Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  The car slid off the road and into someone’s yard. And that someone came shambling out of his house. I squinted, making out the swarms of flies following him through the front door. The man was naked from the waist up, as if maybe he’d been lying in his recliner, having a beer, watching his favorite football team snort cocaine and run interference when some fool came driving up onto his lawn. Now he was coming toward the car. His face was rotten flesh, his head badly ripped apart, and you could see into the gorge, his bloody brain. A substance similar to jelly curdled out his ears, and a putrid cream, more like a creeping yeast, dribbled from his nipples to mat in his chest hair.

  I screamed like an eight-year-old girl watching The Exorcist all by herself in a big empty house at midnight. I expected this rotten dead dude to reach into the car and tear me apart like a rag doll.

  But instead, he said, “Howdy, mister. You’ve reached your destination.” His voice was damply husky. “You’re in the Land of the Dead.” He grinned, and there were maggots squirming in the gaps between his rot-black teeth.

  I screamed again as I stepped on the gas. I still had no traction, because I was in the dirt. Mud sprayed all over the place, hitting the windshield, the house, and the swarms of flies retreated a bit. Were they afraid they’d get dirty?

  And that man with the exposed brain was still coming toward me. He was getting closer and closer and closer, stumbling like the zombies in those Romero movies. You know the kind—they’re so plodding, you can’t fucking believe the other living-meat cast members can’t outrun them. And yet I wasn’t exactly getting away swiftly, was I? Yeah, it’s always easier from the armchair nightmare’s perspective.

  Then the car jerked forward. It started moving. I wobbled onto the road, did a donut on the blood-drenched surface of the street, and turned the car in the opposite direction.

  “Come back. You belong here,” the man said, spitting worms.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 3

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 4

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 5

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part 6

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 7

  Chapter 29

  DEDICATION

  Michael:

  To my lovely wife, Cindy McCarty.

  To my best man and collaborator, Mark McLaughlin.

  Mark:

  To Greg, who can always make me smile.

  To Mike and Cindy, and Latte makes three.

  Michael and Mark:

  To Charlee Jacob, mentor and friend, for teaching us the inner workings of Texas, car insurance, and poetic horror.

  Published 2011 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin

  Cover design by Jim Tampa

  Edited by Helen A Rosburg and Lorie Popp

  Permissions Acknowledgments appear on page 281.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro

  ISBN: 978-1-60542-168-1 EBK

  978-1-60542-167-4 KIN

  978-1-60542-166-7 EPUB

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Helen A Rosburg, Lorie Popp, the Medallion Press team, Daniel Shields, J.R. LaGreca, the Neumiller Family, Joyce Grubbs, The Source Book Store, Dave and Julie Thompson, Shane and Corrosion Press, Ron Stewart, Horror-Mall.com, Ken Lillie-Paetz, Judy Comeau, The Brutarian Quarterly, Leslie Langtry, Sherry Decker, Sam’s Dot Publishing, William F. Nolan, Mick Garris, Latte, Kitty The Bunny (gone but not forgotten), Bev McCarty, The Funky Werepig, Cristopher DeRose, Cemetery Dance, Fangoria, and especially Gerald McCarty for teaching me everything I know about automobiles.

  —Michael McCarty

  To Pamela the Perfect; Tang the Terrifying; Jean the Jaunty; Mel the Magnificent; Leslie the Luscious; Joyce the Joyful; Ben the Bold; Tess the Fearless; Ann the Angelic; Theresa and Ed; Helen, Lorie, and all the good folks at Medallion; Horror-Mall.com; Shane; The Funky Werepig; Tyree; and all my marvelous friends on Facebook.

  —Mark McLaughlin

  PROLOGUE

  SLAVE TO THE WHEEL

  Let’s not worry about the River of Time right now. Or crazy Frank who wouldn’t stay where dead people go. Or even Monster, the best car in the world and trouble from bumper to bumper.

  I’ll get to that eventually.

  It all started with a hell of a scorching summer when I turned ten years old for the first time.

  Yeah, the first time.

  I’ll get to that, too. By the way, my name’s Jeremy Carmichael.

  Summers in Texas are traditional cookers. But this one, when I was a kid, was way hotter than normal. It was like being inside a microwave oven inside a gas stove inside a blast furnace inside the earth’s molten core. Hot, hot fucking hot.

  Because I had to stay indoors, plopped in front of the air conditioner, my parents would buy me lots of toys. They also took me to any movie I wanted to see, as long as it wasn’t rated R.

  My dad’s name was Philip, and he was an insurance salesman. My mom, Emma, was a receptionist in a doctor’s office. I found out much, much later that their first kid, Peter, died two weeks after he was born. It made me sad, finding that out. Maybe he’d have been my best friend. Being an older brother, he might have snuck me my first cigarette or bought me my first beer. He may have taken me cruising around town in his car, driving fast. My folks always drove the speed limit. Hey, maybe he’d have coaxed his girlfriend to let me cop my first feel.

