The vehicle made a sharp right turn at the very last minute and skidded to a stop, parallel to the wall. The taut chain suddenly dropped to the ground and a red, white, and flesh-colored (flailing) projectile shot from the crimson dust cloud and slammed against the cement wall.
The impact splattered the object; half of it exploded into a pink mist while the rest painted the wall like a piece of art by Jackson Pollock. The chain’s links whipped against the cement with such force, they sent up a shower of sparks.
A bloody rain of bones, gristle, and brains descended over the immediate area, covering both man and machine.
“Holy shit!” Trench screamed from the van. “How’s that for a chicken toss?”
Turning on the windshield wipers to clear away the bloodstained brain matter and the single molar with a filling in it, Trench stuck his head out, honked the horn, and screamed again. “Abracadabra! Made that fucker disappear into thin air!” He jammed his foot on the gas and made another U-turn, aiming the vehicle at the remaining men.
Seeing the approaching headlights, Shit-Stain curled up in a ball and started to cry. The van swerved around him (dragging the chain with the blood-soaked sleeveless undershirt still tangled around its end) and skidded to a stop in front of the tree with Trucker-Cap. Leaving the engine running, Trench jumped out, unlocked the padlock around the trailer hitch, and dropped Wife-Beater’s bloody chain to the ground. He strutted over to the metal coil beside Trucker-Cap and grabbed the other end of his steel noose.
“This here’s dedicated to the one that pulls the heads off live chickens.” He winked at Trucker-Cap. “And there he is!” he said, playfully pointing at him.
Trucker-Cap frantically shook his head, the chain around his neck jingling like bells. Tears streamed down his puffing cheeks. Snot shot from his nose. He fought to break free from his restraints, his hands turning purple from pulling at the cuffs with such ferocity.
Trench ignored the man’s theatrics and padlocked the end of his chain to the trailer hitch.
While Trucker-Cap begged for his life and Trench returned behind the wheel, Shit-Stain gingerly climbed to his feet and started to hop in the opposite direction.
An engine roared. The van shot forward. The chain pulled tight.
And Trucker-Cap’s head ripped right off. His noggin was yanked away so fast that his ball cap simply dropped into his lap like it had been perched atop a balloon that had just been popped. A moment later, everything in the immediate vicinity of the tree was drenched in an arterial spray that shot from the corpse’s neck stump.
Shit-Stain refused to look back at the massacre. He kept hopping, hoping that if he didn’t fall there might be some chance he’d get away. Before he could get far, something round and hard, like an extra-large coconut, clobbered him over the head with a wet splat. He wobbled and stumbled to the ground. Both he and Trucker-Cap’s decapitated head landed in the dirt next to one another. Staring face to face with his buddy’s wide-eyed severed noggin, Shit-Stain began to vomit. Since his mouth was plugged with cloth, part of the puke shot up his nasal cavity and bubbled out his nose, while the rest forced itself back down his throat, choking him.
He was quickly rolled on his side. There was a flash of a blade then the cloth gag dropped away from his vomit filled mouth.
“Not gettin’ out that easy, hoss,” Trench said, holding an open Buck knife. He patted the man on the back like he was trying to burp a baby. “C’mon. Get it all out.”
Shit-Stain heaved, coughed, and hacked out the remaining vomit while its acid burned his nostrils and throat. With strands of snot and spittle hanging off his face, he looked up at Trench with watery, bloodshot eyes. “Please! Please, mister! They were chickens for Christ sake!”
While alternating the Buck knife from hand to hand, Trench carefully slipped on leather work gloves. “Don’t matter if it was only a cockroach, hoss” he said, waving the blade around. “I was hired to do a particular job and it’s time I finish it.”
“Oh, God! Please don’t!”
Trench crouched next to Shit-Stain and pointed the knife at his face.
“Now, you…you were the one guilty of tearing off them chicken beaks for a chuckle.”
“They’d already been through the hangin’ line. They was dead, Mister! Their throats already slit! I swear!”
