Weasel stared at his boots. “I know I fucked up, Cleave, and I said I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, huh? They get to town, if Lonnie don’t stop them and they get to town…” He shook his head. He wasn’t going to entertain that thought right now. “Jess, you bring the fire extinguisher?”
“Ayuh. On the back seat.”
“Weasel, go put out the fire. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yeah, Cleave.” He started toward the burning car.
“You gonna put it out with your fuckin’ hands? Get the extinguisher!”
Weasel blushed. “Right, Cleave.” He opened the back door, grabbed the red fire extinguisher, and trotted toward the burning car.
“That boy got about as much sense as God gave a goose,” Cleavon muttered.
“Ayuh,” Jesse said, though he was still looking at the three bodies. Given the hungry glint in his eyes, Cleavon suspected he was looking more at Cherry than the other two. Sprawled how she was, her denim skirt pushed up her thighs, she was showing more than leg.
Just then Earl and Floyd emerged from the forest, their flashlights pointed at the ground ahead of them, their heads lowered. They knew they were in trouble and trying to play ostrich. Fucking retards.
“Earl!” Cleavon shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get your ass over here.”
“The hell they doing in the woods?” Jesse said.
“Looking for the one that got away.”
Jesse raised his eyebrows. “The one that got away?”
“I had the bitch by the throat, I had her, then she goes and kicks me right where it hurts and got away.”
“Shit, Cleave, how we gonna find her?”
“We’re not, not now,” he said. “Where she gonna go? It’s the others we need to think about right now. We gotta deal with them first. Then we can worry about finding the bitch.”
Earl approached in his lumbering size-sixteen-boot gait, red-faced and out of breath. Floyd was behind him, also huffing and puffing. Unless you gave Floyd a direct order—one he could understand, mind you—he’d simply follow Earl everywhere.
“We couldn’t find her, Cleave,” Earl said shyly, staring at his boots. “She took off like a rabbit, and we couldn’t find her. If you didn’t let her go, if you didn’t do that, we woulda had her, we woulda had everyone. Why’d you let her go, Cleave? She’s nothing but a girl.”
Cleavon wanted to kick Earl in the nuts and see how quickly he reacted afterward, but he didn’t dare. Earl had a temper like you’d never seen. You get him worked up, you better be faster than a striped-ass ape. It wasn’t that Earl got it in his head to kill you; he simply might do it unintentionally. He didn’t realize his own strength, or if he did, he forgot about it when he got worked up and emotional.
Back when Cleavon was twenty or thereabouts he’d been feuding with Earl over some fucking thing and had gone into Earl’s room and took his pet mouse from the aquarium and cut off the thing’s head with a straight razor. Earl, only fifteen but already huge, caught Cleavon red-handed and went crazy, tossing the bed out of the way to get at him. He slammed Cleavon against the wall hard enough to knock all the pictures to the floor. Then he heaved Cleavon up like he weighed nothing and launched him straight out the second-floor window. Luckily it had been winter then, and a couple feet of snowfall had cushioned Cleavon’s fall. Still, he’d broken his left arm and split open his chin against his knee. When Cleavon came back from the doctor’s with a cast on his arm and stitches in his chin, Earl had been profusely apologetic, said he hadn’t meant to hurt him, wouldn’t do it again. Since then he had lost his temper only a few other times. This wasn’t due to discipline on his part as much as everybody else having the good sense not to provoke him. You could call Earl a shithead all you wanted, but you didn’t go kicking him in the nuts, no matter how much he was smarting off, not if you wanted to be walking the next day.
“Shut your yabbering and listen to me, Earl,” Cleavon said, feeling as though time was getting away from them all too fast. “You, Floyd, and Weasel are going to take those three there back to the house. Then you come back here with the wrecker and get what’s left of the bimmer to the garage. You got that?”
“Sure, Cleave. That’s easy. And back at the house, can I, I mean, I’ve been thinking, and I’m wondering, I know you’re gonna say no—”
“Spit it out, man!”
“Can I give the bucks to Toad and Trapper.”
Cleavon stared at him. “To your snakes?”
