by phuc
Scott Bradfield and his friends Dave Bruce and Steve Downing. They were running toward him fast, closing the gap. A yell sounded and Tim caught a momentary glimpse of the look in their eyes before he turned tail and ran.
They had too great a lead on him and caught up with him after fifty yards. Scott grabbed him, holding him back. Immediately Tim had gone on the defensive, trying to talk his way out of a physical confrontation. Scott had beaten him up last year on the way home from school, not enough to raise concern with his parents (who hadn’t noticed he’d been in a fight, nor had he told them; he’d been too embarrassed), but the experience was enough to make him avoid Scott whenever possible. In the year that passed, Scott had occasionally set his sights on Tim, who’d done everything he could to get out of Scott’s radar. It usually worked.
Not this time, though.
“All right!” Scott said, clutching Tim’s jacket. He began herding Tim into the field. “Got something I want to show you, Gaines.”
“Listen, I really got to—”
Dave and Steve were laughing as they stood on either side of him, helping Scott herd him into the field. “You’re gonna love this, Count Gaines!”
Count Gaines? That had been the first time the nickname was used and at the time Tim didn’t know what they meant by it. “What?” he asked.
“You’ll see!” Scott’s grip was solid. As they walked into the field, Tim caught a glimpse of Scott’s features. There was something in his eyes that sent shards of fear through Tim’s body. They were cold, calculating. They spoke volumes, and Tim had the sense that something very bad was about to happen to him.
Tim tried pulling away, tried protesting, but it was no use. They overpowered him and Dave socked him in the upper thigh, giving him a Charlie horse. He tried yelling at the top of his lungs but another blow to the face cut it off. Scott loomed over him, telling him he didn’t have to make a big deal out of this…they just wanted to show him something, just wanted to help him. Tim was out of breath, scared, confused, and he let the three boys lead him deeper into the field where they suddenly stopped.
At first the smell did not register with Tim. He was so worked up with fear that he hadn’t noticed it until they were standing directly over it. Tim was practically touching it with the tips of his shoes. A cloud of flies swarmed up at their arrival, buzzing frenziedly, then landing on what appeared to be a lump of fur.
“I shot it this morning with my .22,” Scott said. “Blood should still be fresh. Go ahead, have a sip, Count.”
Tim had stared down at what he now took to be a dead possum. There was an animal smell of sweat and shit. “What are you talking about?”
Scott’s fingers had pressed down on his neck, forcing him to his knees in front of the dead possum. Scott hissed in his ear. “Vampires drink blood, don’t they, Count?”
Steve and Dave laughed, crowding in closer.
“I saw that book you’re reading,” Scott said, holding him down. “About vampires.
You want to be a vampire, Count?”
Tim almost shouted, almost pleaded, no, I don’t want to be a vampire, I just want to go home! Instead he made one more valiant attempt at escape. He forced himself up only to be brought back down by Scott and his friends. He fell to his knees in front of the possum. The flies buzzed up again, circling.
“Fucking weirdo is what you are,” Scott growled in his ear. His fingers dug into his collarbone. “Always reading books about ghosts and witches and vampires. And that fucking Harry Potter shit! What are you, a fucking devil worshipper?”
Dave and Steve were laughing but Scott was deadly serious. “I don’t see you in church, and neither do people I talk to,” Scott continued. “And all you read is that devil shit. When you read occult books it opens you up to be influenced by the devil. Is that what you’re trying to do? Be influenced by the devil?”
Tim had wanted to shout at him: are you out of your mind? Do you really believe what you’re saying? but he couldn’t. The pain in his collarbone was too fierce, and he was too frightened.
“I know a lot of kids like the Harry Potter books,” Scott said, standing over him, keeping him to the ground. “But you…the stuff you read…it goes beyond that. I’ve seen the kind of books you bring to school. Those comic books. Those paperbacks. Stuff with ghosts and demons on the cover. It’s all you read. I’ve never seen you read anything else.
