by Jeff Strand
When Ribeye smiled, he got a little crinkle over his left eye. It wasn’t adorable or anything, although I guess one of his close relatives might have thought it was kind of cute. His left ear was pierced, and he wore a simple silver star, which surprised me because I would have expected him to be more of a “skull earring” kind of guy or maybe a gun or a dollar sign, something more closely associated with a life of crime. The star earring must have been a gift, perhaps from his grandmother or a favorite aunt, and though it didn’t reflect his true personality, he still wore it to express his love, because even somebody like Ribeye has those he loves and who love him in return.
Finally, his chin was kind of pointy. But not too pointy.
“Stand up,” said Ribeye.
I got to my feet, which didn’t hurt as badly as I expected. I mean, it sure didn’t feel like I was walking on a fluffy cloud, but the pain wasn’t as intense as it could’ve been. I guess you don’t need your toes as much as you’d think.
Then I stumbled and fell. The pain was a little more intense now.
“I said stand up,” said Ribeye, pointing his gun at me.
Yeah, yeah, we both knew the gun was empty. It’s still scary to have a gun pointed at you. I got back up.
There was another timid knock at the garage door.
“Let’s go,” said Ribeye, shoving me forward. We hurried to the back of the garage. In the rear corner, he bent down and pulled aside a small rug, exposing a wooden trapdoor. He lifted the door, revealing a metal ladder that led down into complete darkness. Without waiting for Ribeye to say something threatening (for example, “Climb down there before I harm you!”) I began to climb down the ladder.
This didn’t seem to be a particularly foolproof escape plan, because I’d left a trail of bloody footprints and I didn’t see a way to get the rug back over the door after we closed it, not to mention that modern police officers tend not to be flummoxed by the rug-over-the-trapdoor trick. But hey, if Ribeye wasn’t concerned, I wasn’t going to be. It didn’t take long to get to the bottom of the ladder, and then we were cast into complete darkness as Ribeye shut the door above us. There was a loud beep that sounded like an alarm system being activated.
He climbed down and then poked me in the back. “Walk.”
I walked. The floor was still cement, but it was quite a bit wetter and slimier than the cement floor of the garage, and the aroma suggested that we weren’t as far from the sewer as one might hope. This couldn’t be very sanitary for my foot.
Though I’d just decided not to be concerned about the foolproof nature of Ribeye’s escape plan, my curiosity quickly became too much to bear. “Won’t they know where we went?” I asked.
“Don’t talk,” he said.
I didn’t talk for a few seconds. But I really wanted to know, and quite honestly, if Ribeye hadn’t killed me yet, was asking a simple question going to be the act that pushed him over the edge?
“They’ll know where we went,” I said.
“I’ve got it covered,” Ribeye assured me.
“How?”
“Good old-fashioned booby trap. Anybody lifts the door to come down after us, kaboom. Their upper lip and lower lip won’t be part of the same mouth anymore.”
I stopped walking for a moment until Ribeye smacked me on the shoulder to get me moving again. Were Kelley and Adam really headed into a trap? Should I shout out a warning?
“Kelley!” I shouted. “Don’t—”
The punch to the back of the head shut me up. I fell to the ground, my face landing in a very shallow but bacteria-rich pool of what may have once been water.
“Try that again, and I’ll rip the doll’s head off,” Ribeye said.
I had no reason to believe he was lying. I got back up, coughed a few times, and then resumed walking.
Something scampered over my foot.
Something else followed it.
“You.. .you may have a rat problem down here,” I said.
I hadn’t spent much time in the company of rats, so I didn’t realize until that very moment that they scared the hell out of me, at least when I was walking in a pitch-black sewer tunnel.
I forced myself to keep walking so that Ribeye wouldn’t hit me again.
Surely, these weren’t filthy, disease-carrying rats. They were cute rats, the kind you’d find in a pet store. They probably had pink bows around their necks. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
I smacked into a wall.
