by Lee Deadkeys
“What the hell? Was there something in the box?” Jess asked breathlessly.
Before anyone could answer, Dick bolted from the unit. A Medusa’s hair of greasy, greenish-black tendrils trailed behind as he flung himself at the front of the truck. Bracing himself with both hands, Dick arched his head back and barked a sharp cry towards the heavens. He clawed at the hood of the truck, fingers twisting in all directions. His nails peeled away, painting a bloodstained, yet strangely beautiful work of art.
Jess screamed and blasted the horn once. At the sound, Dick immediately ceased his gory finger-drum on the hood.
“Dad, what should we do? He’s crazy!”
Frank didn’t know, couldn’t think of a way to handle this from inside the truck, and he damn sure wasn’t going out there.
Dick reared his head back again, looked at the sky briefly and then bashed his face into the hood. A great glob of blood splattered the hood, obscuring his previous masterpiece. His head snapped up, his face dripping pulp from a busted nose and mashed lips.
“Stop it, Dick!” Jessica screamed. He was still for a moment, considering her command. He swayed before them, indecisive, before resuming his facial-bludgeoning with renewed vigor.
Mason yelled for her to get them out of there and she threw the truck in reverse, cut it hard and hit the gas. Dick fell forward and, thankfully, out of sight.
“Look out, the girl!”
Jessica jerked a glance over her shoulder. Dick’s girlfriend-slash-receptionist stood stock-still, hands covering her face, awaiting the crushing truck tires.
Jess slammed a foot on the brake pedal, tires screeching for purchase as more than two tons of metal slid toward the frozen female. Standing on the brake, Jess willed the vehicle to stop. Time slowed and finally, so did the truck. They heard the girl grunt as the truck bumped her, staggering her back a step.
Mason leaned across Jess and yelled for the girl to get in.
“What’s going on? I saw on the news, something bad happened.”
“Get in, lady!” Jess yelled.
Delilah stood there crying and confused, a strawy lock of bleached-blonde hair caught at the corner of her mouth. Jess put the truck in park and opened the door as Mason grabbed for her, catching her by the sleeve.
“No,” she said.
Jess hesitated, turned to the girl again and pleaded, “Get in. Now!”
“But, where’s Dick?”
A piercing, inhuman scream erupted near the front of the truck. Everyone jumped at the sound, the girl momentarily forgotten. Jess’s eyes began to water as she gritted her teeth. As if summoned from Hell, Dick rose into view.
“Dickey? I’m scared, something has happened, something really wrong has happened. The news, on the news people are going crazy and….” Delilah took a step toward him, arm outstretched, reaching into the Devil’s cookie jar.
Dick’s head hung, chin nearly resting on his chest, shoulders slumped so far forward that his limp hands bumped against each other with every ragged breath. His breath, labored and muddy, was marked by greenish-black fumes on exhalation.
Delilah took another tentative step towards him.
“Get away from him, he’s been poisoned!” Jess yelled, but Delilah didn’t appear to hear.
“What have they done to you, Dickey?”
Dick came to life with insectile speed. He was on Delilah before anyone could react. Delilah gasped as Dick seized her by the arms. Her face bore a stupid bovine expression as Dick dragged her toward unit 2060.
Jess jumped from the cab, drew her .45 from her waistband and leveled it a Dick. “Let her go!”
Dick continued to haul Delilah toward the waiting, pulsing darkness that now seeped over the opening of the box in a creeping fog.
“I’ll fucking shoot you, Dick. Goddamn it, let her go!” Horrified, Jess watched as ghostly tendrils snaked out, coiling up and around their legs as they disappeared into the writhing mass.
“Come on, leave ‘em!” Mason yelled.
Jess stared after them as everything got very quiet. She thought she heard the girl crying softly until that stopped too.
“What’s he doing to her? Shouldn’t we help?” Jess asked, her voice barely audible.
Delilah screamed, the sound resonating between the steel walls, echoing back on itself in an endless, maddening loop.
Jess scrambled into the truck, her left hand slammed over one ear, the grip of the gun over the other. Frank, seeing the firearm flattened against his daughter’s head, reached across and pried it from her hand. She seemed only vaguely aware of this and let it go without a fight.
