Treasure Chest

by Adam Bennett

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ZOMBIE PIRATE PUBLISHING

  THE COLLAPSAR DIRECTIVE: A Science Fiction Anthology

  RELATIONSHIP ADD VICE: A Thrilling Mashup of Romance and Crime

  FULL METAL HORROR: A Monstrous Anthology

  PHUKET TATTOO: Crazy Tales of Far Away Places

  WITCHES VS WIZARDS: A Fantasy Anthology

  WORLD WAR FOUR: A Science Fiction Anthology

  FLASH FICTION ADDICTION: 101 Short Short Stories

  FULL METAL HORROR 2: A Bloodstained Anthology

  SCIENCE FICTION DOUBLE FEATURE: Phosphorus & Into The Eye

  GRIEVOUS BODILY HARM: A Hardboiled Anthology

  COMING SOON

  CLOCKWORK DRAGONS: A Fantasypunk Anthology (Jan 15th, 2020) (Preorders available)

  AND MAN GREW PROUD: Dystopian Novelettes (March 1st. 2020)

  RAYGUN RETRO: A Scifi Anthology (May 1st, 2020)

  SELECTED SHORT STORIES

  Edited By

  Sam M. Phillips and Adam Bennett

  All characters, locations, events, and science depicted in TREASURE CHEST are fictional. Any resemblance to real life locations, events, or any person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

  Cover Art by Adam Bennett

  TREASURE CHEST Logo by Adam Bennett

  Zombie Pirate Publishing Logo by Zoe Maxwell

  Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.

  - Captain Jack Sparrow

  CONTENTS

  Bubbles in the Drina - Blake Jessop

  Cœur de Dieu Mécanique - Lannah Marshall

  The Captain's Dinner - Shawn M. Klimek

  Mandy Villanova Loves her Work - Mel Lee Newmin

  The Hunters - Sam M. Phillips

  The Butcher of Blengarth - David Bowmore

  Jackson's Revenge - Adam Bennett

  The Seance of Madame Moreau - Jonathan Inbody

  Moon Shrine - Rich Rurshell

  Gums - Daniel Craig Roche

  Dude, Where's My Dong? - Laurel Bucholz

  The Confluence - Pat Woods

  Associate Boogeyman - Brandon Scott

  The Pain of Responsibility - P. A. O'Neil

  Run - M. W. Brown

  Gotcha! - Dan Combs

  Pastrami - Don Shore

  Joey - James Pyles

  The Flat Cap - Isabella Fox

  Infestation - Brian MacGowan

  Bubbles in the Drina

  Blake Jessop

  From Serbia With Love

  When I wake up I’m cold. Really cold. I grew up in Montreal, so I know what a winter chill is. This is not that. I played ice hockey all the way to Junior A, so I’ve taken an ice bath before. That is what this is. An ice bath in a hotel. Somewhere in Serbia. I have a headache, but it’s not from the cold. That’s just a hangover.

  I try standing up. My limbs are as numb as tree branches. The icy water is a little pink. I stagger out of the tub to the sink and look at myself in the mirror. I look like shit. The mirror looks like shit, like no one knows what Windex is in Serbia. I try to remember what I was doing before I blacked out. Drinking, obviously. With Uncle Vlado.

  My stomach hurts. I look down. I have a four inch incision running like a ruler from down below my belly button sideways toward my ribs. It’s neatly done and closed with stitches. It’s not bleeding. Now I feel cold on the inside, too. Nausea sloshes around inside me like the icy water in the tub. I’m naked. There’s a smell in the other room. Somebody is frying meat.

  If this had happened to me last week, before I came to Belgrade, I would have lost my shit. Cried, screamed, I don’t know. Right now I feel weirdly numb. This is what’s happening. I guess I have to deal with it.

  I pull the bar off the towel rack and walk into the hotel room with my dick hanging out. Vlado is cooking what smells like kidneys on the little electric hotplate.

