by Alan Spencer
“The death of my uncle,” he finished for her. “It’s okay. I know all about it, believe me. My family won’t talk about it, except for Ned. Nobody wants to face the reality of it. I don’t know many people who’ve had a family member ever accused of multiple murders.”
“I’m Sue Rogers,” she said, flicking the ash from her cigarette. “That asshole on the register is my dad. He makes me work the summers without paying me. Says food and board covers the work, but he lets me off during the school year at least.”
“I’d join a union. I’m sure there are ones for small town grocery stores.”
Sue laughed again. “You’re a funny guy, Andy.”
“Hey, does everyone totally hold a grudge against anyone with the Ryerson name?” He jangled the keys at the driver’s side and unlocked the door. “Everyone in there including the customers gave me nasty looks.”
“You have to remember, everything with your Uncle James happened only eight months ago,” she said. “When someone gets pregnant in Anderson Mills, everyone hears the stork swoop in, so just imagine what murders do. And some of the people that died at the club were from here. The families are still taking it hard. My dad’s friend, Jamie, lost her daughter at that club, and it was her twenty-first birthday. And Suzie Elliot lost her husband and her son that night. What I’ve read in the papers, the whole scene was pretty gruesome. And since your uncle disappeared, there hasn’t been a trial or any sense of closure for anyone.”
“It’s still not a reason to believe that I’m a killer,” he defended himself. “But I guess I can’t expect that understanding from complete strangers who are still grieving. I appreciate you being nice to me, though. I’ll probably be back for more groceries later.”
Sue waved goodbye, stubbing the cigarette into the concrete steps of the front walk, and added, “Don’t take it personally, Andy. You didn’t kill anybody.”
2
Judd “Jewels” Hammock trained the muzzle of the M-16 on the empty cans of Hamm’s beer stacked across the sawhorse. He opened fire. Brack-brack-brack-brack! The cans combusted, jolted ten feet from their perch. “Woo-eee! Woo-eee! Fuck you!”
He stood in his backyard, which faced Black Hill Woods. He could fire and not be in range of campers or tourists. It was a backwoods privilege for Judd to empty a clip into handmade targets, the targets being sandbags nailed to trees, Suck-off Dolly whenever the blow-up bitch deflated, televisions he salvaged from the junkyard during his evening shift as a security guard on the premises, and his favorite target, empty cans of beer. Judd acquired the M-16 from his friend Hal at America’s Pawn in Coopersburg fifteen miles south of Anderson Mills for a hefty eight-hundred dollars, but since Hal was dating his sister-in-law, he knocked three-hundred dollars off the price.
It was one in the afternoon, and he’d returned from a double shift at Sal’s Junk Yard. Judd’s winding down procedure involved guzzling three to five beers, heating up a burrito in the microwave, and popping off machine gun rounds in the backyard.
Judd focused on firing the weapon again, ready for the next release. He created fake scenarios to get worked up about. He imagined Gilbert, his boss, startled awake inside his office trailer when he pounded on the door. “You asleep in there again? You whack-off to Hustler and fall asleep? Poor baby, can I get you a warm rag to clean off your prick? Oh, you’re going to fire me, Gil? Did I hear you right?” He lifted the machine gun and squeezed the trigger. “I’ll whack-off in your face!”
Brack-brack-brack-brack!
The next set of cans on the sawhorse exploded as well as the sawhorse itself. “That’s right—that’s right! Fuck you! Fu-uck yeeeeeeeeeeeew!”
The gunner swigged another Hamm’s and caught a moving speck in the sky. He used his Rangefinder binoculars to observe it, and it wasn’t one of the local birds. It was a white and gray hawk. It resembled a bald eagle, but the wing and feather pattern was different.
“Whatever it is, it’s begging for a good shootin’.”
He took aim and fired immediately, but the shots went wide. The hawk arched its wings and swooped down at him as soon as he’d opened fire on it. The hawk landed on his head. Judd was knocked onto his back, frightened and flapping his arms at the bird. Jagged talons dug trenches into his scalp. Quarter-inch lacerations bled fervently. He flailed and screamed at the attack, blood filling his eyes, now blinded.
