“He can’t feel it,” he said numbly.
“Do it harder.”
“It won’t make a difference.”
“Do it harder!”
“I did it twice!” he shouted. “He can’t feel a fucking thing!”
Austin stumbled away from Jeff’s inert body, his collar damp with sweat despite the cold, the air suddenly greasy, unpleasant to breathe. Through a part in the fog he spotted the road and wished he’d taken the case of beer from Noah’s Jeep before he and Steve had left for the hospital, because if he’d ever needed to get shitfaced, it was right then.
Jeff, he thought. A paraplegic.
Austin blamed himself and the others for this sad fact. Steve had said they had to move Jeff or he would have been barbequed alive. Fine. Austin agreed with that. However, it was how they moved him, half dragging him like he was a heavy side of beef—that he couldn’t get out of his mind. They should have kept their cool, made a litter, carried him properly.
Austin lit a cigarette and inhaled greedily.
Jeff. A paraplegic.
The words were like oil and water, chalk and cheese. They had no business being grouped together. Maybe if Jeff had been some poor slob the idea of him wheeling around in a chair for the rest of his life wouldn’t have been so hard to accept. But Jeff was the poster boy for success and vitality. Austin had met him on the first day of grade nine at Monsignor Farrell High School. Austin had been sitting in the back row of third-period math when Jeff had strolled through the door seconds before the bell rang. He had been tall even then and could easily have been mistaken as a senior. His blond hair had been brushed back from his forehead, his maroon school golf shirt perfectly fitted, his gray slacks pressed and creased, a preppy sweater draped over one shoulder. He swept his eyes across the room, then started down the aisle to the empty desk next to Austin, poking students with his pencil along the way, eliciting nervous chuckles from the victims. Ten minutes into the lesson he made a pssst noise and passed Austin a note. Austin opened it and read the three words: “Suck my dick!” He was so surprised he laughed out loud. Mr. Smith, the bespeckled teacher with a bushy brown mustache and yellow sweat stains under his arms, paused in his explanation of the course outline and asked him what was so funny.
“Nothing, sir,” Austin replied.
“Stand up, Mr.…” He checked the roll call. “Mr. Stanley.”
Austin stood up.
“Now tell the class what is so amusing.”
“Nothing, sir.”
Mr. Smith crossed the classroom and collected the note from Austin’s desk. He read it, his face impassive. “Who gave this to you?” he said.
“No one, sir.”
“You wrote yourself a note?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you laughed at your own note?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d like to see you back here during the lunch break. Do you understand, Mr. Stanley?”
“Yes, sir.”
After class, in the hallway bustling with students, Jeff found Austin and hooked his arm around his shoulder. “Thanks for not ratting me out to Armpits,” he said.
“No problem.”
“What’s your name?”
“Austin.”
“I’m Jeff. I’ll see ya round.”
After that day Austin and Jeff started hanging out more and more. Their personalities complimented each other in so much as they were both smart-mouths and troublemakers. Yet this was as far as their similarities went, because while Austin despised sports and could barely keep his grades above water, Jeff made the varsity golf and baseball teams, graduated with a 4.0 GPA, and was one of three students named valedictorian. And while Austin dropped out of community college and ended up buying a crummy bar with his grandmother’s inheritance and battling alcohol addiction, Jeff went the Ivy School route and was now trading securities at a top tier investment management firm, living the dream.
Was living the dream, Austin amended.
A paraplegic.
Fuck.
Cherry had moved away from the burning BMW and sat beneath a large tree with a thick trunk, wanting to be alone. The fragile calm that had existed since Steve and Noah left with Jenny had deteriorated quickly. Mandy was a total mess, while Austin seemed ready to explode. She didn’t blame either of them. Mandy had dated Jeff for four years; Austin had known him since high school. This was the reason she hadn’t mentioned the plantar reflex stimulation earlier. She knew there was a chance Jeff could be paralyzed from the waist down, and she didn’t want to verify this was the case, for it would only demoralize the others further. But Austin had totally wigged out. He had been slapping Jeff, inadvertently moving Jeff’s neck, which could compound his spinal cord injury. So she told him to scrape Jeff’s foot, and the diagnosis turned out to be as bad as she’d feared.