To me, that spells trouble. It makes sense now why you don’t want to hang out with anybody but that Richard Pilson freak. Makes sense why you aren’t into sports or why we never see you at the park or why nobody sees you at church. Vampire devil-worshippers like to hide, don’t they, Count Gaines?”
Tim could tell that Scott’s logic was not only misguided, it was twisted. He’d dimly followed a newspaper account from earlier in the school year when a local Fire Hall refused to provide security and protection during a YMCA event because of the organization’s sponsorship of a Harry Potter reading event geared toward children. The Fire Hall’s excuse was that the Harry Potter books glorified and promoted witchcraft and Satanism. Mom and Dad had a lot to say about that; the people at the Fire Hall were illiterate morons, obviously. And as they’d explained to Tim later, when illiterate morons gained positions of power, especially illiterate morons who were religious fanatics, all sense of reason and diplomacy went out the window.
Tim had never given much thought to the over-whelming Christian church-going views of the Spring Valley township’s population until that moment. He knew that Scott was a member of some church youth group and that was about it. In the years to follow, he would come to learn that his greatest tormentors hid behind the mask of Christianity, using it as an excuse with which to heap their verbal and psychological abuse. But that day, in the field, with a dead possum at his feet, his mind was a swirling mass of confusion as he tried to connect the dots.
“Do you believe in God, Tim?” Scott’s fingers tightened on his collarbone, pinching a nerve.
“Aaah! ” Tim breathed in pain.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes!” Tim said loudly. “Yes, yes, I believe in God!”
“How come I don’t believe you?” His grip tightened.
“I don’t know! I believe, I believe!”
“If you believe, how come I don’t see you in church? How come I never hear you talk about going to church?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” He just wanted this pain to stop!
“If you believe in God, why are you always reading books about devils and demons and vampires?”
His grip tightened again and he pushed Tim closer to the dead possum. Steve and Dave’s laughter had settled into occasional chuckles as they stood watching.
“Do you like reading about vampires, witches, and demons?”
Tim winced at the pain in his shoulders and neck, which was becoming unbearable. He squirmed in Scott’s grip, trying to ease the pressure, to escape. “Please…”
he panted. “Let me go—”
“Answer the question!” Scott barked, retaining his grip on him.
“Ahh—” Tim winced, his breath held. “Please—”
“Do you enjoy reading about vampires, demons, and witches? Yes or no?”
“No! No, I don’t, now please, just let me go—”
“You’re lying because that’s all you read. You like reading about demons, witches and vampires because that’s what you want to be, isn’t it? You’re drawn to the unholy because you’re not like the rest of us. You’re not a Christian, you don’t go to church, you’re a witch-loving, demon-loving freak who wants to be a vampire!”
“No, that’s not true, please—”
“Then why do you like reading those kinds of books so much?”
“They’re just… stories! Just stories, that’s all they are—”
But Scott wasn’t having any of it. His grip was tight on Tim’s neck. “Just stories, huh? Stories like the Harry Potter books, right? Witchcraft and devil-worsh
ip. Those Harry Potter books aren’t just stories, Tim! Witchcraft and devil-worship is real! It’s not Christian, and neither are vampires.”
Vampires aren’t real, Tim wanted to say, but couldn’t. His mouth was dry.
“We’ve been trying to get you to see that it’s bad for you to read that kind of stuff for weeks now,” Scott said, and Tim’s mind instantly replayed to several incidents that had occurred over the past few weeks. Jeering catcalls made in the hallways at school about Tim’s love of spooks and devils. Verbal jabs in the playground that Tim liked the devil more than he liked Jesus. Tim was intelligent enough to dismiss all of this as immature crap. It wasn’t his problem his classmates couldn’t differentiate fiction from reality.
Apparently, though, he was wrong because now it was his problem.
“Now we realize you weren’t listening because you don’t care,” Scott continued.