“Can I, Cleave, please? They just shed, they’re real hungry—”
“Judas Priest! You must be dumber than you look! There ain’t no way those snakes can eat a full-grown man.”
“Sure they can, Cleave, they can easy. Trapper’s twenty-six feet now. Toad’s only a bit shorter, I just measured them last month. They can eat the bucks easy.”
Cleavon frowned, thinking about that. They were damn big snakes. Monsters. If they could eat fully grown humans, well, that would be two less graves to dig.
“Also,” Earl went on, “it’d mean they don’t need to eat no rabbits for a couple months, and more rabbits equals more money for us, that’s what you always say—”
“All right, all right, enough yabbering, for fuck’s sake! You wanna feed baldy and the cripple to your snakes, feed them to your snakes. Just don’t lay a hand on the girl. That means no ‘playing’ with her either. I swear to God, Earl, I find one mark on her when I get back, I don’t know, but I’ll tell Spence it was you this time, no more covering, and he’ll kick you out of the club forever. You got that, Earl?”
Earl nodded solemnly. “I won’t touch her, Cleave. I promise.”
“Your promise ain’t worth shit,” Cleavon said. “You just remember, you touch her, no more does, never.” He turned to Jesse. “C’mon.”
They climbed in the cab of the El Camino just as a light rain began to fall, and within moments they were speeding north along Stanford Road, on their way to Lonnie’s place.
Chapter 13
“Be afraid… Be very afraid.”
The Fly (1986)
When Jenny came around on the back seat of Noah’s Jeep, she couldn’t make out whether what she was hearing was animal or human. It took her a good fuzzy three or four seconds to realize it was the latter—the warbling, forlorn cries of a man suffering great anguish. Thinking of Jeff, his broken back, she sat up quickly and cried out herself as a bomb seemed to go off inside her head. She moaned and sank back in the seat, afraid to move for fear of setting off another bomb. She remained like this, stationary, until the pain receded and her vision cleared.
The horrible wails, she noticed, had ceased. She leaned forward gingerly and peered through the rain-specked windshield. Steve stood next to Noah on the veranda of some house. A grimy little man pushed between them and stomped down the porch steps. Jenny barely had time to wonder who he was before he reached into the car parked next to the Jeep, retrieved a rifle, and aimed it at Noah.
Jenny didn’t scream a warning, didn’t jump out of the Jeep and tackle the man from behind. She didn’t do any of this because everything inside her had ceased to work. Fear and confusion and disbelief had shut her down, made her a spectator in what was about to play out.
The man fired the rifle. The report was a toneless bang, like a firecracker. Noah collapsed. Steve shouted his name. The man started toward them.
Jenny broke her paralysis and fumbled with the door handle. She thrust the door open and fell out of the vehicle, landing on her hands and knees on the damp gravel driveway. The air reeked of cordite smoke. Light raindrops plinked off the nape of her neck. For a split second she considered turning toward the road and fleeing, running as fast and far as she could, because she didn’t know what was going on here, only that it was bad, really bad, and Noah might be dead and she might be too if she stuck around. Yet even as she contemplated this she was scrambling forward. She hit the porch steps on all fours and used the banister to pull herself to
her feet.
The man had stopped a few feet ahead of her, oblivious to her presence, rifle pointed at Steve. He was saying something, but Jenny didn’t know what, couldn’t make sense of words right then, and it didn’t matter, because he was about to shoot Steve in cold blood.
“No!” she cried, throwing herself at the back of the man. She grabbed him by the shoulders and used her weight to drag him backward off balance. The rifle swung skyward as he fired. The bullet spit a chunk of wood from the porch roof.
Jenny crashed to her side. The man came down on top of her. He elbowed her in the gut, knocking her down the steps. She brought her arms up to protect her head, but still smacked her cheek against one tread hard enough to see stars and taste blood in her mouth. At the bottom she rose on her knees, expecting to hear another gunshot and to feel a round tear through her.