  Well, maybe he wouldn’t have been that nice of a brother . . . but you never know.

  Perhaps it was because of the heat that my parents spoiled me that summer. Or perhaps they were really happy that I hadn’t died on them, like poor baby Peter, and I’d made it all the way to ten. Considering they’d already lost one kid, ten probably seemed like a real milestone. For me, it was just another year.

  After the Fourth of July, suddenly the heat wasn’t the biggest problem. My parents announced we were all going to see Grandma in Minnesota. Normally that would have been good news. Grandma’s tidy little farmhouse always reminded me of Dorothy’s place in The Wizard of Oz. We lived in Wichita Falls in the eastern part—or as Dad would say, the East Wing—of Texas, so it was a long journey to get there, too—as much of an adventure as talking tin men or singing scarecrows on an MGM back lot.

  But this time, it wasn’t such a happy trip. Grandma was sick. Her doctor was worried that she might not make it
.

  “But the carnival’s coming to town this weekend,” I bawled at my folks. Looking back, I can’t believe I was such a brat. Grandma pretty much had one foot in the grave and the other on a roller skate, and all I cared about was the carnival.

  “We’re going to miss the carnival, Scooter,” Dad said. “It can’t be helped.” My folks called me Scooter at that time, because my favorite toy was—you guessed it—my red scooter, which I called Mars Rocket 7. Not sure why I added the 7 to the name. Maybe because 7 is a lucky number, and it rhymes with heaven. Or maybe I just wanted to make it sound more official.

  “The carnival comes to town only once a year. Just once. Leave me behind. You two can visit Grandma without me.” See? I told you I was a brat.

  Any other parents probably would have dealt me a spanking for that comment. But instead Mom said, “Tell you what. We’ll be driving through some different states on the way to Grandma’s house. If we come across any carnivals, we’ll stop at each one for, oh, about an hour.”

  That sounded good to me—carnivals in other states, wow—so I agreed and my parents took me out for ice cream.

  Mom and Dad said I could have three toys with me on the trip, so I spent a good portion of the next afternoon rummaging through my toy chest. I decided to take my favorite action figure, Captain Bravo, who had an enormous square jaw and a battle scar above one of his eyes. Actually, I’d scratched on the scar with a safety pin to make him look even tougher. I then picked a red toy sports car, about four inches long with little flames painted on it. My final selection was a black plastic horse named Dr. Midnight.

  Mom never liked that name. She reminded me that medical schools never allowed horses to enroll. She wanted me to call it Black Beauty. I told her that was a stupid girly horse name. I didn’t have an explanation for my horse’s medical degree. I suppose it was like my scooter’s number 7. I wanted the horse to sound official.

  My dad didn’t want to strap any luggage onto the roof of the car. He seemed to think there were bands of roving luggage thieves, waiting in restaurant parking lots for traveling families to come along. While the families were eating flapjacks and chugging orange juice and having a good time, those evil luggage thieves were carrying away their precious Samsonite goodies, filled with blank checks and Gutenberg Bibles and all sorts of other family heirlooms.

  Every square inch of the trunk and three-fourths of the backseat were filled, so I only had a little corner in the back, and in that corner Captain Bravo, Dr. Midnight, the little red car and I all had some exciting—albeit cramped—adventures.

  I remember I would stick the horse in a crack between a suitcase and a duffel bag, and then I’d whinny in my horse voice, “Help. The evil emperor of Venus has hidden me away in this alien cave. Quick. Find me before I run out of oxygen.”

  So, powered by my freckled hand, the little red car would drive over the luggage, looking for the horse. Then it would stop to rest, and Captain Bravo would resume the search. I must have heard that some el cheapo restaurants made their burgers out of horse meat, because I used to have Captain Bravo say, “Never fear, my four-footed companion. No one is going to make a friend of mine into a horseburger.” I think Dr. Midnight was grateful for that. After all, he hadn’t spent those years in horse medical school just to be made into burgers.

  My parents probably figured I was in my own little world, not listening to them, so every now and then they talked about Grandma’s health. But of course, I was listening. Kids always eavesdrop on the off chance their parents will mention them.

  These days, I suppose doctors would say Grandma had chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia or both. She was always tired and always in pain. But back then, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. Dad was of the opinion that it was all in her head. But Grandma was Mom’s mom, not his. If it had been his mom, he’d have probably stated that she had a great and tragic mystery disease and that medical science was ignoring her pain on purpose and, damn it, why were those moneygrubbing sadist doctors allowing her to suffer like that?

