Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  “That’s not the rule,” Breezer said. “The rule is you lose, you die.”

  “You lost. You let go.”

  “I made it past the finish line before I let go.”

  Rodrigo stared for a moment, then smiled horribly, airing out his bloodstained, sharpened dentition. “My hero,” he said. “Sudden death. We go again.”

  “You go,” said Breezer. “I might could use a little nap. Tell him, Violet.”

  The group parted for her. She couldn’t pretend not to know what Breezer was talking about, but the look of wolfish hesitation that broke Rodrigo’s smug expression was almost worth the wait.

  “Tell him. You read it, right? Tell him.”

  “How about I tell you to shut up?” said Rodrigo, as Breezer’s blood continued to flow toward the larger man’s open wounds.

  “Rodrigo Castelnuevo Santiago,” Violet recited from the much-folded scrap of newspaper entrusted to her care. Of course she had peeked. “Pronounced dead at the scene of a vehicular collision in Triple Pines, no known relatives, buried at city expense last April fourth . . . just about three weeks after the last time he competed here.”

  “You can’t win if you’re already dead,” said Breezer. “That’s not the Dragger way. Tú muere, tú pierde . . . puto.”

  “I’ll be damned,” muttered Tool, in slow, whistling amazement.

  The blood-flow had already reversed, channeling now toward Breezer. In the instant of revelation and exposure, Rodrigo was trying to see the world through eyes that had scabbed to dishwater gray; to speak without vocal cords or saliva. His choke-hold on Breezer became vague, slipped, and disengaged.

  You die, you lose.

  Breezer thumbed his Italian stiletto switch and the blade telescoped out with a snick. He carved LOSER into the available area on Rodrigo’s chest as the corpus literally caved in.

  Pretty soon there was nothing left to make anybody a liar.

  The Draggers all looked at each other and nobody spoke a word. A prime commandment had been violated—by Rodrigo—and they all seemed to know that they might not be meeting up at Bakehurst Field, ever again. It was the sort of terminative moment one feels when your time, your era, is suddenly behind you.

  Later, after they had finally managed to have sex—post-healing, except for one memorably clumsy hospital-bed event that had helped him forget all about Molly Patterson, just for a while—Breezer told Violet a story about how Rodrigo had been involved in the deaths of some friends, in another time and place, including the former owner of the switchblade. Violet was kind enough not to tell Breezer that the whole damned story sounded lame and made up on the spot. And later still, before college, with Lily’s help, she eventually built her own rod and competed—but not as a Dragger—after Breezer moved on, or changed nicknames, or rode into the sunset—it didn’t matter.

  Breezer had never wanted merely to win, without competing.

  On the same day that the Dragger event had transpired, a military C-118 transport bound for Europe from McGuire Air Force Base hit an air pocket and crashed in a New Jersey swamp, killing forty-five aboard and grievously injuring twenty-one more. It barely made the news, while Violet was helping Breezer to stand on his good foot, and Ambulance Duane was preparing to spackle him up. In the distance, somebody else’s radio was playing “Que Sera, Sera” by Doris Day.

  * * *

  DAVID J. SCHOW is an award-winning writer who lives in Los Angeles.

  His novels include The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, Bullets of Rain, Gun Work, Hunt Among the Killers of Men (part of Hard Case Crime’s “Gabriel Hunt” series), Internecine, Upgunned, and the forthcoming The Big Crush (2019).

  His short stories have been regularly selected for over thirty volumes of “Year’s Best” anthologies across three decades and have won the World Fantasy Award, the ultra-rare Dimension Award from Twilight Zone magazine, plus a 2002 International Horror Guild Award for Wild Hairs, his compendium of justly provocative “Raving & Drooling” columns written for Fangoria. The newest of his ten short story collections is a greatest hits anniversary compendium titled DJStories (2018).

  He has been a contributor to Storm King Comics’ John Carpenter’s Tales for a Halloween Night since its very first issue. Storm King has just released the first in his five-issue series for John Carpenter’s Tales of Science Fiction—“The Standoff.”

