by Del Howison
While I kept him talking I tried to work a small piece of wire into the cuff lock, but I couldn’t get leverage. Behind the killer, Mrs. Hughes had begun to come to. Her eyes were fluttering. The boy, however, still stared wide-eyed, blank. He was in shock. If he didn’t get help soon, he’d crack for good.
The killer was slumped, sitting right in front of me on the filthy floor of the backroom slaughterhouse and all of a sudden, despite the blood, he looked like a big-ass baby sitting there. He was even poking at his knee with the scalpel like a pouting child.
“What’s the matter, Psycho?” I asked. “You got a hunk of that kid’s dad caught in your throat?”
“Nobody never talked to me before,” he said with a straight face. “All they ever do is scream.”
“Well, maybe that’s because you’re killing them.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
I gestured toward Papa Hughes on the table. “You done with that one?”
El Beardo looked over his shoulder at the half-skinless man, then quickly back at me.
“You interrupted me,” he said. “Now he’s spoiled. I should start on the lady or the kid. Kid’s meat’s the best if they haven’t been fed processed sugar their whole lives. Even with it, they’re a better eat than adults.”
The killer looked back over his right shoulder, this time at the woman and child. The woman, Debra Hughes, was fully cognizant of her surroundings now. She stared at the bloody, still-breathing body of her husband. His breathing was hard and fast. She was crying and, even though gagged, she still made a lot of noise. Too much noise, I was afraid. The killer kept looking back at them. I had to do something or he’d start hacking them to bits as well.
I looked around the room. My vision was blurred; my teeth were numb. I was in bad shape. What was I thinking, mixing blues, painkillers, and whiskey? I mean, I did it all the time, but it wasn’t mixing too well with the massive head injury. I was screwed.
I watched the sloppy killer in the Hawaiian pineapple shirt weigh his choices. He looked from me to the woman to the kid, then back to me. I wasn’t sure I was even in the running for the feast, and it was that thought that gave me an idea. A bad one, but an idea nonetheless.
“Hey, Psycho, you got a name?”
He looked at me dumbly. “It’s on the front. Can’t you read, mister?”
“I can read.”
“Says my name on the sign. My paw put it up there right before he passed the business on to me.”
I tried to picture the sign out front. I wasn’t doing too well. Then it came to me. “Junior?”
The killer smiled a big, wide smile and I saw the inside of his mouth. It was a cave of rotten teeth, a fetid tongue, and rancid meat. There were black spots on his tongue and odd sores around the inside of his lips.
“That’s my name,” he said, scratched his face, then added, “Me, my paw, and my grandfather was all Juniors.”
“You don’t say? Was your grampy a people eater, too?
Junior smiled. “Uh huh.”
Suddenly, Baby Huey got up and walked out of the room. Just like that I was alone with the Hughes family.
I shot a look at Debra Hughes. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
She immediately came apart at the seams. “Oh … God!”
She was screaming.
I shook my head.
She stopped.
I looked at the boy. I saw he had been tied with rope.
“You got any slack in those ropes, son?”
He swallowed. “No.”
“Well, work them slowly,” I said. “They’ll give.”
The woman began to shudder. She was gonna blow.
“Keep calm. You’ve got to lay low. You and the boy,” I whispered sharply. “Keep your heads down and eyes closed.”
“My … my husband …”
“Lady, we might be able to see his lungs, but at least they’re moving. We have to hope for the best.”
I heard El Beardo stomping back our way. I took one last glance at the Hugheses and nodded. They bowed their heads nervously.
Junior came in through the swinging doors and stood there like some sort of Cro-Mag on vacation, looking around the slaughterhouse, bobbing his head. I coughed and made sure I caught his attention.
He looked at me and let out a long, greasy fart. It sounded like popcorn going off in a wet sack. His dull eyes stayed dull, but one corner of his lip rose like an excited dog’s leg. I assumed he was grinning.