  “What the fuck?” I say in what I want to be a tough voice, but is probably just scared. Vlado and his guys look up at me with their hard, angular Slavic faces. Toma forks up a piece of frying meat and pops it into his mouth. He chews really, really slowly. I touch my stomach and cough like I’m going to throw up. That’s finally too much and someone smirks. In about five seconds they’re all killing themselves laughing.

  “You should see the look on your face, Paul!” Vlado says, supporting himself on his knees, tears leaking out of his eyes.

  “You didn’t take my kidney?” I say. My head swims.

  “Of course not,” Valdo says, “what do you think we are, animals? You’re Neda’s boyfriend, we wouldn’t do that. Your problem is that life is a thing you take too serious. You need to relax. Life is not worth anything.”

  The guys crack open a bottle of Slivovitz, the local plum brandy that Neda warned me about, and start pouring shots.

  “Now,” Vlado says, “if you are feeling better. We can start drinking.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  To Serbia With Love

  To clarify, I’m not actually Neda’s boyfriend. I am so in love with her it makes my guts churn, but that’s not the point. I’m here to cover for her.

  Back in Canada, I intern at a video game company. That job pays nothing, so I work in a bar three nights a week to make enough money to eat. I met Neda there. She moonlights as a waitress for basically the same reason I do.

  The reason I fell in love with her, apart from how pretty her eyes are, is something she said. One night we were closing the bar after a long shift, the kind that makes you wonder how humans survived long enough to build bars and the roads you need to get to them. The bartender and I were joking around about how pointless the whole industry was.

  “People aren’t that bad, Paul,” he said.

  “Yeah they are,” I told him, “this place is proof we live in a cruel universe ruled only by entropy and heat death.”

  Neda overheard us. She speaks both Serbian and French better than English, so it’s always hard to tell if she gets the joke. Her deep black eyes filled with emotion and she clasped her hands together.

  “No,” she told us, “life is beautiful and every single person is precious.”

  We all looked at one another.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “No,” Neda laughed, “life means nothing and everyone is shit.”

  She said it, and tossed her dark hair, and I was in trouble. I didn’t know she was gay at the time, but I caught on pretty quick. She makes it hard to miss. All I had to do was add her on Facebook and look at the pictures. Neda with a pretty girl. Neda with her top off and a different girl painting a political slogan on her chest. Neda getting arrested at the F1 race for violently protesting the sex trade.

  The result was that even though she’s dusky-skinned and beautiful, Neda was so immediately gay that there was never any tension between us. I got to know her without that weight. Women must get unbelievably irritated by romantic overtones. I learned it cuts both ways. Without the baggage of wondering whether she’d sleep with me, I started loving who she was, not just what she looked like.

  I fell hard enough that when she told me she was going back to Serbia I felt queasy. I felt better when she told me it was a vacation, that she wanted to find an old school friend named Anja, and that she was worried her family would find out she’s a lesbian. The internet is patchy over there and none of her family is on social media. Almost as a joke, I offered to take the trip with her and pretend to be her Canadian boyfr
iend. She thought about it for a few seconds.

  “That’s a good idea, let’s book the ticket.”

  So we flew to Serbia. The whole thing felt like a dream. She fell asleep on my shoulder on the trans-Atlantic flight.

  The first night at the Vilina Vlas, our hotel on the Drina, she told me about her family. How her parents were killed in the war and it was mostly aunts and cousins. And her Uncle Vlado. That was my responsibility; convince him his niece was straight, and that I was her nice Canadian boyfriend. Maybe do a little drinking to bond. Visit the family farm and meet the horse Neda took care of as a teenager. Suck up to his best friend Toma, the sketchy guy with the tattoo shop. I felt like she was letting me into her world. Like some kind of barrier had dropped between us.

  That night I tried to kiss her. I’m not proud of it. It didn’t go well. She smacked me in the face and started screaming at me. When the girl gets angry, she really gets volcanic. I already knew this. She’s a FEMEN activist, and she’s been arrested more often in the twelve months I’ve known her than I’ve had conversations with the police in my entire life. I went to sleep on the couch with the distant murmur of the river flowing through the window.

