by Jeff Strand
“I thought you’d catch it.”
“That’s how people get hurt, moron. Now pick it up.”
Blood Clot sheepishly walked over to where the screwdriver had fallen. He picked it up, handed it to Gary, then walked back to where he’d been standing.
“I swear to you there’s nothing inside the doll,” I said. “It’s really important that you not cut it open.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
“I don’t know why you’re getting so bent out of shape over this doll. You realize that I’m going to kill you, right? You’ve captured my interest and all that, but this is gonna end with you getting a bullet in the head. Bloody corpses don’t care much about dolls.” “Please, I’ll do anything,” I said. “I’ll steal cars for you. I’ll mop the floors.” Yeah, I was no James Bond in the face of danger, but considering the circumstances, I think I could’ve been handling myself much worse.
“That’s a very tempting offer, but I think ol’ Ribeye would be disappointed if I let somebody else mop up the gore.” He picked up the doll and placed the tip of the screwdriver against its chest.
“Voodoo doll! Voodoo doll!” I shouted. I’d meant to be more articulate than that, but I hoped that got the point across.
“Say what?”
“It’s a voodoo doll,” I said, more calmly.
“It does look like a voodoo doll,” said Gary. “How about that?” “So you can understand why I don’t want you to rip it open with a screwdriver.”
Gary let out a high-pitched laugh. “This is a voodoo doll of you? Aw, man, that’s some bad luck, huh? Hey, Blood Clot, didn’t you try to make a voodoo doll of your ex-wife that one time?” “Naw, man.”
“Yeah, yeah, you did. You were all like ‘I’ll teach her to come home from work early and catch me with that tramp,’ and you were jabbing pins into a SpongeBob SquarePants doll.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Yeah, it was. No, wait, it was Ribeye. Hey, Ribeye, didn’t you try to make a voodoo doll of your ex-wife that one time?” “Ex-girlfriend.”
“Right, right. How did that work out for you?”
Ribeye shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as I know, she didn’t complain about any pain, but we weren’t living together anymore, so I wasn’t around to say for sure. Made me feel better, though.” Gary slowly slid the tip of the screwdriver across the chest of the doll. “You’re sweating a bit there, buddy,” he said to me. “You really believe in this thing, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re serious. You’re deranged but serious. What do you think is gonna happen when I jab this screwdriver in here?” “Hopefully nothing.”
“Oh, hey, there are a few pins in the box. How convenient.” He tossed the screwdriver back at Blood Clot. “No sense wasting all of the fun on gouging your chest out right away, huh?”
Blood Clot picked up the screwdriver and glared at him.
I was in a state of absolute panic, but what could I do? Should I attack him? That seemed risky. Should I wait around and hope that he was only kidding? Though I hated to not be proactive, there were still multiple guns pointed at me.
Gary selected a nice long pin with a light blue head. “This one is perfect, don’t you think? I’ve always liked the color blue. Especially this particular shade. Now where should I poke it? Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.”
“Black magic is not something you should take lightly,” said Ribeye. “There are forces in this universe more powerful than anything you can imagine, things we cannot see with our regular five senses, and you shouldn’t be taunting them.”
“Shaddup.”
“I agree with Ribeye,” said Scorp. “That voodoo stuff, it can be nasty. What if all of this playing around gets you a voodoo priestess coming after you? That what you want?”
“Get lives, all of you,” said Gary. “I’m just having some fun with Paranoid Boy here. Now where, where, oh where should I stick this pin?”
What would you do in this situation? I’m not actually soliciting advice—it’s too late for that—but I’m curious. The most common answer is probably “I would never have gotten into this jam in the first place, because I wouldn’t have messed with the voodoo doll, even under peer pressure,” and the second most common is probably “Well, I at least wouldn’t have knocked on the damn garage door!”
But let’s pretend you did do all that. What would you do now?
The way I looked at it, here were my options:
1. Faint. Advantages: Easy to do. Everything is less scary when you’re unconscious. Disadvantages: Could hit head on floor. Would probably be dead before I woke up.
