by Ryan Harding
Ed pushed his family back. Annette broke out of her shock and clawed for the dangling phone, consequences be damned. “This doesn’t work either!”
While Ed and the Thai girl tended Nathan, Lawrence made sure the deer was still there.
Don’t go anywhere, Bambi.
Spooked, it stared at the group of humans huddled around the fallen man.
A distant wail slowly rose into a frightening crescendo.
The deer ran into the woods.
“What’s that?” Eliza asked.
This time it wasn’t Annette. The sound grew louder, a sonic wave crashing toward them like the tide. A civil defense siren.
To Lawrence, it sounded like the end of the world.
They stood rooted to the spot. Even Nathan momentarily ceased his writhing. A shared look of horror passed through everyone who met Lawrence’s eyes, in doomed solidarity. He looked toward the Morgan Falls Lodge, thought of trying to barricade a door against Agent Orange. It might hold him off five seconds, if room 237 was any indication.
Annette went back to her swiveling head trick, on a perpetual word find only she could see.
Nathan cried out again, still plain as day over the siren, pained profanity which ended in vowels as if he lost half his tongue with half the toes of his foot.
Hate it for you, mastermind, but I’m not sorry to move up on the group speed chart.
“Come on, man, damn,” Marcus said, looking around. “We can’t just stand here holding our dicks.”
Adam peered at the phone booth partition. “Hey, there’s a directory for other Chicken Exits.”
“Adam, get away from that!” Pamela yanked him back. “There could be more traps!”
Marcus halted immediately in his path to the phone. After pondering a moment, he said, “Hey, Nathan, can you see that directory?”
Suzanne shook her head at him, corner of her mouth curled.
“What? He’s over there anyway.”
“Marcus is right. We can’t stay here.” This came from Patrick, and Lawrence felt the corner of his own mouth curl into disapproval at the rapt attention he commanded. Finally opened his mouth to offer more than his name and they clung to every word like edicts from the burning bush. Lawrence said one little thing and he was “Rain Man.”
“There may be three towns in this quarantine zone, but they put us in this one, and I doubt it was to give us a chance in…whatever this is.”
Ooh, nice dramatic pause.
Nathan might have read the Alpha Dog guide, but Patrick probably wrote it.
“If they put us here, we need to be somewhere else. Somewhere we can arm ourselves.”
“Sorry,” Lawrence said, “but I think we’re fresh out of guide books to Morgan Falls.”
“I thought you had Tourette’s,” Patrick said, not missing a beat.
Lawrence felt the unwanted scrutiny of the group turn to him. The siren blared as if to alert everyone to his deceit.
“He sounded fine when he asked where I was from earlier,” Gin said.
Cover blown. “It comes and goes, fu-fuckmou-mouth. Hmmmm.”
“We ain’t got time for this shit, Sling Blade,” Marcus said.
Patrick gestured to the road adjacent to the Chicken Exit. “We don’t have many options. Right or left.”
“Or into the woods,” Adam said.
“The woods?” Marcus echoed. “Man, why didn’t I think of that? Oh right, cuz I don’t want my head to end up on no damn stake.”
“Not a good idea,” Patrick said more diplomatically. “Could be more traps, too.”
Adam blushed slightly, but didn’t give it up. “They might not expect it.”
“Yeah, they might not expect us to jump in front of a speeding train, either, but that shit’ll still kill us dead, boy.”
“The lake is that way.” Lawrence said. He pointed to their left. They all looked back at him. “Bi-bitchlicks.”
“Is that from the guide book you don’t have?” Gin asked.
Adam laughed harder than the comment warranted.
Got yellow fever, Romeo?
“Morgan Falls Massacre. It’s a game with a virtual recreation of this whole c-c-cocksucking town. Hmmmmm.”
Pamela blanched at that word in particular, looked like she wanted to cover her little boy’s precious ears. Lawrence wished he’d never thrown out the Tourette’s excuse, but with all the petty vulgarities he saw online every day, he thought it had the most convincing shot.
i cornhold your moms asshatch cuz you aint shit, bitch u mad bro? and other such patented bon mots from the likes of Bustakapp187fool and sundry.
