Untcigahunk: The Complete Little Brothers

by Rick Hautala

  The driver hit the brakes, but it was already too late. The tires skidded on the gravel just as a heavy thump sounded from underneath the ambulance.

  “Aww, shit! You hit him!”

  “Hey! Watch your language up there!” Cochran said.

  “What the hell—? Was that some kind of dog or something?” the ambulance driver asked. His expression was tight as he played the steering wheel back and forth while stepping down hard on the brakes. The ambulance swerved to a stop, its tires skidding on the dirt as the siren died with a descending hoot

  “Come on, man,” the passenger up front said. “You can’t stop now. We have to get this kid to the hospital.”

  “Shouldn’t we check it out. If that was a dog, we have to report it,” the driver said.

  “We have to get this kid to the hospital. We can check whatever the hell that was on our way back.”

  They delivered Stan and his mother to the hospital in Portland and, once the paperwork was completed, headed back up Route 25 to the Thornton Fire Station. As they neared the construction site, the driver slowed down so they could scan both sides of the road.

  “I know it was right around here,” he whispered.

  A second later, he saw a dark lump of...something lying on the road ahead. He braked to a stop, jammed the shift into park, and opened his door. As he stepped out into the night, the other man got out and walked around to meet him at the front of the ambulance. The headlights shined brightly, and both men stared at the dark splotch in the middle of the road.

  “What in the name of—?” the driver muttered, shaking his head.

  Flattened onto the hard-packed dirt was a tangled piece of dark, scaly flesh. Blood and purple guts had spurted out of its opened mouth. Huge, rounded eyes bulged up out of the eye sockets, glistening like exposed bone in the glare of the headlights. Not quite daring to touch the thing, the driver knelt down and stared at the array of tiny, pointed teeth that lined the squashed lower jaw. The body—at least what was left of it—looked like a long, flattened tube with long, distorted hind legs, and stick-thin arms that were tipped with flat, clawed hands.

  “What the fuck is that thing?” the driver muttered.

  “Looks to me like somebody else ran over it after we did,” the passenger replied. “Either that, or else you really creamed it. You were going kind of fast.”

  The driver wiped his forehead with the flat of his hand as he leaned closer, tensed, half-expecting the thing to leap up at him. “You ever see anything like this before?” he asked. He was barely able to restrain the nervous quaver in his voice as he looked back and forth between his partner and the splattered roadkill.

  “Nope,” his partner replied coolly. “Can’t say as I have. But I’ll tell you one thing. Whatever it is—or was—it sure as shit wasn’t no dog. Come on. Let the crows have it. Let’s get our butts back to the station.’

  The driver just stood there for nearly a full minute, his eyes glued to the strange mess of twisted flesh and bone on the road. Then he heaved a deep sigh and followed his partner back to the ambulance, got in, and drove away. The next morning, one of the construction workers noticed the roadkill and scooped up what was left of it and threw it into the gully by the side of the road.

  LOVE ON THE ROCKS

  Spring, 1977

  1

  Eddie LeFevbre figured he was approaching the bridge at a rate of about twenty-five feet a day. By his calculations, he was probably going to be in the right spot by Thursday, Friday at the latest. Being the flagman on this stretch of road construction along Route 25, ten miles north of Thornton, Maine, was one boring bitch of a job. But even if he did have to stand out here freezing his ass off in the cold drizzle or sweating it off when the sun came out, it was a whole lot better than staring at three concrete cinderblock walls and one wall of iron bars every day for the rest of his life.

  Spring had come, and Eddie had a bad case of spring fever...so bad, in fact, that he didn’t really give two shits about what he planned to do even if it all went to hell in a hand basket. He was serving a life sentence plus for killing a punk-ass college kid in a fight outside a bar in Portland. Every day was the same, and he was no closer to getting his sorry ass back on the street...not with a ninety-nine year sentence hanging over his head.

  Every day after lunch, he walked up to the bridge and pretended to be interested in checking out what the construction crew was doing. In fact, he was scoping out the area. The bridge they were repairing spanned a good seventy- five to one hundred foot stretch of the Saco River. Straight down, the water looked pretty shallow, maybe four feet deep at best. It was white-capped with rapids that raced over the stony riverbed, but that wasn’t what interested Eddie.