“Hell, now. I’d seen the tape and I beg to differ. Them chickens hadn’t even made it to the line. They were squawkin’ in the coop when ya pulled ‘em out and did your business. Eye for an eye, remember?” He knelt, clamping his meaty thighs around Shit-Stain’s head to hold it still. Trench stuck a finger in each nostril, pulled the man’s nose up, and placed the blade underneath it. “Now, you hold still when I start cuttin’. I’m gonna be mighty pissed if I slice myself on your account.”
“NO! Wait! Wait! What you’re doing…how is it any different than what we did to those birds?”
Trench paused for a moment then let go of the man’s nose. “Hmmm. Ya know…this is wrong.”
Shit-Stain nodded; a glimmer of hope danced in his eyes that he might be set free, unharmed (at least physically).
“A chicken’s nose is really just two holes on top its beak,” Trench said, repositioning himself beside Shit-Stain’s right shoulder. “So their beaks would be the equivalent of our mouths. And it’d make more sense if…” Trench stabbed the knife into the dirt, freeing both hands to stick into Shit-Stain’s mouth.
The bound man screamed as one of the gloved hands hooked onto the roof of his mouth while the other clamped down on his jawbone.
The veins in Trench’s forearms bulged as he pulled apart with all his might. There was a sickening crack, a tearing sound, then gurgling.
With eyes rolled back in his head and tongue dangling practically to his chest, Shit-Stain floundered on the ground. His bladder and bowels released, coating him in a muddy mixture of shit, piss, and blood.
Trench stepped back and looked at the bloody mandible in his hand. “As for your comparison of me and you, I already told ya…I only kill what I plan on eatin’.” He gave the jawbone the once over. There was hardly any meat there but he’d find use for it somehow, having been raised to use all parts of the buffalo.
While Shit-Stain gasped and gargled out his dying breath, Trench turned around and took in the carnage coating the area.
He walked to the back of the van, climbed in, and slid one of the extra large (320 qt) polyurethane coolers to the edge of the open door, tossing the jawbone into it. He double-checked to make sure the cooler’s drain plug was firmly in place (or there would be one hell of a mess inside the vehicle) then removed the axe and snow shovel (perfect for scooping up the squishy bits) that were mounted on the van’s interior wall.
Trench checked his watch and smiled. Ahead of schedule.
He stepped from the vehicle to start gathering the meat for his next couple of meals.
AN HOUR LATER, THE cargo van plowed down the rural highway toward the rising sun. Trench sat behind the wheel with a cell phone raised to his ear.
“Gotcha. Yes, sir, I understand.”
A billboard blew by, announcing ANDERSON FUR FARM – NEXT RIGHT.
“Will do. Okay, I’m at the next one. And just to be clear, you’re fine with me keepin’ as many skins as I want, right?” Trench smiled and nodded. “Why yes, sir. You did promise lotsa perks with the job. Okay, sir. I’ll be checking-in to give ya an update when I’m through here and headin’ to the next one. Uh-huh, will do.”
Trench snapped his cell phone shut and tossed it into the passenger seat. It landed on top of the folded pouch that contained his skinning tools. Since the minks wouldn’t be harvested until next month, the amount of employees needed to run the farm would be next to none. Trench could only hope that there would still be enough working today to reupholster his leather couch. He estimated he’d need the skins of four or five normal-sized employees. Maybe less if some of them were big ol’ fat people.
Whether skinny or fat,
they were cold, heartless monsters, deserving of the same fate as that of their victims.
Trench put on his blinker and began to slow for the upcoming exit.
It was time to go to work.
BY BIZARRE HANDS
by Joe R. Lansdale
When the traveling preacher heard about the Widow Case and her retarded girl, he set out in his black Dodge to get over there before Halloween night.
Preacher Judd, as he called himself—though his name was really Billy Fred Williams—had this thing for retarded girls, due to the fact that his sister had been simple-headed, and his mama always said it was a shame she was probably going to burn in hell like a pan of biscuits forgot in the oven, just on account of not having a fun set of brains.
