She looked at Chris and mouthed, “Where the hell are we going?”
To allay her suspicions, Chris asked, “So, you guys from around here?”
“Huh-uh,” the driver said. “We’re from over in Preston.”
“Never heard of it,” Chris said. “You know how to get back to town from here?”
“Now, we’re not going there just yet. We got some stuff to do. Might could use your help.”
“We kind of needed to get back in a hurry,” Nie said, icy fingers of fear spreading through her.
“Well, now your boyfriend here, he was willin to pay us, said anything you want... I reckon we need us some help.”
Nie leaned forward in her seat and said, “That’s not part of the deal. If you want cash, that’s fine, whatever you want, but we’ve got places to be and... parents that are expecting us.”
“Just ease up, honey. We ain’t a couple of sickies. We just need your help, that’s all.”
Nie clenched her jaws, ready to lash out at them. Chris reached over and put his hand on her knee and spoke in her place.
“What, exactly, will we be helping you with?”
“Just a little, uh...” the driver looked at the passenger and they both chuckled, “Horticulture.”
“I don’t understand,” Chris said.
“You ever hear tale of the June tree?”
“No,” Chris said.
“Don’t rightly know why they call it the June tree, since it blooms in October.”
“I’ve never heard of a tree blooming in October,” Nie sneered.
“Well, this’n does. At least it’s rumored to. I guess the tree must’ve been named June or something before.”
“Before what?” Chris asked.
“The way the story goes, a number of years back, prob’ly before any of us was even born, there’s this girl named June who got raped and killed out by some woods. But that ain’t the really strange part. I mean, that shit happens every day. But now they say that, if you was to be standin and lookin at this old dead tree that happens to be bout round where they say the girl was murdered, and it was a full moon on Halloween, you’d see the tree become that girl. You’d see it bloom.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nie said.
The passenger turned around and looked at her and, for the first time, she saw that he had a red number two on his tank top. It made her think of Thing One and Thing Two, from The Cat in the Hat. “It’s nothin to be afraid of. It’s not like the tree’s gonna jump out and getcha.”
And then he shot his arms out and squeezed the inside of Nie’s thighs, a little too close to her crotch for Chris’s liking. But Nie took care of herself. After jumping nearly to the roof of the van, she roped out her right arm and punched the guy in the face.
The man retreated back into his seat holding his mouth and Nie was pretty sure he was sobbing. She was surprised when the van didn’t stop and they weren’t asked to leave.
Then she heard the passenger say, “She hit me, Vin.”
The driver reached out and patted his brother’s quivering shoulder. “That’s all right, buddy. She didn’t mean it. Did you, sweetie?”
“Yeah, I did, shitface.” She wasn’t looking at the driver. She was turned in her seat, scanning the back of the van, looking for some means of escape. On the floor in front of the backseat, she spotted a shovel, a bag of dirt, and a large plastic pot. She looked at Chris and motioned toward the shovel.
He reached back for it as the driver said, “You know, you kids got a funny way of showing gratitude.”
Chris quickly grabbed the shovel and, with his hands somewhere around the middle, wielded it in front of him.
“Okay, guys,” he said. “Stop the van. We wanna get out.”
Chris met the driver’s shaded eyes in the rearview mirror as the man said, “I think you might wanna put the shovel down,” and then nodded to Thing Two in the passenger seat.
Thing Two held a gun on Chris.
The driver said, “We’re gonna go find the June tree. We know right where it’s at and we need you to help us dig it up. There’s a fella back in Preston that’s gonna pay us big bucks for this and you guys are comin along to tell em it’s real. That is, if it’s even there. If it is real.”
Nie sensed Chris’s powerlessness as he lowered the shovel.
The sun had all but left the sky and the van seemed way too dark, charging toward the gold powder harvest moon.
“We ain’t got long to go,” the driver said. “You two better just sit back n relax.”
Nie shot Chris a look that said, “We’re in deep shit.”
Chris nodded, reached over and put his hand on her knee. The touch didn’t comfort Nie nearly as much as she would have liked.
The van slowed down to turn right and Nie pulled the handle of the sliding door. It was locked even though the lock switch itself said it wasn’t.
Damn child safety, Nie thought.
The van turned into a heavily wooded area, making it seem even darker than it actually was. Thing One pulled the van into a gravel turn-off and cut the ignition.
“You all wanna grab that shovel and pot and shit from back there?”
Nie grabbed the shovel and the empty black plastic pot. Chris grabbed the bag of soil. It was heavy and warm. Thing One and Thing Two got out of the van, came around and unlocked the door.
If the twins didn’t have the gun, Nie was sure they would be able to outrun them. They were so short and plump, Thing Two looking pitiful with the trickle of blood oozing down from his mustache.
“Now, we’re gonna take this here trail. You guys don’t wanna try nothin, ya hear?” Thing One said.
He turned and stepped into the woods, Nie behind him, Chris behind her, Thing Two bringing up the rear.
Nie couldn’t believe any of this was happening. She tried to think of something, but the red streaks of panic blazing through her head made it difficult.
She and Chris had darkness, the cover of the woods, a shovel and speed.
