Chucklers (Book 1): Laughter is Contagious

by Jeff Brackett

  The man, however, had managed to hang on and was banging his fist into the already-damaged rear window. Linton hit the brakes again, causing the man to stumble backward, and then threw the truck back into drive and punched the gas. Still giggling, the man fell backward over the tailgate.

  Linton swerved to miss the woman, who was limping as she came toward them. Once past her, he bounced the truck over the curb and into the grass to the side of the fire. Another man ran at them and Linton swerved slightly, clipping him and knocking him to the ground.

  “Son of a bitch!” Linton didn’t know if he cursed himself for hitting the man, or at the man for rushing at them. Either way, he had hit a man, and he hadn’t stopped. His life had just taken a darker turn than he’d ever had to deal with.

  When they were almost even with the fire, another man ran laughing at them from the other side of the pileup. Linton saw him, saw the fire, gauged the distance between the fire and the brick wall beside the business on the right, and saw that there was no way he was going to miss the man. He had to decide: was he going to stop, or was he going to run the man down?

  That was his turning point. It’s us or them, Lint. Us or them.

  He hit the gas. The impact of the man on the hood wasn’t as bad as he had expected. He was only going twenty or twenty-five mile an hour, so it wasn’t like his truck was going to cave in. But the sight of the man’s head flopping forward and hitting the hood wasn’t something Linton was going to be able to forget for a long, long, time.

  They were several miles past the wreck before Linton realized Michelle was crying in the seat beside him. His hands ached from clenching the steering wheel so tightly, and he realized that he didn’t remember any of the drive since hitting that man. He looked down at the speedometer and saw that he was driving too fast for the feeder road he was on, and he hadn’t been paying the slightest attention to any traffic.

  He eased off the gas and checked his mirrors. Seeing no traffic, he looked over his shoulder at Emmet. “You okay?”

  His friend swallowed. “Yeah. You?”

  Linton shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever be okay.” He reached across and grabbed Michelle’s hand. “But we’ll work it out, right?”

  Her sniffling sounded strange through the diaphragm on the mask, but she nodded. “Sure.” Unable to wipe her eyes through the mask, she squeezed them closed repeatedly to clear her vision.

  Around a curve in the road, Linton saw another pileup. His chest tightened at the thought of a possible repeat of earlier events. He slowed the truck as he saw more people jumping around in the street. “Emmet, call up a map on your phone and find us another route.”

  “You got it.”

  The crowd around the wreck started running their direction.

  “You just passed a neighborhood a minute ago,” Michelle suggested. “Maybe there’s a way around through there.”

  Linton nodded and began backing up around the curve. He found the entrance to the neighborhood just where Michelle had said it would be. He turned in and headed away from the wrecks. “How you doing on that alternate route, Emmet?”

  “You just made it a lot harder. Doesn’t look like there’s a way through here.”

  “Even off road?”

  Emmet ran his fingers on the screen of his phone. “Maybe. It looks like there might be a field you can cross into the next neighborhood. Take the second left up ahead.”

  The second left had several people running between houses, most of them laughing. Linton sped past quickly, and they found a wooden barrier at the end of a dead-end street. Across the field behind it, they could see a row of fences; the backs of the homes in the next neighborhood.

  “Is there another street over there?” Linton asked.

  Emmet squinted at his phone. “Doesn’t look like it. You’re going to have to go through some fences.”

  People running behind them convinced Linton that there wasn’t any time to worry about the legalities of driving through someone’s fence. “Hang on.”

  He crashed the barrier and headed across the field.

  Chapter 48

  Ross Mayfield

  Sleep

  One of the only bonuses to Ross’s condition was the fact that he always had a good supply of medications on hand, including anti-depressants and sleep aids. He seldom ever used the anti-depressants. They left him with a mental fuzziness he didn’t like. It made it too difficult for him to maintain that keen edge of mental control that was so important to him. But the sleep aid was another story. His doctor was under the impression that Ross used them all the time, and so prescribed him ninety days at a time. And Ross filled those prescriptions every ninety days, even though he only took them a few times each month. Every doctor he had seen had told him that the only treatment was finding the right combination of drugs. They claimed that there was no behavioral treatment for his very rare variant of cataplexy.

  But Ross hated the way all the drugs made him feel. It was the control issue again. So he politely filled the prescriptions as he was supposed to, and the extra pills filled several bottles that he kept in his dorm room.

  He’d found that he could make a bit of extra cash under the table by selling the stuff to fellow students who used uppers during the day to keep up in classes. They often needed something to balance them out at night so they could get to sleep, and Ross became known as the guy who could get it. He didn’t really think of himself as a drug dealer. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a user. He sold one item, and one item only. He sold “Zs”. As for use, he only used two drugs; the occasional Z, and grass.

  After a sleepless night during which he’d been unable to take his mind off of Erica, he’d found himself getting more and more depressed. When he realized he was in danger of losing control, he considered taking the anti-depressant. But he finally decided that all he really needed was to get some sleep.