This was a thing he had thought on considerable, and this considerable thinking made it so he couldn’t pass up the idea of baptizing and giving some God-training to female retards. It was something he wanted to do in the worst way, though he had to admit there wasn’t any burning desire in him to do the same for boys or men or women that were half-wits, but due to his sister having been one, he certainly had this thing for girl simples.
And he had this thing for Halloween, because that was the night the Lord took his sister to hell, and he might have taken her to glory had she had any Bible-learning or God-sense. But she didn’t have a drop, and it was partly his own fault, because he knew about God and could sing some hymns pretty good. But he’d never turned a word of benediction or gospel music in her direction. Not one word. Nor had his mama, and his papa wasn’t around to do squat.
The old man ran off with a buck-toothed laundry woman that used to go house to house taking in wash and bringing it back the next day, but when she took in their wash, she took in Papa too, and she never brought either of them back. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the laundry contained everything they had in the way of decent clothes, including a couple of pairs of nice dress pants and some pin-striped shirts like niggers wear to funerals. This left him with one old pair of faded overalls that he used to wear to slop the hogs before the critters killed and ate Granny and they had to get rid of them because they didn’t want to eat nothing that had eaten somebody they knew. So, it wasn’t bad enough Papa ran off with a beaver-toothed wash woman and his sister was a drooling retard, he now had only the one pair of ugly, old overalls to wear to school, and this gave the other kids three things to tease him about, and they never missed a chance to do it. Well, four things. He was kind of ugly too.
It got tiresome.
Preacher Judd could remember nights waking up with his sister crawled up in the bed alongside him, lying on her back, eyes wide open, her face bathed in cool moonlight, picking her nose and eating what she found, while he rested on one elbow and tried to figure why she was that way.
He finally gave up figuring, decided that she ought to have some fun, and he could have some fun too. Come Halloween, he got him a bar of soap for marking up windows and a few rocks for knocking out some, and he made his sister and himself ghost-suits out of old sheets in which he cut mouth and eye holes.
This was her fifteenth year and she had never been trick-or-treating. He had designs that she should go this time, and they did, and later after they’d done it, he walked her back home, and later yet, they found her out back of the house in her ghost suit, only the sheet had turned red because her head was bashed in with something and she had bled out like an ankle-hung hog. And someone had turned her trick-or-treat sack—the handle of which was still clutched in her fat grip—inside out and taken every bit of candy she’d gotten from the neighbors.
The sheriff came out, pulled up the sheet and saw that she was naked under it, and he looked her over and said that she looked raped to him, and that she had been killed by bizarre hands.
Bizarre hands never did make sense to Preacher Judd, but he loved the sound of it, and never did let it slip away, and when he would tell about his poor sister, naked under the sheet, her brains smashed out and her trick-or-treat bag turned inside out, he’d never miss ending the story with the sheriff’s line about her having died by bizarre hands.
It had a kind of ring to it.
He parked his Dodge by the roadside, got out and walked up to the Widow Case’s, sipping on a FROSTY ROOT BEER. But even though it was late October, the Southern sun was as hot as Satan’s ass and the root beer was anything but frosty.
Preacher Judd was decked out in his black suit, white shirt and black loafers with black and white checked socks, and he had on his black hat, which was short-brimmed and made him look, he thought, exactly like a traveling preacher ought to look.
Widow Case was out at the well, cranking a bucket of water, and nearby, running hell out of a hill of ants with a stick she was waggling, was the retarded girl, and Preacher Judd thought she looked remarkably like his sister.
He came up, took off his hat and held it over his chest as though he were pressing his heart into proper place, and smiled at the widow with all his gold-backed teeth.
Widow Case put one hand on a bony hip, used the other to prop the bucket of water on the well-curbing. She looked like a shaved weasel, Preacher Judd thought, though her ankles weren’t shaved a bit and were perfectly weasel-like. The hair there was thick and black enough to be mistaken for thin socks at a distance.
“Reckon you’ve come far enough,” she said. “You look like one of them Jehova Witnesses or such. Or one of them kind that run around with snakes in their teeth and hop to nigger music.”