  Hello, I am Vlado

  The first time we meet, Uncle Vlado takes me out drinking. Neda wanted to run around the city looking for Anja, and I’m her alibi. Not why I want to be here, but it’s why I’m here.

  Vlado is a big man with dark eyes and stubbly white hair and a belly that’s going to fat. Neda kisses him on the cheek and I get into his ancient black Mercedes.

  “It is good to meet you, Paul, I am Vlado. I am happy Neda has a man. You are not Serbian, but that is fine; for a while there we thought Neda was a queer.”

  I swallow. His English is good, though, so that’s something.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I know this is very common over there in Canada. Like your prime minister who is a—” Vlado searches for an English word and can’t find it. “You know. Lezbača.”

  “Sure.” I don’t know what that means, but probably nothing nice. While we drive around the outskirts of Belgrade I tell Vlado an almost entirely true story about my relationship with his niece. The longer I speak, the more truth I tell. Vlado is a big guy, and he has that gut, but his arms are still wiry and he has the dark eyes of a person who would do anything. I recognise them. Neda has them too.

  “Do you love her?” He asks casually as we drive. He turns his eyes to me at the same time he takes a hairpin corner with a sheer drop to a valley on one side. I wonder how far down it is to the picturesque trees while my stomach tries to crawl up my throat.

  “Well,” I say and pause. Vlado’s ancient Mercedes squeals as it takes the corner and weight comes off the right side wheels. We scream past a transport truck that would have killed us if we’d been going any slower and met it in the middle of the turn. Vlado is still looking at me.

  “I do. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. It’s complicated, but I took one look at her and knew I was in trouble.”

  “Good,” Vlado says, “it is good she has a man in her life. Still, for eating pussy like Olympics, you ask around Belgrade. We know what the time is.”

  “Okay,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

  Things don’t get any more normal when we get to dinner, which is simple sausage sandwiches the locals call ćevapi, and then start drinking. Neda warned me this would happen. I’m not much of a drinker, but if you work in the bar industry long enough you learn how to keep up. As we roll up to whichever sketchy Serbian dive Vlado has chosen for us to bond in, my cell phone rings.

  It’s almost eleven pm, so my boss at the video game company is probably just ending his day. It figures he would call to give me shit while I’m on vacation. The phone keeps ringing.

  “Who is calling?” Vlado asks.

  “My boss.”

  “At the bar?”

  “No, my other job, a company called CoreSoft. They make video games for mobile phones.”

  “Why is he calling on your vacation? Does he pay you to deal with his shit as late as this?”

  “It’s an internship; he doesn’t pay me at all,” I say, and know I’ve made a mistake. Vlado gets a look on his face that makes me feel like he’s sizing up a puppy who’s been pissing on his carpet. The phone rings again, stops. Vlado scowls at it for a change, which is a relief.

  “I know guys like this. He talks a lot but he can’t pour piss out of my boot if I write instructions on the heel. I will show you how to deal with him, then we can be drinking. Give me your phone.”

  “Vlado, I don’t think you need to talk to him.”

  “Give me your fucking phone,” Vlado says, and turns his deadly black eyes on me. I give him my phone.

  “What is his name?” Vlado says, scrolling through my contacts.

  “Pierre Sevigny-Hernandez.”

  “What?” Vlado says, “What the fuck kind of asshole name is that?”

  “His father is Argentinian. He’s pretty French Canadian, though.”

  “Argent– what the fuck. This guy?” Vlado shows me the caller ID picture. He’s right: Pierre does look like an asshole.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Okay,” Vlado says, and puts the phone to his ear. “Yes. Hello, this is Vlado; I am calling for my friend Paul. Yes. What do you mean why did I call you in your car? Because that’s where you are. What? I don’t give a fuck. This is business.”

  There’s angry buzzing from the phone, Vlado holds it away from his ear.