“Why do we care about the lake?” Marcus said. “Is there a tire swing?”
Suzanne smacked his arm lightly. “There might be a boat.”
“Probably not,” Patrick said, “but there were houses out there, right?”
Lawrence nodded. “The army has to patrol the water, too. Ti-tits and a-ass.”
A lake patrol took him down in the game, matter of fact, and when he tried to continue the game put him on the other side of Morgan Lake. Between cheap shit like that and stingy save points, he gave up. He found the Army and Agent Orange a billion times. It made all of this seem less real, an urban legend like yellow dye five shrinking your penis.
“What about Nathan?” Eliza asked.
“I can make it! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh…I’m okay.” He hoisted himself up with the help of the Chicken Exit booth, rather unconcerned another toe popper might give him a matching pair of shoes. His fingers left bloody smears on the partition.
“You’re sure you can walk on that?” Patrick asked.
“Never better.” He tried to test his weight on the wounded foot and groaned immediately. “Ah, Christ, that hurts, God, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh!”
Marcus made a “hurry up” gesture at Patrick and pointed to a nonexistent watch on his wrist.
“We’re going to the lake,” Nathan said, breathing ruggedly. He pointed the wrong way. He hadn’t listened to Lawrence. Too busy cradling a shoe where he didn’t have to worry so much about toe room any more.
“We’ll hide there and figure out our next move,” he continued. “Lawrence will help me.”
“Lawrence will what, fuckass?” He hadn’t tried to affect a Tourette’s façade that time; it came from the heart.
“You’re a bigger guy and you’ll be slower anyway,” Eliza said. “We can’t leave him behind.”
“Yeah, we can’t leave him behind,” Annette repeated, all the while scanning the woods in the word find for cowardice, panic, opportunist.
“That’ll work,” Marcus said.
Lawrence smirked. They’d all done the math on an ambush and concluded that two easy targets substantially increased their own odds of survival. Well, at least he’d have a potential human shield and could let the man with a plan try Power Gestures on a crazed mass murderer.
The guy could be off in Sandalwood right now for all they knew. The lake was half a mile away, bicycled on the game in a minute.
Lawrence carefully went to Nathan and extended a hand, expecting Nathan to vanish in a cloud of bloody red mist from another trap, but he stayed in one piece. He consulted the Chicken Exit directory as he waited for Nathan to stabilize. It reminded him of the display in shopping malls, right down to a red dot which helpfully informed him “YOU ARE HERE,” a feature which struck him as morbidly cynical.
Been awhile since some buffoon was on TV for a Chicken Exit evac, he thought uneasily.
The news stories excited the imagination for awhile, but it all became less interesting once people understood this place could coexist in the world as they knew it and they’d still have to wait in lines at the grocery store and post office and die of the usual things like cancer and heart disease, bored and deeply unhappy as ever. Hopefully diminished interest accounted for this dearth in media coverage.
The nearest Chicken Exit looked to be a long walk in the opposite direction of the lake. Good.
Maybe Orange staked out those locales before ultimately staking the heads.
“Okay, I’m good,” Nathan announced, neither looking nor sounding so. He clapped Lawrence twice on the shoulder. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Lawrence almost shrugged him away and booked, the unreality of all of this threatening to overwhelm him. He envied the bemused version of himself from twenty minutes ago. Nothing amiss here, guys. Just mind games by some butthurt video gamer or rich degenerates scaring us for yucks, that’s all.
The group set off in a loose cluster with the expected alliances of Ed, Pam, and Adam, Marcus and Suzanne, Eliza and Annette, and that hot new power duo Lawrence and Nathan. Gin and Patrick gravitated to one another as well. Adam kept looking over at Gin like someone in a barber chair trying to see the TV in the corner until a stern glance from his mom snapped him forward again. Lucky for the boy everyone lost all their stuff or Gin might have Maced him.
The siren thankfully stopped. Heavy silence filled its wake minus Nathan’s latest vowel-uble grunt (Shiiiiiiiiiiiii oh gahhhhhhhhhhhh). For all the debate, Lawrence estimated only three minutes passed since the toe-popper.