Shrack! Shrack! Shrack!
The hawk’s beak pecked at his forehead, each connection issuing a loud “thuck.” Judd reached up to rip the wings from the infernal creature when the bird’s beak pierced his right eye. His vision was replaced with darkness and electric lances. The next eye was immediately gobbled, and the bird took off again in retreat.
Judd randomly shot the M-16, unable to see. Before Judd bled to death from his injuries, a stream of M-16 bullets had connected with the hawk’s chest and it burst into bloody feathers—including Judd’s eyes stored in its gullet.
3
Andy pulled over to the side of the road, curious at what caught his eye. The red truck was parked behind a set of trees half a block from his house. It was the truck Jimmy Jennings drove up yesterday afternoon in.
“Mr. Jennings?” He called out, peering through the dense oak and maple trees and spotting no one. He expected to hear footsteps nearby, or a voice to shout back at him from a distance. “Do you need help with your truck? Did it break down? Hello? Anybody there?”
If it broke down, why the hell wouldn’t it be out on the road instead of hidden like this?
He waited five minutes before giving up the search. Jimmy was close enough to home, perhaps he parked it off the road so nobody would crash into it, and then he walked to retrieve supplies for repairs.
He let it go at that, satisfied.
Andy drove home and stored his groceries in the refrigerator inside the garage. Then he checked his watch. It was noon. “Damn, half the day is gone already.”
He brought in a frozen pepperoni pizza with him, the roil in his belly insatiable. The breakfast with Walter was all he’d eaten, and he was starving. The strange day in Anderson Mills occupied his mind as he prepped the oven in the kitchen to three-hundred and fifty degrees. Everyone in town condemned the Ryerson name. Men like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy probably caused the same problems with their family members. How long did it take for a town to move on from a string of brutal killings? It was a good question to pose in a documentary. The theme would be an investigation of how a crime of such a magnitude could affect the small town of Anderson Mills. He considered pitching it to Professor Maxwell and seeing who he could talk to and maybe raise the funds and interest to green light the project.
The oven’s timer dinged.
“Huh?” He opened the oven, confused. “It can’t be preheated already.”
The oven was hot enough to convince him it was ready for the pizza. “I hope this thing isn’t broken.”
He shoved the pizza inside and hoped for the best despite his reservations. Andy set the timer for seventeen minutes and wandered into the backyard. Rows of silky red, white and yellow daisies bobbed in the soft wind. They surrounded an oak tree that was hundreds of years old. The branches extended across the yard, and one had grown over the roof of the house, resting on top of it. The garden buzzed with yellow jackets and moths sucking the nectar from the tulips. He kept to the stone path and enjoyed an overhead view of the bottom of the hill. The Jennings’ dairy farm was visible. Cows grazed along the hundreds of acres. Mary-Sue’s truck braked hard in front of the house, and she stormed inside, weeping and shoving open the screen door. It clapped hard shut behind her.
“What’s got her so worked up?”
Now that can’t be because of me. No way in hell.
It wasn’t his place to investigate. It would be awkward for the both of them if he randomly showed up at her house and told her he’d spied her from a distance upset and he was concerned.
He gave up the concern and waited for his pizza to bake.
Bachelorhood at its finest, he thought.
He flipped on the film projector and dutifully watched the remaining reels of The Mallet Killer. He was disappointed after the thirty-minute mark when he understood the basic plot—David Anderson loses his job as a carnie, steals the mallet at the “Pound-O-Meter,” and starts picking off the carnie patrons and the workers, including the bearded lady, the elephant man, half a dozen burlesque girls, and an especially interesting death, the operator of the “Tilt-O-Whirl” receives a bump in the noggin and the ride continues to spin as the riders get sick and can’t escape for an hour before the ride finally stops. A magician stops David’s killing spree after shoving him into the Iron Maiden. The closing scene reveals David’s body punctured by spikes and ultimately dying as the credits roll.