  What had caught his eye was the sharp right hand turn the river took about a hundred yards downstream. A huge patch of briars covered the near side of the riverbank, and from there it looked like nothing but dense pine forest stretching, as far as he knew, all the way to the distant, purple-hazed mountains of New Hampshire.

  Fred Webster, the guard from the prison who was watching Eddie and the other two prisoners on work release, usually took a nap in his car after lunch. Eddie knew Webster always had a mean-looking shotgun in the front seat with him, but he was willing to bet his life that he could get down to that fast-moving water and swim clear around the bend before Webster or anyone else knew he had bolted.

  “But plu-eze, don’t fling me inta that briar patch, Brer Fox!” Eddie whispered, chuckling to himself as he studied the tangled mess of branches and thorns. He took the cigarette from his mouth and snapped it out over the railing. It twisted end over end before it finally landed in the raging water and was instantly whisked out of sight. Eddie smiled with satisfaction, thinking that Thursday or Friday at the latest, he was going to be just like that cigarette, bobbing and floating its way down the river to freedom!

  2

  “Don’t be such a retard about it, okay?” Mark Murray said. Flames from the campfire lit up the sneer on his face before he leaned his head back and guzzled a huge mouthful of red wine from the bottle. He smacked his lips, gasped, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I’m not being a retard, all right?” Janie said.

  She was sitting in front of the fire, huddled in a thick sweater against the chilly spring night. At least the rain has stopped, she thought as she looked from Mark’s glazed eyes to the dark sky overhead. A crescent moon ripped like a scimitar through the fast-moving cloud cover. A few pale stars winked in and out of existence.

  “Then what are you being?” Mark asked sharply. He tilted the wine bottle to his lips again and took several more noisy swallows. “I mean—besides a Goddamned bitch!”

  “Yeah, well fuck you, too,” Janie snapped, narrowing her eyes as she glared at him and wondered how the hell she had ever convinced herself she loved this jerk. Okay, so he knew how to make her squeal and twitch in bed, but that was lust, not love.

  “All I’m saying is, you’re a Goddamned idiot if you think you can read any of that shit,” Mark said. His words we’re slurred, and there was a dull, unfocused glow in his eyes. “No one can decipher that shit!” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the streambed, but it was too dark for either one of them to see the carvings Sarah had found on the slanting rock ledge above the stream. “You’re starting to sound like that guy from...wherever the hell he’s from—that guy who says these petroglyphs are...are Egyptian hieroglyphics or whatever.”

  Janie held her hands out in front of her, then—in exasperation—clenched them into fists. “I’m not saying I can read them all. Well, not word for word, anyway. Actually, I don’t think they’re words per se. I’m just saying that—”

  “You’re just saying they’re … What? Some fucking warning, right?” Mark leaned back for another chug-a-lug of wine, but the bottle was empty, so he tossed it off into the brush behind him where it made a hollow thump.

  Janie shrugged. “Wel
l...yeah, sort of.” She closed her eyes and scratched her head as she tried to measure her response. “I mean, I think it says something about some kind of cycle—something that looks, at least to me, like some kind of danger. I can show you if you’d just take a minute to look at the rubbings I did. There’s this wolf figure, see, that—”

  Mark cut her off with a derisive snort of laughter as he stood up and kicked viciously at the fire. Sparks cork-screwed like comets into the night sky.

  “You trying to start a forest fire or something?” Janie asked with a bitter edge in her voice.

  “Fuck it,” Mark said with a hardened sneer. He wobbled on his feet as he stared at her, his eyes almost crossing. “Fuck your rock carvings! And fuck you!”

  Janie shook her head sadly as she looked up at him. “No thanks. Not tonight,” she said between clenched teeth.

  With that, she got up and walked over to the tent that was pitched under the trees. After unzipping the fly screen, she grabbed Mark’s sleeping bag and flung it out onto the ground, the edge just missing landing in the fire.