  It was a self-admitted fault in his character. Ross had a tendency to sleep whenever he felt depressed. He didn’t know whether it was a part of his cataplexy, or just an emotional retreat. Either way, all he wanted to do when he felt the gloom coming on was curl up and sleep it off like some sort of emotional hangover.

  It was pitiful and childish, but he really didn’t care. Between Erica having left without so much as a “kiss my ass,” his parents being out of the country, and most of the campus being deserted for the holiday, he figured he was entitled to a little childishness. So he’d finally given up as the sun was beginning to rise and he’d swallowed a double dose of Z.

  He slept until he heard the laughter and shrieking in the dormitory hallways, groaning at the latest personal affront that the heavens had thrown at him, rolled over in his bed, and pulled the pillow over his head. Unfortunately, it seemed that he had reached the point where his mind and body were in disagreement with one another. His mind demanded that he shut it all out and go back to sleep. Perhaps tomorrow would be a better day.

  But his body was already fully rested. He peeked out from under his pillow and looked at his alarm clock. It was seven o’clock. He’d slept all day. No wonder he couldn’t go back to sleep. More laughter sounded outside. It was accompanied by the sound of several people running past his door, hooting and cackling in amusement at something. He sat up and sighed. Opening the drawer in his nightstand, he pulled out the baggie and papers, and began rolling himself a joint.

  He’d begun smoking pot a few years ago after reading about other narcoleptics and cataleptics who’d had great results with it. To his great surprise, it had worked wonders for him. When the state of Alabama had made the marijuana extract CBD legal, he had tried that too. And while it had helped, he had already invested the time into learning how much pot he could smoke without losing control. That was the key for him: getting just enough in his system that it would help keep the cataplexy at bay, but not enough that he risked losing control of himself.

  Ross lit the joint and took a deep drag. He held his breath f
or a moment before repeating the process. After half of the joint was ash, he pinched it off and dropped the remainder back into the baggie. More laughing distracted him, this time from the quad outside his window. He knew there would be a few people like him who stayed on campus for Thanksgiving, but he hadn’t anticipated having to contend with so much noise. Didn’t they know he was busy in here trying to sulk?

  He tossed his baggie back into the nightstand. As he did, he glanced at where his phone lay plugged into its charger. An indicator flashed on the screen. He opened the screen and saw that he’d missed two calls. How had the phone not awakened him?

  Looking at the bar at the top, he wanted to kick himself. You silenced the damned thing so it wouldn’t wake you, you dumb ass! He pressed and held the one on the number pad, hitting the built-in speed dial button for his voice mail.

  “You have one unheard message. First message, sent yesterday at eight, twenty, three, pee, em from Erica mobile.” There was a short tone followed by Erica’s voice, “Hi Ross. Hey, umm… it’s Erica.” He heard her sigh into the phone. “Sorry, that was a stupid thing to… you recognized my voice, though, didn’t you? Of course, you did. Look, I’m sorry I had to leave town so abruptly. Uncle J died and I had to come back to Texas to take care of things. I found out about it right after we had our fight. No, that’s not fair. We didn’t have a fight. I just got pissed off and left. You didn’t do anything wrong.” There was a short pause before her voice continued. “Listen, I know I left things on a bad… Never mind. We’ll talk it out later. What I really called you about was the news. I know you don’t usually watch TV, but you really need to watch the news. Or maybe look it up online or whatever works best for you. There’s something going on in Africa, and some folks are saying it might be spreading. Supposedly there’s an epidemic or something. They’re saying that millions are dead.” She paused again, and Ross imagined her on the other end of the line trying to think of what to say. “Baby, I’m so sorry I got ma—” Her voice was cut off in the middle of whatever she was going to say.

  What the hell? Then he recalled that he’d set his voicemail to only give callers sixty seconds for their messages. The messaging system then told him, “To repeat message, press one. To delete, press seven. To archive, press nine. To hear more options, press star.”

  This was one of those times when someone in one of the silly movies Erica watched would likely fling his phone across the room. He wondered whether there was really an emotional satisfaction for some people in seeing a five hundred dollar piece of electronics shatter into dozens of pieces. It was something he would never know first-hand. He couldn’t afford the loss of control.

  Instead, he took a deep and calming breath, once more sinking into the near meditative state he strove for. It was relatively easy at the moment, having just awakened from more than thirteen hours of sleep, followed by half a joint. What was harder was the deeper technique of finding his heartbeat and acquiring the more profound control of his body. The techniques that usually took him only moments, were more elusive after the weed. But Ross was patient, and after nearly fifteen minutes of meditation and deep breathing, he began to feel he had it.

  He was at the point of attuning his heart to the piano tone when another bout of laughter sounded from outside. Shoving it into the background, he again reached for the tenuous link between imagined piano and heartbeat when a woman’s scream sounded, as well. It was followed by a deeper voice, a male voice. A voice that shouted loudly enough that Ross could hear it even from his bedroom.

  “…back! Leave her alone, you sick sons o’ bitches!”

