Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  Steve came swooping from behind the mine cart then, kicking out the legs of the man closest to the exit. Steve stomped the dude on the face and took his torch.

  Jody leveled her gun at the next man closest to her and saw it wasn’t a man at all, but a woman. Well, why not? The psychotic hag was missing most of her front teeth and was frothing at the mouth. Jody did her a favor and shot the rest of her teeth out. Into the pit!

  Of the four assailants remaining, none of them seemed to have the courage to attack. “Oh Great One, save us!” a scrawny guy pleaded.

  Jody leveled the gun toward his face.

  “Jody! Stop it!”

  Jody came to, staring at her old friend Ted.

  Ted was gibbering like an idiot, though. It was Steve’s voice that had brought Jody to her senses. “Jody, don’t. Just leave him. Let’s go.”

  Jody stole a glance left toward Steve and then back to Ted. She could hear groaning and a mass of mud churning over on itself to her right. What had she just done? She relaxed her finger on the trigger and held her free hand up in peace. “Ted, it’s me, Jody. I don’t know what just happened. Let’s get of here and get help. C’mon, we can go together. All of us.”

  Ted stared at her for a long moment, his face twitching and contorting. He shuffled toward Jody tentatively.

  “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.”

  He squinted his eyes shut, twitched again, and when he opened his eyes all humanity was gone from them. “Great One, take me!” he screeched and hurled himself into the pit where the others were twitching and sinking beneath the muck to lie with the creature. At seeing Ted relinquish himself to the pit, the last two torch-wielding assailants followed suit and hurled themselves into oblivion.

  Jody had to will her eyes away from the scene. Steve came to her, the last torch in hand, and pulled her away. Together they grabbed the professor, who still stood in a stupor.

  “C’mon, Professor H. Let’s get out of here while we can.”

  He stared at the pit for a moment—longingly?—but when they tugged on his hands he followed dutifully after them.

  With the torch to light the way, they moved swiftly through the passage back the way they had come, and with each step, Jody felt the seduction of the pit weaken. The professor, too, regained more of his faculties.

  “I saw it,” he muttered. “It had me. That’s why the valley was dammed up, to bury the creature, not flood the mine.”

  “Quiet,” Steve whispered. “Not now.”

  “We’re gonna get out of here alive,” Jody said. If she said it out loud, it became reality. Didn’t it?

  When they reached the side passage, though, they heard more voices echoing down the vertical shaft. It was a cacophony of vowel-less babbling, human tongues twisted into bleating an inhuman language.

  “Fuck, we’re cornered,” Steve hissed, dragging the professor to a halt.

  “We will get out of here alive,” Jody said again, tucking her gun back into her waistband. “This way.”

  She led them down the smaller passage, the undisturbed one she hoped led to Lake Town. The silt on the ground grew deeper and the passage narrower, tapering to the point that they had to hunch forward to proceed. Behind them the voices grew.

  “The torch,” Jody whispered. “Put it out or they’ll see us.”

  “No way.”

  Jody didn’t bother arguing. She snatched the torch out of Steve’s hands and threw it to the ground, where it sputtered out with a hiss.

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “Shut up and grab my hand. Keep hold of the professor.”

  “I’m here still,” the professor said at hearing his name.

  “Shut up, both of you.”

  She found Steve’s hand and pulled him deeper into the passage, blind in the dark, probing in front of her with her elbow and forearm. The passage grew narrower around them, and then came quite suddenly to an end. Jody probed the sloping wall in front of her, feeling only wet mud that crumbled at her touch.

  “What the hell is happening, Jody?”

  “A dead end.” They were screwed. The cave entrance must have collapsed decades before beneath the pressure of the lake water above it. Jody kept probing, desperate for a way out. She found a beam of wood, half buried in the mud. “Your camera,” Jody said. “Take a picture in front of us.”

  “We already tried that. The flash doesn’t stay on long enough to see anything.”

  “Take a picture and we can look at it on the screen.”

  “Of course. I’m an idiot.”

