(Laurie’s parents were both perfectly nice, perfectly normal people who didn’t seem to understand why anyone would want to do anything apart from what their daughter asked. But Colleen, who was the squad’s record keeper and had access to all the Fighting Pumpkins handbooks, going back to the foundation of the high school, said that she was pretty sure Laurie’s great-grandmother had been a river nymph of some sort. Some things can skip a generation or two. Like gills, or an irresistible voice.)
“But I need to go,” whined Laurie. “I gotta go bad.”
“Can’t you just piss behind a bush like a normal person?” asked Marti. She sounded annoyed. That was pretty normal. Marti generally sounded annoyed by anything that wasn’t all about Marti, which made her a perfect mean girl attack dog for the rest of us. Any time someone started to question why the Pumpkins did things a certain way, we’d just point Marti at them and run in the opposite direction. After she was done stripping the flesh from their bones with her tongue—metaphorically speaking, anyway; she wasn’t a real flesh-stripper—they were generally way more willing to tolerate the rest of us being a little odd.
“No!” Laurie shot a horrified look at the back of Marti’s head. “I don’t need to go number one. I need to go.”
Colleen looked up from her notes and said, in a surprisingly clinical tone, “She’s been eating yogurt for the last hour. By now, her colon is probably ready to explode. She needs to—”
“I am begging you not to finish that sentence,” said Jude. “We’ll stop at the very next place we see so you can use the bathroom, all right, Laurie? Do you think you can hold it for just a couple of miles?”
“I can try,” said Laurie. She sank deeper in her seat. “Just hurry, okay?”
“I’ll hurry,” said Jude, and hit the gas.
* * * * *
One car, five cheerleaders, and a totally disregarded speed limit: these are the things that dreams are made of. Jude drove like a girl who desperately didn’t want to have her upholstery cleaned, until an exit loomed up ahead of us, complete with a large, hand-painted sign advertising JACK’S COFFEE * GAS * HOMEMADE BEEF JERKY.
“I bet they have a bathroom,” said Laurie, with strained enthusiasm.
“I bet they have a man in a hockey mask waiting to carve our faces off and wear them like pretty little masks,” said Marti. “I don’t want to stop here. This looks unhygienic.”
“I gotta go,” said Laurie.
“I don’t know—” began Jude.
And that was when Laurie, sensing that the bathroom was about to slip out of her grasp, did the unforgivable. “Jude, can we please stop? This place seems nice.”
“Sure, Laurie,” said Jude, and swerved for the exit, ignoring the way Marti and Colleen were shouting for her to slow down. I didn’t shout. It wouldn’t do any good now that Jude was on a mission, and I had a better task to perform: glaring at Laurie like I was willing the flesh to melt right off of her bones.
To her extremely slight credit, Laurie grimaced apologetically and whispered, “I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to put the whammy on squad members, but I have to go.”
“You didn’t put the whammy on a squad member, you put it on the squad leader,” I whispered back. “You’re going to be lucky if you don’t spend the rest of the season sitting on the bench as a punishment for treason.”
“I wasn’t aware that we were a totalitarian government,” said Colleen, adjusting her glasses as Jude got the car back onto an even keel. “There’s nothing in the bylaws about treason charges.”
“Shut up, Colleen,” snarled Marti.
Laurie crossed her legs, looked apologetic, and said nothing.
We were approaching the end of the exit, which looked exactly as promising as an area that played host to Jack’s Coffee should. Heavy weeds choked the fields in every direction, broken only by the shapes of twisted, claw-like trees. None of the trees had leaves, naturally; that would have been too friendly, and too welcoming to travelers. It was like we were driving into a bad horror movie from the late 1970s, before anyone had discovered concepts like “production values.”
Then we came around the bend, and things got worse.
Jack’s Coffee, Gas, and Homemade Beef Jerky was a wooden shack with two antique pumps shoved into the cracked concrete out front. One of them was listing to the side at an alarming angle. The other had a sign on it that read “Out of Order.” Completing the picture was a green porta-potty, shoved off to one side with a piece of cardboard declaring “Customers Only” taped to the front.