  Schow is also the editor of the landmark horror anthology Silver Scream (1988), the three-volume Lost Bloch series (reprinting Robert Bloch obscuria) for Subterranean Press, and Elvisland by John Farris (Babbage, 2004).

  DJS has written extensively for film (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red) and television (Masters of Horror, Mob City). His nonfiction works include The Art of Drew Struzan (2010) and The Outer Limits at 50 (2014). He can be seen on various DVDs as expert witness or documentarian on everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Psycho to I, Robot. Thanks to him, the word “splatterpunk” has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002.

  * * *

  THE STARLITE DRIVE-IN

  by John M. Floyd

  “It headed toward the Starlite, didn’t it,” Katie said. “The old drive-in theater.”

  * * *

  BILL FOLEY STRETCHED OUT ON THE beach chair, eyes closed and thoughts drifting. He could hear the whisper of the surf, the calling of tropical birds, the rattle of palm fronds overhead. He also heard the soft swish of footsteps approaching through the sand, and felt the coolness of his friend’s shadow as she leaned over him with another mango daiquiri and said—

  “Sheriff?”

  Foley snapped his eyes open. He looked up into the worried face of Deputy Katie Burns.

  Katie? Suddenly the palm tree became a coat-rack, his chair felt hard and creaky, and instead of bare toes he saw his booted feet propped up on the desktop in his office.

  “Wake up,” Katie said. “They found another body.”

  ***

  WIDE AWAKE NOW, the third-term sheriff of Terry County, Mississippi, steered his cruiser into the gravel lot of the Deer Lick Mobile Home Park. Above the fence in the distance he could see the once-white wooden screen of the abandoned drive-in movie theater that had been such a part of his teenage years. Old but still standing, after all this time. Like Sheriff Bill Foley.

  He and Deputy Burns climbed out into the chilly November morning, crossed a muddy yard littered with cinderblocks and bald tires, and banged on the door of one of the double-wides. The woman who answered the knock looked like Willie Nelson in a Dolly Parton wig. She said, without bothering to remove her bent cigarette, “They’re all out back.”

  “They” turned out to be Elmer Higby, his twin sister Elmira, and their cousin and his wife, Doogie and Lucille Sistrunk. Like most everyone in town, Sheriff Foley had known them all his life. When he and Katie showed up in the Higbys’ backyard, Doogie’s broad bottom was perched on the rusted hood of a ’58 Thunderbird, Lucille was sipping a Bud Lite on the front fender, Elmer was leaning against a sad-looking pecan tree, and Elmira, who’d been puffing on something suspiciously smaller and more fragrant than a Virginia Slim, quickly stuffed the still-smoking butt into the pocket of her sweatsuit.

  Nobody said a word. Doogie spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt and pointed to a clump of brush twenty yards away.

  Behind it was a pile of red guts that had once been Darryl Wayne Goodman. Foley knew this because of the orange gator-skin boots on one end of the body and the turkey-feathered cowboy hat lying near the other. On the off-chance that there were two people in the county with that kind of taste in head-and-footwear, Foley eased a wallet from the pocket of the victim’s bloodied and muddied jeans and checked the driver’s license. It was Darryl, all right.

  “Where’s the rest of him?” Foley asked.

  “Ain’t sure,” Doogie said. “One of his arms is downair by the creek.”

  The coroner—actually her assistant, since she was out of tow
n for the day—arrived soon afterward to load up the parts and pieces of Darryl Goodman and cart him away. Neither the Higbys nor the Sistrunks knew what might’ve happened to their neighbor, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it was the same thing that had killed Booger Ray Willis the night before last, less than half a mile west. Mangled corpse, nothing stolen from the body, no footprints or other evidence left at the scene.

  “What done this to him, Billy?” Lucille Sistrunk asked.

  Foley shook his head. He had no answers to offer.

  ***

  KATIE BURNS DIDN’T EITHER—but she’d never been shy about voicing her thoughts.

  “A seriously big-ass animal of some kind,” she said, when they’d returned to the sheriff’s office. “Has to be.”