2. Scream for help. Advantages: Easy to do. A kindly individual might hear and help. Disadvantages: 99.9997 percent chance that Gary & Co. would shoot me before I finished the first scream.
3. Acquire invulnerability. Advantages: Bullets would bounce off of me, and the voodoo doll would be powerless against me. Disadvantages: Unlikely to happen in the next few seconds.
4. Try to fake him out. Advantages: If it worked, I might not die. Disadvantages: I was not immediately sure how to go about such a thing.
All of my options pretty much sucked raw eggs through a straw, so I went with the fourth one. “What makes you so sure that doll isn’t of you?” I asked.
Gary raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to fake me out?” “That doll needs somebody’s essence to work. By touching it, you’ve transferred your essence into it. You jab a pin in there, you might as well be jabbing a pin right into your own brain.” “That’s not how voodoo dolls work.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m comfortable with my decision,” he said, jabbing the pin into the corner of the doll’s foot.
CHAPTER 11
Oh yeah, I screamed.
Here’s what it felt like: Imagine that somebody (probably not a close friend) took a small pair of garden shears, opened the blades, pressed them against the little toe on your left foot, and then closed the shears with a crunch. The corner of my white shoe instantly turned red, and it felt all squishy inside, and the pain was beyond belief.
All of the thugs looked completely shocked.
“Look at his foot!” shouted Blood Clot, pointing as I fell to my knees. “That ain’t natural!”
“Ow!” I screamed. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
I couldn’t be completely sure, but it really felt like I was missing a toe. A toe! I’d lost a toe! I only had nine toes! Okay, yeah, this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as losing an entire leg.. .but I’d lost a freaking toe!
“Shoot him in case he’s a witch!” Blood Clot shouted, his voice filled with panic.
“Nobody shoots anybody until I say so!” Gary pointed the doll at me as if it were a gun. “Get that shoe off.”
I’d mastered the art of tying and untying my shoes over a decade ago, but now I was having serious difficulty with the whole bunny-going-through-the-hole thing. I finally managed to get the shoe off and tossed it aside, revealing a red, drenched sock. I still wasn’t entirely sure that my toe was completely off, although if it wasn’t, there was a small rock in my sock.
“Ditch the sock!” said Gary.
I yanked off the sock. Four of my toes were perfectly fine, but the fifth one was just sort of.. .well, not there anymore, except for a tiny piece of bone.
“That is messed up,” said Blood Clot.
“Let me see the toe,” said Gary.
“You think I’m faking this?” I wailed.
“I said let me see it!”
I picked up the sock and shook it a few times until my toe dropped out. I whimpered. I sniffled. I did not, however, hug it to my chest and sob, so that’s a point in my favor.
“Hol.. .lee.. .crap,” said Gary. “It worked. It actually worked.”
“Are voodoo dolls supposed to do that?” asked Ribeye. “I thought it was just supposed to make his foot, like, hurt or something.”
“Where’d you get this?” asked
Gary, waving the doll at me.
“It was a gift.” I really wished that blood would stop coming out of the place where my toe had once been.
“Where’d they get it?”
“None of your business!” I’m no martyr, but I sure wasn’t going to tell this guy where Adam had gotten the doll. If Gary used a vast collection of dolls to assassinate national leaders so that he could rule the world, it wasn’t going to be because of any address I gave him.
“I wonder how much of a waterfall I can get if I stick this in your neck?” asked Gary.
So this was what it felt like to be moments away from death. It sucked about as much as I’d expected.
As Gary touched the pin to the doll’s neck, I retreated into a glorious, wonderful fantasy world.
“Hey, Adam,” I say, narrating in present tense for no particular reason, “did you throw away that voodoo doll like I asked?”
“I couldn’t,” he says. “We live in a world where voodoo dolls don’t exist. Nobody has ever heard of them. They cause no trouble for anybody.”
