I mean, are you indestructible or something?”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up to my hairline. “What makes you think that?”
Noah threw his hands up in exasperation. “I don’t know, maybe all the insane shit you do that no normal person would ever do.”
“Define insane,” I said. The sun was starting to bake West Virginia and the scent of barbeque smoke was mixing with the smell of hot asphalt coming in through Lucy’s windows.
“Insane; anything that Bane...what the hell is your last name anyway?” Noah asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, thanking the timing gods for not having to go down that rabbit hole. “We’re here.” I parked Lucy under a crooked horse-chestnut tree behind Rosetta’s two-story Tudor, next to her old pink Cadillac convertible. Her side yard was full of color, a sharp contrast to the yellowed and dying lawns around hers. Rosetta had two green thumbs and a way with finicky herbs and flowers. From where we sat, I could see that the house was dark. The worry for Rosetta I kept trying to push down had formed a painful knot in my chest, making it hard to breathe.
I got out of the truck and turned to look at Noah. “Grab that leather bag off the floor.”
Noah looked down at his feet, “Eww that one?” He said, pointing to the dirty bundle he’d knocked out of the glove compartment the night before. I nodded and slid the Smith & Wesson into the back of my jeans.
“It’s not gonna curse me and make my dick fall off or anything, right?” Noah asked. He was trying to sound sarcastic but his eyes told me he really was asking.
“Just put it in your pocket,” I said. I leaned in the passenger side and picked the silver chain off the floor. I tucked it back into the glove box and pulled the ten-gauge out of the cab. I held it out to Noah.
“Nuh-uh,” Noah said, looking at the gun. “I’m not touching that thing.” I had no idea what exactly had Rosetta but in case it got past me, I couldn’t leave Noah out here and I sure as hell couldn’t take him inside, unarmed.
“You want the sawed-off?” I asked, hoping he’d say no. I was pretty attached to the sawed-off. Noah shook his head. I sighed. “Well, I’d give you the Smith & Wesson but it has actual bullets in it and I frankly don’t want to chance getting shot in the face with it.”
“I don’t want any gun. As far as I’m concerned, if I never see a gun again, I’ll die happy,” Noah said.
A banging noise sounded from the house and I looked up to see the shutters on the old Tudor rattling on the clapboard siding even though there was no wind.
“I don’t have time for this,” I spat at Noah. “If you wanna go in there unarmed like a fucking idiot, fine, don’t come crying to me when whatever’s in there turns your intestines into guitar strings and plays a Ritchie Blackmore solo on them.”
I slammed the truck door and flipped the sawed-off over to load it. Then I holstered it and pulled a machete from the toolbox in the truck bed and headed off around the house to Rosetta’s front door.
I heard Lucy’s passenger-side door slam and I turned to see Noah stomping after me, carrying the ten-gauge. He drew even with me as we reached her front porch.
“I am a fucking idiot,” Noah said, sarcastically. “Anyone smart would have stayed in the truck.”
Probably true. I was already regretting him being armed and on the porch with me. This was a bad idea, but it would be worse to leave him in the truck and come out to find his mangled body because I left him alone. I motioned him to one side of the front door. I took the other side and for a moment we listened.
Silence.
I reached out with the machete and opened the screen door with its tip. The front door was ajar behind the screen and I nudged it wider with my shoulder. The entryway of Rosetta’s house was trashed. The umbrella stand was a twisted scrap of metal lying in a pool of shattered glass. The pictures that normally hung on Rosetta’s wall were scattered across the floor, half in and out of mangled frames. I did my best to step over the mess, moving deeper into the house, listening for anything. A chair squeak, a foot-step on the floor above, any sound that might tell me where Rosetta or the thing that had her might be. I heard something move on the stairs overhead. I looked up to see a big, red, rubber ball bouncing down the stairs. I watched it bounce slowly, unnaturally so, as it hit each stair. Above me, as if in surround sound, I heard someone giggle. It was soft and taunting and it was definitely a creepy-kid laugh.
“This isn’t good,” I muttered to Noah who was almost pressed against my back. “Seriously Noah, if you screw up and shoot me at this distance and it doesn’t kill me, I will kill you.” Noah glared at me but took a step back.
I turned back to look at the ball that was now rolling in a perfect circle at the bottom of the stairs.
“What the hell?” Noah asked, spotting the ball.
“Well it’s not a Rawhead,” I said with a sarcastic smile.
What happened next was so quick I didn’t have time to react. Something grabbed me from above by the shoulders and I was suddenly flying through the air. I banged my head on the light fixture and then the door frame as it began to spin me end over end. Flashes of color that I barely recognized as Rosetta’s kitchen cabinets and floor spun before my eyes. I gripped the machete and sawed-off tighter, trying to keep them both pointed away from me so I didn’t shoot or decapitate myself, but I had to be ready as soon as I hit the floor. I thought I had a good idea of what this was. The large picture window above Rosetta’s sink entered my vision a split second before my head went through it. I felt the glass cut into my face and chest as I was launched over her back porch and into a stand of bamboo. The stalks cracked beneath my weight and I finally collapsed onto the grass.
“I have a back door, Bane. You could have just used that instead of breaking my window.”
I gazed, upside down, at Rosetta. She was stretched out on a pink lawn chair, her gray hair was pulled back in her usual tight bun and she wore pink, Lolita sunglasses on the bridge of her nose. She took off a set of headphones and set them down on the chair beside her.
“Nice to see you too,” I wheezed, trying to get my bearings. I turned onto my stomach and crawled out of the bamboo patch. Somehow my sawed-off had gotten shoved up my shirt, but my machete was still in hand. I pulled the sawed-off out and stumbled to my feet, heading back towards the porch.
“You shouldn’t run with knives, Bane. You’re lucky you didn’t cut your own head off with that,” Rosetta said, looking over her sunglasses at my machete.
“I don’t know if that makes me lucky,” I breathed, leaning against the porch steps railing for support. I was still trying to catch my breath and there was a raw, burning pain in my side. I looked down and tucked my sawed-off under my arm. I gritted my teeth as I pulled out a piece of glass just above my right hip.
