X2: Another Collection of Horror

by C. M. Saunders

  “We took the lousy sack of meat and money over to Trinity, where they bought his liver and eyeballs. Guess we already lost the eyeballs on the fucker we got ridin' in back right now. But we should still get something for his liver and kidneys.”

  Another thunderous crash. It now sounded as if Roadkill was taking runs at the partition and trying to knock it down with what remained of his his shoulder.

  “What happened to him? Your last partner?” Jimmy asked, suddenly curious.

  “Who knows?” Tito shrugged.“Skipped town, maybe. Didn't show up for work one night. Left me working this beat alone. Wouldn't answer his cell. Fuckin' prick pussy. Next day I went to his apartment and knocked the door coupla times, but there was nobody home. I called his cell a few more times after that, but I guess the guy didn't wanna be found. It's pretty fuckin' hard to find a guy that doesn't wanna be found. So I stopped trying. Fuck him. Don't need that shit. I was on the look-out for a replacement, and that's when I pumped into you.”

  “Bumped.”

  “What'ya say?”

  “It's bumped, Tito. You bumped into me. Pumped means something else entirely.”

  “Oh, right. Gotcha.”

  “Do you think he really skipped town?” Jimmy said,“Or do you think maybe the curse the Devil's put on you guys caught up with him? That one we got in back seemed very anxious to get his hands on you. Didn't try an' rip my head off. In fact, didn't pay me no heed at all. If you ask me, that's what we have here. Or that's what you have here. You got the curse of the devils. In the flesh.”

  “Fuckin' curse, haha!” Tito laughed as if that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.“That dude, he was just no good. He just skipped town, okay? This is...”

  “Brazil. I know. This is fuckin' Brazil,” Jimmy finished for him.“Tito my man, it may have escaped your notice, but there's a fuckin' headless corpse currently banging on the walls back there. That shit ain't right. It ain't right at all.”

  Tito shrugged and said, in his typically understated way,“I know. It's... incredible, right? Where da fuck is he getting the strength from?”

  “What? Tito, we have a situation here! Don't you understand? This isn't normal.”

  “What's normal, anyways?” Tito shrugged his burly shoulders.

  “Not that!” Jimmy retorted as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. In all the time the two men had known each other, this was the first time they had engaged in what could be described as a heated discussion.

  “Okay, enough. That's fuckin' it!” Tito yelled as, without even checking the rear view mirror, he stood on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a shuddering halt.“Come on, I might need your help.”

  “What do you need me for?” Jimmy complained. He was beginning to get a very bad feeling.

  “Just come on!” Tito said.“I've had enough of this fool trashing my wheels. This is how I make my livin,' you know?” The big Brazilian again unclipped his seatbelt, opened his door and exited the vehicle.

  With a heavy heart, Jimmy did as he was asked and followed Tito to the back, where the big Brazilian unlocked the doors and flung them open.

  The compartment now resembled a slaughterhouse. There was blood and gore everywhere, covering almost every surface of the once-sanitised interior. Roadkill was on his knees, the stubby length of vertebrae protruding from his neck where his head used to be twitching in the breeze, as if sensing that something in the atmosphere had changed.

  Tito jumped into the back and held the door open for Jimmy who quickly followed. The door slammed shut behind them.

  Now they were alone with the thing they called Roadkill.

  Jimmy shrank away from the headless monstrosity, pressing his back against Cigano's cool wall. The entire episode was becoming surreal and dream-like. But through it all, there was an over-riding sense of impending danger. Jimmy's senses were in a state of red alert.

  Tito snatched up a box of disposable rubber gloves, took out a pair and threw the box to Jimmy.“Cover up,” he said.“This could get messy. Who knows what bugs this diseased fuck is carrying.”

  In one of the storage spaces beneath the benches was a selection of heavy tools, usually used to cut and pry crash victims free of wreckage. As he opened the compartment, Tito neatly side-stepped one of Roadkill's flailing arms. Jimmy noticed the hand hanging limply, the wrist having either been broken in the initial accident or by its own blows on Cigano's walls.

  It.

  Not he.

  It.

  Jimmy couldn't even think of Roadkill as human any more.

  He could feel hot bile rising in his throat and swallowed it back with a grimace.

  Tito turned around. He was holding something unwieldy and metallic in his burly brown hands.“Come over here and hold this sucker down!” he shouted, moving swiftly out of the way as Roadkill made a last, desperate lunge at his ankles.

  No sooner had Jimmy recognized that the instrument Tito wielded was a fireman's axe, there was a flash of sharpened steel, a too-loud whoosh! then a sickening dull thunk as the axe blade cut through one of Roadkill's legs, severing it just above the knee.“That should slow the sucker down!” Tito yelled triumphantly as he immediately adjusted his position and swung the axe again.

  The other leg took two blows, the first strike becoming lodged in the thick thigh bone. As Tito hacked away, Jimmy did his best to limit the effects of Roadkill's wildly flailing arms by pinning them against his body, wondering all the while for some absurd reason whether Roadkill could still feel pain or not. He didn't know a great deal about human biology but he suspected not, now that the brain and all the pain receptors it held had been severed from the body. At least, he hoped not.