“Go be customers buy something I don’t care what,” wailed Laurie, launching herself out of the car as soon as it started to slow down. The door slammed shut behind her as Jude brought us to a full stop.
The sound was the trigger: Jude’s hands tightened on the wheel, her shoulders going abruptly stiff, before she leaned forward, attention focused on the fleeing Laurie. “We’ve stopped,” she said.
“Yes,” said Colleen.
“I did not want to stop.”
“True,” said Marti.
Jude made an irritated noise. “She whammied me.”
“Yes,” I said, opening my door. “And then she whammied us all. Excuse me, but I need to be a customer and buy something.”
Grumbling and muttering, the other three cheerleaders followed me as I climbed out of the car. We were an odd streak of color in the blasted landscape: we had changed out of our uniforms after the game, choosing comfort over remaining encased in cotton-poly blend, so we were all in jeans. But our sweatshirts and hair bows were in various permutations of the school colors, orange and green, the high school social structure equivalent of those deep-sea fish that look like rainbows and will poison the shit out of anything that tries to eat them. Even with most of the squad elsewhere, we moved like a pack, smooth and fluid and completely united.
The door was unlocked. That was good. It creaked like a prop from a Vincent Price movie. That was bad. Nothing creaked like that unless it had been abandoned for twenty years, or was being intentionally damaged by a local horror enthusiast.
The interior wasn’t much better, although to be fair, it was precisely the sort of place that had been promised by the exterior. The floor was bare, splintery wood, and looked like it would give way under any but the most cautious of treads. There were shelves, which meant that the place could continue to claim to be a “convenience store,” no matter how inconvenient it actually was, but those shelves were virtually bare, and the boxes and cans they did hold were all brands I didn’t recognize. Judging by the hairstyles and clothing of the grinning kids on the cereal boxes, some of the groceries had been here since my parents were in high school, if not longer. Eating anything sold in this store would probably be a quick ticket to food poisoning.
“I am going to strangle Laurie with my bare hands,” said Marti philosophically, as she looked around. “If anyone wants to dissuade me, feel free, but it’s not going to work. She’s going to die, and I’m not going to be sorry.”
“At least prison jumpsuits are orange,” said Colleen. She took a dainty step forward. The floor creaked, but held. “Maybe they have gum.”
“Does it still count as gum after it’s fossilized?” I asked.
“Can I help you girls?” The voice was calm, clear, and sounded like it belonged on the radio, maybe trying to sell us a new car or something. I jumped anyway, spinning around with Marti, Colleen, and Jude only half a beat behind me. (Coming back from the dead hadn’t changed my reflexes back to human normal, and the horror movies lie about how quickly zombies react to the possibility of a good meal: at my best, I could pluck squirrels out of the trees. These days, I’m just a little quicker than the norm. Which is still uncannily fast, especially when compared to the people around me.)
The man in the doorway matched the voice. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a chin that should have been immortalized in story, song, and the occasional soft-focus photo shoot. Only his clothes spoiled the effect
, since I’d never seen a piece of prime beefcake wearing dirty brown zip-up mechanic’s overalls before. They were at least three sizes too big, and still managed to look amazing. The thought that if he looked that good in them, he’d look even better out of them occurred briefly. I shoved it down. This was the time to buy expired sodas and rock-hard gum, not to indulge our carnal natures.
Besides, while I was willing to share most things with my squad, the idea of adding my love life—or lust life, as might have been more accurate—to the list just didn’t sit well with me.
“Hi!” said Jude, falling immediately into her role as leader. She offered the stranger a winning smile. (Literally winning. That smile had put us over the top at cheer camp, twice. When it came to bringing home the gold, the power of Jude’s orthodontist could not be ignored.) “Do you work here?”