The scenes of carnage can whet the pallet of any red-blooded gore fan, Andy jotted down, and it’s interesting that David Anderson uses the traveling carnival to escape enlistment in the Vietnam War. The flashbacks serve well to dictate the moments between the arrival of the enlistment letter and his father’s patriotism and the pressure he bestows on his son to do the family name well. Soon after he opens the letter, David’s mother weeps as if her son has already died. The following scene where their next-door neighbor receives a letter in the mail saying her son has died in the line of duty sets up the horror for our main character. That woman’s son was David’s best friend, and David comes to the conclusion to run away with the carnival. The carnie master is impressed with his booming voice and ability to sucker people into taking swings at the “Pound-O-Meter.” It’s the moment that David loses his job and he goes crazy that the movie gives up on any commentary about the Vietnam War. I give it an average rating for story, but the gore and effects were wrenching. Five skulls are split open, a sternum is shattered, eight faces are rendered into pulp—the camera fails to flinch at these moments—and there’s a mass vomiting scene at the “Tilt-O-Whirl.” I didn’t fall asleep, but the plot has a major loophole with David’s motivation to kill all those people.
Five-thirty. He earned a break from work. He chugged a can of Coke and stretched, walking outside the perimeter of the house, then into the backyard, when a cord wrapped around his ankle and he tripped, losing his fizzy drink mid-air. Landing hard, his ribs and left shoulder took the punishment with a loud ka-thump! He glared at his feet. The garden hose had entangled both ankles.
“How the hell did that happen?” He rose to his feet, the palms of his hands bleeding from scuffing the stone path. “Fucking house, it’s a death trap for the clumsy.”
He washed his hands in the kitchen sink after recovering. Deciding to avoid nature and trip falls, he returned to the living room and searched the bin of films: Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana, The Incredible Exploding Man, Frankenstein Versus the Living Dead, The Cannibal Brain, Revenge of the Basement Trolls, Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home, and he stopped reading the titles when he thumbed back to Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana.
“Sounds interesting,” he tittered. “I wonder what a rat looks like in a 1973 film. And why does it eat Indiana? Why not Los Angeles or Newark or some drugged out city that deserves to be infested with people-eating rats?”
He placed the first reel into the projector and shut off the lights, then relaxed in the chair and waited for the film to begin. The scene opened with a semi-truck rig winding down a back road. The film was lower quality, perhaps shot in eight millimeter—Super Eight—and the night hues were so dark it obscured any fine definitions of trees or the truck itself. Two men were in the rig, both with mutton chop sideburns. The audio was dubbed, though it was an American movie. A rock tune he didn’t recognize played on the radio, a cross between Ted Nugent and Credence Clearwater Revival. The two were dressed in black denim body suits like housepainters even, though the side panel of the truck read “Sewage Disposal Unit.”
“Harvey, what’s your wife like in bed now that she’s pregnant?”
The other—he assumed was named Harvey—smoked a joint and passed it to his co-worker. “Man, Christy hasn’t given it up ever since her periods stopped. I think she resents me. Hell, she was happy in college while I paid the bills and put food on the table. Now that she’s not burning her bra and panties anymore and dropped out of school, she’s turned into a real bitch. She eats all day and watches television. It’s like she’s lost her ambition to please me.”
“She didn’t resent you when you were puttin’ the blocks to her,” Travis added with a sharp laugh of righteousness. “She’ll get over it. Once the idea of a becoming a parent sinks in, she’ll pursue a sex life again. Maybe with you, maybe with someone else…”
“Hey, fuck you, man.” Harvey stole the marijuana cigarette back and sucked in a hard toke. “Ah, I think it’s the cannabis that’s really doing her in. Her grades sunk below C average after a fellow student introduced her to her mind, if you know what I mean.”
“Hell yeah.” Travis pulled out a baggie from his side pocket. “Man, these late night drives bite the big one. It takes this groovy shit to take the edge off.”
“Is that coke in the glove compartment?” Harvey’s eyes lit up. “Let’s snort it, pal. Nostril napalm!”