  The flash illuminated the mud walls around them briefly, and then Steve was holding out the LCD screen toward her. The photograph showed the wooden beam she had discovered, collapsed diagonally and covered in mud, barring their way. The photograph also showed several other beams, half-buried near the ground.

  “This has to be the entrance,” Jody said. “Maybe we can push our way through. Stand back.” She probed the mud before her and found the beam again. She dug her fingers into the mud around and behind it, then yanked it toward herself. It budged, allowing her to get a better grip. When she pulled a second time, the beam came loose, along with a small avalanche of mud. She climbed up on the new pile of mud and used the beam of rotting timber like a battering ram, driving it into the mud in front of her. The soil crumbled away, and light leaked in

  “Yes!” she yelped, and drove forward with the beam again, frantic to be free at last. The beam broke through the surface and fresh air and daylight bathed her face. She scrambled toward the opening, filled with elation. “We’re getting out of here,” she said, and then the ground collapsed beneath her and everything went black.

  ***

  When she came to, Steve and the professor were standing over her, pulling away the soil and crumbled planks of timber beneath which she was buried.

  “Jody!” Steve was saying. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, but when she tried to push herself up, her ankle exploded with white hot pain. “Fuuuck, my ankle!”

  “It looks to be broken,” the professor said, hauling the last beam away.

  Jody was trembling and her forehead was already beaded with sweat. Shock, she knew, but she didn’t have time for that shit. She hoisted herself up on to her elbows and peered back the way they came. The tunnel was a gaping, dark wound on the outer edge of the dried-up lake bed. The tree line was no more than thirty feet away, and up the hill somewhere in the trees was the other mine shaft.

  “We have to get out of here,” Jody said. “Whoever was going down the other mine shaft is gonna figure out where we went.”

  As if on cue, gibbering madness echoed toward them from the tunnel.

  “Shit, we’ll have to carry you,” Steve said.

  “No, we won’t get very far that way. You go, get my Blazer and come back. Keys are in the ignition.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes! hurry!”

  Steve scrambled away toward the trees, and Jody reached up to take the professor’s outstretched hand. He hoisted her up and gave her his arm so she could steady herself on her good foot. “Let’s get away from the entrance,” she told him, and began hopping away with his help.

  The gibbering voices were growing louder. Jody tried to hop faster, but that only threw her off-balance, and she instinctively tried to steady herself by putting her bad foot down. She collapsed to the ground with a curse. The professor reached down to help her up again, but the ground rumbled beneath them as the creature in the mine groaned. The sky turned angry and red. It must be smoke from a forest fire, Jody thought at first, but when she spun on the ground to look to the sky in the west, she saw it was a solar eclipse.

  “How the hell?”

  The first of the mad folk stepped foot out of the mine.

  “Nyrlp, flgrtrr,” the professor gurgled above Jody. His eyes went blank and he turned toward the mine.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Jody said. She pulled out the pistol again
and shot toward the professor, peppering his ass with bird shot.

  “Aye-ahh!” He clutched at his bloodied ass-cheeks and spun around to face Jody, once again himself. “What the hell happened?”

  “Help me!” she yelled at him. “They’re coming.”

  How many shots left? She couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered. There were a dozen mindless idiots shambling toward them already, and another stepped out of the mine every moment.

  An engine roared and Jody looked up to see her Blazer barreling out from the trees to slide to a halt in the mud between them and their assailants.

  “Hurry!” Steve yelled, his voice high-pitched and frantic.

  The professor hoisted Jody up and into the passenger seat of the Blazer, then hopped in the back seat.

  “Go!” Jody barked, and Steve punched it, spraying their attackers with four rooster tails of silt and mud.

  Jody turned in her seat to watch the freaks and the mine disappear behind them as they tore ass across the lake bed. They skirted Lake Town, bathed in the red light of the eclipse. True to his word, Steve drove like a champ, straight into the sun as the moon slowly snuffed it out.

