Banana Hammock

by Jack Kilborn

  “Use leaves!” Hollis hollered back.

  “I tried! They’re all stuck to me!”

  Fredrick raised his hand. “Would a werewolfskunkdeer try to eat people? Or would it just forage for nuts and berries?”

  “You don’t even know what ‘forage’ means,” said Silas.

  “It means to search for provisions.”

  “Well, you don’t know what ‘tourniquet’ means!”

  “Yes, I do. We learned about them last week. It’s that thing you twist around your arm or leg to stop bleeding.”

  “Well, you don’t know what ‘hypothesis’ means!”

  “Silas! Enough!” Hollis clenched and unclenched his fists a few times. “Anyway…”

  Theolonious frowned. “So is a werewolfskunkdeer a person who changes into something that’s a wolf, skunk, and deer all at once, like it has fur and Bambi eyes and sprays skunk spray, or is it a person who can change into a wolf or a skunk or a deer?”

  “I have no idea,” Hollis said.

  “I think he changes into one of them, but he can’t control which one it is. So he’ll be fighting Bigfoot and he’ll want to change into a wolf because wolves are better at fighting Bigfoot, but he’ll change into a skunk instead and Bigfoot just steps on him. That’s probably why you don’t see many werewolfskunkdeers around anymore.”

  “What if a werewolf bit a Dracula who bit a zombie who then bit the werewolf?” asked Cecil.

  “My baby brother bit the babysitter, but she didn’t turn into a baby.”

  “Shut up!” said Theolonious. “That’s not what we’re talking about!”

  “But what if a werewolfskunkdeer bit a wolf? Is it a werewolfskunkdeerwolf, or does the wolf part just not matter because it was already a wolf?”

  “Werewolfwolfskunkdeer sounds better,” said Anthony.

  “Soon the full moon will rise,” Hollis said, raising his arms theatrically. “And then the werewolf takes its supernatural form and…”

  “You mean the werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “No. I mean the werewolf. There’s no such thing as a werewolfskunkdeer.”

  “You forgot the extra wolf. It’s werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “I did not forget the extra wolf. We aren’t talking about the werewolfskunk deer.”

  “The werewolfwolfskunkdeer.”

  “We’re talking about a werewolf! A regular old werewolf! That’s it. Just a man who turns into a goddamn wolf, okay?”

  The scouts went silent. Hollis knew he’d gone too far by using the g.d. word, but the punchline to his story was so amazing and they were ruining it.

  “Mr. Hollis, is this poison oak?” Billy asked, walking back to the campfire holding some leaves.

  “Yes, Billy. Put that down.”

  “I wish I’d picked different leaves. Can I go home?”

  “No. There’s some baking soda in the tent. Let me finish my story and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Could a werewolf eat a baby whole, in one bite?” asked Anthony.

  “I suppose one could,” Hollis said. Actually, he knew that one could. Firsthand. Heh heh.

  “So when it pooped out the baby, would the baby be a werepoopwolf?”

  “What if a werepoopwolf bit a werewolfwolfskunkdeer?”

  “It would be a werewolfwolfwolfpoopskunkdeer.”

  “Enough,” Hollis said. “The next person who says something gets a bad report to their parents and they won’t get to come on any more of these trips. Got it? See that full moon up there? That ties into our little story, doesn’t it? Do you see the connection between what happened to Troop 192 and the lunar cycle of today? You get it, right? Do you know what Troop 192 was doing on that fateful night? They were—irony alert—sitting around listening to scary stories from their scoutmaster! Do you get where this is going?”

  The scouts remained silent.

  Hollis stood up.

  “That’s riiiiiiiiight! The story I was trying to tell you is foreshadowing what’s going to happen tonight! Ha! How about that, you little brats? The reason there are so many similarities in the fate of Troop 192 and our situation at this very moment is because I am a werewolf!”

  He stood there, facing the moonlight, waiting for the inevitable transformation.

  “What story did you tell the other kids?” Cecil asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Were you telling them about another werewolf attack before that one?”

  “Yes. That’s right. It’s all a vicious cycle. Each story I tell the scouts is about the previous massacre. I’ll tell the next troop about you guys.”

