Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  I put my money down on the nightstand, telling myself, It’s for the car. Not like I’m paying up front for a roll with the madame at a whorehouse. As I poured a shot of tequila in her smudged glass, I noticed an old black-and-white photo by the fancy liquor cabinet, which was next to an even more elaborate gun cabinet. It was common to find such a combination in fine Texas homes: side-by-side cupboards for the booze and the arsenal. I picked up the snapshot. It was of a much younger Connie wearing a black bikini, like something you’d see in a vintage Elvis or James Bond movie, sitting on a blanket with a young man in an Army uniform. They were on a beach. Down south in Galveston maybe.

  God, Connie wasn’t too bad looking back then. Her breasts were firm, and her legs were muscular and tanned. And was that a waistline? The kind a man could put his hands all the way around? Not like the stomach I saw in front of me—shapeless and ballooning. Not like the legs—flabby and scrimshawed with varicose veins.

  You could see a hint of ass in the shot, and her butt looked good.

  I was getting an erection.

  “Is this your husband?” I asked, handing the drink and photo to Connie.

  She smiled vaguely, bemused. “No, this was before I got married. It’s my old soldier boyfriend before he went off to Vietnam.”

  “Oh yeah. The noseless guy. Nose-tradamus.”

  She laughed. “His name was Garth. You make me laugh; you’re so clever. I wish I was clever like that.” She smiled. “If a man can make you laugh . . . Well, that’s better than a million bucks sometimes. But if you ever make a million bucks, you’d better share it with Mama.”

  “I’d settle for making a decent living,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask how your husband died? You’ve never mentioned it.”

  “I killed him.” Connie tilted the glass back, swallowing the warm liquor. “Nah, just funnin’ with ya. But there were days when I wanted to kill him.” She stared at the bottom of her glass. “Frank blew his brains out in the front seat of the Barracuda. Apparently he loved that fucking car so much, he wanted to die in it. I cleaned it up pretty good, didn’t I? Not a speck of blood anywhere. Blood or . . . anything else.”

  I shuddered. Connie sure had a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But my boner didn’t wilt on me, so I guess I was getting used to her. I was getting used to a lot of weird shit lately.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore. Let’s fuck.” She untied her pink robe and walked across the living room and out the side door. She climbed into the hot tub, where the water roared and steamed.

  I started taking off my clothes and joined her.

  The swirling warm water felt good against my skin, as effervescent as seltzer in the pores. I knew the routine. She perched on the ledge of the hot tub and spread her legs wide open. I knelt in front of the parted thighs and began to run my tongue inside her, feeling every moist bump and curve of inner lip. She closed her eyes, a barely audible whisper of breath hissing out between her teeth. I kept my tongue in motion, imagining ripe grapes I could only taste, never burst, fuzzy slices of peach I could savor but never chew. I didn’t pause to linger in any one single bud or hollow. Never stopping was the secret.

  All the time I pictured the younger Connie in the black bikini, modeling for me in provocative poses. Stacked and hot like Raquel Welch in that caveman movie or Ursula Andress in Dr. No or any of the Russ Meyer vixens. All babes from another era. Somebody get me a time machine. I was sucking like this slick mound of flesh was the time machine, propelled backward with saliva and energy, delivering me to the porthole of a gorgeous young woman, staring at me with wild eyes, murmuring, “Yeah, baby, lick those years away.”

  I could hear the ocean beside that beach like thunder in my skull.

  Soon Connie was quivering and moaning. I ran my tongue even faster, and she climaxed in a whole series of mental Kodak moments. I looked up, disconcerted and confused momentarily at the sight of the aging blonde.

  “Your turn, lover,” she said.

  I sat on the edge of the hot tub, and she slid into the water. A moment later her head was between my legs.

  My eyelids fluttered, and the vision of the young Connie was there again, wriggling out of the pieces of her suit, showing the two round cups and tiny square thatch of where she was still china-doll white amid her thriving tan. She was lying down on her naked back in the sand, spread-eagled before me. She kept touching herself between her muscled legs and groaning like a porn star. And somehow, years away, I was inside that glowing time machine of hers, so big and hard with the bubbling hot ocean water steaming all around me.