  Jody was shivering and numb, exhausted beyond comprehension, but she couldn’t push away what she’d seen and done in that mine. The creature with the membranous eye. How many had she pushed into that eye? It had consumed Ted. And probably Preacher Wilson. He was a blowhard who had turned his mother into a humorless Bible-thumper, but that didn’t mean he was a bad guy. Even Brad Boy had deserved better.

  “You still with us?” Steve asked.

  Jody opened her eyes to see they were driving up out of the lake bed near the dam. The eclipse was full now, directly before them above the canopy of ponderosa pines.

  “I’m here. You can slow down now. I think we’re safe.”

  “Not until we get you to a hospital.”

  “Right, but you’re gonna have to stop first and unlock the front hubs now that we’re out of the mud.”

  Steve frowned at her, but once they were clear of the lake bed and on the dirt road again, he pulled to a stop. “How do I unlock them, exactly?”

  “Just turn the hub switches all the way to the left.”

  Steve hopped out of the Blazer and disappeared from her line of vision as he knelt alongside the driver’s side tire. Movement in the distance caught Jody’s attention and she peered into the canopy of trees along the dirt road.

  “Steve! Get back in here now.”

  Steve was already on the passenger side, unlocking the second hub. “What?”

  “Back in the car. Hurry!”

  Steve scrambled back around the Blazer and into the driver’s seat just as a mob of people emerged from the woods on the dirt road. Hundreds of people from Georgebrook. Not just the local meth-heads and fuckups, but normal people, too. Jody recognized the attendant from the Gas’N’Go from that morning. The gal who worked the teller at her bank. The town librarian. All of them in a daze as they shambled down the dirt road toward Spider Camp and the mine shaft beyond it.

  “No—what are they doing?” Jody whispered.

  “It is the call of the creature in the mine,” the professor said. “It beckons to them, just as it did to us. We have to get away while we still have the will to do so.”

  Several of the shamblers took notice of the Blazer sitting alongside the road and began coming their way.

  “Shit, yes, go!” Jody told Steve. “Nice and slow and hopefully everyone will get out of the way. Everyone lock your doors.”

  Steve put the Blazer in drive and eased forward into the crowd. It was like driving through a herd of cows. They got out of the way, but slowly, some of them only after walking right into the grill of the Blazer. Some of them slapped at the windows, but for the most part they were content to keep walking down the road.

  “Slow and steady,” Jody said, more for herself than anything.

  The crowd began to thin and Steve quickened their pace.

  “I think we’re clear,” he said.

  “No.” Jody grabbed his arm. “Stop. It’s my mother.”

  “What?”

  “I said stop, dammit!”

  He did, and Jody rolled down her window. It was indeed her mother, at the tail end of the pack, wearing a paisley house dress and still in her slippers. “Mom, stop. Get in. It’s me.”

  Her mother tilted her head sideways and came toward the window. “Daughter. Come.” Her eyes were milky and out-of-focus.

  Cold fury filled Jody. She reached out the window and smacked her mother across the face, trying to snap her out of it. Her mother was unfazed.

  “Daughter. Come. To the Lake Town. To be baptized in the warm embrace of mud.”

  “No!” Jody cried out reaching out again, but before she could grab her mother, Steve gunned it and they were speeding away. “No, stop!”

  “I’m sorry,” Steve said, “But she’s gone. We have to get out here.”

  “I’m afraid Steve is right,” the professor said. “There is no salvation for them. Not for any of us. Not after what we’ve seen.”

  “But she’s all I have!” Jody sobbed.

  “You’re all alone now,” the professor said.

  The flatness in his voice cut Jody’s tears short. Was he still himself? Was he back under the control of the ten-armed serpent? Either way, he was right. Jody was alone. Then again, she had been for years, she realized, and she’d survived this long.

  TAXED

  Scott William Taylor

  Chief Larry Delafontaine stood beside Detective Stephens and looked through the one-way glass into the interrogation room at Tommy, sweaty and fidgeting. Larry could feel his revulsion tugging down the corners of his mouth and working in the muscles of his chin, and for the first time in years he was thankful Louisiana still had the death penalty.