  “If you killed all of those Cub Scout Troops, who keeps hiring you as a scoutmaster?”

  He adjusted his angle. Change, dammit, change!

  Theolonious raised his hand. “So if you bit a mummy—?”

  Screw it, Hollis thought. He’d brought an axe.

  Frederick was first, right in the middle of another stupid question when the axe caught him under the chin. It cleaved his jaw in half, his tongue waggling through the gap, blood spurting like a lawn sprinkler.

  Hollis pinned Billy under his foot and hacked his arm off, then dangled it above his face, teasing him.

  “Stop hitting yourself!” he yelled in Billy’s face, slapping him with his own hand. It was good fun until shock set in and Billy stopped screaming.

  Cecil got a straight chop to the throat, but the axe wasn’t sharp enough to decapitate him fully, and his head flopped backward, still attached to some sinew.

  As he’d warned earlier, Hollis drove the axe head into Anthony’s ribcage, cracking it open, then diving in the feast on the child’s still-beating heart with his razor-sharp werewolf fangs that seemed rather flat and dull for the job. He did manage to bite off a piece of something that could have been a ventricle, but might have been an atrium. Hollis always got those confused.

  Theolonius watched, eyes wide, hugging his knees. He was covered in blood that wasn’t his own. Hollis raised the axe, ready to make a lupine feast of the boy’s small brain, when Theolonious began to scream.

  No, not a scream.

  That’s more like a howl.

  First the boy’s nose extended, becoming hairy and snoutish.

  Then claws burst from his fingertips, curving into the shape of scythes.

  Hollis dropped the axe, dumbfounded, as the miniature werewolf then grew…

  Antlers?

  Theolonious quickly spun around, lifting his giant black tail, one that had a white stripe running down it ala Pepé Le Pew.

  “Oh no…”

  The werewolfskunkdeer sprayed Hollis with its anal scent glands while the scoutmaster was screaming, and some of the spray got into Hollis’s mouth. The smell…the taste…was so bad, Hollis had no choice but to whip out his Swiss Army Knife, thumb open the mini scissors, and immediately begin snipping away at his own nose and tongue, snip snip snipping until…

  “Mr. Hollis? Is this the baking soda?”

  Hollis blinked away the daydream and stared at Billy.

  Hollis sighed. “That’s it, Billy.”

  Theolonious raised his hand. “Mr. Hollis? Will we get our fishing merit badges tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Theolonious.”

  “Is storytime over?” Cecil asked.

  “I guess.”

  Silas raised his hand.

  “What, Silas? Do you want to ask me what ‘transitory’ means?”

  “I want to know what’s wrong with your ears. They’re getting longer.”

  Hollis slapped his hands against the sides of his head. Indeed, his ears were getting longer. Longer and hairier.

  He jammed a finger into his mouth, tapping the quick growing fangs.

  It’s about time.

  Hollis leapt onto Silas, taking the boys whole head in his mouth. He squeezed his mighty werewolf jaws closed, feeling the skull bend inward, then crack suddenly, popping open like a walnut, squirting hot brains through Silas’s nasal cavity.

  Wit
h Cecil, he dug his snout into the boy’s belly, clenching his teeth down on a length of intestines, holding tight as Cecil ran for the trees. Cecil managed to pull out his intestines, both large and small, his colon, his stomach, and something that might have been a spleen, before keeling over.

  With Billy, Hollis dug one of his claws through the child’s eye socket, then dug it through his skull and out the other eye, holding him like a six-pack. Then he pulled, tearing off the bridge of Billy’s nose.

  Theolonious cried out in horror, and Hollis ripped his lungs out of his chest, squeezing them like an accordion, making the scream go on and on and…

  “Mr. Hollis? Is that a werewolfskunkdeer?” Cecil asked, pointing at something in the woods.

  Hollis shook his head to clear it. The fantasies were getting more and more real. The medication wasn’t working like it should.

  “It’s not?” Cecil asked.

  “What are you pointing at, Cecil?”

  “That thing, with the horns.”

  “You mean the tree?”

  “No, the…oh, yeah. The branches looked like horns.”