Instead she found Steve grappling with the grimy little man for the rifle. Bellowing like a caveman, Steve tore the gun free, shoved the barrel into the man’s stomach, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet passed straight through the man, exiting his back in a jet of blood. The man clutched his gut and fell facefirst to the deck.
Jenny scrambled up the steps toward Steve. He jerked the rifle at her. His eyes were glassy and sightless, like a doll’s, empty of whatever made him him.
“Steve! It’s me! Jenny!”
Steve returned his attention to the now dead man, who lay on his stomach, blood pooling around him. He tossed the rifle away, as if it had burned him.
“He killed Noah,” he said softly.
Jenny glanced at Noah, crumpled against the wall, his head bowed against his chest, as if he were snoozing. But he’d never be snoozing again, would he? He’d never be doing anything again. She hadn’t known any of Steve’s friends well, had met them for the first time this evening, but Noah had seemed most normal of the bunch. Jeff was a shmuck who thought he was God’s gift to women. Austin was immature, and from what Steve had told her, a borderline alcoholic. Mandy was funny but an airhead. And Cherry, well, she was named “Cherry” and dressed like a prostitute to boot. It was only Noah—soft spoken, dark, brooding, Noah—whom she had thought she would be happy getting to know better in the future, especially if he found a nice girlfriend and the four of them could double date.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” she asked, the words coming out wooden.
“The fucker shot him right in the forehead.” He drove a foot into the man’s side.
The man groaned.
“He’s alive!” Jenny said, and felt his neck for a pulse. “Steve, he’s alive!” She slipped her hands beneath the arm closest to her and flipped the man onto his back. His red T-shirt was saturated with blood. “Give me your pullover.”
“Why?”
“To stop the bleeding!”
Steve came back from wherever he’d been. “Stop the bleeding?” His brow knit. “Let him bleed! Fuck, Jen! He killed Noah! He tried to kill us!”
“You’re a medical student, Steve. You have a duty to—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit.”
“You want to have his death on your hands? Is that what you want?”
“It was self-defense.”
“That’s not what I meant. Christ, Steve!” She tugged her black elastic top over her head. She had nothing on beneath but her bra. The cool air bit her bare skin.
“Okay, Jesus, okay, Jen, here…” Steve removed his pullover and held it out for her.
She put her top back on, accepted the pullover, and pressed it against the man’s abdomen. “This is only going to give him a bit more time. You have to go call an ambulance.”
“There’s no phone.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Noah and I already checked. That’s what started all this…” He shook his head. “Anyway, we checked. And the kid said they didn’t have one—”
“The kid? Where—”
“He’s dead. It was an accident.”
Jenny felt as if she’d been slapped. A dead child? But she didn’t have time to wonder about this. The medical student inside her had taken over. The man before her was still alive. He could still be saved. He was the priority. It was her duty to help him.
“Get Noah’s keys,” she said. “We’ll drive him to the hospital ourselves. We’ll tell them about this child, and Jeff, and— Jesus, just get the keys!”
Nodding, Steve stood and said, “Oh shit.”
“What?” But she saw what he did.
A car had turned off the highway and was bumping down the driveway toward them in one heck of a hurry.
Steve picked up the rifle and held it across his chest so it was clearly visible. Jenny was asking him what he was doing. He wasn’t listening. Every instinct in his body was telling him that this wasn’t right, that he was in danger. He couldn’t say why this might be the case, not right then, not keyed up on adrenaline and stressed out of his mind with horror and grief. But now was not the time to question his instincts.
The approaching vehicle sported the roofline of a sedan and the flatbed of a pickup. It skidded to a halt behind the Jeep and Buick. Both front doors opened and two men emerged. The driver was bookish and harmless looking, and Steve might have let down his guard had it not been for the other man. He was tall, maybe six feet. Beneath shoulder-length greasy black hair he had a hard, no-bullshit face, and beneath a protruding brow he had hard, no-bullshit eyes to match. The muttonchops and handlebar mustache shouted “redneck,” and he might have been a comical stereotype had he not been so…hard. That was the word that kept coming back to Steve. Hard.
Steve tightened his grip on the rifle.