  Foley slumped into his desk chair. He wished he were still dreaming. “Didn’t see any paw prints. Just like the other night. And that ground’s been wet for two weeks.”

  “I know it has.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Prints or not, what kind of critter could do that? Black bear? Panther? Unless something’s escaped from a zoo someplace, them’s the only options I know of, around here. Besides, neither one a them’s apt to tear a man up that way, for sure not twice in two nights.” He looked up at her. “You listening to me?”

  Katie was reading a note that had been left on her desk. “It doesn’t just do it to people, apparently.”

  “What?”

  She held up the note. “This says Ethel Boggins called in while we were gone. Said something killed her dog last night. German shepherd.”

  “I know Ethel—she lives near Higby’s trailer park. Killed the dog how?”

  “Slashed him to pieces. Greg took the call—says he’s driving out to take a look.”

  “Good,” Foley said. Gregory Waszewski was the other deputy, a pleasant but lazy psychology graduate that Foley had hired last year when no one else would take the job. And since the office dispatcher was on maternity leave, Deputy Waszewski had been handling most of the phone calls. He liked doing that, and paperwork, and interviews too, as long as they were done in the office. He wasn’t fond of guns or confrontations. Smart man, Foley thought.

  But investigations also involved getting out in the real world now and then, and Foley had been encouraging Greg to do more of that. Maybe it was working.

  Katie tossed the note onto her desktop. “So what do we do?”

  “We see what Doc Green says, when she gets back and looks at Goodman’s body. And since all this seems to be happening around Deer Lick Road, we have to keep asking residents there if they’ve seen anyone or anything strange lately.” He paused. “We got one of three things, here—a bear, a big cat of some kind, or a psycho with a butcher knife. And none of ’em’s good.”

  Katie nodded, looking thoughtful.

  “Oh, one more thing,” he said. “Call Greg on his cell phone.”

  “And?”

  “Tell him to be careful.”

  ***

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS were the most hectic—and frustrating—the Terry County Sheriff could remember. He and his two deputies questioned a dozen families in the square-mile section where the two mutilated bodies (three, counting that of Ethel Boggins’s dog) had been found. Foley had also recruited several local hunters to scour the area, although so far he’d sent them out in daylight hours only. He figured anything nocturnal could also be tracked in the daytime, and he wasn’t eager to add any more citizens to the death toll. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before the state police got involved, and he honestly wasn’t sure if he dreaded that or welcomed it. He knew how to issue speeding tickets and defuse domestic arguments; murders and/or animal attacks were a different matter.

  As it turned out, no confirmed sightings of large predators were made during that time by the three law officers, their hunting parties, or the interviewed residents. But a teenager did report a glimpse of a giant “ape-like” creature in his grandma’s back yard one night, and an elderly guy with binoculars said he’d spotted two men entering a small building on the premises of the old drive-in theater at dawn. One of the men was tall, he said, with a long black overcoat that billowed behind him like a sail, and the other wore what looked like an old-timey high-school football jacket. Dark with white stripes on the collar, waist, and sleeves.

  Odd information, but not earthshaking or case-changing. For the tenth time, Foley and Katie studied the map of the area in question; they’d already trudged over most of its woods and pastures these past couple days, alert and armed to the teeth. All they’d seen, except for their fellow trackers, were trees, grass, a shallow creek, the trailer park, a few wood-frame houses, the weedy expanse of the deserted drive-in, and the vast construction site next to it. An outfit called Merrillton Development was planning a shopping center there, although the project had been delayed because of recent rains. Bulldozers and backhoes were parked onsite and waiting for clearer skies.

  Regarding their witness reports, Foley was understandably skeptical of the ape-man sighting, but the fact that two strangers were seen roaming the grounds of the drive-in this morning—the only logical-sounding lead so far—convinced him it was time to look closer there.

  Which he did, late that afternoon. The sheriff and Katie left Deputy Waszewski to watch the phones, drove out to the old open-air theater on Deer Lick Road, and parked beside the low wooden building that had once housed the projection room/office/concession stand.