“Oh my God what the fuck,” muttered Marti, slapping her forehead with one hand. Louder, she said, “Jude. He’s wearing the logo of this shit-shack on his left boy-boob. If he doesn’t work here, he’s a murder-hobo, and we need to leave.”
“Please forgive my friend; she was raised by wolves, and she doesn’t really understand how to interact with normal people,” said Jude. She glared daggers at Marti before flashing another smile at the stranger. “I was just hoping you could sell us something. Our friend is using your bathroom, and she’s really into following the letter of the law.”
“Ah, the ‘customers only’ sign got another one,” said the man. He looked amused by the whole situation. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. We were sort of a house of horrors once we got going—most people found us less “amusing” and more “terrifying give them whatever they want so they’ll go away.”
I’d say it was because we were a bunch of sometimes semi-supernatural weirdoes who flung each other into the air for fun, but honestly, the semi-supernatural thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Every cheerleading squad had their own version of our repelling field, effective on high school students and high school graduates alike. Once you’ve known the terror of large groups of girls in short skirts and spirit bows, you can never truly be free of it.
Only this fellow didn’t seem to be batting an eye, either out of fear or because he wanted some barely legal cheerleader action (also not uncommon, unfortunately). He was looking at the four of us with an expression of vague amusement, like we were the most adorable things that had ever darkened his doorstep. That made me nervous. No, more than nervous: that made me wary. Never trust anybody who can look at a group of teenage girls in short skirts and not react at all. Those are almost always the people who are hiding something.
“We don’t get much business around here,” he said. “How’d you like some homemade beef jerky?”
“Was it made this decade?” asked Marti.
“Yes,” said the man, looking amused. “It was even made this year. I’m Chuck, by the way.”
“Jude,” said our squad leader. She pointed at the rest of us as she listed, in turn, “Marti, Colleen, and Heather. Our fifth Fighting Pumpkin should be here shortly.”
“If she didn’t fall in,” said Chuck, and laughed at his own joke before starting toward the counter. “Come on. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”
The beef jerky was kept up at the front counter in a variety of old apothecary jars. Anywhere else, they would have looked charmingly antique. Here, they fed right into the overall horror movie décor, making it seem even more likely that a man with a machete was going to spring out at us at any moment.
“Oh, look, teriyaki,” said Colleen happily, and removed the lid from the first jar of jerky.
The smell hit me immediately, blunted by a heavy coating of teriyaki, but unmistakable all the same. I actually moaned, the sound rising involuntarily from the depths of my throat and causing all three of my teammates to whip around and stare at me. Jude, especially, went pale. She extended one hand like she was going to take my arm, only to pause and pull back, unsure of what she was supposed to do.
“Heather?” she said. “Are you . . . feeling all right?”
The man in the overalls raised his eyebrows. “Your friend sounds hungry. She a big fan of jerky?”
“Actually, she’s a vegetarian,” said Marti smoothly. She plucked the lid from Colleen’s unresisting fingers and clamped it back down over the jar. The smell of teriyaki jerky stopped invading the store, although it lingered in my nostrils, dreadful and cloying, like smoke, or permanent marker.
Jude frowned, eyes still locked on my face. “Heather?”
I struggled to make my jaw unclench. My heart was hammering, and my lungs ached—I hadn’t exhaled since the jar had been opened, freeing that terrible, wonderful scent. I tried to focus on my heartbeat. It meant that I was still alive. Living people had choices. They could choose whether to moan or not. They could choose whether they were going to stuff their faces with jerky or kick some terrifying gas station asshole in the balls. They were alive. But in the moment, I didn’t feel like I had any choices at all. I couldn’t move.
The door banged open behind me and footsteps pattered into the room, followed by Laurie demanding mulishly, “Aren’t you guys done yet? The bathroom was way gross. I had to raid the glove compartment for wet wipes. By the way, we’re out of wet wipes. Do they sell those here?”
“Just a second, Laurie,” said Jude. Her eyes remained fixed on me. “Heather? Are you feeling all right? Do we need to step outside? Because we can step outside, if that’s what needs to happen. We can always come back in and make our purchases after you’ve had a chance to take a few deep breaths and maybe sit down.”