  “This guy, you should not work for him,” Vlado says. More buzzing comes out of the phone and Vlado loses his patience. He starts yelling. “Okay, are you done? Now listen you nig-nog pindo motherfucker. Do you ever lie awake at night and wonder why you are alive? There is no reason. The best part of you dried on your mother’s leg. So, if you ever phone Paul any more shit, I will fuck your dick while you fuck your mother. Do you understand? No. Listen, I will fucking come for you, and then it is bite the pillow, peškir, Vlado goes in dry. You will be searching for your children with a fucking Geiger counter, no? Okay, good. Thank you. Yes, I am Vlado.”

  He hangs up and hand me my phone.

  “This is not a good man,” Vlado says. I’m having a hard time processing what I just heard.

  “He’s still my boss,” I say. Maybe not anymore, though. Not after that.

  “Fuck him. You should not let a man like this control you in your life. Better to play football in a minefield. At least then you have fun before you lose your balls. Do you understand? Now, let us drink like men.”

  In hindsight, that was why Vlado phoned Toma and got him and the rest of his friends to dunk me in the tub after I passed out. I think Vlado was trying to teach me a lesson. An insane, incoherent Serbian lesson, but still a lesson. When he drops me off he gives Neda a peck on the cheek. She asks him about her horse. Neither of us mentions the kidney thing. My underwear is still a little damp.

  Neda and I spend the day taking in the sights around Belgrade. She just shows me around, like I didn’t creep her out last night, and I bask in the illusion that we’re a couple. This used to cause me a lot of anxiety and happiness at the same time. I don’t feel either so much anymore. Like it’s a hangover that’s going away. My hangover is going away, but this is something else again. The sky is as blue as I’ve ever seen a sky and Belgrade is beautiful. All stone and ancient bridges and bomb damage you need a local to point out to you.

  It’s Thursday. Tomorrow I’m supposed to go hang out with Uncle Vlado at the farm. Neda and I talk. To stop her speaking giddily about Anja and her fucking horse and other things she loves that aren’t me, I apologize for kissing her, or trying to.

  “I misunderstood what was happening. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” she says, “have you got your shit straight?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and find that I do. The angst is gone. There’s a little ache, but I can live with that, and I still li
ke her. I still want to be here.

  “So, what do you think of my Uncle Vlado?” she asks.

  “Well, he’s a crazy, homophobic racist,” I say, “but I like him. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yes,” Neda says seriously, “that is my Uncle Vlado. He’s not so bad, even when he is bad.”

  “I think he called Justin Trudeau a lesbian.”

  “You’re still spending the weekend with him,” she says.

  “Sure, no problem. That’s why I’m here. You go find Anja.”

  “Are you okay, Paul?” She asks this very directly. Her eyes are as black and deep as the river. I can see why I fell in love with her. I don’t blame myself, and finally see my way clear to not blaming her, either. It’s better to leave some things behind.

  “Sure,” I tell her.

  Ćevapi on the Drina

  While Neda hunts down the girl she came here to find, I’m going to spend the weekend with Vlado at the family farm. I’m covering for her while she finds love. Not why I want to be here, but it’s one of the reasons I’m here. Vlado picks me up in the Balkan mafia mobile.

  “I have a hangover like someone shit in my mouth,” Vlado says, “how are you?”

  “About the same. You want to get some ćevapi?”

  “You begin to think like a Serbian,” Vlado says.

  The restaurant Vlado chooses looks like the front room of someone’s house. Just a few tables. The waitress is young, amber-skinned and gorgeous with eyes that are haunted and drawn. The smile she gives Vlado is real, though, until he slaps her on the ass as she walks off with our order.

  This all strikes me as weird. Not the ass slapping part. That seems totally normal. The thing is I read the Wikipedia page about the war, and Bosniaks and Serbians aren’t supposed to get along. Later, when I ask, Neda will explain it to me.

  “Oh,” Neda will say, “that’s Amina. She’s a Bosniak orphan Vlado adopted after her father and brothers got killed in Srebrenica. A Muslim. I don’t know where he found her.”