  Ross got up and walked to his window just as the man started screaming. The sound raised goose bumps, and his jaw dropped at the sight in the lawn just outside the quad. It was getting dark, but there was still enough light for him to make out the scene below. Five men and a couple of women were beating and clawing at a young man on the grass. A woman, apparently unconscious, lay unmoving on the grass a few yards away from them. It was impossible for Ross to see much detail, but her face and throat appeared to be little more than a wet and red mess of ragged tissue. He felt his pulse begin pounding, and immediately took a deep breath as he reached again for the piano tone. He felt the muscles of his jaw begin to weaken and his vision swam.

  No, I will not lose it this time! He closed his eyes and fought for the calmness that would allow him to bypass the impending episode, feeling for a moment the fragile mental anchor as his body threatened to betray him again. Ping, two, three. Ping, two, three. Slow it down. Concentrate on the sound.

  Another scream sounded from outside and his eyes flicked open once more, involuntarily drawn to the scene of the attack out there. The man was curled up in a fetal position as the crowd laughed and kicked at him. One of the crowd raised a large rock above his head. Laughing the entire time, he smashed it down on his victim’s head. And though it wasn’t possible that he could have actually heard it, the imagined sound of the man’s skull smashing like a watermelon was enough to send Ross over the edge. His knees began to buckle, followed quickly by the other muscles as they all decided to betray him. He managed to angle his body away from the wall as he collapsed, and that was the last influence he was able to exert over his body. He hit the floor face first and stared at the carpet as he waited to regain control of his body.

  Chapter 49

  Ken Holtzapfel

  Downtown H-Town

  Ken awoke to the rocking of his boat on the lake. The wind must have really been kicking up because it was jostling his whole body.

  “Mister? Mister Holtz… ah, hell. Ken! You need to wake up!”

  Ken opened his eyes to find a pretty blonde woman reaching over the back seat and shaking his shoulder. She had blood running down her face, leaking from a scalp wound behind her hairline. “What the hell happened?”

  “We got hit.” She nodded at the little BMW that had attached itself to the front of his cab. The windshield of the Beamer was starred in front of the driver’s seat, and something dark trickled from the point of impact.

  Ken blinked as he began to recall the craziness before the accident. He heard sounds outside; screaming, laughter, horns blaring. And there was suddenly the sound of another accident somewhere behind them. That spurred him into motion. He tried to open his door, but it was jammed from the wreck. “We need to get out.” He scooted warily across the seat, being careful to not cut himself on any of the hundreds of squares of broken safety glass that littered his seat. He reached the passenger’s side door and shoved it open, finding the blonde lady already there to help him as he stumbled into the street. He looked around, dazed. What was her name? Angela, wasn’t it?

  Ken’s vision swam as he turned his head. “Let’s get out of the street. The way people are driving tonight, it ain’t safe out here.” He squinted at the sidewalk across the street. Even through his admittedly fuzzy vision, something was off. People were running all around them. But it was the sounds that ran a chill up Ken’s spine. There were screams, as some of the people ran from others, but there were more people who were laughing.

  “What the hell?” Angela said.

  He looked at his fare, then to where she pointed. On the sidewalk to the right, a woman screamed as two men knelt over her. The men were laughing uncontrollably, and as Ken watched, one of them bent over the woman and kissed her. The woman’s screams increased in volume, and as the man raised back up, his face was coated in blood.

  “Oh god!” Angela suddenly turned away from Ken and puked. The tart, yet sweet smell of grenadine and alcohol hit him, and he was glad she’d had the presence of mind to turn away.

  Ken pulled his eyes away from the scene on the sidewalk and walked the few steps back to his cab. He reached in the open front door and withdrew his attitude adjustment device. It was an old tire iron, and he always kept it in the front seat, just in case. And if this wasn’t such a case, he didn’t know what was. He hefted the length of iron in his fist and felt much better.
“Come on, lady. Let’s get inside someplace where it’s safe.”

  “Safe? That man just ate a woman’s lips!” Angela sounded on the verge of hysteria, and if Ken had realized what the man had done before, he might have been a bit hysterical, himself. But he hadn’t comprehended what he was seeing when he had watched earlier, and now he had his mind on protecting himself and Angela.

  “All the more reason to get out of sight.” He pulled her along, toward the opposite sidewalk. He scanned the streets around them, and the sound of another accident sounded from the corner ahead. A block behind them, the sound of an explosion caused them to spin around. Ken saw the fuel tank on one of the vehicles in the first accident had exploded.

  The men who had been accosting the woman on the sidewalk jumped up, laughing gleefully as they ran toward the flames. Ken pulled Angela along again in the opposite direction. “Come on.” They were in the theater district, close to the I-45 entrance ramp. As late as it was, there wasn’t going to be much open, but if there was a Thanksgiving play of some kind going this evening, maybe there would be an armed guard at the underground parking garage. Ken saw a sign for The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, and started jogging. He tried to keep them away from the other groups of people, but there was a young couple on the sidewalk ahead of them. They laughed and ran at Ken and Angela.