Delilah’s scream stopped abruptly, cut off with such violent intensity that the silence was nearly as deafening as the sound itself.
Something was coming out of the darkness. It moved in jerking steps, resembling a child of Romero, the Godfather of reanimation.
It was the girl and she was pulling out whole handfuls of hair from her head. Jess saw that in one handful a large piece of scalp remained attached and felt sick.
The girl stopped at the threshold. The thick black cloud billowed out around her legs, which parted it like a black sea. Her chest rose and fell in harsh pants as she looked around, disoriented. She dropped the handfuls of hair and flesh, and opened her mouth to a cavernous size.
Her hands began a disturbing marionette fumble up her body until they found her face. Spiderlike fingers began to probe around her gaping mouth, finally clamping on her jaw. She began to pull. The sides of her mouth began to tear, slowly at first, as if resisting the mutilation, and then came the wet crack as the jawbone unhinged.
Jess screamed. Delilah’s head jerked toward the sound, lower jaw swinging in a bloody, disjointed arc.
Delilah moved at them with bat-like swiftness, closing the distance to the truck. She seized Jess, one hand vice-like on Jess’s arm, the other gripping a clump of her hair. Her strength was impossible as she began to yank Jess through the truck’s window.
Jess’s free hand flailed about inside the cab, blindly found the steering wheel and latched on. Jess struggled with the attacker and tried to pull herself free. Delilah countered her efforts by digging her nails into Jess’s arm while planting a foot against the door for leverage. Jessica’s hand slipped from the steering wheel as she was pulled halfway out the window.
Mason held tightly to Jess, arms wrapped securely around her waist. He pulled with strength he didn’t know he possessed, fearing he may rip her in half. He heard the girl—Delilah, he remembered in a moment of unreasonable clarity—cough and moan. He was horrified to see a thin greenish-black smoky substance leaking from her destroyed mouth. The ropey vapor stretched and lengthened toward the bloody gouges on Jess’s arm like blind feelers.
“Frank, grab her legs!”
The men combined their strength in a final heave. Delilah’s grip slipped to the end of Jess’s hand, her body yanked more or less back into the truck.
Jess’s ribs ground painfully against the door. She risked letting go of the steering wheel with her right hand and grabbed for the .45 tucked into her waistband. Her hand found the holster, it was empty.
The girl made a sickening slurp-moan sound as she vomited an enormous quantity of squirming bile down her front. She lurched forward and regained her grip on Jess’s arm.
Jess screamed. At the sound Frank nearly lost his hold on her. His head, a moment before full of bees, cleared with calm determination. With his left arm tightly around her lower half, he leaned over his daughter, pointing the gun dead in the crazy girl’s face. “Let. Go.”
The gun in her face had no effect on the girl; it could have been a flower. She clamped her other hand further up on Jess’s arm and began to pull.
Jess felt herself slip another inch through the window. The arm in the grip of the other girl felt like living taffy and it suddenly occurred to her that she wouldn’t really miss the thing if it were torn from her shoulder. Anything, just to be free, would be worth it at this point.
&nb
sp; As she dazedly pondered how possible it was to rapidly chew off her own arm, part of the crazy girl’s head exploded. Jess felt the hot sticky gore hit her face and arm; a moment later the girl crumpled to the ground and Jess was yanked into the cab of the truck, both arms somewhat intact.
Mason pulled Jess across his body as he slid himself into the driver’s seat. She laid there, sprawled half on the seat, before sitting bolt upright, hands out in front of her, inspecting the Delilah bits.
“Oh God, oh my God!” Jess screamed, steadily rising in pitch.
“Frank, see to her. Calm her down, don’t let….”
There was a crash at the front of the truck. Dick threw himself on the hood of the truck and began to climb. Mason threw the truck in reverse and hit the gas. The bed of the truck punched through the closed roll-up door of the unit behind them, the impact sending Dick up the hood and onto the windshield.