But the twins had the gun. Damn the gun. Could they even shoot the gun? They seemed to have some inept quality about them. She doubted their marksmanship.
They traveled in their single-file line down into a gully, crossed a moss-covered wooden bridge and started up the other side.
She decided the best thing to do would be to create chaos.
Quickly, she grabbed the shovel with both hands and let the pot drop. She raised the shovel. It was much heavier than she expected and rather than bringing it down on Thing One’s head, she bashed him in the shoulder.
Her plan was to turn and run, charge through Thing Two before he could figure out what was happening and just hope Chris had enough sense to follow her as fast as possible.
The blast from the gun shot her plan to hell.
The body in the trail prevented her from running back the way they had come.
It was Chris, face down, the back of his head a glistening mass.
She froze. Stood there screaming.
“Shut her the fuck up, Vinny!” Thing One shouted from the ground.
Thing Two shifted the gun to his left hand and drove his right into her mouth, dropping her onto Chris, her hand coming down in his wound, sick and warm and wet.
Thing One was over by her side now, his hand wrapping up in her hair.
“You really fucked up, bitch,” he said. “And now your boyfriend’s dead.”
Too afraid to scream, Nie blathered softly toward the moldy smelling earth.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said.
“You should be,” Thing One said. “We do you a favor and you try n clobber me with my own damn shovel. Now if you don’t give us any more hassle, we might think about letting you go after we visit Mr. Martin.”
“Please. Please don’t hurt me.”
Thing One smacked her cheek and said, “Get up. We got work to do.”
She stood up, her nervous body shaking violently.
Thing Two move
d closer to her, poked the gun into her ass and said, “You scream any more and we might take it upon ourselves to satisfy certain urges. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Pick up the pot and the shovel.”
She bent and picked them up.
“We need to hurry,” Thing One said. “Grab the boy. We can leave the soil here until we come back,” Thing One said.
“But there’s blood all over it.”
“Fuck that shit. Don’t matter. It’s Halloween. You think anybody’s gonna think anything of comin up on a bag with a little blood on it?”
“Guess you’re right.”
“Besides, it’ll be gone before anybody sees it. Gimme the gun.”
Thing Two passed the gun to Thing One and grabbed Chris around the ankles.
Thing One pointed the gun at Nie and said, “You go first. Just follow this here trail up the hill. You run, I shoot. And then we’ll take turns fuckin your corpse.”
Nie turned and started back along the trail, traveling up the hill and into the moonlight. She cringed at the sound of Chris being dragged along the sandy trail.
The trail opened up into a large meadow. Dead autumn smells surrounded Nie, dried wild grasses and deep brown thistle crunching under their feet as they walked to the far side of the field. Darkness had brought fog and a chill with it. The fog, still settling, swirled gray and clean-looking over the ground.
“It should be just over here,” Thing One said to Thing Two. Eagerly, he quickened his pace.
Maybe I’ll get out of this, Nie thought. Immediately, she doubted herself. She hadn’t thought things could get as bad as they had. She certainly hadn’t thought the twins were murderers when she and Chris had first entered the van.
They came upon the other side of the field. More woods loomed in front of them. A storm last week had knocked most of the leaves from the trees but these woods contained a lot of eastern juniper cedars making them seem darker, thicker. Nie didn’t want to go into any more woods. Even though they were still in the middle of nowhere, unseen, she found a modicum of security in the clearing.
“Ah, here she is, buddy,” Thing One said.
He had stopped just at the edge of the woods. Nie stood on his right side and Thing Two moved up parallel on the other side of her, so they stood in a semi-circle looking down at... what? What was she supposed to see that she didn’t?
“The June tree,” Thing Two said.
“That’s gotta be it,” Thing One said.
The tree stood about chest high to Nie. She didn’t really see anything incredibly strange about it. She supposed that, maybe, it vaguely resembled a human form. Its trunk was abnormally thick for its height. The trunk was as thick as Nie’s chest. It was cruciform so it could be perceived to have a head and arms held out like a martyr.
“Why ain’t it bloomed?” Thing Two asked.
“Shit, I don’t know,” Thing One said. “It is a full moon, ain’t it? I mean, we’re not like a day away from a full moon or somethin, are we?”
“No, it’s full. I checked the paper, the Old Farmer’s Almanac. I even checked online.”
“Maybe it’s like that old riddle. You know, ‘If a tree falls and no one’s around, does it still make a sound?’ Maybe the June tree don’t bloom unless there’s somebody here to look at it.”
“And maybe everyone’s just full of shit. Maybe it’s just a rumor.”
“You think Mr. Martin would lie to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“You seen his pictures.”
“I guess.”
“Should we dig it up anyway?”
“I don’t see why it would matter.”
A shrill scream pierced the crisp night.
“Shit,” Thing One said.
“Fuck,” Thing Two said.
Nie didn’t say anything.
She could only gape in amazement as the June tree bloomed.
The overall color of it seemed to lighten until it reached the color of pale skin.
“Jesus, we’ve gotta stop that sound,” Thing One said.
The top of the tree softened, became a waterfall of dark hair spilling over the intersection of the horizontal branches.
“Take the boy’s shirt off,” Thing One said.