“What you doing out there?” I asked.
He grunted and walked toward where I was tied on the floor.
“Forgot to lock the door,” he said.
“Afraid customers will come in while you’re eating somebody?”
He leaned down and slugged me so hard my lip split. Then he just kneeled down and waited for me to recover. When I looked at him like what the fuck, he went on.
“I ain’t afraid of anybody,” he spat. “Anybody comes in here unexpected, dies. Plain and simple. Paw always said nobody can tell if they ain’t nobody to tell.”
I raised my eyebrows. It was about all I could muster. I’d guess if there was such a thing, right at that point I was peaking on whatever concoction I’d consumed earlier.
“Too bad,” I muttered. I didn’t really know what I meant.
He seemed to though. He laughed. “Too bad for you, dumb fuck!”
I walked into that one.
While he laughed I worked the cuffs around my wrists. I was fucked up and weak, but I used my numbness to my advantage and pulled hard enough to break my wrists. I hit pay dirt. The pipe moved. Or maybe it was the room. At any rate, something moved.
His laughing turned to a raspy cough, and then he was alternating glances at me and the Hughes woman. But it was the sound from his stomach that worried me most. It was loud, and rumbled. If I had to guess, I’d say the cannibal’s stomach was growling hungrily. Not what you want to hear.
And then he licked his lips, catching a string of dripping saliva that slid off his fuzzy yellow tongue.
He was hungry.
I made my move.
“You look like you need some meat, Junior.”
He looked at me like I understood.
“I need strength,” he said. “I need another soul.”
I slurred just a bit. “Then why don’t you eat me?”
El Beardo went slack-jawed.
“What?”
“I’m the strongest one here. I bet I got a big-ass soul,” I reasoned. “Eat me.”
Junior picked up the scalpel from the table. I hadn’t even noticed he’d placed it down.
“You know a lot about stuff, don’t you?” he asked.
“I get around.”
The cannibal worked his attention back to my leg. He pulled it straight and ripped the slit a bit extra to show more thigh. He pushed away the material and cleared a large section of my flesh for his handiwork.
He placed the scalpel against the meat of my thigh just below the hipbone and slashed about a quarter inch across and into my leg. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth. When he cut me, I screamed, more like a yelp. It was a stinging pain. Even with all the dope in my system, I felt it.
But that cut was just prep. He placed the scalpel down and wiped the inch-wide, inch-deep gash with a wet rag, already stained with somebody else’s blood. Then he reached for what looked like a homemade cheese cutter. It was a length of wire attached between two wooden handles.
God, I thought, this had better work.
The cannibal took the cheese cutter by the handles and pulled the thin wire taut. I tensed up, pulling hard on the cuffs until I felt my wrists bleed. I had a pretty good idea what was coming and I couldn’t help myself.
It took every ounce of my strength not to lash out and kick the fucker in the face. But I couldn’t risk it. I was still cuffed. I might get in a good kick, but he’d have the last laugh. I had to sit and take whatever he dished out.
He took the wire tool to the woun
d he’d made on my leg and pressed the taut steel under the lip of the cut. I braced. The killer pushed down causing the wire to tuck neatly into the gash. It stung so bad I started to shake.
“Now keep still,” the killer said.
And then he yanked!
The wire sliced under the flesh of my thigh fast, like a heated knife through butter, cutting an inch-thick filet of flesh from my leg. It was the most excruciating thing I’d ever felt, but I did my best to stay still.
My eyes and teeth were shut tight, trying to block the searing pain. When I opened my eyes, I saw what I’d been feeling. I saw the killer—Junior—pulling as hard as he could on the handles. He almost had a slab cut off. He was bracing for the final yank.
He pulled one last time and the flap of flesh came loose.
“There!” the killer yelled like he’d achieved something.
I rocked my head. Tears ran in the corners of my eyes. The pain was unbelievable.