They all stared at the Dick-thing peering at them through the glass. He had been clawing at his eyes and one of them looked off to the right through a bloody gouge. He was breathing heavily, rapidly on the glass, each exhalation producing a smoky green-black substance that leaked onto the windshield and spread, not down toward the wiper blades but sideways, toward the open windows.
“Time to move, Mason,” Frank said as he rolled up his window. Mason didn’t need to be told twice, he put the truck in Drive as he rolled up his own window. Metal screamed as the engine worked to pull the truck from the ruined door. The smell of the spinning tires filled the cab and Jess began to make retching noises.
“Mason….”
“Yeah, Frank, I’m trying,” Mason replied as he twisted the wheel back and forth. The auto 4-wheel drive kicked in and the front of the truck began to hop from side to side.
Dick bounced on the hood, grabbed at the wiper blades for purchase and began ramming his open mouth into the windshield. His last holdout tooth did a bloody water-slide ride down the glass and Jess lost her fight with the contents of her stomach.
Mason tried to hold his breath and cuss the stuck truck at the same time. The visibility through the windshield was quickly diminishing and only going to get worse unless he could shake Dick, and the stuff leaking from him, loose.
Checking the side-mirror, Mason saw that a piece of twisted metal from the door had embedded itself just above the truck’s gas flap. He twisted the wheel away from it and reversed until the truck stopped. He took a breath as he put the truck in drive, gagged on the smell of burning rubber and vomit, and punched the gas.
This time the truck lurched forward. Dick slid further up the windshield, fully blocking his view. The rear of the truck caught briefly on the metal thorn in its side before finally breaking free. Mason yanked the wheel quickly to the left and almost succeeded in avoiding his own truck.
The force of the impact finally, mercifully threw Dick from the hood of Frank’s truck and into the bed of his own. Mason kept the gas pedal to the floor, trading paint with the entire length of his truck before finally breaking free and speeding through the narrow lanes of the U-Store-It, toward the front gate.
“Get down!” he yelled as he hit the security gate, plunging them into six lanes of chaos that only a short time ago had been Indian School Road.
Day 5,Late Morning
Ox
Boulder City
Ox sat at the red light, bewildered. The box in his mother’s shed looked identical to the one he had unsuccessfully tried to cut open the day before and a state away. What were the odds of something like that? It seemed too big to comprehend, like those twisty riddles Jess would tease him with. If a man talks in a forest and no woman is around, is he still wrong? And another one about a bunch of monkeys, typewriters and the works of Shakespeare.
He understood fire and steel. Intimately. All that other stuff was for people like Jess, who had to ask those kinds of questions-without-answers.
A horn beeped behind him. Ox looked up, realized the light had changed and nudged his old truck through the intersection. Taking the next left, his mind still buzzing, movement caught his eye from the sidewalk in front of the Hallmark store. An elderly lady waved. Ox waved in return, trying to place the lady’s name.
Mrs. Clark? Yes, Mrs. Clark. The lady who lived across the street from his mother. Mrs. Clark used to sit with him while his mother and father went to Bingo at the church. Mother used to say that Bingo night was the only saving grace of the entire Catholic religion. That and Friday fish-fry.
Mrs. Clark smiled as she turned and resumed her stroll. Ox wondered if she needed a ride, began to roll the window down to ask when she stopped suddenly and stared down the street. Ox followed her gaze down the sidewalk where a narrow alley bisected the block. There, Ox saw a youngish man being pulled into the alley by a much older balding man. The younger man yelled something that Ox couldn’t make out before disappearing down the alley. Ox looked back to Mrs. Clark, who shrugged and gave him another small wave.
Could be a mugging, he thought as he neared the alley. Could also be a couple gay guys looking for some alone time. Still, he should check it out; tell them to get a room.
Moving slowly down the street, Ox craned his neck as he approached the alley. It was long and dark, blocked at the end by the brick backside of another building. He had a brief glimpse of the men standing at the edge of total darkness before a large moving van passed, blocking the scene.
The sign for the hardware store was just up ahead, same side of the street and everything. Screw it, he decided. Let them work it out between the two of them. He has his mother to worry about. Besides, it was the younger guy being led by the hand; he could have easily gotten away.
The inside of the hardware store was warm, dusty and smelled like packing grease and PVC. It was heaven.