  And then I came.

  Connie spat the cum into a dirty ashtray on the ledge of the hot tub. She grabbed a pack of cigarettes next to the ashtray and lit up.

  I climbed out of the hot tub, wrapped a towel around my waist, and walked inside the house, where I strolled into the kitchen and nabbed a Bud.

  I was blinking a little too rapidly, as if trying to keep something in my head that I thought I’d witnessed—or as if trying to hold something back that I didn’t want to see. Hey, fantasy was a big part of sex for most people. So what was the big deal?

  I went back outside and sat next to the hot tub.

  Connie handed me her empty glass. “Mas tequila.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE INQUISITION

  It was raining blood.

  That sounds like a trite horror-show gimmick. But just thinking of blood gushing out of heaven in a torrential scarlet downpour doesn’t convey the full import of sticky hammers of blood pelting the skin. Or the hot, soapy coating it creates on the face, matting the hair into sanguine brillo. Or the god-awful stench of it that makes the nose run, mixing with the stormy gout until the mucus runs a sludgy pink.

  I was in the Land of the Dead again.

  But why? Why was I having yet another nightmare? This was the third time I’d popped into the place where dead people go.

  I wasn’t dead.

  Before I could give it any more thought, a bolt of lightning struck the paving and cracked it, red spraying up like lava. Thunder sang out overhead like the muse of dead meat.

  I ran down an abattoir-scented, slaughterhouse-slippery, trash-spewed alley, jumping over foaming plasma puddles as blood dumped all over me from the wounded sky. I stumbled and skidded and flopped down, clawing my way back to my feet, spitting and gagging as if I’d been tossed with scraps down a chute at a shark-bait factory. I must have looked like a refugee on the run from Carrie’s prom, passing doors and pawing at their knobs, nothing turning or opening to offer me shelter. Hell, they weren’t even real doors. They were just painted there, and the doorknobs were ground patties of mystery meat that mushed in my fingers.

  My eyes were burning. I tried to keep them shut, squeezing the lids together until I felt eyelashes coming loose. But it was no good; the blood kept seeping under like floodwaters beneath the gate to a city’s storm shelter. It irritated me so much that I had to blink, eyelids doing an SOS in gummy-teared dots and dashes. The more I blinked, the more blood got in and the worse the searing felt. Blood’s salty, you know.

  I tried to jump-start a wake up by saying to myself: This is a dream, just a goddamn dream. Usually that works, if I’m having one of those goofy dreams where I’m walking around school naked.

  This one just wouldn’t end that easily.

  But maybe that was okay. Maybe this had something to do with the dead voice in my car. If I stuck around in the dream long enough, I might learn something.

  The red slime stinging my eyes was gross enough, but what I saw in the alleyway was even worse. There was a zombie who had half a torso, only the upper half of his body from his head down to his stomach. He used his hands as feet for walking, dragging his intestines as if they were some kind of a tail.

  Suddenly I didn’t care that the burning rain was soaking me. At least I had an entire body that didn’t end at my navel.

  The semizombie hobbled closer and closer to me. I
looked down at the ground, hoping he’d go on past me. No such luck. He stopped directly in front of me and looked at me with repulsion, with sickening revulsion. He snarled, baring his rotten and jagged teeth.

  “Freak,” he said with distaste. “Fucking weirdo. You disgust me.” He then spat out an earthworm. He spat out a variety of different creepy crawlies, including beetles, grasshoppers, earwigs, centipedes, and even a praying mantis. All the insects slithered and scuttled past my feet.

  I felt like vomiting; my stomach was spinning like a frenzied carnival ride.

  After the zombie finished spitting up bugs, he continued down the alley, shaking his head, as though trying to shake out the memory of having ever met the hideous Jeremy Carmichael.