Junior tossed aside the bloody tool and carefully handled my strip of flesh. It wobbled and flopped in his hands. It had weight to it. I fought everything I had not to throw up. I was dizzy, nauseous, and my head spun.
In the killer’s hands was about a six-inch-by-three-inch wide flap of my leg. There was a matching-shaped, bleeding wound on my thigh that glistened and bled.
I could hardly think. I craned my neck and tried to talk, but I was squeezing my teeth so hard I couldn’t part them.
Then I got it out; “Now what, Junior?”
“Gonna cook and eat this-here people steak,” he said, staring at the flesh jiggling in his hands.
“Cook it?” I spat. “You some kind of sissy?”
This upset Junior. He almost dropped the bloody slab on the dirty floor.
“What d’ you mean?” he asked, raising his chin defiantly.
“I mean, everybody knows when you cook people you lose all the goodness.” I could hardly speak.
All I wanted to do was scream. All I wanted to do was scream at the top of my lungs and break Junior’s skull open. I pictured myself beating him with a pipe, choking him with my hands, strangling the life out of him. I could almost feel his throat in my hands.
The cannibal was looking at his meat, my skin. He looked as though he was genuinely concerned with what I told him.
“Really?” he asked.
“That’s what I heard.”
Junior grabbed a plate from a shelf and slapped the slab of bloody flesh onto it for further examination. Behind him was a gas stove that he glanced at, in between looking at me and once or twice at the Hugheses, who listened to me and continued to play possum even when they heard me yell.
Between the concussion, the bleeding wound, and the near-overdose, I was hanging on by a thread and I began to doubt my plan would even work. And to boot, it looked like the crazy motherfucker wasn’t going to play along.
Junior poked at the hairy, bloody slab. “You sure? Cuz Paw always taught me to cook what I eat.”
I nodded, trying in vain to hide the pain. “The heat makes the soul leave the meat.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I had no clue.
Junior thought about it for half a second, then placed the dish down and walked to a drawer. He opened it and took out, to my relief, a fork and knife. It was time to eat and time to see if I’d save the day or become the day’s special.
I didn’t want to, but I watched as he sliced a piece of my flesh from the jiggling chunk of thigh. He pinned the edge with the fork and sawed with the knife until he had a small, relatively hairless piece of people meat to taste. It wobbled on the fork as he lifted it to his mouth and shoved it inside.
He chewed on me for a good minute, rolled me in his mouth and then, finally, swallowed with a big, loud gulp. I could almost hear the last of me sliding down his gullet.
He looked around the room in that food-taster sort of manner, then went back to the place for the next slice.
“How am I?” I asked, as sarcastic as I could summon. I was hurting, dizzy.
“Meat’s good,” he said smacking his lips. “Chewy.”
I felt sick. When I looked down, the fish-shaped, oval wound on my leg was bleeding so badly, my leg was drenched and dripping hot gore.
Junior decided he liked me, I guess, because he started slicing up the filet of McDonald on the plate into evenly cut, easy-to-chew strips. I watched him closely as he ate one strip, chewed, then moved on to the next. Each one he chewed, hair, blood, and all, and swallowed without showing any effects.
I glanced at the Hughes boy. His head was down, but I could see movement around his arms. Good boy, I thought, he’s working those ropes.
Junior finished the last of the meat and then licked the plate. I watched him, looking for any signs. He seemed to be acting exactly as he had before … until he didn’t. I saw his eyes flutter, and he sort of swayed as he rubbed his face.
Junior smiled and turned and, as soon as he did, I saw my incredibly stupid plan had worked. I might have the tolerance built up to take a handful of painkillers, pot, and whiskey and live to tell about it, but Junior the cannibal obviously did not.
He was wasted.
Eating me had wasted him.
I was toxic.
Junior stumbled forward, rubbing his face, and laughed. He looked like a big freak. He just wasn’t close enough yet, but it was most definitely kicking time.
“How’s it going there, Junior?” I asked. “Ready for another serving?”