  After making swift work of the legs, Tito, sweating now with the effort, also relieved Roadkill of both arms. When he finished hacking at the tattooed limb, he hawked and spat on it.“Fuckin' Devils. Fuck you!”

  Grisly task completed, the Brazilian plucked up the bloody torso in a bear hug and dumped it onto the stretcher, using the straps to hold it in place.“Make some noise now, fucker!” he yelled.

  Jimmy should have known what was coming next. Yet, he watched in a combination of awe and horror as Tito used the small selection of tools they carried to open up Roadkill's stomach and chest cavity and take out his internal organs, one by one.

  The worst part of the whole operation was the smell. In the enclosed space it was almost overpowering. Jimmy had no idea a human body could stink so badly.

  As Tito extracted the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and several other slimy, bloated, unidentifiable fleshy masses from the still-quivering body he handed them to Jimmy, who bagged them in zip-locks and set them aside. He gagged when he handled the heart, and found that it was still pulsing weakly. Not beating exactly, but pulsing, as if an electrical charge was passing through it.

  How could that be possible?

  But Jimmy had given up trying to distinguish between the possible and the impossible.

  He had a good mind to lay the heart on the floor and stomp on it until it was nothing but red jelly. But something told him that Tito would freak out if he did that. The heart was potentially the most valuable part of the entire haul. To lose it now would make everything they had gone through redundant.

  Dismembering and amateur organ harvesting complete, Jimmy and Tito threw the severed limbs and violated cadaver into the rich undergrowth off the side of the road where, hopefully, the native wildlife would dispose of the remains by natural means before anyone found it.

  Even if the body parts were discovered, Tito insisted, there was nothing to tie them to the crime. There wasn't even any evidence that a crime had been committed. If it came down to it, he was pretty sure a good defence lawyer would be able to get them off. This was Brazil. And he knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy...

  They finally reached Trinity Hospital shortly before 4am. At that hour, when even the druggies and gang-bangers were asleep, the place was deserted. Tito parked Cigano in an empty
ambulance bay out front. He used the rear-view mirror and an oil rag to clean up the worst of the blood on his face, then left Jimmy sitting in Cigano's cabin while he took the bag of organs, which had mercifully stopped pulsing, and went off into reception to find his contact. He insisted on going alone.

  As he waited in the car park, Jimmy must have experienced some kind of adrenaline dump. He remembered reading somewhere that traumatic situations have a way of doing that to you. This night had certainly been traumatic. And not just for him. The one they called Roadkill was in pieces. Literally.

  Jimmy wanted to crack a smile, but found he couldn't. Maybe his little joke would be funny if it wasn't true. Instead of laughing, he closed his eyes and dosed for a while.

  A sudden noise snapped him back to his senses.

  He jumped in his seat.

  NO!

  In his mind's eye he saw Roadkill, or some disembodied part of him, pounding on Cigano's side, looking for his heart.

  Then the driver's side door opened and Tito appeared. He was smiling from ear to ear and waving a huge wad of cash in his hand.“What did I tell you? Ten grand all-in, baby!”

  That was the way it was done in Brazil. Cash. Always cash. During his time, Jimmy had seen people pay for cars with big wads of bank notes. Later, he wondered if Tito had been straight with him. He could have been given any sum of money for the body parts, knowing that Jimmy would have no way of knowing.

  Then, at some point, he realised he didn't give a shit. His cut was more enough for his purposes.

  By the time they dropped off the bag of still-warm organs and drove back across the city, dawn was breaking over the city. Tito drove Jimmy to his apartment and the two men parted ways with nothing more than a solemn handshake.

  By that point, Jimmy had already decided his new line of work was just too damn weird. Fuck it. Three days later, he used his cut of the money from Trinity to buy a one-way plane ticket to Newark international and returned to Tom's River. There, he fell back into his small-town existence and his south American adventure soon faded into memory.

  Usually.

  Sometimes, in the dead of night, Jimmy would see Roadkill in his dreams. Or at least he would see the pieces of him edging their way through the undergrowth, decomposing but still somehow animated. And still on his trail. Tito had said that it was difficult to find a man who didn't want to be found. But Jimmy had his doubts.

  Every time he dreamed of Roadkill, he was reminded of Tito. He really should give his old friend a call or an email soon. It had been a long time since he'd heard from his old colleague. But every time he thought about it, something squirmed deep in the pit of his stomach. Somehow, he knew his call or email would go unanswered.

  Afterword

  Little Dead Girl

  The idea for this little shocker came from a pretty disturbing dream I had when I was working as an English teacher in central China. Immersing yourself in a completely different culture, especially one so removed from what you are used to, can be a very alienating, and occasionally debilitating experience. It did provide me with a lot of material to write about, though, including this and my novella Apartment 14F. Thinking about that dream even now still makes me shiver. Little Dead Girl was originally published in the first edition of Unspoken Water magazine. In Scottish custom,'unspoken water' is water with supposed healing properties collected from under a bridge,“Over which the living pass and the dead are carried.”