  I finally found an honest to God eave to duck under, a carved-out threshold where I could manage a temporary shelter. Ripples of meaty sludge continued to slosh over my feet, thick as mud inside my shoes, so hot it seemed to boil the hair right off my ankles. I hawked and spat again and again until I cleared the mess off my tongue for an entire holy minute.

  I tried to look up. Expecting to see—what? Giants wringing blood out of the bodies of the dead, veins popping, arteries bursting, organs toothpaste tube squirting? I couldn’t see anything but a ceiling cloud of what looked like boiling scarlet oatmeal. My stomach heaved—the smell was really getting to me. I tried to throw up again but nothing came out.

  I slid down, huddling in a corner, my sodden knees up to my chest. I wrapped my arms around my head, trying to keep the splash away from my face. Then the bloody raindrops turned cold. I shivered in what previously had been liquified but was now chilling into sloppy, pulpy cherry Jell-O around me.

  And then I heard music. Coming out of nowhere, filtering between the thick, chilly raindrops, down from the sky, up from the torrid gutters, everywhere at once like a haunting, audible steam. It was a sullen, classical composition, as if an orchestra from hell were playing next door. The melody was intense, dark, and passionate—the kind of music to which scorpions made love. A Ravelian song for creatures with poison stingers.

  The music hypnotized me until I stopped shaking, the dropping temperature of the storm no big deal anymore. I still couldn’t see much, my eyes squeezing out blood and tears like iodine. But I wanted to know where this symphony was coming from. Like a rat in the Pied Piper’s procession to a watery grave, I blindly followed the orchestra of oblivion: spooky strings, haunting horns, pianos of pain, and cymbals of chaos.

  Finally the rain stopped. I wiped my face on the backs of my hands, used my fingers to pry off bits of hardened blood, flicking them away. Clots had created a chunky graffiti on the walls.

  I walked down a cobblestone alley and stopped at an old tire factory that looked as if it had been bombed a long time ago. You could still get a strong sense of rubber and fusion, as if a monumental, eternal pile of tires were burning in the back. It seemed an unlikely spot to be the source of the music, but this was the place.

  I stood in front of a red door. Painted, not streaked from the bloody storm. The doorknob was dull brass, convincing me it wouldn’t do the rare-hamburger trick in my fingers. I grasped it, and it vibrated in my hands because the music inside was so loud. I turned the handle and walked in.

  There was no sign of the factory or the devastation of the building that had been apparent outside. There was an odor but not of tires meeting Armageddon. It was a nightclub with tables and chairs in a semicircle, a stage, and a dance floor. There was an undead orchestra groping instruments, skinning a wind section, and boning percussion. A guy with no bottom jaw had a violin propped under his front teeth.

  But what really scared the hell out of me were the dancers. At least they didn’t seem to mind my clot couture.

  I grew up in Texas where folks of Mexican extraction celebrate the Day of the Dead. And even gringos are welcome to join in. Death welcomes everyone with open arms. It’s a fiesta not to be missed by anyone with an appreciation for Halloween, even though it’s a day or two after. It’s all in good fun, with death depicted in skeleton dolls and edible corpse-shaped goodies. It’s a lot like a totally morbid Mardi Gras, where you can bite into a sugar skull and suck the chocolate brains right out while dancing in a crowd that looks like it was visited by a plague or two.

  But these weren’t tipsy revelers mimicking dry bones coming out of their graves to dance the night away. This was no candied cotillion. The discolored flesh that dangled loose in filmy veils wasn’t carefully sculpted praline. The curdled heart visible inside the rib-spreader-revealed chest wasn’t a plump strawberry. Those weren’t chocolate brain curds served up in the crushed brainpan of that guy’s head.

  The zombie dancers performed a grim tango, creaking hip to creaking hip, withered legs paired in exaggerated sultry stride. As they danced cheek to cheek—exposed and rotting flesh clinging wetly or flaking off against even more exposed and rotting flesh—their decomposed body parts would periodically shudder, snap, and fall off, shucking out of sleeves, trousers, and sequined skirts throughout the intense ballroom dance.