“What did it mean?” Annette asked. “I bet it’s bad. Oh God, why am I here? I can’t be here. I’m not a bad person.”
“And the rest of us are?” Marcus asked. He pointed at Adam. “You think that boy deserves to be here? I bet he ain’t killed nobody or robbed a bank.”
Annette resumed her ponderings, but at a more subconscious volume.
The open road ahead appeared perfectly nonthreatening, minus the woods flanking either side. There was tentative bird song in the trees, one bashful bird looking for any takers. Another answered and soon chatter grew more animated, as though in discussion of theories for the siren.
“It might have been on a timer,” Lawrence said. He needed to stake a claim on some of the group esteem. His current portion of the pie wouldn’t feed a goldfish.
A few looked back, Patrick and Gin included. They had an alarming lead already. He tried to pick up the pace a little, much to Nathan’s fuuuuuuuuuuuuh’d chagrin.
“The siren,” he explained between breaths. “It didn’t last very long and…nothing seemed to happen. Maybe it was just…just on a timer.”
“Yeah, Sling Blade, and maybe they were ringing the dinner bell for that freak,” Marcus said.
“It was bad,” Annette mumbled. “Whatever it was, it was bad.”
Eliza patted her shoulder. “We’re going to get out of this. Hang in there.” She actually sounded like she believed it. Maybe she and Annette were sharing psych meds.
Their feet shuffled on the pavement except for Nathan’s. He dragged his blasted foot like a mummy. Lawrence’s shoulder throbbed. They hadn’t reached a quarter of the way yet. He was about to request a volunteer to give him a rest when Patrick’s head tilted up sharply.
Lawrence didn’t hear anything, but he felt something; a tightening in his guts.
Why did the birds go quiet?
Then it was like an avalanche in his senses with a light scattering of rocks before an entire ridge broke off and cascaded down the base of his spine, goose bumps rippling across his arms and back with the revelation—Agent Orange is here.
Time seemed to slow to a complete crawl, and Lawrence fancied he could hear Patrick’s lids slipping across the orbs of his eyeballs as terror sprang them wide open. His lips parted and he shouted one word that sent everybody off like a flock of birds from a treetop:“GO!”
Lawrence didn’t think it through at all. He whirled away from Nathan as though trying to yank his arm from a coat sleeve.
It was enough to see a glimpse of the Minotaur, the god of the labyrinth. Fifty yards away, stationary for the moment as he pulled the drawstring of a black bow. Lawrence swore he heard it tighten. His stomach dropped as though the ground opened and he’d plunged a hundred feet into the earth.
His face, he thought.
There wasn’t one. It was a mask, perhaps a hood with eyes like goggles.
The arrow was halfway there before Lawrence completed his turn and staggered forward into a run. Fear atrophied his muscles and he expected his legs to collapse in a rubbery pile, but he stayed upright and lumbered forward as fast as he could, anything to make the fifty yards more like fifty miles. He moved faster than he would have believed, but so did the rest of the group, as though borne on a whirlwind of their own screaming. Annette unsurprisingly laid claim to loudest, but second place went to a more masculine claxon that might be Marcus or Ed.
The grisly sound of punctured flesh provoked another outcry from Nathan with at last a completed oath (“Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”). Lawrence heard him hit the deck.
Don’t look, don’t look, Lawrence warned himself, even as he did; he had to.
The arrow jutted from Nathan’s shoulder, the force strong enough to punch it through the other side. He stumbled into an upright position and limped a couple yards before his wounded foot crippled the effort and put him face down on the road. He extended a hand as if Lawrence could somehow pull Nathan twenty yards to him, twenty-five, thirty.
Sorry, Nathan, but this bird’s gonna fly.
And he’d take wing while Agent Orange tore at Nathan like a beast of prey on a fallen elk.
Lawrence caught sight of a blur just before he faced forward again, and his arms and legs pumped with renewed vigor. He swayed in a lackadaisical zigzag pattern to discourage another arrow attack, knowing the difficulty would still be no greater for Orange than hitting a dead elephant.
Orange is running for all he’s worth.