“What a fantastic universe!” I say, dancing around as sparkly colored lights follow me and upbeat music plays. “I want to live here forever!”
“And you can!” says Kelley with a merry laugh. “Forever and ever and ever and ever!”
“Changed my mind,” said Gary, moving the pin away from the doll’s neck. “Why end the fun so soon?”
He jabbed it into the doll’s foot again.
The fourth toe on my left foot shot off like a bottle rocket, leaving a trail of red mist instead of smoke.
It struck Blood Clot right in the face.
“Aw, bleagh!” Though it hit him in the cheek and not the mouth, he spat a couple of times and wiped his mouth off on his sleeve. “What the hell, dude?”
I screamed some more.
“That was awesome!” Gary shouted. “Let’s try that again! Open wide!” (I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying with all of the screaming I was doing, but I think that’s a pretty accurate guess.)
Eight toes. I only had eight toes. Did this mean I’d have to start wearing narrower socks?
Suddenly, the garage door did not burst open and no reinforcements arrived to save me.
I clutched at my leaking foot and howled like one of those howler monkeys in South America.
“Stop doing that,” said Blood Clot.
“I just lost two toes!” I shouted. “What else do you want me to do?”
“Not you! The screaming’s okay.” Blood Clot pointed his gun at Gary. “Knock it off.”
“I’m sure you don’t have a gun pointed at me,” Gary said, his voice filled with rage.
“This is one of the most amazing discoveries of the twenty- first century, and you’re using it to play around and blow off toes. I can’t stand here and let that happen.”
“Ribeye, kill that traitor.”
Ribeye hesitated for a moment and then pointed his gun at Gary as well. “Sorry, dude. We really should be using this for something more ambitious.”
Scorp pointed his gun at Blood Clot. “Who do you think you are? You throw down that gun, or I will drop you where you stand!”
Shark pointed his gun at Gary. “Screw all of you guys!” he said. “None of you ever acknowledge me! You probably forget that I’m even here, and I’m tired of it! I’m just as important a part of this gang as anyone, and all I want is a little respect, okay? Is that so much to ask?”
Gary dropped the voodoo doll. None of my bones broke when it hit the floor, which was nice. “Listen to me, Blood Clot,” he said. “You have exactly five seconds to lower your gun, or I’m going to kill you with my bare—”
Blood Clot shot Gary in the chest.
Scorp fired, missing Blood Clot.
Ribeye turned his gun on Scorp.
Shark fired, hitting Gary in the chest a second time.
Blood Clot turned his gun on Scorp.
Ribeye fired, missing Scorp.
Scorp fired, grazing Blood Clot’s ear.
Blood Clot fired, grazing Scorp’s ear in almost the exact same place his own ear had been grazed. Honestly, you’d think they’d planned it out.
A few more bullets were fired with nobody getting hit.
Gary dropped to the floor.
Ribeye shot Scorp right in the freaking eyeball, which made my wallowing about my two missing toes seem kind of petty.
Scorp dropped to the floor.
Ribeye shot Blood Clot in the chest. His motive was not entirely clear to me, but I’m sure he had a good reason.
Blood Clot pulled his trigger a couple of times as he fell, but he was out of bullets.
Shark fired a bullet that I assume had to have been meant for Ribeye, because he was the only one left, but it was so far off the mark that I was a little embarrassed for him.
Ribeye fired at Shark, missing.
Shark fired at Ribeye, also missing.
They fired simultaneously, and I swear I’m telling the truth when I say that their bullets struck each other in midair and.. .Okay, no, that didn’t happen. They just missed each other again.
Ribeye shot Shark in the foot, and he went down screaming.
Shark blew a couple of holes in the ceiling, apparently just to prove that he could hit something.
Ribeye shot Shark in one of the three places that I would least want to get shot.
And then Ribeye fired a bullet that definitely, positively, inarguably, with 100 percent certainty killed Shark. It was pretty disgusting.