Ox meandered up the aisles until he came to a wall of large spindles. The top two rows held various types of rope and the bottom three held various links of chain.
He chose a middle gauge of the heavier chain. A set of bolt cutters was attached to the rack by a comically thin chain. The irony of this brought a chuckle as he used them to cut a length.
Chain in hand, he grabbed a padlock on his way to the register.
Back in the truck, Ox eased out into the light traffic. Looking for a place to turn around, he spotted the colorful sign for Big Al’s Guns, Jerky and Beanie Babies. Mom loves those beanie things, he remembered and eased the truck into the space in front.
The door chimed as he entered. “On my mother! Could that be little Cecil?”
Ox reddened at the name given him by his father.
“Could be, is that the last black gunslinger in Nevada?” Ox said as he approached the small dark man, hand extended. “How the hell are ya, Al?”
The older man grabbed his hand in both of his and pumped it. “Me? Well, I’m right as the mail, my son, right as the mail.” Big Al stepped from around the counter and Ox smiled when he saw the two huge six-guns slung crisscross around the man’s bony hips.
“Did I hear you right, Andrew? Is that little Cecil? Oh my, it is, it is. Come here child and give an old lady a hug.”
Mrs. Allen approached Ox shakily but surely and hugged him like a son, then pushed back to get a better look at him. “My, my, that Arizona air certainly agrees with you, my boy, yes it does. You’re as big as a house!” She smiled at him and Ox could only smile back. “Thank you, Mrs. Allen.”
The door chimed again and Ox turned. His broad smile faded when he saw Sheldon enter, his Confederate gray uniform and hat punctuated here and there with SS medals and a Swastika armband.
Mr. Allen dropped an arm around Sheldon and beamed at Ox. “Sheldon, look who came to pay us a visit. It’s little Cecil, remember? Say howdy, Sheldon.”
Sheldon stood rocking from foot to foot, eyes on nothing just to the left of Ox. Sheldon didn’t age like other people; his blue eyes were slightly faded and his pale skin appeared a little more translucent but other than that it was like he had stopped around a myste
ry age of thirtyish.
The silence stretched on until Ox finally said, “Hey, Sheldon, how you been?”
Sheldon’s rocking slowed, “‘Lo, good, you?”
Before Ox could answer, Sheldon walked into the back of the shop and disappeared.
Mr. Allen shrugged, “You know Sheldon, a man of few words.”
“He’s still hanging around here, huh?” Ox asked, turning back to Big Al.
“Yes, yes, his uncle passed a year ago, isn’t that right, Missus?” Mrs. Allen nodded and added her own yes, yes. “After that, we sorta took him on fulltime. He’s a good boy, Cecil, he really is. Folks just shy from him because of his oddities.”
“I see he’s still donning his Civil War-Nazi uniform,” Ox said, unable to keep all the malice from his tone. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No, no. Why should it? He don’t mean anything against us, does he, Missus?”
Mrs. Allen shook her head, “No, no he doesn’t, Mr. Allen. Besides, we’re the only family the boy has now. And you know how folks feel about him, because of his oddities. We take folks on what’s in their heart and that boy has a good one. He’s just wearing a getup, nothing more. He’s got a right to wear what he wants, isn’t that right, Mr. Allen?”
Big Al nodded emphatically and Ox had to wonder at these two outstanding people. He had never liked Sheldon. He was odd and dim and had no sense or cares of social correctness.
The silence stretched and grew in weight. Finally, Mrs. Allen said, “Mr. Allen? How would you and Cecil like some coffee?”
Big Al looked to his wife, “Why, I think we would like that fine, Missus, maybe one of those sweet rolls too.” He turned his beam on Ox, “The Missus makes the finest sweet rolls in all of these United States, did you know that, son?” Ox said he did, but had to be getting back to his mother. Mrs. Allen asked how Ethel was doing.
Ox could hear his mother, It’s family business, son, and it stays in the family. She would be mortified if he answered any other way, so he said that she was fine, doing well.
Mrs. Allen nodded and said she would check in on her, then turned and left to get the coffee. “One cup and then you can be on your way.”