  As a result, the floor was littered with torn arms, legs, and other fleshy detritus. Yet the dancers slinked and crept sleekly around the crusty debris, never missing a beat.

  “Hey, big breather. Spend a little time with meeeee.”

  I turned around, wobbling on my feet. No more blurred vision. There before me was a dead lady, heavily shadowed eyes only a little loose in their sockets. There were gummy threads, as thick as her funereal mascara, in the corners. It disgusted me—eye snot—until I realized it was where her lids had been glued shut by the undertaker. Only paste.

  She wore an elegant white satin gown that only made her blue flesh appear more cyanic. She had jet-black hair that almost reached the floor. She was voluptuous, sexy in a ghastly, vampirish sort of way.

  I was stupefied.

  “Wanna dance, breather? Trip the blight fantastic?” she slurred, not entirely articulate. She pursed her bloated scarlet lips in an air kiss.

  Before I could answer her preposterous questions, she grabbed my hand and we were stalking through a tango on the marble floor. Not a particularly graceful guy, I was usually lucky to manage three unfaltering steps of the Cotton-Eyed Joe dance before my boots got tangled up. But here I was, doing this elaborate Latin ballroom routine.

  A fleshless lady with flapping lungs in her rib cage stepped up to the microphone and started to sing in a low, wet, bottom-feeder voice:

  Dance, dance, dance in

  The Masquerade of Death

  Blood slowly drains

  Till there’s no color left

  Loved ones gather

  To bemoan your doom

  Gently you’re placed

  In a pine-box tomb

  The Carousel of Death

  Turns round and round

  It doesn’t stop

  Till you’re six feet down

  A priest comes to bless

  Your soul he’s to save

  Friends and family march

  Right up to your grave

  You lay in the blackness

  Alone like the night

  You begin the journey

  Down the tunnel of light

  At the end of the ride

  Account for your sins

  In purgatory

  The waiting begins

  Beg now for forgiveness

  Repentance too late

  To heaven or hell

  Which is your fate?

  Spin in the cycle

  Of this endless ride

  Life goes on

  Even after you’ve died

  Now is the time

  You’ve got to keep steady

  A new ride awaits

  Get your ticket ready

  A mortician’s transition

  Formaldehyde ride

  Carnival of Souls—

  Where you go when you’ve died

  I kept dancing cheek to blue cheek with the dead lady. Her voice wa
s husky and deep as she purred into my ear, “You’re soooo warm.” She was as cold as the ice on a keg of Lone Star Beer served during January’s Super Bowl.

  She also reeked, the stench of a road-kill skunk in the middle of a dead-end street where it lies for weeks, because the city road crews haven’t bothered to scoop it up. She was wearing perfume to cover the stink. About a bucket of Chanel No. 5. But it only made it worse, sweet on top of sweet until it cloyed through my pores, starting to suffocate me on a neural level.

  She crunched a little in my arms. It felt as if some careless dressmaker had left pins in the gown. I yelped and pulled back, seeing slivers of green-tinged rib cage ivory sticking out of my upper arm. Deftly I plucked them out, wincing.

  She pulled me close again, dress rustling and bones crackling. She set her overripe-peach cheek next to mine.

  I felt something tickle, then race across my nose. “Shit, let go of me. What the hell?” I wrenched out of her arms and grimaced at the cockroaches crawling out of her ear. I heard them ticking, clicking as they swarmed over my face and down my shoulder. I started screaming, trying to swipe the damn things off me.

  They seemed to enjoy the fact that I was filthy with blood from the rain. Don’t ever let anybody try to tell you that roaches don’t bite.

  I heard a ratchety giggling. A coven of wallflowers—stiff death-lily maidens—demurely tittered at my antics.

  My partner gave me a disapproving look, folding her dead-branch arms and tsking. She wasn’t one to take no for an answer, grabbing me again and taking off across the slick floor. Her body thrummed against mine. I pictured the cavities of her torso and head scoured free of organs, crawling with millions of roaches, each one sniffing out my red, wet clothes and looking for an exit—up or down in her, didn’t matter. Didn’t these tangos ever end?