“Turn right,” said Ribeye.
My nose hurt but didn’t seem to be bleeding. I turned right and continued to walk, holding my arms out in front of me. My good foot slipped in some slime, and I lost my balance for a split second, but I saved myself from taking a comical spill.
I hadn’t heard any explosions or screaming. Hopefully, if Kelley and/or Adam did come into the garage, they realized that when you see bloody footprints leading into a dark pit, it’s best to go in the opposite direction.
More scurrying next to my feet.
Think of other things, I told myself. Bunnies. Goldfish. Pugs. Flowers. Amusing monkeys. Snoopy.
There had to be thousands of rats down here. Or maybe just the three. Somewhere between three and thousands. It didn’t matter. Even one rat—even half a rat—was too many.
What diseases did rats carry? Rabies? The Black Death?
No, no, no, I had to think positive. These were charming rats, like Remy the Rat, who wanted nothing more than to become a master chef in a five-star restaurant.
On today’s fine dining menu, teenager flesh! Nom nom nom!
I kept walking.
I didn’t feel it with my hands, but my face went right through a great big spider web. I frantically wiped it off of my cheeks and out of my hair. Don’t you hate walking through spider webs?
Don’t you hate how your neighbors see you and it looks like you’ve just suddenly decided to start clawing at your face for no reason? And you feel like you should go over and explain that no, you didn’t have a fit of insanity, you just walked through a web, but instead you keep walking and hope that they didn’t notice? I hate that.
There was something crawling on the back of my neck.
I yelped and slapped at it.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Ribeye.
“There’s a tarantula on me!”
Okay, it couldn’t really be a tarantula, but it was a huge spider, and I had to get it off me before it laid eggs in my hair, which would immediately hatch into millions of other spiders. I smacked all over the back of my head until the spider scurried onto my fingers, at which point I yipped like a poodle and shook my hands as rapidly as I could.
Nothing seemed to be crawling on me anymore.
Was that a hissing sound?
I was definitely imagining things. There were no snakes down here.
“Are there snakes down here?” I asked.
“Are you an idiot? Keep walking.”
I bet there were snakes down here. Snakes and spiders and rats and alligators. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a much deeper puddle ahead with a great white shark. Oh, this sewer sucked.
I was so distracted by the deadly wildlife that I’d forgotten to keep my arms extended, so I smacked into another wall. My nose still wasn’t bleeding. I have a resilient nose.
“Out of the way,” said Ribeye, shoving me aside. I heard some metal rattling and then some cursing and then some more metal rattling and then a curse word that even people who curse a lot don’t usually say.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I think Gary locked the door.”
“Is that bad?”
“What do you think?”
Because there were snakes, spiders, rats, alligators, sharks, and probably a mountain lion down here, I guessed that it was probably pretty bad.
More rattling, more cursing, and then a few loud kicks.
“Can I help?” I asked. I wasn’t volunteering to kick (remember, toe issue), but I
certainly didn’t want to be trapped down here.
“You can help by shutting up,” said Ribeye, kicking the door a few more times. He sounded like my mom when he said that, but I didn’t share this with him.
With the next kick, something definitely gave.
And then a little voice in my head said, Gosh, Tyler, I hate to bother you, but by any chance did you notice that the homicidal thug who kidnapped you is sort of distracted at the moment? I don’t want to be pushy or anything; I just thought it was kind of interesting that if you were inclined to make a move that would save your life, right now might be a pretty good time to consider it. Again, not trying to tell you what to do; only making an observation. Thanks!
The nonexistent voice in my head was right. Unless my plan to escape was to wait for a magic fairy to make everything all right, I needed to act, and now was the time. Though I had no weapons, it’s not like I was some scrawny weakling. I could hit hard.
I balled my hands together into a mighty double fist and then bashed him on the back of the head.
He fell.
Then he got right back up, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed.
I kneed him in the hip, which was not where I was aiming.
He let go of my throat.
