by JL Bryan
“Follow me,” the calico lady whispered. She stepped through the batwing doors, then slipped away through the pink curtain.
Finn followed, a burlesque girl on each arm, all the blood in his brain slipping away and flowing southward. He knew what it would be like inside the Old West brothel—deep Oriental rugs, silk furniture, candles, soft music, strong whiskey, maybe opium pipes and hookas. Upstairs, the feather beds would be enormous and full of warm, welcoming girls. He could see it all in his mind.
His heart hammered in anticipation.
Distantly, he heard Derek calling after him, but Derek was an idiot. Derek was obsessed with money for the sake of money, not realizing that the whole point of having money was to get laid.
Finn passed through the curtain.
The facade of the hotel turned out to be a false front. Behind it lay three feet of dusty space ending at a bare plywood wall.
Finn looked up at the second story. Female mannequins rolled back and forth behind the pink-curtained windows on automated loops, riding little train contraptions on circular tracks. The tracks sat on scaffolding behind the hotel facade. Little spotlights mounted behind the mannequins created the alluring shadows he’d seen on the window curtains.
“I kind of expected it to be different back here...” Finn lowered his gaze back down to the three women.
The older woman no longer wore the calico dress. Dark mud smeared her hair thin and flat against her head. Her entire body looked pale, more than a little decayed, and dripping with more dark mud, like she had just crawled out of her own grave.
In place of the calico dress and high-heeled boots, she wore a mud-soaked summer blouse and high-waisted mom jeans, all of it ripped and pasted to her body. A mud-drenched orange fanny pack sagged on her hip, and her eyes were concealed in the shadow of an orange plastic sun visor smeared with grime—two red-flag signs of a tourist.
One of the younger girls was now just a mud-soaked teenager in an airbrushed Conch City shirt and denim shorts.
The other girl, he realized, really was his hot neighbor Kylie Winchester who had died in the sinkhole. Her skin was pale, her entire body muddy, and the left half of her face bashed in as if by some blunt object, but he recognized her. Her eyes glowed, pale and drained of color, inside the decayed wreckage of her face.
All three of them looked like the risen dead, and the two younger girls had grown icy cold in his arms. He tried to pull back from them, but they clutched him tighter, encircling him with their stiff, dead arms, their nails digging into his waist like bird claws. Finn tried to break away, but the two girls were as stiff as iron, trapping him in their embrace.
The tourist mom removed her visor as she approached him. Her eyes were also colorless, so pale they seemed to glow, even when the spotlights overhead snuffed out and left them in darkness.
“You said we could take what we wanted as payment,” she whispered, her voice hoarse, as though her throat were full of water and sand. “‘Take what you want,’ you said.”
The cold dead girls giggled, clutching him tighter from both sides. Finn shuddered, his heart beating triple-time, his entire body shivering with fear, but he couldn’t break free.
“What is this?” Finn whispered.
The dead tourist mom raised her face toward his, the smell of rotten flesh wafting from her rotten lips, and he remembered how she’d kissed him less than a minute ago. She lay an icy gray hand on his chest, and it was so cold Finn thought it might stop his heart.
“Feeding time,” she whispered.
Then she bit into his chest, her teeth cracking his breastbone, as if she planned to chew right through to his heart.
The other girls sank their teeth into his belly and into the back of his neck.
Finn couldn’t break away from their deadly hug, so he screamed for Derek to come help him until his hot dead neighbor Kylie bit open his windpipe and sucked all the air from his lungs.
Then they really tore into him.
Chapter Seventeen
Heath stuffed himself on the midway, but he felt he had no choice. The food was delicious, packed with grease, salt, and sugar. He ate multiple slices of pizza, three or four corn dogs slathered in ketchup and mustard, a deep-fried funnel cake with powdered sugar and blackberry jam. He’d chugged at least six beers. He’d done all of this in less than five minutes.
His belly full, he’d strolled down the midway, taking in the endless array of bright neon signs, blinking light bulbs, and painted animals and clowns.
