by Jeff Strand
I nodded. Her effort to intimidate me had been successful.
Or had it?
On those crime scene investigation shows, they were always talking about how you could never truly get rid of blood traces, no matter how hard you tried. Many a criminal had been apprehended because of their false assumptions about the cleaning power of household detergents. But I’d never heard of the lab guys saying, “Oh my, look at this...she forgot to sweep up this chunk of the victim’s brain.”
So Mildred was bluffing.
She wasn’t really going to shoot me.
I was pretty sure she wasn’t really going to shoot me.
But she could be lying about her familiarity with brain matter and still be telling the truth about her intent to shoot me.
Obviously, she was trying to sound more threatening than she actually was. Yet if a mob enforcer said, “I’ve killed thirty-eight people,” when he’d only killed twenty-six, you’d still be worried if he took you out on a boat and asked you to hold your feet in a box of cement until it dried.
If she had the gun and the gun was pointed at me, why would she need to say something about brain matter? Why did she need to be scarier? I was a sixteen-year-old kid. Was she so worried that I was going to try to rush her and knock the gun away that she made a sinister comment to make sure I stayed in my seat?
Well, to be fair, I had considered the idea that she was bluffing, and her comment about the brain matter had encouraged me to devote more thought to whether or not that was a good idea, so technically, her comment had been successful.
Was the gun even loaded?
Franklin seemed kind of irresponsible. Would a good parent keep a loaded gun in a house with somebody like him around? What if he accidentally shot out his eye?
Did Mildred have a secret pocket in her apron where she stored the gun? Did she hurriedly put on the apron when she heard the doorbell.. .or did she keep the apron on at all times just in case she needed to shoot somebody?
Oh my God, I was being held at gunpoint by a woman who carried a gun in her apron at all times just in case somebody needed to be shot.
No way was I standing up.
Adam screamed again. At least I knew he wasn’t dead.
Unless he was a zombie.
No, Mr. Click was a zombie, and he couldn’t scream.
Unless Adam was a different kind of zombie. One that could scream.
All of these thoughts went through my head in about 0.00039 seconds, at which point I made my final decision to respect Mildred’s gun and not try to knock it out of her hand.
“So which base should we cover tonight?” asked Mildred.
Glenn shrugged. “What are you more in the mood for? The kindness and serenity of Buddhism or the human sacrifice of the Aztecs?”
“Aztecs!” said Franklin.
“Nobody asked you,” Glenn told him. “Although it’s been a while since we got any use out of the sacrificial chamber. The new dagger we bought has just been lying on the air hockey table.”
“I’m not sure I want to cut out anybody’s heart tonight,” Mildred admitted.
“I’ll do the heart,” said Glenn.
“Actually, it’s not so much the cutting out of the heart,” said Mildred. “It’s more about what he said about the cannibalism thing.” “You mean you think we’ll look like hypocrites if we take a bite out of the heart?” Glenn asked. “That’s okay. I don’t mind looking like a hypocrite.”
“No, it’s just that I’m not sure I’ll fit into the sacrificial gown. I have put on weight since then. I know I should exercise more, but it’s hard with everything that’s going on right now. I know, I know, excuses, excuses.”
“If you want to treat them with kindness, that’s okay with me,” said Glenn. “Although we could also store them in the freezer until you’re feeling more up to it.”
“We still have all of that ham in the freezer. Let’s just be nice.” Franklin frowned and looked as if he were going to throw a temper tantrum like a three-year-old.
Glenn looked at Kelley and me. “Good news. Looks like our religious experience for tonight is going to be to treat you with respect and dignity. Would you like some ice cream? We have chocolate mint, french vanilla, and Neapolitan.”
I really wasn’t sure how to react to this, so I said, “Sure. Chocolate mint.”
And then my right ear exploded.
CHAPTER 19
Mildred, Glenn, and Franklin all gasped and stepped back.
Kelley screamed.
I wasn’t immediately sure what had happened, except that it felt and sounded like a water balloon filled with warm water popped next to my ear.
And then pain. Lots of it.
I clutched my ear. It wasn’t completely gone, but the entire earlobe was missing along with half of the cartilage above it. What remained was a wet, sticky, mangled mess.
Most of my earlobe was on my shoulder.
Back in Donna’s room, Adam screamed again, though I assume it was unrelated to my ear explosion.
I tried to stifle my own scream and accidentally bit down on my tongue so hard that I screamed.
“Did you shoot?” Glenn asked Mildred, his voice frantic. “Did you shoot him?”
“I didn’t shoot anybody!”
“Then what happened to his ear?”
“I don’t know! It just burst!”
“Somebody shot him!”
“I have the only gun, and I didn’t shoot it! Did you hear it go off? Did you? Do you see any smoke?”
I pulled my hand away from my ear. I was hyperventilating in a big way. More than half of my ear was gone. What if my entire head was next?
The inside part of my right ear was ringing, but I could still hear with it. So I was mutilated but not deaf.
I tried to speak but couldn’t catch my breath.
Kelley had bits of ear on her shirt.