“No ma’m, I don’t hop to nothing, and last snake I seen I run over with my car.”
“You here to take up money for missionaries to give to them starving African niggers? If you are, forget it. I don’t give to the niggers around here, sure ain’t giving to no hungry foreign niggers that can’t even speak English.”
“Ain’t collecting money for nobody. Not even myself.”
“Well, I ain’t seen you around here before, and I don’t know you from white rice. You might be one of them mash murderers for all I know.”
“No ma’m, I ain’t a mash murderer, and I ain’t from around here. I’m from East Texas.”
She gave him a hard look. “Lots of niggers there.”
“Place is rotten with them. Can’t throw a dog tick without you’ve hit a burr-head in the noggin’. That’s one of the reasons I’m traveling through here, so I can talk to white folks about God. Talking to niggers is like,” and he lifted a hand to point, “talking to that well-curbing there, only that well-curbing is smarter and a lot less likely to sass, since it ain’t expecting no civil rights or a chance to crowd up with our young’ns in schools. It knows its place and it stays there, and that’s something for that well-curbing, if it ain’t nothing for niggers.”
“Amen.”
Preacher Judd was feeling pretty good now. He could see she was starting to eat out of his hand. He put on his hat and looked at the girl. She was on her elbows now, her head down and her butt up. The dress she was wearing was way too short and had broken open in back from her having outgrown it. Her panties were dirt-stained and there was gravel, like little b.b.s hanging off of them. He thought she had legs that looked strong enough to wrap around an alligator’s neck and choke it to death.
“Cindereller there,” the widow said, noticing he was watching, “ain’t gonna have to worry about going to school with niggers. She ain’t got the sense of a nigger. She ain’t got no sense at all. A dead rabbit knows more than she knows. All she does is play around all day, eat bugs and such and drool. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s simple.”
“Yes ma’m, I noticed. Had a sister the same way. She got killed on a Halloween night, was raped and murdered and had her trick-or-treat candy stolen, and it was done, the sheriff said, by bizarre hands.”
“No kiddin’?”
Preacher Judd held up a hand. “No kiddin’. She went on to hell, I reckon, ‘cause she didn’t have any God talk in her. And retard or not, she deserved some so she wouldn�
�t have to cook for eternity. I mean, think on it. How hot it must be down there, her boiling in her own sweat, and she didn’t do nothing, and it’s mostly my fault cause I didn’t teach her a thing about The Lord Jesus and his daddy, God.”
Widow Case thought that over. “Took her Halloween candy too, huh?” “Whole kit and kaboodle. Rape, murder and candy theft, one fatal swoop. That’s why I hate to see a young n like yours who might not have no Word of God in her… Is she without training?”
“She ain’t even toilet trained. You couldn’t perch her on the outdoor convenience if she was sick and her manage to hit the hole. She can’t do nothing that don’t make a mess. You can’t teach her a thing. Half the time she don’t even know her name.” As if to prove this, Widow Case called, “Cindereller.”
Cinderella had one eye against the ant hill now and was trying to look down the hole. Her butt was way up and she was rocking forward on her knees.
“See,” said Widow Case, throwing up her hands. “She’s worse than any little ole baby, and it ain’t no easy row to hoe with her here and me not having a man around to do the heavy work.”
“I can see that… By the way, call me Preacher Judd… And can I help you tote that bucket up to the house there?”
“Well now,” said Widow Case, looking all the more like a weasel, “I’d appreciate that kindly.”
He got the bucket and they walked up to the house. Cinderella followed, and pretty soon she was circling around him like she was a shark closing in for the kill, the circles each time getting a mite smaller. She did this by running with her back bent and her knuckles almost touching the ground. Ropes of saliva dripped out of her mouth.
Watching her, Preacher Judd got a sort of warm feeling all over. She certainly reminded him of his sister. Only she had liked to scoop up dirt, dog mess and stuff as she ran, and toss it at him. It wasn’t a thing he thought he’d missed until just that moment, but now the truth was out and he felt a little teary eyed. He half-hoped Cinderella would pick up something and throw it on him.
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 15