Cherry herself remained clinically detached to Jeff’s predicament. She wasn’t close to him like Austin and Mandy were. In fact, she didn’t particularly like him. Not only had he been making fun of her height from the moment they’d met, he was an asshole in general. Moreover, as a registered nurse, she had become used to seeing sickness, disease, and injury.
Just last week there had been a mentally disabled man in the ER with an infected stasis ulcer in the back of his calf. The necrotic tissue around the black eschar had been gnawed away by maggots that were still in residence in large numbers. During debridement surgery the man decided he had to urinate and could only do this standing up, so he got off the operating table, bleeding and dropping maggots everywhere, and peed in the middle of the floor.
And then there was old Ray Zanetti who had cancer to the mandible. Cherry had been his primary caregiver, and pretty much every time she checked in on him he would be looking in the mirror and peeling away pieces of his flaking skin. By the time of his death his face had all but fallen off.
Situations like these were grotesque and sad certainly, but they didn’t faze her anymore. They were simply part of her job, what she experienced on a daily basis. All in a day’s work, so they say.
Nevertheless, Cherry had never questioned her career choice; it had provided her a new life, literally. She had been born in Davao, in the Philippines. Her family had been dirt poor. Her father didn’t work, while her mother was a housecleaner, mostly for Western ex-patriots. She earned two hundred pesos, or approximately four dollars, a day. This went to support her husband, Cherry, and Cherry’s two siblings. They lived in a cinderblock house with a corrugated iron roof and no running water. They battled lice and rats on a constant basis, and they wasted nothing. Her mother often told her how disappointed she was with her Western employers, whose refrigerators were always full of expired food and spoiled vegetables.
Most of Cherry’s friends dropped out of high school to work at McDonald’s or one of the big malls. These positions didn’t pay any more than her mother made cleaning houses and apartment units, but you got to hang out with your friends and spend the day in an air conditioned environment out of the stifling tropical heat. Cherry, however, had greater ambitions. She wanted to get a university degree and work in a call center. She would have to work night shifts to compensate for the different time zones in the UK or US or Canada, but the money was decent and, in the eyes of other pinoys, it was a highly respected profession.
However, when Cherry heard about a friend of a friend who had become unimaginably wealthy as a registered nurse in the US, she promptly changed her degree to nursing. Her mother, starry-eyed at the prospect of having a daughter who could lift her family out of poverty, offered to sell the carabao—water buffalo—to help pay for Cherry’s schooling, but Cherry refused. She began working at a massage parlor servicing Western expats because the hours were flexible and could accommodate her classes. The company exploited her shamefully, paying her twenty-five cents each massage she gave, regardless of whether it was one hour long or two. Even so, they turned a blind eye to “extra” service. Cherry was raised Roman Cathol
ic, went to church every Sunday, and was conservative by nature, but money was money. For her, a hand job was a service, nothing more, and depending on how cheap (not poor—Westerners were never poor) or generous her client was, she could make anywhere from ten to fifty dollars for a few minutes of work. She could have made even more by offering sex, for which she was often propositioned, but she would not cross that line. She was not a prostitute.
Once she completed her BS in Nursing four years later, she passed the US licensure exam, applied successfully for a green card, and was offered an entry position with New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. She’d been there for three years now, had a mortgage, a car, and enough money in the bank to send hefty sums to her family in Davao on a regular basis, making them the envy of all their friends.
Cherry pulled her eyes from the ground and glanced at the others, relieved to see they had settled down somewhat. Austin was pacing again, but he no longer seemed like a ticking time bomb. Mandy had stopped crying and was staring inward.
Cherry checked her Coca-Cola Swatch and saw that only ten minutes had passed since Steve and Noah had left with Jenny. How long would it take them to find a hospital, explain what was going on, and bring back help? Half an hour? Longer?