“People’s ears don’t do that for no reason!” said Glenn.
Franklin clutched at his heart. “It was the Aztecs!”
Then he dropped to the floor in a dead faint. I didn’t blame him. I was pretty close to fainting myself, but I successfully forced myself to remain conscious and unsuccessfully tried to force myself to remain calm.
Oh God, it hurt. Though I’d never had my ear pierced, I think the pain was like having your ear pierced a million times in a row, all over, with a dull, ear-piercing device.
Blood ran down my neck.
I had to focus. Had to at least get enough control over myself to blurt out a sentence. That cabdriver could be holding the tip of a pin right between the doll’s eyes.
“You have to let me make a call,” I said.
Mildred shook her head.
“I won’t call the cops!” I promised. “I know who did this! I have to speak with him!”
“Satan?”
“No, not Satan.” I reached into my pocket and dug out the cabdriver’s business card. Zeke Geiler. “Please call this number and let me talk to him.”
Mildred looked like she wanted to question the reason we would call a taxi service about an exploding ear, but instead, she walked out of the living room and returned a moment later with a phone. She dialed the number on the card and then handed the phone to me.
“Try anything sneaky, and I’ll shoot your other ear off,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I have to do this. I can’t have these on me,” said Kelley, her voice a full octave higher than usual, as she picked my ear bits off of her shirt and flicked them onto the floor. She’d been strong and brave through this whole ordeal, but cartilage on your clothes is a bit much for anyone.
On the other end, the phone rang once, twice, three times.
Please answer before the crazy lady decides to shoot me, I thought.
“Hello?” asked a familiar voice on the other end of the line. A voice that sounded much more evil and villainous than it had earlier this evening.
“It’s me,” I said.
�
��I was wondering when you’d call,” said Zeke. “How’s your ear?”
“My ear’s totally fine,” I said. “Why?”
My thought process while saying that: “If he thinks the voodoo doll doesn’t really work, I’ll have much more leverage.”
My thought process immediately after saying that: “He’s going to poke the doll again to make it work! Retract statement! Retract statement!”
“Okay, I lied,” I told him. “I barely have any ear left. Are you happy?”
“Send me a phone picture of your missing ear. Right now. If I don’t have it in sixty seconds, the doll gets hurt again.”
Zeke hung up. Ack!
“This phone has a camera, right?” I asked Mildred.
“Why would my phone have a camera? I didn’t buy a camera. I bought a phone.”
“Every phone made since 1974 has a frickin’ camera!” I said. But this one didn’t even have a touch-screen display, and I didn’t see a camera lens anywhere. “Listen to me! I need a camera in the next few seconds, or I am going to splatter!”
“We have a Polaroid in the attic,” said Glenn.
“What’s a Polaroid?” I asked, not that it mattered. Franklin probably had a better phone, but he was still unconscious. Unless I could somehow stop time, there was no way I could meet the driver’s deadline!
Could I stop time?
No. I couldn’t stop time.
What part of me was going to explode next? My eyeball? My eyebrow? My chin? My uvula? The knuckle of my left ring finger? One of my thighs? My torso? Several inches of my lower intestine? My teeth? What if my teeth exploded in my mouth? I couldn’t even stand having the dentist drill a tiny little spot for a filling, and now there was a very real chance that my teeth could explode all over my mouth!
I frantically hit redial and called him back.
While it rang, I gave Kelley a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
It probably would have been more reassuring if the hand doing the patting wasn’t covered with blood.
Adam hadn’t screamed in a while.
“Where’s the picture?” asked Zeke.
“I don’t have a camera,” I said. “But I swear to you I’m not lying. If I hold the phone up to what’s left of my ear, you can probably still hear it oozing.”
“I think I should pierce the doll again just to be sure.”
“No! Listen to me. The doll is way more powerful than you think! It’s.. .it’s.. .it’s like the Red Bull version of voodoo.” “Prove it with a picture.”
“I said I don’t have a camera! Why are you asking me to prove to you that you have the upper hand? You’ve won! You’ve got me! What do you want?”
“I want to know that you’re not just yanking me around.” “Listen, Zeke—”
“Don’t call me Zeke.”
“That’s what’s on your card.”
“I don’t care.”
“What should I call you?”
“Don’t call me anything! You don’t have to use people’s names to talk to them! We’re not trying to bond! And it’s been more than sixty seconds.”
“No, no, don’t do it. Believe me when I say that there isn’t enough Windex in the world to clean up the mess if you aren’t careful with that doll! Please, just tell me what you want. We’ll get it. I promise.” “I want one million dollars.”
“I can’t get you a million bucks. Not gonna happen.”
“One million dollars, or I shove this doll into a meat grinder.” I was willing to bet he didn’t even have a meat grinder handy, but I didn’t try to call him out on the fib.
“I’m sixteen years old. Where am I gonna get a million dollars?” “That’s not my problem.”
“Well, it is your problem, because you’re asking for something I can’t give you. This whole thing started when we didn’t have enough money to pay your fare!”
“Then you’d better come up with a good offer, kid.”