He walked right to the Whack-A-Frog, half-smiling to himself. He remembered wanting to play it years ago, when he was six or seven, and his dad insisting it was a waste of money. His dad had found most things Heath wanted, and some of the things he actually needed, to be a waste of money.
Heath looked over the booth, lit by its array of alternately pulsing lights. Big stuffed animals dangled from ceiling wires above. The frogs crouched in the holes in the painted pond, waiting to spring out. He hefted the cartoony oversized mallet, connected by a thick cable to the game console.
He dug into his pocket, came out with a pair of quarters, and fed them into the machine.
All the lights flared to full brightness at once, and the game played a few croaking-frog and cricket sound effects.
Then the first frog jutted out of its hole, and the booth’s speakers began to blare the oldies song “At the Hop.” Heath swung the mallet, but not before the frog ducked back into the hole. He had never been fast on his feet, but he was strong as an ox, and in both these things took after his father.
When the second frog jutted out, he slammed the mallet into its grinning green face and felt a pleasant crack at the impact. The lights of the machine flashed red for a moment, and a bell rang.
Heath kept swinging, pounding the third frog, missing the fourth, and bashing the fifth with a vengeance.
When his mallet bashed into the fifth frog, he felt a satisfying crunch like cracking bone. Dark red fluid spurted from the frog’s head, spattering the blue and green booth around it. He guessed it was some kind of mechanical oil or other lubricant, but it almost looked like blood, and Heath smiled at the sight of it.
He bashed the sixth frog, feeling its face crack, and a gusher of the dark red fluid splashed his arm. The frog retracted into its hole with obvious damage to its green head, the eye and nose area cracked and sunken.
Heath smashed one frog after another, feeling them break under his mallet, while “At the Hop” played at deafening volume. Soon Heath and the booth were dripping red, and the frogs popped out already damaged and cracked, but he kept swinging, filled with destructive glee.
When he was eight years old, his father had taken him deer hunting, which involves waking up before dawn and sitting in a tree stand hung with camouflage. His father had drunk Wild Turkey—not a waste of money, apparently—and when thoroughly plastered, had given Heath the rifle to hold.
Heath had held it while his father continued drinking himself into a stupor. A deer had stepped out into the little clearing in the woods below, a buck with an impressive rack of antlers, and Heath had gone ahead and shot it. He’d never killed anything larger than an insect before that.
It hadn’t been a perfectly clean shot—he’d hit the big deer in the lung, and it thrashed around for a minute, hacking up blood, and dashed into the woods.
Heath had scrambled down from the stand and chased after it. He found the deer several yards away, toppled over on its side, struggling and gasping to breathe while it drowned in its own blood. It took several minutes to die.
He’d roused his dad, and they’d tied to the deer to the truck and gone to his dad’s friend’s place to hang it upside down on a wooden rack. Heath remembered his dad slicing the deer from crotch to throat and the steaming, ropy entrails spilling out into a big metal tub below.
“Killing a thing is power,” his dad had muttered in his slurred voice. “But eating a thing you killed, that’s real power.”
Heath had thought tha
t over while his family ate roasts and ground venison from his kill over the following weeks.
His dad had taken off a month or two after that, rarely to be seen again. Apparently he’d decided that supporting Heath’s mom and brother and sisters was a waste of money, too. Times got hard after that, and Heath often thought about his dad’s last lesson, and what it really meant, if anything.
When the game ended, most of the frogs still jutted out of their holes, too demolished to sink back inside. Springs and ruptured plastic tubes hung out of their fractured bodies like broken bones and leaking intestines. A sheet of blood-red fluid coated the entire face of the game, with little trickles running off and dripping softly into the sawdust at his feet. The oily red fluid soaked Heath’s face and shirt.
Heath looked around with a grin, eager to show Derek and Finn how he’d completely destroyed the game, but he didn’t see anyone at all, just the hypnotic colored lights pulsing along the midway, and more lights from the high rides beyond, especially in the direction of Space City.