He could hear it, too, boot falls on the asphalt, like war drums, way too fast to simply stop and savor Nathan’s agony before the obligatory dismemberment. It’s what Lawrence naturally assumed—had counted on—to give him any prayer of escape. And why? Because that’s how it happened in all the movies with the horny teenagers?
It was at that moment he realized the second place screamer was himself. He transformed it into actual words: “Help! Please help!” A petition for the very thing he never would have given Nathan because one man’s mutilation is another’s escape.
The others were way ahead of him. A few glanced back for an instant, but nobody slowed. It was like a relay race where everyone forgot they needed Lawrence to hand them the baton, or they were willing to do another lap to catch up with him eventually, but no hurry on that.
“You chickenshit bastards!” he screamed, his throat raw and stinging. “Get back here and fight! He can’t take all of us!”
Of course he didn’t believe that for a second, but he had to try. A rational remnant of his mind complimented him for staying in character with Tourette’s down to the bitter end.
The war drums caught up, like the pounding of his own blood in his ears. Lawrence looked back, saw the crazed eyes in the goggled hood and a small orb over the mouth like the spout of a garden hose. He would have looked like a scarecrow without the goggles and mouth tube. It hadn’t occurred to Lawrence to wonder why the chase at all from a man with a bow, but it made sense when he saw the machete.
For years he’d heard of mothers lifting cars off their kids and other superhero acts of adrenaline he now knew to be as suspect as the yellow dye five deception, because Lawrence would die if he couldn’t outrun Agent Orange and he wasn’t getting much of a fight-or-flight rocket boost. Shitting himself seemed far more likely than the saving grace of warp speed.
Lawrence heard a distinct whoosh, the unmistakable slice of the machete through the air. He waited for the thunk of metal to free his head from his neck or hack deeply into his brain.
It didn’t.
He did see the flash of the blade from the corner of his eye, but at a much lower arc than expected. It puzzled him an instant figuratively before it completed the job literally. Heat exploded beneath the knee of his right leg and spread to the left.
Jesus Christ, he cut off my…
Then came the dropping sensation as he
adjusted to the abrupt loss of sixteen inches in height in the span of one second. He didn’t stop running despite his resignation to the execution, propelled forward on his now uneven limbs. All of his weight came down on the crooked stump of his right leg in a shocking detonation of pain. Then a sickening lurch as his unevenly distributed weight twisted upon gristle and carried him onto the left stump. He struggled to find footing in the absence of actual feet, impossibly close to the ground without kneeling. He pitched forward to the left, screaming far beyond the previously charted potential of his vocal cords. Lawrence struck the street and rolled, sliding to a halt on his back like an upended tortoise shell with stubby legs to match.
His legs and feet lay a couple of yards behind him at the end of a trail of bright red blood. Still wrapped in his pants, pieces of a human jigsaw that wanted to fit back together. He vomited down the front of his shirt at the sight of his blood jubilantly hemorrhaging from a tangle of arteries, like wires spooling from a fuse box.
Agent Orange stood over him. Lawrence maintained eye contact for about one and a half seconds. If he expected anything, it was an expressionless psychosis befitting the man’s military background, but what he glimpsed was ecstasy. This was his surrogate orgasm, something as pleasurable the five hundredth time as the first, perhaps infinitely better. The wardrobe was combat appropriate with the black boots, camouflage fatigues of khaki, gray, and black, and the gas hood he couldn’t face again. He would have been distracted anyway by the necklace, its length clogged with shriveled ears, trophies he’d taken from many heads in his illustrious homicidal career. Lawrence dry heaved and saw the blurry length of the machete held to Orange’s side, pointed at the ground, then twisting and rising like a metal erection.
Lawrence cinched his eyes shut, not wanting to see it coming, but eager for a release from the awful agony. He uttered the strange new vowels of Nathan’s language in his suffering.
“Uhhhhhhh…gahhhhhhhhhh…fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…”
The thump of rubber receded.
The hell?
Lawrence dared to open his eyes, thinking Orange would wait for him to do that before the death blow, but the camouflaged figure had turned back to Nathan.