Until today, I had never seen a dead body, and now I was in a garage with four freshly murdered ones. I knew that if I were to ever write about this experience, I’d have to do so with an inappropriately lighthearted tone to help me cope with the horrors I’d witnessed.
Ribeye pointed his gun at me.
“Aw, c’mon, seriously?” I asked.
“Seriously.”
“Why would you need to shoot me?”
“Because there are four corpses in this room and you know who made them. One corpse, not such a big deal, but I can’t have you squealing about four of ’em.”
I tried to scoot away from him, even though I knew it wasn’t going to be very helpful. “I won’t say a word,” I promised. “I’ll say I shot off my own toes! I’ll tell everybody you were a hero, but I’ll say you were a mystery man whose face I never got to see, that you were always in shadow!”
“Stop talking,” Ribeye said, and then he pulled the trigger.
I was going to put a chapter break here, so that you might think I died and that the book was going to suddenly switch to Kelley’s point of view as she set off on her quest to avenge my murder, but I figure a couple of hours after this is published, the Internet is going to be filled with spoilers saying that I don’t die at the end of Chapter 11, so why bother?
What really happened is that he pulled the trigger and the gun didn’t shoot anything, because it was out of bullets. Kind of a cop-out, I know, but sometimes real life doesn’t follow the rules of good storytelling.
My foot was bleeding a little less than it had been immediately after my toes had come off, though this fact wasn’t all that reassuring. Also, I’d been in here for quite a while, so what exactly were Adam and Kelley doing? Shouldn’t somebody have stopped by to at least check on me?
“Please,” I said. “Don’t kill me. You could be rich.”
“How?”
“The doll has more power. A lot more.”
Ribeye raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“It can grant wishes.”
On a scale of one to ten of “Awesome Ways to Convince a Thug That He Shouldn’t Kill You Because a Voodoo Doll Has More Power Than What He’s Already Seen,” that ranked about a two. It was better than shoving a finger up my nose and saying “Durrrr.I dunno!” but not by much.
There was a knock on the garage door.
It was sort of a timid knock. Probably not the police with a battering ram.
“Y
ou’ve lucked out,” said Ribeye. “If you can get a sock tied around that foot in the next few seconds, you can come with me.”
I grabbed my bloody sock and tied it around my foot, pulling it as tight as I could. Ribeye picked up the doll and spat on Gary’s dead body.
“Think you can walk?” he asked.
I nodded. As bad as my left foot hurt, at least I still had 60 percent of my toes left, and the ones remaining were the three biggest.
“Then let’s go to the secret passage.”
CHAPTER 12
Because Ribeye was the only one left, I guess I should probably give you a physical description. He was not a handsome gentleman. It wasn’t the scars—those were actually kind of cool—or even his basic facial structure that made him so unattractive. A lot of it was his hair, which looked like it hadn’t been washed for the past six to eight weeks, unless he’d recently dunked it in a barrel of bacon grease.
His eyes, nose, and mouth were where they were supposed to be and perfectly fine in size and shape. His facial hair was...uh, sporadic. Look, I’m not saying that I’m a beard-growing superstar. I was rocking the whole “peach fuzz on the upper lip” style for a while. But when you grow out of your teenage years, if your facial hair grows in weird, random clumps around your face, it’s time to consider that perhaps the clean-shaven look is best for you.
Also, he constantly had his face all scrunched up in a grimace, which didn’t do much for him.
He was about six-one, six-two. Maybe 180, 190. Eyes that were a light shade of hazel. Teeth that were also a light shade of hazel. His neck was muscular but not so muscular that you’d see him and say, “Whoa! Look at that guy’s neck!” His feet were size eleven-and-a-half, I’d estimate, and I don’t know how ring sizes work, but I’d guess that he was about a large. He wore work boots, faded blue jeans, red boxer shorts that protruded from the top of his jeans—not in that style where people walk around with half of their underwear visible, just enough where you could tell it was less a fashion choice than him simply needing a belt—and a red T-shirt with a picture of somebody who was either a music star or a world leader. (I didn’t recognize him.)