El Beardo Boy laughed again and looked at me like I was his best friend in the whole wide world. I tried to look pleasant, but I was holding on to consciousness like a redneck gripping a greased pig. I was gonna slip any second. I had to egg him on.
“Come on, big boy,” I said. “You can eat more than just one little piece of me!”
Junior laughed and then picked up the fork and knife. He was swaying erratically now, and his eyes were wet and half-closed and appeared to be getting worse by the second. He even tried to rub his face again and almost stabbed himself in the eye.
I laid there until he got close. When he did, I opened my eyes wide and stared him down before delivering my right, uneaten leg so hard into his testicles that I actually heard an audible crunching sound. He doubled over, dropping the knife and fork. The knife slashed my open leg wound as it fell.
Hurt. So bad.
Junior hit the floor in front of me. He was balled up and vomiting foam. I looked at the Hughes boy. His head and his mother’s were up. The kid had gotten one hand free and he was working on the other. I gave him a wink.
“You two might want to close your eyes again.” I said raising my leg into the air above Junior’s head on the ground.
“Don’t!”
I stopped. Looked up.
The Hughes boy had freed himself. He was frantically pulling the last of the rope off himself. I put my leg down.
I watched as the Hughes boy walked across the slaughterhouse to his father on the slab and put his head barely above the draining table. Nothing can describe the pain in the boy’s eyes as he discovered his dad had finally passed. His exposed lungs were no longer moving.
The kid’s expression changed from sorrow to pissed in less time than I’d ever seen, and I’d seen it plenty. He glared at the killer rolling on the floor, then at the assortment of tools.
He chose a small hammer-ax combo deal that looked like something for cutting bone, and then walked over and stood over Junior, who was unaware of everything going down around him, except he was fucked up and his balls were crushed. Within minutes, Junior’s head would be added to the crushed list, too.
“Hey, kid,” I muttered.
The boy looked at me. His eyes were blank rage. “Yeah?”
“You sure you want to do that?” I said. “I can take care of it if you don’t want to.”
The kid slammed the blunt end of the tool down onto Junior’s skull so hard, his sandals and bloody feet kicked up.
The kid said
, “I’m sure.”
Even if I could have, I don’t think I would have stopped the kid. He was working out what would’ve turned into a lifetime of rage right there on the scene.
It took about a dozen equally hard whacks until the cannibal stopped moving. His head was pulp and hair. The Hughes kid just let the tool fall from his hand. He was done. He had his vengeance.
The boy’s eyes cooled and he came over to me. He saw the cuff, then without asking checked the dead killer’s pockets and came out with the keys. He unlocked the cuffs. My hands came free.
I didn’t—or rather couldn’t—get up right away, so I sat there waiting for the feeling to come back in my hands while the boy untied his mother.
* * *
And that was that. Case fucking closed.
I stuck around long enough to make sure the remains of the Hughes family were okay. I covered the father’s body and walked them out front where they wouldn’t have to look at the bodies.
Then I cleared the cash register for my pay. I made forty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. It would barely cover gas.
I didn’t stick around for the cops. What good would it do? The freak was dead. The only remaining question was how the fuck did this psycho family exist off the main highway all these years without getting checked out?
Like I said, cops are retarded. They don’t see what’s right in front of them because they don’t want to believe how bad things can get.
It’s a big, dark, scary world out there as it is. Can you imagine what it would be like if they believed in monsters? You’d think they would know. Some of the worst are human.
THE DIVING GIRL
RICHARD LAYMON
I NEVER WOULD’VE known she was there, but last night I found myself unable to sleep and I had a story deadline coming up. So at about midnight, I walked through the darkness from my house to my brand-new garage, unlocked its side door, turned on a light, and climbed the stairs to my office.
The office, though large, was nearly airtight. Open or shut the door, and a small suction of air disturbs window blinds twenty-five feet away. Being so well sealed, it was also uncommonly quiet.