  Mom’s opinion was that Grandma had some kind of obscure women’s disease. That term really bothered me. Women’s disease? Did that mean there were men’s diseases, too? As an adult, I now know that there are—prostate cancer, for one—but being just a kid back then, I figured that all men’s diseases were probably centered about the pecker. Pecker rot. Pecker mold. Bleeding pecker. Pecker cough. Ick. I would imagine a poor limp pecker, wheezing out sickly coughs like a dying dog. Sad.

  But all thoughts of pecker cough flew right out of my head when I saw the top of a Ferris wheel in the distance.

  “Hey, look,” I cried out so loud that my mom jumped. “A carnival. We get to stop there for about an hour.”

  The carnival was located in a south central Iowa town called Sweet Patience. Since then, I’ve tried to find it on a map, and it’s not there. So either the town dried up and blew away, or else it was renamed at some point. But I’m tempted to think it simply blew away. It was just a seedy little farm town, where most of the houses looked too much like the crappy, cobbled together Douglas place on Green Acres.

  The sign outside the town proclaimed, in big swirly dark green letters—Sweet Patience: Our Pride Is Showing. That’s probably why I remember the name. Their sign was basically one gigantic brag, but when we entered the town, I sure couldn’t see anything for them to be proud of. The town looked like it needed a wrecking ball to put it out of its misery.

  A three-legged dog ran in front of the car, and Dad had to swerve to miss it. I didn’t actually see the dog since I was all tucked away in the backseat, but my folks started talking about it. Dad said, “It runs pretty fast for a dog with three legs.”

  Mom replied, “Maybe that’s what they’re so proud of.”

  The carnival, like the town and that dog, was on its last legs. Most of the stands and rides had faded and chipped paint jobs, and everything looked rickety. We played a game called Run, Mousey, Run, where they’d release a mouse in the middle of a huge spinning wheel lined with holes. Each hole had its own color, so people would bet on which color of hole the mouse would dive into. I felt sorry for that poor mouse. I imagined him getting dizzy and barfing up cheese in all those mouse holes. I put a quarter on purple, and purple won, and the lady at the booth handed me a stuffed green frog about as big as my head. I gave it to Mom, since stuffed animals were kind of girly.

  We also played the crane game. Basically, the player got to spin a handle that allowed him to control a little crane in a glass booth. The crane would stop over one of the many small toys in the booth, and hopefully it would come down on the toy, snatch it up, and deposit it in the chute that led to the player’s waiting hands. But more often than not, the crane’s toy jaws missed the toy, slid off the toy, or picked up the toy and then dropped it back among all the other toys about five seconds later. I didn’t win anything, but Mom won a tiny silver statue of Buddha.

  At one point, I noticed a lady who was crying. My parents were concentrating on the crane game, so I watched the lady for a while.

  Kids are no good at guessing ages, but thinking back, I suppose the lady was probably about twenty-two. She was as pretty as any movie star. She resembled Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. She had a poofed-up swirl of auburn hair, huge green eyes, pouty lips, and even a beauty mark on her cheek. Two big corn-fed blondes who looked like they were sisters were with her.

  “Forget about him, Maddy,” one of the big blondes said. “Million men in the world. Just find yourself a new one.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Maddy, the pretty crying girl, said.

  “Well, aren’t you a regular soap opera,” said the other big blonde. “Ain’t nothing complicated about it. What you got to do is—”

  At that moment, my dad took me by the arm and we continued deeper into the carnival, so I didn’t get to hear what the blonde thought Maddy had to do. But I remember thinking, Hey, that pretty girl’s looking for a ne
w boyfriend. Maybe it’ll be me.

  God, but I was an optimistic little shit back then.

  We went into the House of Mirrors next, which had several mirrors of different shapes and sizes. I saw myself as a big, fat kid, a tall, skinny kid, a squat troll kid, and Siamese twins. In a huge mirror that had eight different reflections, I looked like identical octuplets all swirled together. One of the most disturbing mirrors had a huge crack down the middle, and I saw what I’d look like if I were split completely in two. I left this maze of mirrors feeling a little creeped out, almost on the verge of tears.

  Then we came to the Ferris wheel I had spotted earlier and that made those impending tears dry up. It was a marvelous machine, painted with orange and red flames. The sign next to it said, Ride the Devil’s Spinning Wheel in black block letters wrapped in fiery swirls.

  The sign made me laugh. Even at that age, I was well-read enough to know that a spinning wheel was something people used to make yarn about a million years ago. Chicks in fairy tales, like the gal who pissed off Rumpelstiltskin, had them.

  Cool ride. Stupid name.

  The Ferris wheel attendant was a potbellied, middle-aged man with about six teeth in his head.

  Dad hooked a thumb in my direction and asked him how much the ride cost.

  The man replied by pointing to a wooden cutout of the devil holding his barbed tail in the air. “Sorry, but small fry there ain’t taller than that tail is high, so he can’t ride.”

  I walked up to the cutout. The man had a good eye. I was about two inches too short. “So I’m not that tall. Big deal. I’m close enough. I want to ride.”