“Jesus Mary!” the bookish man exclaimed. “Lonnie? That Lonnie? You shot Lonnie, you sumbitch!”
“Who are you?” Steve demanded.
“Who’m I? Who’m I? You shot Lonnie, you motherfucker!”
The hard man held up his hand, signaling the other to calm down. “We’re from next door,” he said. His manner wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t angry or disapproving either. It was like a cop’s: cool but alert, aloof but calculating. “We heard the gunshot, came to see what happened. He dead?”
“He’s alive,” Jenny said. “He needs to get to the hospital.”
“Right-o.” He took a step forward.
Steve pointed the rifle at him. “Stop.”
The man stopped.
“Steve!” Jenny said. “They can help!”
“Jenny, get inside.”
“Steve—”
“Get inside!”
“Whoa there,” the hard man said. “That’s no way to speak to a lady.”
“How many gunshots did you hear?”
The man didn’t smile, not quite, but his face twitched, as if he were smiling to himself, and Steve knew right then it didn’t matter the answer he gave, he was dangerous. The man’s eyes flicked from Noah to the man named Lonnie and he said, “Two.”
“Jenny, get inside,” Steve repeated.
This time she didn’t argue. She stood and backed up slowly. Steve backed up also.
“Now, say,” the hard man said. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know who you are or why you’re here,” Steve said, “but you come any closer, I’ll shoot you.” He pulled the stock tighter against his shoulder.
“Hey, okay, take it easy—”
Stumbling backward across the threshold into the house, Steve slammed the front door shut, flicked the thumblock, and shot the bolt.
Chapter 14
“Good Ash, bad Ash. I’m the guy with the gun.”
Army of Darkness (1992)
Beetle turned off the shower taps and dried himself with the towel he’d draped over the curtain rod. He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped over the lip of the bathtub. Steam had turned the mirror above the sink opaque. He cleared a circle with his hand to view his reflection. He ran his fingers over a few of the shrapnel scars that tattooed his chest and right shoulder. He hated the sight
of them, the feel of them. They reminded him that he should have died with the rest of his platoon on the beach in Grenada. He wished he had too. Sarah would have remembered him fondly, with love. She would not have grown to hate him. They would have avoided all the pain and suffering of the last two years.
It could have been different, of course—Grenada, his life with Sarah, everything. If the chopper hadn’t missed the designated beach drop-off in front of the university campus, if it hadn’t set down hundreds of yards away in the middle of enemy territory, the mission to rescue the American students could have gone as planned. But that was the thing with life: there were no second chances, no rewinding time.
Burt Jackson and Big Dave died within seconds of each other. Small arms fire erased their faces, flinging them to the ground and knocking off their helmets. Shortly after this a mortar round blew Oklahoma Eddy to confetti. The detonation was close enough to Beetle it charged the air around him and splattered him with Eddy’s blood and guts.
The rest of the platoon was slaughtered in a similar fashion. In the chaos and confusion only Beetle and two other Rangers made it to the shanties beyond the shoreline, where they escaped into the zigzag of back streets and hunkered down in a derelict café. Otter, an anti-tank gunner, had been shot in the back, Pips, a sniper, in the leg. Beetle put pressure on Pip’s wound and told him he was going to be okay, lies, he knew, because the bullet had severed a main artery or vein. Pips died listening to those lies a few minutes later. Knowing Otter was next if he didn’t receive proper medical attention, Beetle set off on his own to the nearby abandoned Russian Embassy in the hopes of finding a two-way radiotelephone. He killed two Cuban soldiers he came across with his bare hands so as not to raise an alarm and reached the embassy undetected. Inside he discovered the power was out and retrieved a first-aid kit as consolation. While leaving he turned a corner and bumped chest-to-chest into a lone Russian diplomat.
Beetle recognized him immediately. The day before the man had driven alone to Point Salines to deliver an official message from his government to the senior American commander at the recently captured airfield. Beetle and another Ranger had searched him and his car. He had been polite and respectful and thanked them when they finished their search and handed him back his wallet, inside of which he carried a photograph of two daughters, one attractive, the other not so much.
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