  “Has he said anything?” he asked Stephens, who couldn’t take his eyes away from the twenty-seven-year old taxidermist on the other side of the glass.

  “Nothing. Except he did say he’ll only talk to you,” the lanky man shifted his weight.

  “He ask for a lawyer?”

  “No, and thank God, ’cause then this whole f—” Stephens bit his tongue in mid-word and looked down. Larry knew Doug’s new girlfriend hated the crude language used by Atwood County’s entire police force. Some habits are nearly impossible to break.

  “…This whole insane thing would just drag out longer,” Stephens said.

  “Can you do me a favor?” Larry asked as he reached for the interrogation room’s doorknob. “Get me a Diet Coke and two Advils. My knee’s killing me.”

  “Sure thing, Chief. I thought your knee was doing better.”

  “It was, but everything’s fu—” Larry cut short the profane word in a show of solidarity. “Since this morning… well, a lot of things have changed.”

  Larry’s hand was on the doorknob when Stephens said, “I… heard a little about all this at Tommy’s shop from Neil Tarbet. Is it…”

  Larry closed his eyes, trying to shut out the images that mention of “Tommy’s shop” brought up. He fought to keep them buried. “Doug, it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Ever.” Larry hoped that the note in his voice with which he ended the sentence would forestall any further questions.

  “I’ll go get your Coke and Advil.” Stephens left Larry to do his job.

  Larry opened the door and stepped through.

  Tommy started from his chair. “Oh, thank God you’re here!” Tommy said he blurted. Larry motioned him back into his seat. There was a small second table against the wall, near an electrical outlet, and Larry pressed the red button on the tape recorder on top of it.

  “Tommy, you just sit tight.” Larry pulled a cheap, government-issued chair out from the black linoleum table and took a seat across from the younger man. When he spoke again, his tones were measured and constricted. “And Tommy, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. It is taking everything that makes me human to not pull my g
un and blow your damn head off right now. Do you understand?”

  Tommy nodded, his breaths coming his short bursts. His lower jaw twitched and he eyes bore into Larry’s. Larry knew the man across from him was terrified, but he didn’t think it was because of what he’d said. He thought Tommy had brought that fear in with him.

  “I do, sir. But I didn’t do anything! I swear! It wasn’t—”

  Larry held up his hand.

  “Tommy…” Larry took in several deep breaths. “Have you been read your rights and do you understand them?”

  Tommy nodded.

  “Good. Then you just start at the very beginning. Tell me the story, front to back. I’ll stop you if I have questions. Understand?”

  Tommy nodded again.

  “Okay then,” Larry said, and he could feel and the pain that pulsed in his knee begin to be mirrored by an equal sensation in his head.

  ***

  “The beginning,” Tommy muttered, his eyes darting back and forth across the tabletop. “The beginning… I guess it began two nights ago. Pete Johnson and Clyde Flatts just dropped me off—we’d spent some time at Lucy’s Bar. We got home around 2 A.M.”

  “How drunk were you?” Larry asked.

  “Just a little buzzed. I was expecting Dave Stoker to drop off a ram in the morning—he wanted a rush job and was going to pay top dollar so I didn’t want a hangover to slow me down. You can ask Pete and Clyde if you don’t believe me.”

  “I will. Then what?”

  “I got up around 8:30, had breakfast and waited for Dave. Well, I wait for another hour, hour and a half, and he doesn’t show, so then I check the drop-off box to see if he left the ram before I got up.”

  Tommy stopped talking and took several short breaths. His eyes darted around the room as if he expected something to attack him.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Larry saw Tommy’s hands begin to shake and wondered if Tommy was about to confess. If so, Larry wasn’t sure if he was prepared to hear it. “Just give me a second,” Tommy said.

  “Take your time.”

  After a few moments, Tommy spoke again. “I saw that the latch had been tripped so I knew something was there. I thought it must be the ram and I opened the box.