Travis produced a mirror from the glove compartment under the stash and cut it with a folded up road map. The shot panned to the rig taking a sharp turn and passing the gates with a faded sign reading:
DO NOT ENTER
WATER TREATMENT FACILITY
RAW SEWAGE
Harvey complained, “It smells like my grandma’s farts—maternal farts, you know?” He pinched his nose with his thumb and index finger. “That facility smells worse than what’s in the back of our rig, and that’s saying a lot!”
“Do you know what we’re hauling?” Travis challenged the man, snorting a track down the mirror and toot-toot-tooting in delight. “Ah, that’s what I needed, partner. Yeah, Bert didn’t tell you what’s really in those barrels we’re driving.”
“The line master doesn’t tell me anything. He said I’d get overtime pay for driving this on short notice through Indiana to Wisconsin. That’s all I needed to know. Pay me money. I fucking drive.”
Travis let the secret out. “It’s agent orange sealed air tight in those barrels. A factory in Wisconsin refines it into a powder they can put into missiles.” He put his hand over his heart. “Don’t you feel patriotic? We’re sending it to help our fellow soldiers overseas.”
It was Harvey’s turn to snort the toot. “I pledge allegiance to the flag—hell yeah!”
The semi-truck picked up speed, and when it did, the front wheel struck a pothole. The truck dipped and tilted to the side, jolted so hard the entire vehicle was affected. The rig was spring-ejected from the road, then hurled down a short hill, and finally, it burst through a fence. Barbs and jolts of electricity shot sparks as the steel perimeter was uprooted. The truck kept picking up speed and crashed nose-first into a sewage pond, the water’s surface oily and suspicious. The howls of the drivers faded as the rig sank with a gurgle of air pockets that burst topside. The back hatch opened as the rig sank deeper, and the barrels in back went plop, plop, plop into the water, the cargo escaping one by one. And that’s when the camera closed in on the dozen rats at the water’s edge, where the barrels had collected. The vermin were lapping up the black sludge kept inside the round containers.
Andy rolled his neck and groaned, already feeling glassy eyed. “Wouldn’t agent orange kill rats? And what about the rest of the local wildlife, like mosquitoes or frogs? How come they wouldn’t be mutated?”
In the next reel, a scene carried on to the following day where a group of people in yellow moon suits combed the sewage treatment area, testing the wa
ter in a frenzy. Andy watched the next scene in anticipation when two of the suited men heard a shriek from within a large sewer pipe.
One said to the other, “You hear that?”
The other man with a device that looked like a tire pump connected to a 9-volt battery in his hands, replied, “It came from that sewer pipe over there.”
“Is it too late to clean this up? Shit, we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we’re checking it out. It’s our job to clean up messes, isn’t it?”
“We didn’t find anyone from the truck,” the man whispered, hesitantly edging toward the pipe. “If anyone finds out about this or gets hurt, we’re in deep shit. The government doesn’t have clearance to use civilians to transport the chemicals. These guys will probably contract every form of cancer…if we find them.”
“Shut up about it. We’re scientists. None of this concerns us. We’re here to clean up and that’s it.”
The man moved alone to the giant pipe. He aimed a flashlight inside and turned back to the man Andy guessed was his superior. “I don’t see anything but floating turds.”
The hairy muzzle of a rat extended from the dark shadows, and then the camera cut to the man falling backward with his arm missing, howling in agony. Blood turned the algae-colored water pink. The man screamed, splashing in retreat with one arm. “My arm. Shit! My arm!”
It was obvious the man’s real arm was tucked under the suit.
The other worker was soon attacked, the top of the rat’s head at the bottom of the camera bobbing as it hunkered down upon him. The rat chomped on the man’s head, the neck stump spurting three foot tall jets of blood.
Andy jotted notes on his pad and prepared himself to endure the rest of the movie.
3
“Wayne, are you inside?” Sheriff O’Malley called out into the empty store. The word on the dispatch was that Wayne had locked an intruder inside the walk-in refrigerator. “Wayne, answer me. Where are you?”