  “You can sleep it off outside, thank you very much!”

  3

  “I feel like such a damned idiot,” Mark said the next morning. He was curled up in his sleeping bag, leaning against a tree trunk when Janie came out of the tent. His hair was disheveled, and his eyes had a frosty cast.

  “You were a damned idiot,” she said, scowling at him. Kneeling beside the campfire, she stirred up the coals, trying to bring them to life, but the fire was just cold, gray ashes. Without another word, she got up and went off into the woods to collect an armload of firewood. When she returned, Mark hadn’t moved; he was still huddled in his sleeping bag, leaning against the tree.

  “You plan on staying there all day?” she asked. “I maybe could use some help getting breakfast going, you know.”

  Mark nodded and then eased himself out of the bag. The clothes he had slept in were rumpled and dirty, and his eyes were red-rimmed. Janie wished he had a monster headache, too.

  “I was pretty obnoxious last night, wasn’t I?” he said, more comment than question as he walked over to where Janie was trying to get the fire going again and placed both of his hands on her shoulders.

  She cringed beneath his touch and looked at him over her shoulder with a fixed smile. Shaking her head as though deeply saddened, she said, “I think it might be the dominant characteristic of your personality.”

  “Can you forgive me?” he asked as he massaged the knotted muscles in her neck.

  Janie turned away because she knew damned well he’d have that earnest-little boy-pleading look in his eyes that she found so irresistible.

  “You do have to understand that I—we’re both under a lot of pressure, here,” Mark said earnestly. “We’ve got less than a week left, and we haven’t done a tenth of the work we should have done.”

  Janie sniffed with laughter. “Yeah, but that was before we found those petroglyphs.”

  “I know, I know,” Mark replied. He hissed between his teeth as he nodded. “You’ve spent a lot of time working on them, but I’ve been thinking, you know, that something’s happened here that we haven’t even noticed.”

  “Oh? And what, pray tell, might that be?”

  Mark shrugged nervously, then walked around in front of her and knelt down. He picked up a stick and poked at the cold fireplace between them, his eyes going unfocused.

  “I think, what with all the pressure I’ve been feeling—we’ve both been feeling to get this excavation done, we’ve kind of let what we feel for each other go by the boards.” He reached out for her hands, but Janie didn’t reach out to him, and he let his hands drop uselessly at his side. Her lower lip began to tremble, and her eyes started tearing up even as hot rage filled her.

  “I think,” Mark continued, “you know, what with the budget cuts the department just found out about and my having to get my thesis done this year—or else—we’re forgetting how much we really love each other.”

  “Pu-leaze,” Janie said as she looked at him with a cold, steady gaze. “You’re the only one feeling any pressure.” Her voice was low and measured. “I’m just along for the ride, remember?” She almost said something about just being here to keep his sleeping bag warm for him but decided to let it drop.

  “Com’on. You know you’re more than—”

  “And if I want to spend my time working on translating those stone carvings, even if I’m not even close, well then—that’s my choice. I don’t have to have any fieldwork to report for Professor McCray or you or anyone.”

  Running his hands through his disheveled hair, Mark nodded his agreement. “So does this mean you forgive me?” he asked.

  If he hadn’t poured it on so thick with his hurt little boy voice, Janie might have said she forgave him. Instead, she bristled and, jabbing her forefinger at him across the campfire, said, “Look! You get to work digging down into that trench of yours all you want, all right? Just leave me out of it!”

  “All right,” Mark said, nodding his agreement but still looking at her with a downcast expression.

  “And don’t make fun of me if I tell you what I think these carvings mean, okay? It’s none of your damned business, anyway!”

  4

  Eddie could barely contain his excitement as he rode out to the construction site right after breakfast on Thursday morning. As Webster let the men out of the back of the prison van, he even commented that Eddie seemed awfully damned chipper, but Eddie just said it was the warm, sunny day that was lifting his spirits after such a God-awful winter. Those spirits soon fell when Webster directed Eddie to the other end of the flag line, a good hundred yards over the bridge and away from the river. His good mood rapidly evaporated as he stood with his back to the bridge, stopping and starting the thin flow of traffic on Route 25.