  It was a cold day, but cloudless for the first time in weeks. Rows of short poles—in the sheriff’s high-school years they’d held little metal speakers that moviegoers unclipped and hung on their car windows—stretched into the distance. Bordering the south side of the property was the highway; to the north, behind the looming wooden “screen,” was a stretch of woods and a cotton field; and to the east and west were the trailer park on one side and the construction site on the other. A lone sign, faded and weather-worn, stood beside the road: STARLITE DRIVE-IN.

  Foley got out, popped the trunk, and dug a heavy flashlight out of a box that also held various other items he’d purchased to use on the secondhand boat he kept at a friend’s marina on the Gulf Coast. He reminded himself to take those out soon; if higher authorities did get involved in this case, he didn’t want to have to explain the presence of fishing tackle, life jackets, flare guns, and bait buckets in a county patrol car. At the moment, though, he found himself wishing that was his only problem.

  He slammed the trunk and walked with Katie to the building. It was long and windowless and shaped like a shoebox, half of it enclosed and the other half an open-fronted shed. Underneath the shed roof were two shiny rows of fifty-five-gallon drums. When Katie asked about them, Foley said, “Gas containers for all the trucks and digging equipment next door. The construction folks probably leased this property so they’d have a place nearby to store their fuel.” But his attention was on the other half of the building. With one hand on his holstered revolver Foley turned the doorknob, pushed the front door open, and stepped inside.

  The office was empty but for a chair and an ancient two-foot-square TV set. On the far wall was the door to a second room, one that had obviously been locked at one time; a broken latch hung from the half-open door and a padlock lay on the floor in one corner.

  That second room was empty too, except for the wall shelves. Stacked there were dozens of big reels of film, some in cases, others lying overturned with their black and shiny innards spilling out. Katie used Foley’s flashlight to examine several of the reels. “Old movies,” she said to him, then smirked and added, “Real gems, too. From the fifties and sixties, looks like.” She read off a few titles: “Mothra. Killer Shrews. Day of the Triffids. Rodan. Son of Godzilla. The Horror of Dracula. The Blob. The Creature From—”

  “I get the idea. In fact, I’d heard about it.”

  “Heard about what?”

  “Delbert Turner, the guy who owned this place forever, died a while back. When he had to close down,
years before, and sell all his projection equipment—well, some said he couldn’t make himself get rid of the old movies. Or at least the scary ones.”

  Katie narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about, Billy?”

  He let out a sigh. “It was a crazy thing. Notice I didn’t say he closed down—I said he had to close down. From everything I’ve heard, there was a rash of unexplained murders around here, along with . . . well . . . sightings.”

  “What?”

  “Sightings,” Foley said. “People said they saw things, in the woods near the crime scenes.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Nobody was ever sure. Creatures, some witnesses said—like those from old horror stories, spider-people, aliens, mummies.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “I’m telling you what I was told. And a few folks, religious nuts mostly, started saying all this was happening because of the otherworldly movies Turner was showing—this was the fifties, remember—and things got ugly. Vandalism, threats, demonstrations, boycotts, you get the idea. Anyhow, Turner wound up having to shut down.” Foley waved a hand at the shelves. “But apparently he kept the films. Just locked ’em up and left ’em here all this time. When the Merrillton Development people bought the site from Turner’s kids this year, probably to use, like I said, as a fuel-storage depot during the building of their project, I guess the construction team must’ve busted the locks, looked around, and decided to leave it as is.”

  “What about the murders? I mean, after the drive-in closed . . . ”

  “They stopped,” he said.

  Both of them stayed quiet for a minute, thinking about that.

  “That is a crazy story,” Katie said, wiping her dusty hands on her jeans. “But back to our current problem—looks like this place isn’t big enough for two men to hide out in. Do you agree?”

  “I agree.”

  She seemed about to say something else when her cell phone buzzed. She answered the call, listened a while, said “Thanks, Doc—good to have you back,” and disconnected. “That was Dr. Green,” she said. “Called to tell you she’s examining the second body.”