  Curiosities

  When I was growing up, my parents part-owned an antiques shop in my home town. It was a massive three-storey building with a dark, damp cellar and a warehouse-like storage space attached to the back. A lot like the one described in this story. Being such an old, decrepit place, it was full of dark nooks and cranny's. Not to mention funny smells. It may have been my over-fertile imagination, but I was sure there was something in that cellar. This story was going to be the first part of a series involving Neil Needham and his shop, partly inspired by The Collector in the old Eagle comics, with a sly nod to Stephen King's Needful Things. It still might be.

  Intruder

  A short, snappy little tale I knocked out in a single session, more details of which escape me. Sometimes the best stories work that way.

  Embracing Solitude

  This was among the first things I ever wrote. It sat dormant on my hard drive for years, and has never been published before. When you first start writing fiction you don't want anyone else to read your work in case they think it's shit. I think it's a phase a lot of people go through when they are learning the ropes. This is from that period. A couple of years ago I stumbled across it, gave it a little kick up the ass, and here it is. It addresses some things most of us have some unfortunate experience with at some point in our lives, specifically jealousy and infidelity. There's also a little dig at unscrupulous literary agents, of which there are many.

  The Night Visitor

  The idea for this story also came from a dream I had once when I was staying at my parent's house in New Tredegar, South Wales. In the dream, I was the one sneaking into people's homes at night. Not to steal anything or inflict harm, but just to watch people sleep. How creepy is that? I knew there was a story in it somewhere. The challenge then lay in developing that concept into a something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The finished product was rejected a few times before eventually finding a home in Fantastic Horror magazine as The Night-Time Visitor.

  Hero of the Day

  With this story I wanted to see if I could lull the reader into a false sense of security, lead them down the garden path, then sucker-punch them in the last paragraph. I like playing with the idea that all is not what it seems on the surface. I think I succeeded to some degree. I stole the title from a Metallica song. It was published in the short-lived Dark Valentine magazine.

  Treat Night

  Writing about ghosts and monsters is fun, but horror comes in many forms. This is a bold attempt at psychological horror, specifically the devastating loss of a loved one and the effect grief might have on a fractured mind. As I wrote this I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Stuart. But whichever way you slice it, the poor guy was never going to get a happy ending. If he did, I wouldn't have a story. Treat Night was originally published in the anthology Denizens of the Dark.

  Handsome Jack

  There are a lot of old-fashioned traditional pubs in Wales, and the rest of Britain. Though nowhere near as many as there used to be. Apparently, in the second half of 2014 they were closing at a rate of 31 a week. I love the idea of a traditional haunted pub, and wanted to reconcile this concept with something approaching lad culture. From there, I wanted to explore the themes of friendship and betrayal. I remember being fascinated by accounts of paranormal investigations I had seen on TV or read about, where some ghostly or demonic entity attaches itself to one of the investigators and follows them home.

  Mix all these components together and Handsome Jack comes crawling out of the woodwork, probably scratching his name everywhere. In the originally published version, toward the end I name-checked Lostprophets. But after the crimes of ex-lead singer Ian Watkins came to light in 2012, I thought it wise to change that to fellow Welsh band Funeral For a Friend. It actually works out better for the story that way, given the in-joke to be found in the second band's name.

  Tiny Little Vampires (flash version)

  I hate mosquitoes. Horrible, vile creatures. They really are tiny little vampires. At least, the females of the species are. So I wrote a weird little gross-out pseudo-rant about a guy in a hotel room being tormented by the little fuckers so much it drives him nuts. I did a load of research around the topic, either for my own amusement or for a non-fiction article I never wrote, then cut most of it out for this flash (by definition, less than 1000 words) version. The uncut version still exists somewhere, and might surface one day. I cut it down by about 60% on the advice of a prospective publisher, who didn't accept it anyway. Sigh.

  Still, it means a lo
t when editors go to the trouble of giving you a bit of feedback or constructive criticism instead of just sending out a form rejection email. Some don't even bother to do that.

  Roadkill

  I once read one of those hard-hitting investigative journalism articles once in a men's lifestyle magazine about rogue ambulance crews. I thought it was in Brazil, but looking back it might have been Thailand. Rogue ambulance crews are far more prevalent there. At 8,400 words, this is one of the longest short stories I've ever written. If having a long short story isn't a contradiction.

  I had a lot of fun with this. It carries more dialogue than most of my stories, which usually rely more on narration. I sometimes find that when I submit a story it either gets snapped up for publication by one of the first couple of markets I hit, or it hangs around for a long time looking for a home. Fortunately, this belongs to the former category, having been published as bonus material in the e-book version of the anthology Fading Light.

  By the Same Author:

  X: A Collection of Horror

  This is what happens when you ‘wake up’ inside a dream, when the urban myth you heard turns out to be so much more, and when that hottie you pick up in a bar springs a terrible surprise. But what do you do when your wife gives birth to something not entirely human? When your past discretions come back to haunt you? Or when a serial killer moves in next door?

  The first collection by C.M. Saunders includes ten slices of horrifying dark fiction. Seven previously published in magazines or anthologies, and three exclusive to this collection, along with an introduction and extensive notes. Featuring exclusive cover art by Greg Chapman.