“You love the devil more than you love God. That makes you a freak. So we decided if we can’t save you, we’ll help you. That’s why we brought you out here.”
Tim struggled once more briefly and Scott applied vice-like pressure to the nerve in his collarbone that sent him to his knees. Tim was barely aware that he was crying now.
“You want to be a vampire so much, we got you something to drink.” Scott’s voice was teasing, mocking. “After all, blood is blood, right? Figure we might need to get you used to animal blood before you start going after people.”
And as Tim realized the mad intent behind Scott’s words, he fought one last time to break free from the grip. The blows crashed down on him again, landing on his torso, his legs. He was driven closer to the ground, Scott forcing his face into the matted, bloodied fur of the dead possum. He screamed, his throat becoming raw, and as he screamed his face was shoved into the animal’s body and he felt the fur, felt the matted blood, barely heard Scott’s voice commanding him to drink! Drink its fucking blood, you freak! He didn’t hear Dave and Steve laughing uncontrollably, wasn’t aware that he was crying, that he’d peed his pants and his strength left him as Scott held his face to the possum’s body, filling his mouth and nostrils, the strong scent of it now overwhelming, triggering his nausea, and that’s when he threw up.
Throwing up had been the trigger. Scott released him and the boys had jumped back, laughing. “Ha ha ha, lookit him!”
“Fuckin’ puked all over himself!”
They’d stood over Tim, laughing, watching him puke his guts out. Then they’d walked away, leaving him lying there on the ground, dry heaving, out of breath from crying, still sick with nausea, pain wracking his body.
That simple, very quick reliving of the incident that had set things in motion for Tim Gaines–the arrest of Scott and his friends, their parents influence on the town which forced the authorities to release them and not press charges, Scott and his friends circulating nasty rumors about Tim in the years to follow–was enough to convince Tim that, yes, Scott Bradfield and his crew could be capable of such cruelty. It was a no-brainer. If he could beat another kid, force him to try to eat a dead animal, he was capable of even worse atrocities.
So he listened as Gordon continued his story. He listened as Gordon told him about their brief excursions into Harrisburg and Philadelphia, where they’d target a homeless person and beat him up, then leave. It sickened Tim to hear this and it once again angered him that a group of kids who cloaked themselves with such holier-than-thou bullshit—who had everybody in town fooled that they were not only such upstanding, caring citizens and perfect Christians—were such monsters.
When Gordon got to the part of the abduction of Neal Ashford, Tim drew in a breath. This crossing the line from random beatings to felony abduction was the final straw. Tim could only listen with bated breath as Gordon told them how they’d abducted Neal and taken him back to Scott’s place and locked him in the guest house. He related how the plan had been to use Neal as their own personal punching bag, that the whole idea was to use somebody nobody would care about, but then the guy had fucking died on them a week later, and that’s when Gordon had come up with the idea of resurrecting him.
Tim blinked. “You what?”
“I came up with the idea of bringing him back from the dead,” Gordon said.
Despite the therapeutic nature of the confession, Gordon looked amazingly calm. “I thought…if he came back…it would be better. Because then we wouldn’t have to worry about getting another one. We could just use this same guy over and over again. Just beat on him without having to worry about killing him.”
Tim didn’t see the logic in that. They’d already killed the guy. But then, they never saw Neal as a fellow human being. They saw him as an object to pummel and pound on, to use as a human punching bag. With that thought it was now clear to Tim.
He was speaking to a stone-cold sociopath.
Somehow he kept his fear in check as he nodded at Gordon to continue.
As Gordon segued into his borrowing of Back From the Dead from Tim, everything became clear. He finished this part of the story himself aloud. “When I told you what the book was about, you realized it contained the elements you were thinking about,” he said. “That’s why you were asking me about the zombies, how they were made.”
“Exactly,” Gordon said, nodding. He took another sip of coke. “And that’s why I asked you to show me the parts in the book that told how to make the zombies.”