He vaguely remembered the two girls walking by—not giving Heath a second look, he was sure—and then he seemed to remember glimpsing Derek and Finn from the corner of his eye, heading into the dark ruins of Fools’ Gold. Jared and Becca weren’t anywhere in sight, either, but those two didn’t seem to like him very much anyway. They had only tolerated Heath because Derek brought him around.
A creaking, humming sound came from above, near the ceiling of the booth. Heath looked up. One rack of stuffed animals was moving, each plush creature advancing one spot like the candy bars in a vending machine.
The animal at the front dropped off the rack and landed in his arms. It was a green reindeer with brown felt antlers, wearing a red collar with a jingle bell on the front.
Nine-point buck, Heath thought. How’s that for a waste of money, Dad?
He hugged it against him, which smeared red fluid all over it.
Carrying his prize deer, Heath walked up the midway and into Fools’ Gold. The place really was a ghost town now—several of the buildings had burned to the ground, others had collapsed, and the only light came from the tracks of the Starland Express high above, though the actual depot where riders boarded the roller coaster remained dark.
“Derek?” Heath called into the shadowy wreckage. “Finn? You guys here?”
The only answer was a rusty squeak, and then another, and another, as if some big metal wheel were turning around and around.
Heath followed the sound, calling Derek’s name again.
As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw the source of the squeaking. The When Pigs Fly ride turned very slowly, even for a kiddie ride. The four grimy pigs crept along through the air, their teeth bared in ugly, muddy grins.
Beyond this, a spot of dim red light, like raw fire, glowed somewhere in the distance.
“Derek?” Heath called again. He started toward the red light.
It burned somewhere deep inside a wooden shed of a restaurant called Pork Belly’s BBQ. He could barely read the wooden sign over the door, which had faded and was partially overgrown with the thick, thorny green vines that half-buried the building.
Heath stepped up onto the creaking porch and peered inside. It was dark, except for that one red spot at the back. He could smell charred meat and smoke, and he thought he could hear the hiss of sizzling fat.
“Derek?” he asked, but he couldn’t manage more than a whisper. The dark interior of the restaurant seemed to require silence.
Heath tiptoed inside, shining his phone around. The floor was sticky and strewn with broken chairs and table legs, so he had to move cautiously.
A serving counter ran along his left side. The entire counter had shifted askew, probably when the sinkhole opened, and now lay as a kind of shattered barrier under the big open window to the kitchen. Heath couldn’t see much through that window.
That’s not where the real action happened, anyway, he thought. That’s just where they made the cornbread and cole slaw.
The sales counter with the battered cash register sat near the back. Behind it was an open door, from which emanated the fiery red light and the sound of sizzling fat.
Heath made his way around the wreckage of the counter and nudged open the door.
It led into a partially outdoor area under a slanted corrugated-metal roof. The ground was covered with gravel.
Directly ahead of him, in the weedy area behind the restaurant, sat an enormous black barbecue smoker, the kind so large it had its own tires and trailer hitch. One of its two coffin-sized front doors was open, and pyre of red coals burned inside. It was so hot that he already felt scorched from several feet away. A blistering-hot breeze poured out of the open door, strong enough to nudge Heath’s hair back.
The odor of cooking meat and the buzzing of flies filled the air around him.
Unidentifiable lumps and remnants sizzled on the grill he could see, the one behind the open door. Louder sizzling and popping sounded behind the closed door.
He stepped closer to the second door. It was a horizontal hatch that rolled upward, big enough to justify having two handles for lifting and lowering it. Heath set his green prize deer on the seat of a rocking chair with a broken leg.
He gripped a sticky wooden handle in each hand. The hot black surface of the smoker was less than an inch away, close enough to scorch his fingers red.
He pulled, but the door barely budged. It felt like hundreds of pounds of solid iron.