Thing Two began stripping Chris’s shirt off.
Nie watched the tree as it slowly became a human female, emerging from the dirt at mid-thigh. Frantic eyes stared at Nie, shooting around in their sockets. The screaming knothole became a screaming mouth. Farther down, two rough places of bark became nipples. The tree brought her limbs down, covering her breasts and her sex, only the limbs were now arms.
Thing Two approached the tree and jammed Chris’s shirt into her mouth, tying the arms of the shirt behind her head.
“All right, now take off his pants and put them over her head. Makes me nervous to look at her,” Thing One said. Then he pointed the gun at Nie. “All right. You better get to diggin.”
Nie put the pot down and pulled the shovel out. Again she thought about taking it across Thing One’s head and remembered what they had said earlier. She had no doubt that killing her wouldn’t be the only thing they did. Fucking creeps.
She put the point of the shovel in the dirt about a foot out from the base of the tree and drove it in with the bottom of her foot, suddenly glad she had opted for the Doc Martens rather than the six-inch heels.
As the shovel bit down in the soil, the tree doubled over, thrashing in pain, the pants sliding from her head. A geyser of blood shot up, spraying Nie’s face.
She dropped the shovel and turned away from the tree, falling to her knees and vomiting.
“Shit,” Thing One said. “We need to hurry.”
Nie curled up on the ground, shivering in the cold fog.
“Fucking useless cunt,” she heard Thing One say.
She couldn’t bear to look at what was happening. She heard the shovel punch into the fleshy earth.
“Now we’re gonna put him in her place, right?” Thing Two said.
“Yep. Take his legs off at the knee and put the stumps in the pot. She’s losing a lot of blood.”
Nie heard the thwakking of what had to be the shovel coming down on Chris’s legs.
“Jesus, man, use your fucking knife,” Thing One said.
Nie lay there and tried to concentrate on the sound the wind made as it rustled through the woods because if she didn’t concentrate on that then the only thing she could hear were the muffled cries of the June tree and the squelching sound Chris’s body made as they put him into the earth.
This was a far cry from Donna’s Halloween party. She shouldn’t have listened to Chris. She should have just walked back to town by herself. But Chris was gone now. She couldn’t blame Chris.
One of the twins dusted off his hands like someone who’d just planted a garden of petunias and said, “Well, that’s it. Get yer tits up here, missy. We’re ready.”
Nie brought herself to her feet with a faint glimmer of hope.
Maybe, now that they’ve got what they came for, they’ll let me go.
Or maybe they’re saving you for something else.
If it came to that, she would force them to use the gun.
Thing One held the pot containing the June tree, slanted haphazardly from within. When Nie looked at it, the first thing she thought of was that the tree had wilted. Her arms hung down by her sides. Her breasts appeared more pendulous. Her hair hung lank around her face.
Where the June tree had once stood, Chris was now buried to just beneath his shrunken penis. He was bent over from the waist, his face in the dirt. Nie figured he was wilted, too.
“She don’t look too good,” Thing One said while studying the June tree. “We need to hurry up and get that soil.”
He started back along the fog-covered meadow, covered in purplish moonlight.
Thing Two held the gun in his right hand and the shovel in his left. With the gun, he gestured for Nie to follow Thing O
ne.
Nie tried to block out the fear and any thought of escaping. She fought to clear her mind completely, free herself from the cat claws of madness scraping at the backs of her eyes.
It seemed like an eternity before they reached the blood spattered bag of soil.
Thing Two gave her the shovel to hold and he lifted the bag easily with one hand. The same bag Chris had struggled so hard to carry.
The rest of the walk seemed like an eternity.
When they reached the van, Thing One sat the pot at the rear and opened up the doors. He took the bag of soil from Thing Two and unrolled the top of it. The smell that wafted out made Nie gag. She tried her best not to vomit again, but when she saw him dump the “soil” into the pot, she lost it. At this point, it was little more than a dry heave, but it sucked her energy even further.
What came out of the bag looked like entrails and blood, all squishy and glistening. Thing One centered the June tree, positioning it upright. Thing Two handed him the shovel and he packed the offal down around the tree. Then he lifted up the pot and put it in the van, folding the bag back down on the soil and placing that next to the tree. He handed the shovel back to Thing Two and said, “Better keep that up front with you.”
“Should we dose her before we get back on the road?” Thing Two said.
“I’ll let you take care of that.”
Thing Two grabbed her around the arm and pulled her up to the passenger door of the van. He stepped back and continued to hold the gun on Nie.
“Why don’t you reach in there and open up the glove box,” he said.
She opened the door, leaned over the seat and turned the faux chrome knob of the glove compartment, conscious of Thing Two’s eyes burning into her ass.
“Now reach in there and grab that bag.”
She felt around and pulled out a Ziploc bag, its bottom lined with blue pills.
“Pull out two of them things and pop em in yer mouth. We can’t have you goin apeshit on us.”
“I won’t,” she said quietly. “I promise.”
“Why should I believe you?”
She moved closer to Thing Two and said, “If you promise you’ll let me go, I’ll let you fuck me.”
Sunruined: Horror Stories Page 2