“Maybe she just needs to eat some jerky,” said Chuck. “In my experience, most vegetarians are just people who haven’t had enough beef jerky in their lives.”
That was the last straw. My jaw finally obeyed my orders to unclench. As soon as I could move again, I grabbed the nearest arm, which belonged to Jude, and yanked it—along with its owner—further from the jars of jerky. “Human,” I hissed.
Jude, who hadn’t risen to leader of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad by being slow on the uptake, gasped. Marti and Colleen looked at me blankly. And Laurie skipped over to the counter and reached for the nearest jar.
“This looks delicious!” she chirped. “Sorry about the, um, you-know from before. I just really had to go.”
Marti’s hand clamped down on Laurie’s wrist before she could take the lid off the jar. “How about you reverse the you-know so that we can all leave, hmm?” she said. “I don’t think Heather’s feeling much like jerky right now.”
Chuck, who had been looking increasingly confused by the ruckus we were making, frowned. “Now, hang on,” he said. “We enforce a strict ‘customers only’ policy with our bathroom facilities.”
“Oh, like what, you’re going to shove it back up her ass?” snapped Marti. “How about we leave a dollar on the counter, and you call it all good?”
“Wait, why is my ass involved?” asked Laurie, sounding alarmed.
I found my voice again. “It’s human,” I said. “The jerky is made from people.”
“Are you sure?” asked Jude.
“I know what human flesh smells like,” I said, letting go of her arm. “I know what it tastes like too. None of you need to know that. We need to leave. Laurie?”
“Um,” she said, pulling away from the jerky jar. Marti released her wrist, enabling her retreat. “No one has to buy anything, let’s just leave.”
“Oh, no, sugar,” said Chuck. His voice had dropped down into his chest, becoming dark and gravelly. I whirled, putting myself between him and the rest of the squad.
His overalls weren’t too large anymore. If anything, they were too small, clinging to his body like they had been painted on, seams threatening to split with every move of his densely muscled arms. Hair covered his neck and hands, and ran up the sides of his face in some of the most impressive muttonchops I had ever seen a man grow in under a minu
te. His eyes had gone from charming brown to piss-yellow, cold and somehow rancid, like they were windows for a soul that had gone bad.
“No, no, no,” he said, showing a mouthful of jagged teeth. “You agreed to the contract when you used the bathroom. Customers only. If you want to break it, you’re going to pay.”
“Oh, goodie,” said Colleen faintly. “We found a wendigo. I always wondered if they were real.”
Chuck snarled and lunged for her. Marti kicked him in the throat as Jude kicked him in the balls. I elbowed him in the side of the neck for good measure before I grabbed Jude again and hauled ass for the exit, trusting the others to follow. The wendigo, meanwhile, was in the process of folding in half and dropping to his knees, thus proving the old adage that you should never forget to wear a cup to a cheerleader fight. No matter what kind of junk you’re packing in your pants, a good boot to the groin is going to put you down if you don’t have protection.
The door hadn’t latched all the way. I hit it shoulder-first, bursting onto the porch in a shower of splinters and deeply confused termites. All I needed to do was get Jude to the car. The others could look out for themselves, or I could double back for them once I was sure that our captain was safe; saving her meant saving the team, at least symbolically. It was less than twenty yards to safety—
Twenty yards, and three more wendigo, their mouths bristling with teeth and their chins slick with drool. I came skidding to a stop, aided by Jude, who grabbed the doorframe with the hand that wasn’t clutching my shoulder. Her fingers dug in to both the wood and my flesh. We halted.
“What the fuck,” demanded Marti from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. Wendigo #1 was still crumpled in a heap on the floor. He was going to be pissed when he recovered. Marti, Colleen, and Laurie were all standing there, ready to run, which gave them a clear line of sight on the new wendigo. “Why are we in a horror movie? I just had my nails done!”
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