A nippy breeze ruffled the nearby reeds and saplings and stirred the mist into searching, serpentine tendrils. Cherry folded her knees to her chest for warmth, wrapped her arms around them—and spotted three flashlight beams bobbing between the trees some fifty yards away.
Chapter 7
“They’re here!”
Poltergeist (1982)
Mandy hurried over to Austin and Cherry to watch the crisscrossing flashlight beams approach. She frowned as an uneasy feeling built in her gut. She told herself there was no reason to be concerned, whoever was out here had come to help. But there was something about random people in a dark, unfamiliar forest that scared her silly.
“Do you think they’re campers?” Mandy said anxiously.
“Out here?” Austin said.
“Maybe they live nearby?” she said. “They heard the crash and are coming to help?”
“Maybe,” Austin said, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“Why else would they be out here?”
“I don’t like this,” Cherry said. “I don’t like this at all.”
Mandy frowned, momentarily despising the Filipina. She wanted to hear that they were safe, that they were fine; she didn’t want to hear fear and paranoia.
Soon the strangers were close enough Mandy could make out the snapping of branches, the crunch of footsteps on dead leaves, the general rustle of disturbed foliage.
“’Lo there?” one of them called.
“Hello,” Austin said.
A few seconds later three men dressed in checkered lumberjack jackets emerged from the gloom of the night into the firelight produced by the burning BMW. Mandy gasped silently in surprise and horror. The slim one in the middle sported stringy black hair, bushy muttonchops, and a handlebar mustache. Despite skin the color and texture of old vellum, and a hooked beak for a nose, he appeared normal enough. The other two, however, might have just escaped from a carny sideshow. The freak on the left had a round moon face, piggish eyes, stood close to seven feet tall, and must have weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred pounds. The freak on the right had misshapen features covered by a jigsaw of wormy white scars and a vacant expression, as though his brains were nothing but mush.
Mandy forced herself not to stare and focused on the middle one, who was visoring his eyes with his hand while he studied the flaming vehicle.
“Good Lord almighty, will ya look at that,” he crowed.
“We had an accident,” Austin said.
“No fooling,” he said. “Anyone hurt?” His eyes fell on Jeff. “Aw, shit. He ain’t dead, is he?”
“No!” Mandy said, shocked by the man’s blunt manner.
He looked at her. His eyes were dark, unreadable. They appraised her from head to toe and lingered on her breasts. “Well, now,” he drawled, “that’s quite an outfit you got on, ma’am.”
“It’s a Halloween costume.”
“I reckoned as much. And a good choice at that.” He turned his attention to Austin. “How about you, Cueball? No costume?”
Austin twitched at the insult. “I took it off.”
“And you, little lady?”
“I didn’t bring one,” Cherry said quietly.
“All Hallows’ Eve, my favorite night of the year, when all the ghoulies come out to play, ain’t that right?” He grinned, revealing a missing front tooth. “Anywho, the name’s Cleavon. What can I do to help y’all?”
“Our friends have already left to get help,” Mandy said. “They’ll be back any minute,” she added purposefully.
“Any minute you say?” Cleavon said to her. “When did they leave?”
“Forty minutes ago,” Mandy lied.
“Forty minutes, huh?”
She nodded.
“And they ain’t back already? Shit, maybe they got lost?”
“Do you live out here?” Austin asked him.
“Over yonder, in fact.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.
“And you wander the woods at night?”
Ignoring the question, Clevon took a few steps toward the BMW and said, “Well knock me down and steal my teeth. It’s a genuine Bimmer, boys! Or was, I should say. So you some uppity rich kids, that right? Where you from?”
“New York,” Austin said.
“The Big Apple! Never been there myself. Always wanted to go, but don’t reckon I’d fit in too good. I’m ’bout as country as a baked bean sandwich. Ain’t that right, boys?”
The four-hundred-pound freak nodded. “Right-o, Cleave.”