He grimaced and lunged with all his strength. The door let out an ear-splitting squeal as he heaved it up, and a cloud of smoke billowed out around him, rich with the flavor of roasted meat. Though Heath had just pigged out on the midway not long ago, the savory odor made his mouth water. There was nothing like fresh meat.
As the initial blast of smoke cleared, he looked over the butchered animal on the grill, its skin crispy, grease dripping from its pores.
He tried to tell himself it was a large pig, its limbs severed and arrayed around it, and did his best to try and see it that way, but he knew that wasn’t the case. The limbs were much too big, more like a cow, but the body was too small for that.
He finally let himself look up from the grill, at the rack above. He’d glimpsed it before, but looked down and tried not to see it.
Finn’s head sat on the smoker, his red hair blackened, his glazed eyes open and appearing to look right at Heath. The limbs and torso on the grill below were his.
Heath felt sick for a moment, as if he were going to throw up, but it passed. He stared in a kind of wonder at what had been done, that a person had actually done this to another person. Had Derek killed him? Derek seemed a more likely candidate than Jared or the girls. Or maybe there was some crazy serial killer living in the park, luring people in just to murder them and eat them.
It was a powerful thing, Heath thought. Killing a big buck wasn’t just a matter of putting the head and antlers on your wall, after all. It was a matter of eating that big, powerful creature, taking its life into your body.
Heath had figured that out over time, in the months after his father left while he lay in bed at night, kept awake by his younger brother beside him in the bed, who wouldn’t stop coughing. The kid had always been sick, and one day, when Heath was eleven, he’d awoken to find his brother stiff and cold in the bed beside him, his eyes open as if he’d he died while watching Heath sleep.
Finn was not sickly—he was more athletic than Heath, more confident, and he got girls to sleep with him. Given the circumstances, Finn was probably the best choice, if the killer wanted to eat someone with strength and power. Heath could appreciate that. If he had to eat somebody out of their group, he would have chosen Finn or Jared, the ones who seemed to exude the most power. The girls were probably tastier but had less strength to offer.
He licked his lips.
With one shaking hand, Heath reached out and tore a strip of roasted meat from Finn’s bicep. The drumstick, he thought.
Heath looked Finn in the eyes while he placed the juicy morsel onto his tongue and chewed.
It wasn’t bad, taste-wise—somewhere between chicken and pork, expertly seasoned and smoked. Heath wasn’t interested in the flavor, though.
“I’m taking your power,” Heath whispered to Finn. “I want it, and you don’t need it anymore.”
He peeled away another juicy strip and ate it.
The buzzing of flies grew louder, and he heard the sound of metal scraping on metal. Heath could feel someone watching him before he even turned his head to look.
The sounds of the flies had been constant, so the man must have been somewhere in the gravel lot behind the restaurant the entire time, possibly hiding behind the big, heavily stained dumpster.
He wore grease-stained boots and jeans, with an apron from his waist to his knees that had once been white but was now stiff with thick, crusty black stains. He wore a yellowed tank top stretched over his enormous gut, the shirt so filthy Heath could barely see the faint PORK BELLY’S BBQ logo underneath the spattered black stains.
The man’s arms were meaty and hairy. He held a long, rusty roasting fork in one hand and a black-encrusted butcher knife in the other, and he scraped them back and forth while he stared at Heath.
Dried blood and entrails encrusted the man’s pudgy face, obscuring his features. Heath could make out pale, colorless eyes glaring out from sunken sockets. The man’s long mullet haircut was clumped together with more filth. Flies swarmed in the air around him, crawling in his ears, nostrils, and open mouth.
Heath found the big man so horrific that he froze where he was, unable to move or think. He just gaped.
The man raised the rusty fork and pointed it at Heath’s right hand, where a shred of Finn-meat still clung to his greasy fingers.
“Thief,” the man grunted. “Thief. Stealing from Pork Belly!”
Heath looked at his hand, still damp with hot grease, then back up to the man.
“I...” Heath began, then he realized he had nothing to say and turned and ran back into the restaurant.