  And then the transformation began. For real this time? Hollis bit down on the inside of his mouth as hard as he could. It hurt like hell—this was definitely real. Those little bastards were about to see what a true werewolf could do.

  The scouts stared at him. Their jaws dropped as one.

  The inside of his cheek was bleeding pretty badly. He shouldn’t have bit so hard.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Just like I’ve been hinting over and over, I am a werewolf! And on this night of the full moon, I shall enjoy a Cub Scout gore feast!”

  Cecil screamed. Hollis laughed and then, transformation complete, let out the howl of the beast he had become.

  “That’s it?” asked Billy.

  “What?”

  “You’re not very furry.”

  “My arms are hairy!”

  “Not that hairy. My dad’s arms are hairier.”

  “Look at my ears! Those aren’t normal ears anymore. Look at my fingernails! And my nose sort of looks like a snout now!”

  “I thought werewolves were supposed to be a lot scarier,” said Theolonious.

  “You know what? You kids suck! It’s not my fault that the werewolf who bit me didn’t break the skin all the way, and that I don’t do a complete change! You should still be terrified! When’s the last time you saw somebody’s fingernails grow a full half-inch within ten seconds? Never, that’s when? You’ve never seen somebody’s nose change shape like that!”

  “My sister got hit in the face with a basketball and—”

  “Shut the hell up! I have killed hundreds of Cub Scouts, and if you think your ridiculous werewolfwolfskunkdeermoosepygmy fucker is the height of terror, then you can all just…just…” No, no, no, I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this again. Please, not again. Don’t let it happen again…

  It happened again. Hollis succumbed to tears.

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “Mr. Hollis, can we go home and play Nintendo?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Hollis wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes, we can.”

  The end.

  To return to the previous section, click here.

  To start over, click here.

  To read Harry McGlade’s very first story, click here.

  “At the end of Whiskey Sour I killed the cyborg from the future, ensuring that there would be no nuclear war against the machines.”

  “That was end of The Terminator,” Jack said.

  “Was not.”

  Jack folded her arms. “Yes it was.”

  “Okay. At the end of Whiskey Sour I blow up the Death Star.”

  “Try again.”

  “I throw my prescious into the lava pool at Mount Doom.”

  “Lord of the Rings.”

  “I shoot Liberty Valance.”

  “That’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

  “I sink the putt that wins the caddy tournament.”

  “Caddyshack. You aren’t even trying.”

  “We all go to jail for being jerks?”

  “The series finale of Seinfeld.”

  “That’s all I got. Unless—”

  “Be still my beating heart.”

  “—it turns out Bugs Bunny was drawing the cartoon all along.”

  “Duck Amuck.”

  “That’s my favorite Loony Tunes. It was even cooler than that time I killed the Gingerbread Man at the end of Whiskey Sour.”

  Jack frowned. “Why don’t I ever kill the bad guys?”

  “You did, in one of them,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

  Her face scrunched up in thought. “Which one?” she asked.

  “The one named after the drink.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “With the drink on the cover. Two word title.”

  “I don’t remember that one.”

  “Which was the one where we turned out to be brother and sister?” I asked.

  “None of them.”

  “Was there one where we ever…” I gave Jack a bit of bump and grind.

  “No! Hell, no! Hell fuck no!”

  “I think the books need more sex. Did you know J.A. Konrath also writes a science fiction series under the name Joe Kimball? The first book, Timecaster, has plenty of sex in it. And I’m in it, too.”

  “Are not,” Jack said.

  “Am too.”

  “Prove it. Or better yet, go jump out of the window.”

  To read a Harry McGlade scene from Timecaster, click here.

  To make Harry jump out of a window, click here.

  To return to the previous section, click here.

  Hi, Maria!

  To restart the adventure, click here.

  To return to the previous section, click here.

  JA Konrath’s Works Available on Nook

  Whiskey Sour

  Bloody Mary

  Rusty Nail

  Fuzzy Navel

  Cherry Bomb

  Click here for more J.A. Konrath ebooks on Nook

  Table of Contents

  Banana Hammock by JA Konrath

  Author's Warning

  Author's Note

  Banana Hammock Drink Recipe

  Ebooks by JA Konrath