“My apologies,” Cleavon said. “That there’s me brother Earl. And that’s me other brother, Floyd. Floyd don’t say much. He only got two speeds: slow and stop. And he don’t hear too good neither unless you shout.” He raised his voice. “Ain’t that right, Floyd?”
Floyd nodded.
“Well?” Cleavon said, smiling expectantly at them.
“Well what?” Austin said.
“Ain’t you gonna introduce yourselves?”
Mandy glanced at Austin and Cherry. She saw her fear reflected in their eyes. Cleavon and his brothers were not just assholes; they were dangerous. But there didn’t seem to be any choice other than to keep Cleavon talking until Steve and Noah returned with help.
“I’m Mandy,” she said.
“Mandy,” Cleavon repeated. “That’s short for Amanda, ain’t it?”
She nodded.
“I like it. Mandy. Suits you.” His eyes floated to her breasts.
“I’m Austin,” Austin said. “And this is Cherry.”
“Austin and Cherry—now those are a coupla fine names as well. Had an uncle named Austin. Sat on the porch all day drinking hooch, his own concoction, from a big ol’ jug. By suppertime he would be drunker than Cooter Brown on the fourth of July.” He smiled his gap-tooth smile at Cherry. “Never knew a Cherry though. The pleasure’s mine, darlin’.”
Cherry looked away from him. Her lips were pressed together in a thin line.
“Well,” Cleavon went on, “now that we’re all fine friends, why don’t y’all tell me what happened? What caused this unfortunate accident?”
“Our friend lost control of the car,” Austin said simply.
Cleavon eyed Jeff. “That the friend, huh? And just lost control, you say?”
“Another car ran him off the road. It was a hearse.”
“A hearse? You sure you don’t need to get your eyes checked, boy?”
“We all saw it,” Mandy said sharply.
Cleavon held up his hands. “Hey, no need to get worked up, darlin’. You say ya’ll saw a meat wagon, ya’ll saw a meat wagon. Now, enough talk. How ’bout we give you a hand bringing your friend there back to the house. We got medicine and enough food to feed the lot of you to your
heart’s content.”
“Like I mentioned,” Mandy said, “our friends went for help. They’ll be back here any minute. But thank you for the offer.”
“And if they got lost? Could be hours ’till they get back. We got a telephone. We’ll call the sheriff. He knows exactly where the ol’ McGrady house is. He’ll be there with an am’blance in fifteen minutes.”
“We’re going to wait here,” Austin said tersely.
“Hey! I ain’t liking your tone, boy,” Cleavon growled. “Didn’t your mama teach you no manners? When someone offers you help, you be gracious.”
“Listen, mister…Cleavon,” Cherry said pleasantly. “We appreciate your offer. We really do. But we can’t move our friend. He has a broken back. Moving him will make his injury worse.”
“Don’t worry, darlin’. We’ll be careful with him.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Austin said, stepping forward.
“I’m ’fraid I have to insist,” Cleavon said. “Boys, get the cripple.”
Floyd and Earl started toward Jeff.
“Don’t you touch him!” Mandy shouted. “His back is broken!”
Austin made to intercept them.
“Hold it right there, Cueball,” Cleavon said, and to Mandy’s horror he produced a monstrous machete which had been hidden beneath his jacket. “I wouldn’t do nothing stupid if I was you.”
Chapter 8
“They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What’s blood for, if not for shedding?”
Candyman (1992)
Austin acted without thinking. He charged Cleavon and jump kicked him in the gut. Caught by surprise, Cleavon didn’t have time to swing the machete. However, the jump kick was uncoordinated and did little more than knock Cleavon backward a few steps while Austin crashed awkwardly to the ground. Before Austin could regain his feet, Cleavon was on him, raising the machete. Austin kicked the psycho in the shins, dropping him to his knees. Austin lunged, driving his shoulder into Cleavon’s chest, knocking him onto his back. He grappled for the machete, but the man wouldn’t let go. Then Cherry appeared beside him, also grappling for the weapon.
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