I tried to bite him but didn’t come anywhere close.
He dropped something in the dark. It didn’t clatter, so I was pretty sure it was the doll and not the gun. I hoped neither of us would step on it.
Ribeye did something else in the dark that sounded very much like he was taking a switchblade knife out of his pocket and snapping open the blade. You can guess how happy that sound made me.
He took a swing at me. I dodged backward, slipped on something slimy with my bad foot, and fell on my butt.
My hand came down on a rat, which let out a horrifying squeak as something inside of it snapped. I pulled my hand away from it in revulsion. The creature, twitching and rolling, bumped into my leg.
“I’m gonna cut you up,” said Ribeye.
It was true. I was going to be sliced and diced, and there was nothing I could do about it.
.well, except throw the rat.
I grabbed the squirming, squealing rodent by the tail and flung it at Ribeye. From his startled reaction, I’m pretty sure it hit him in the face. He responded with much more panic than I’d shown when I walked through the spider web.
I’d only expected a second or two of distraction, but Ribeye continued to flail around and bat at himself, leading me to believe that the half-crushed rat had gone down the front of his shirt.
I like to think that it bit him over and over as it slid down his chest. He sure acted like it did. Heh heh.
So far in this book, I’ve shared a bunch of things I’ve done that weren’t very smart, and I’ll share a few more before it’s over. However, I’m pleased to say that I did not waste the rat-down- the-shirt opportunity. I advocate peaceful solutions to conflict whenever possible, and there are very few circumstances under which it’s okay to bash somebody’s head against the wall. I feel that this was one of them. I’m not saying that you should expose somebody’s brain or anything like that, but if you’re following the Moral Code of Tyler Churchill, a few slams to help ease them into dreamland is acceptable.
I still couldn’t see anything, but the sound effects were Wham! Wham! “Aaah!” Wham! Squeak. Thud.
Ribeye and the rat went silent.
I quickly picked up the voodoo doll. I had never been happier to pick up a sewage-tainted doll in my entire life. I sighed with relief. All of my problems were solved, except for the one about my girlfriend and (former) best friend possibly walking into a deadly booby trap.
I ran back through the tunnel the way I had come. It hurt.
I reached the ladder without slipping on slime or being attacked by an alligator. “Is anybody up there?” I shouted.
“Tyler?” It was Adam.
Wow. He’d actually come to save me. I couldn’t believe it. “Adam! Don’t come down here! Don’t touch the trapdoor!” “Did you know that there are dead bodies all over the place?” He sounded more than a little distressed by this observation.
“Yes, I did! Just go back outside and wait for me. I know another way out.”
“Is any of this blood yours?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay. I got the doll.”
“I think I’m going to pass out.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I’m really not feeling good, Tyler. I think I need to lie down.” “Fine. Do what you need to do. Just don’t come down here.” I turned and ran back through the tunnel. It hurt again. Ribeye had not regained consciousness. I listened for a moment to confirm that he was breathing and then bashed the door with my shoulder. Three hits, and it flew open. A small light bulb hung from the ceiling, revealing a ladder leading up.
I quickly climbed it, pushed open another trapdoor, and emerged next to a huge pile of metal scrap. I was in a small junkyard. I shut the trapdoor and looked around. There were rusty automobiles and random piles of unidentifiable metal everywhere, along with a small wooden building that I assumed was where they rang up your purchases.
The trapdoor was camouflaged on top with a layer of fake dirt that perfectly blended with the real dirt. When I closed the lid, you couldn’t tell anything was there.
The whole junkyard was surrounded by a tall wire fence, but
it didn’t seem to be electrified, so that wouldn’t pose too much of a problem.
The Rottweiler, on the other hand.
CHAPTER 13
It came running around the largest scrap heap, furiously barking. There was no way I could get the trapdoor back open in time, so I considered my options.
Option One: Try to—
Before I could finish considering my first option, the Rottweiler knocked me to the ground and pulled the doll out of my hand.