“You’ll go to prison,” I said. “I’ve got your business card right here. They’ll know you did it.”
“What, you think I’m going to get arrested for jabbing pins into a doll? Seriously? What kind of an idiot would worry about going to jail for voodoo?”
“I can get you five hundred dollars,” I said.
“I want a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Can’t do a hundred and fifty thousand. I can get you six hundred.”
“A hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
“Seven hundred.”
“One hundred thousand even.”
“Seven hundred and fifty.”
“I’m not going lower than one hundred thousand.”
“I’m not going higher than seven hundred and fifty-five.” “Then I guess that’s the end of the doll.”
Kelley grabbed the phone out of my hand. “Zeke? This is Tyler’s girlfriend. Do you know anything about this kind of negotiation? You have to ask for an amount that’s within the realm of possibility, or else you’re just wasting everybody’s time. I don’t like having my time wasted. When I feel like my time is being wasted, it makes me want to get rid of those who are wasting my time, understand? No? Okay, I’m sorry.” She listened silently for a moment. “Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can be there. Thank you.” To me, she said, “We’re going to deliver ten thousand dollars in thirty minutes. If we call the police, you’re dead. We’re meeting him at the junkyard. Cool?”
“Uh...”
“Cool?”
“We need more time.”
“Thirty minutes. That’s perfectly fine, right?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“Good.”
“Don’t hang up.”
Kelley handed the phone back to me. The voodoo doll issue was taken care of, except for having no possible way of getting that much cash that quickly, but we still had the problem of the Basers. Mildred and Glenn were watching me closely. I didn’t think they’d just let us casually walk out of their home.
“Zeke?” I asked, forgetting the don’t-call-me-Zeke rule. “Yeah?” Apparently he had forgotten about it too.
“In the meantime, I need you to create an aura of destruction.” That sounded pretty intimidating, right? I know that if I thought there was an aura of destruction in effect, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, my behavior would be much more cautious.
“A what?”
“Yep, exactly. Right now. Using voodoo, the one true religion.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go with burning flesh. The more charred, the better.” “Huh? What?”
“I’ll let you decide that one.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Be creative.”
“What?”
“And painful.”
“I truly don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Zeke. “Is somebody else there? Is this some kind of fake-out?”
“Fifteen seconds will be fine,” I said. I hung up the phone and handed it back to Mildred. “Thanks.”
“Fifteen seconds for what?” she asked.
“For the aura of destruction,” I said, giving her just a hint of a smile. Or at least that was my intent. Despite my attempts to maintain a cool demeanor, my voice was all shaky and squeaky, and my face was twitchy because of, y’know, the whole shredded right ear thing. So it was probably less a hint of a smile than a grotesque grimace of agony.
“What’s that?”
“It’s part of the same power that blew up my ear,” I said. “You should never have let me call Zeke, because now everybody in this house is under its spell. If you negatively impact my aura, your flesh will burn.”
“It’s true,” said Kelley. “Black and crispy.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Mildred. “What does it even mean to negatively impact your aura?”
“You’re starting to do it right now.”
Mildred flinched.
“I don’t want to turn you and your family into burnt-out shells,
but I’ll do it,” I warned her. “I’ll cook you like a hot dog.” “You’re bluffing,” said Glenn.
“You think so?” I pointed to the mess of my right ear. “Just know that this could be your face.”
“Except burnt,” said Kelley.
“Right,” I said.
“What do you want from us?” Mildred asked.
“All we want is for you to let us go,” I said.
“And your car,” Kelley added.
I nodded. “And your car.”
“Not a chance,” said Glenn.
“Really?” I asked. “Are you saying you don’t believe me? Do you think I came in here with a fake ear strapped to the side of my head that I could pop on cue?”
“It wasn’t on cue,” said Glenn. “You were obviously very surprised when it happened.”
“Right. So.. .you know it was real then.”
“I’m not doubting that your ear exploded. I’m doubting the aurora of destruction.”
“Aura.”
“What’d I say?”
“Aurora.”
“I meant aura. The first part of the call was clearly somebody blackmailing you with a voodoo doll, but it doesn’t make sense that somebody who was blackmailing you would then turn around and do you a favor. If there’d been two separate calls, I might buy it, but you’re asking us to accept a pretty big flaw in logic if you want us to believe that the blackmailer has also been nice enough to set up an aura of destruction.”
“He knows that if we die here, he’ll never get his money,” I said, thinking as quickly as you can when you suspect that part of your brain may actually be starting to leak out of your ear hole. “He didn’t do it out of kindness; it was a business requirement.” “But you said it like you were asking a favor of an administrative assistant or something,” said Glenn. “The two conversations didn’t naturally flow into each other. Again, I’m not doubting that the damage to your ear happened exactly how you claim, but I think the rest of the conversation was completely one-sided and that we are in absolutely no danger.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. I’ve always felt that when you’re at risk of your body burning from the inside out, you should err on the side of caution, but I’m not going to tell you how to live your life.”
Kelley lunged forward a bit, fingers curled into claws. “Bad aura!”