  The chattering of jackhammers and the rumbling of huge dump trucks rolling by worked on Eddie’s nerves all morning. The vibrations transmitted through the asphalt, shaking the ground so badly he began to worry it would loosen the fillings in his teeth. With warming sunshine bathing his back, he maintained his position until Tom Eckert, one of the other prisoners, relieved him for lunch at twelve-thirty.

  Today or never, Eddie decided as he took the bag containing his tuna fish sandwich, a small bag of Doritos, and a can of Coke, and sat down in the shade by the roadside. Webster kept an eye on him while he ate his own lunch in the comfort of the van.

  “You cock-sucking mother-humper,” Eddie muttered, chewing his sandwich angrily as he eyed the parked police van.

  Was it just his imagination, or was Webster watching him just a bit more suspiciously today?

  Eddie knew he couldn’t make a run for the river from where he was. Webster would be on the radio the second he started to move, and no doubt he’d unlimber that mother-humping shotgun before Eddie took more than twenty paces. Sure as shit, Eddie knew he’d be nailed and at the very least lose his work release and any chance of making a break. That was, if he wasn’t outright killed.

  No, Eddie thought, somehow he had to get his ass up there on the bridge so he could jump off right into the river. The swift current would sweep him away faster that he—or Webster—could possibly run. Problem was, how was he going to get up there without Webster noticing?

  “Awright, break’s over,” Webster shouted as he leaned out his window. He rested his beefy arm on the open window edge and gave Eddie a quick “get-along” signal.

  Eddie crumpled up the trash from his lunch and tossed it into one of the orange and white barrels that lined the construction site. Instead of heading straight back to his position, he started over to Webster’s van.

  “You got a smoke?” he asked, patting his empty shirt pocket. He had thought to toss away his full pack with his lunch trash so this would look convincing.

  “Fuck no,” Webster said with a snarl. “’N you don’t need one, either. Get your ass back to work.”

  Eddie almost said somethi
ng, but then, shrugging, turned away and started walking toward Tom. Apparently satisfied, Webster eased himself down in his seat, shook a cigarette out of the package in his breast pocket, lit it up, and exhaled as he leaned his head back. With one quick glance over his shoulder—You’re so fucking predictable, Webster—Eddie walked right on past Tom and headed to the bridge.

  “Be right with yah, Tom,” he said. “Gotta bum a smoke from one of the guys.”

  “I have one,” Tom said, but Eddie pretended not to hear him as he strode out to the middle of the bridge and, without a moment’s hesitation, swung his leg up over the guardrail.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. “Get away from there! What the fuck’re you doing?”

  Eddie casually glanced over his shoulder and saw Tom and Webster along with several construction workers staring at him. After a quick glance straight down at the raging current, Eddie turned back to Webster and waved his hand at him. “So long,” he called out.

  Webster stumbled as he opened the van door and leaped to the ground, shotgun in hand. “Hold it right there, Eddie!” he bellowed as he raised the gun to his shoulder.

  Eddie raised his middle finger high in the air as he swung his other leg over the railing, teetered for a second on the edge, and then pushed off. At the arc of his jump, he heard the scattering of shotgun pellets whistle over his head, followed an instant later instantly by the heavy thump of the shotgun.

  His arms and legs flailed wildly in the air as he tried to stabilize him in midair. All sound was lost in the whooshing of air in his ears. After a fall that seemed simultaneously to take forever and to be over in an instant, Eddie hit the water. Icy cold gripped him, and he was tugged away by the current as if strong, unyielding hands were trying to yank him under. He rose to the surface, sputtering, and spinning around madly careened off rocks. He caught a fleeting glimpse of hectic activity on the bridge. Webster was standing with one foot up on the railing and his arm braced to his side to steady him aim. Praying that the swift current would sweep him out of harm’s way, Eddie laughed when he saw the shotgun kick back. He didn’t hear the report above the roar of the water, but the pellets made a loud zipping sound when they hit a few feet in front of him.