I expected all of my toes, fingers, and assorted facial features to jettison from my body at once. Fortunately, I didn’t feel an urge to shriek in unbearable agony, so apparently the dog’s teeth hadn’t punctured the doll yet. The dog ran off about twenty feet, then turned around, as if daring me to fight it for the prize.
“Good doggie,” I said. “Please don’t bite down.”
The Rottweiler shook its head back and forth like it was drying itself after an unwanted bath.
I immediately felt a wave of dizziness beyond anything I’d experienced in my life. My vision went completely blurry. My legs lost their ability to hold up the top half of my body, and I collapsed to the ground. The entire world was spinning, spinning, spinning.
I knew that I needed to fight through this, but the best I could do was dig my fingers into the ground and hope it was enough to keep the earth from flinging me off its surface deep into outer space, where I’d smack into Jupiter.
I threw up. More than once.
I was so dizzy that I didn’t really even care what the dog was doing. It was like the time when I was a kid, when I got on the chair in my dad’s office and just spun and spun and spun and spun until I fell off onto the floor and hit my head and had to go to the hospital, except a million times worse. I didn’t believe in interdimensional hyperspace vortex portals, but if I did, this felt like the way to open one.
I tried to push myself up, but my body said, “Nah, I don’t think so,” and kept me down.
When was this going to stop?
Maybe it was never going to stop. Maybe I was going to spend the rest of my life in this dizzy, spinny, pukey state.
The dog hadn’t yet ripped out my throat or apparently the throat of the doll. My initial thought was that he wasn’t a very good guard dog if those throats remained intact, but at the same time, I certainly wouldn’t be stealing anything from the junkyard on my way out, so maybe he was perfectly fine. I’d figure it out later when the Tilt-A-Whirl in my brain stopped.
The world was spinning a little less quickly. Or else I was just holding on to the earth better.
> I thought I heard somebody calling my name, although they may have also been calling for Orville Redenbacher.
Okay, the planet was definitely slowing down. I could make out some shapes. I couldn’t identify these shapes, but at least now I knew there were shapes in my general vicinity.
“Tyler?”
Who was that? A leprechaun?
“Tyler!”
It sounded like a girl. I hoped it was a hot leprechaun.
Now there was an annoying clanging sound, as if somebody were rattling a chain-link fence. I tried to remember if I’d seen a chain-link fence recently. There was that one around the junkyard where that dog had stolen my voodoo doll, but that was years ago, wasn’t it?
I could see that there were colors attached to these shapes. One of the shapes was a black panting one that kind of looked like a mean dog. The other looked like a pile of scrap metal.
Junkyard. I was lying in the junkyard.
“Tyler!”
Yep, it was a girl. Adam? No, wait, Adam wasn’t a girl. I knew that voice. Kelley.
I looked over. Kelley was standing outside of the fence, maybe ten feet away. Or two hundred feet away. It was still hard to calculate distance.
“Are you okay?” Kelley asked.
“Not great.”
“Can you get up?”
With some effort, I got myself into a sitting position. My head felt like it weighed about forty pounds, but I was finally able to hold it upright.
“Do you think you can climb the fence?” Kelley asked.
I studied the fence. Maybe with an escalator I could.
“Do I have to do it now?” I asked. It sounded like somebody else was talking.
“Tyler, I need you to focus. You have to get out of there.”
“The doggie has the doll.”
“I know. We have to figure out how to get it back from him.”
“Do you have any dog biscuits?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you have any chew toys?”
“No.”
“What about a tranquilizer dart?”
“Try to make friends with it,” Kelley suggested.
I turned my attention to the dog. Though it was a big, scary- looking Rottweiler, it wasn’t really growling or anything. It was just lying on the ground with the doll between its front paws. It could probably take the head off the doll in one bite. Actually, it could probably swallow the doll whole. What would happen to me then? Would my real body be sizzled by stomach acids while the doll made its way through the dog’s digestive tract?