“But…I don’t understand…that book is just a horror novel. It’s not real. It was just a story!”
“You said yourself that zombies are real in Haiti!” Gordon argued.
“Yeah, but what takes place in Back From the Dead is fiction. It isn’t real! It’s made up.”
Gordon shook his head. It looked like he was struggling with this basic fact. Tim tried to remember if Gordon came from an overtly religious family, the kind that believed the fantasy novels of J.K. Rowling were as real as thunderstorms. “It might be a story, but it mixes fiction with reality. All fiction does that to a certain extent, right?”
“I suppose,” Tim said. “But…” But you can’t resurrect the dead! That’s impossible!”
And then in the back of his mind came one of the oldest stories of the dead being resurrected. That son of a Jewish carpenter who’d been nailed to a tree, was entombed in a cave, then rose from the dead three days later.
He banished that particular thought from his mind, focusing on what Gordon was telling him. He nodded for Gordon to continue.
Gordon wrapped it up quickly, telling him about the second abduction, how that homeless guy was killed quickly in a fit of rage by Scott, how they’d taken the body out to Zuck’s Woods that night and waited while the spell did its work. He felt a sense of disgust as Gordon revealed that the other guys wanted Neal Ashford’s corpse to eat the second homeless man, and he was even more horrified when Gordon told him about John Elfman. His jaw dropped. “You killed John?”
“I didn’t kill John!” Gordon protested. He was showing a faint sign of nervousness. “Scott…Dave and Steve… they killed him.”
Tim almost blurted, but you helped! but didn’t. For the first time, the thought that Gordon was making everything up as some sort of elaborate practical joke occurred to him, but he kept that to himself. “Okay, Scott and others did it. But…why?”
“They wanted to feed somebody to the zombies,” Gordon explained. His features had a sense of pleading in them, as if he were begging Tim to understand the nature of their actions. “It was like…once we started talking about doing this, all the talk of zombies and stuff…and when it really happened with Neal…they wanted to see if all the stuff you see in movies was real.”
“And was it?”
Gordon nodded. It seemed that with Gordon safe within the sanctuary of his living room he felt comfortable in letting his true emotions through. He looked visibly affected by what he’d seen. “Yeah,” Gordon said. “Once John was pushed into the zombies it was like…they turned on him. It was just like those D
awn of the Dead movies. They just…tore into him.”
“They ate him?”
Gordon nodded. “Yeah.” Gordon’s eyes were haunted. They reflected the depths of the horror he’d witnessed.
As horrible as it all sounded, Tim still had a hard time trying to wrap his mind around it. They’d resurrected their murder victims and turned them into zombies…not just Haitian zombies, but a combination of Haitian and Romero zombies, the latter of which weren’t even real! How was this possible?
Gordon wrapped the story to its conclusion. “I helped the guys clean up. It was…pretty messy. Steve got sick…I did too. We finally got the worst of it out of there and—”
“How’d you get John’s body out without getting attacked by the zombies?”
“Scott brought a bunch of gardening tools. Rakes, shovels and shit like that. We used them to fish the…body parts…over to us.”
“And the zombies didn’t try to lunge at you?”
“Not really. They were pretty sedated at that point. Like munching on John had made them lazy. You know?”
Tim didn’t know, not having ever seen a zombie consume a human being before.
“So you got the rest of John out of there and then what?”
“Scott spread lime on the floor and the rest of us went out and got air fresheners.
We hung them up to mask the smell. We…burned the rest of John in the fireplace.”
Tim’s mind was turning everything over. The events Gordon was describing had occurred five nights ago. He had yet to hear of John’s disappearance in the news, but then he supposed the local media hadn’t run anything on it yet. “Do you know if John’s parents have reported him missing?”
Gordon shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Scott’s mom is home now?”
Gordon nodded.
“Have you heard from Scott or Dave or Steve since then?”
“Just phone calls. We’ve been checking in with each other, to make sure everything’s okay.”
