Dead As Dutch

by Rich Docherty

Irv realized “oxygen debt” probably wasn’t a familiar phrase to Bryce or Munyon, but he recognized that was what they were paying back in the minutes after returning from their impromptu mad dash through the woods. It was simple science: the gulps of air they now sucked in replenished the oxygen they had depleted and broke down the lactic acid that had built up in their muscles causing the classic burning sensation associated with fatigue. Recovery was just a matter of feeding their bodies more oxygen than they had used up.

  Stan watched intently as the trio’s breathing returned to normal, all three still looking gassed and something more—and not just from the frantic exertion they’d expended. He could see it carved on all three of their exhausted faces: something very out of the ordinary had occurred, and whatever happened had taken more than just a physical toll. It seemed to have gashed their psyches, too, as they grappled to recover their equilibrium in the wake of a collective experience that, based on their drained appearances, had zapped them like fifty-thousand volt-Taser darts.

  Stan studied each of them: Bryce and Irv limp, winded and dazed, staring at the floor as if in a hypnotic trance; Munyon more focused and wired, like he was rehashing in his mind every single detail of the episode that led them to return in such a state of dread. As for Keisha and Dana, Stan couldn’t help but notice their worry and understood the concern. He was unnerved, too. Everybody was spooked and the room was thick with apprehension. There was no doubt that an incident of some sort had transpired. But what, he thought, if whatever occurred in the woods was misinterpreted? It wasn’t unheard of. Errors of perception and deduction were not rare or unusual under the murky cloak of night. It could be a case of the “fog of war,” a well-established concept that referred to the confusion that developed in some situations—most often on the terrain of a battlefield—when judgments, decisions, and later recall were clouded or skewed as a result of the chaos caused by sensory overload. Kind of like trying to thread a needle in a pitch black, snake-infested room filled with smoke while Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” blared at ear-splitting levels, singing the Star-Spangled Banner, balancing on a tightrope, and getting pelted by water balloons all at once—or so Stan imagined. Maybe, though, the circumstances here were less dire than presumed and could be utilized as more fodder for Letter 13. Inspiration, after all, came in many forms and from a multitude of different sources. Maybe that’s all this was, a serendipitous opportunity for him to take advantage of, a fortuitous chance to turn a negative into something positive for his movie. Maybe.

  It was Munyon who spoke first, not with his usual bluster, but more sullen and tempered. “Don’t ya wanna know what happened, big cheese?”

  Once Stan heard the way Munyon posed the question, the alarm and foreboding jangling in his voice, any hopes he had for serendipity giving his film a lift evaporated faster than a snowflake in a blast furnace. Stan braced himself. He had a feeling that if a fan suddenly materialized on the premises, a whole lot of doo-doo was on its way to hitting it. “So…what happened?”

  Munyon leaped up as though an electric cattle prod had wormed its way into his nether regions. “AMBUSHED!” he roared, fists clenched and punching through the air above him.

  Stan swore he spotted Munyon’s eyeballs pop out of their sockets, not to mention the walls of the shack vibrated as the megaton bombshell he plunked in their midst exploded like a fart at a ladies social: no one was quite sure how to react. Except Dana.

  “I told you! I told you!” she squealed, aiming her vitriol at her brother.

  “Told me what?” Stan replied, miffed that perhaps Dana was right. Eating crow that she prepared went down with him about as well as a live scorpion.

  “You know what. Don’t pretend you don’t!” she charged.

  Stan fired back, restrained, taking care to avoid another round of mudslinging. “How about this, Dana? How about you just zip it and let Mr. Munyon tell us what happened, okay?”

  Dana folded her arms and stamped her foot. “I’m just sayin’, that’s all,” she added with a sulk.

  “Well stop sayin’ and start listenin’,” Stan implored her as he turned his attention to Munyon. “An ambush you said. Who?”

  “Hmph,” Munyon smirked as he strolled away. “Who? How ’bout what?”

  The enigmatic response staggered Stan, like a guy expecting to hear a diagnosis of an ulcer, but finding out it was a hernia instead. “What? Did you say what? What do you mean, what?”

  Munyon’s attention was diverted by the display of animal trophy heads that hung above and lined the walls around them. He was drawn to one in particular, a snarling grizzly, saber-like incisors protruding from its upper and lower jaws, still as intimidating in death as when it had roamed its natural habitat. Munyon reached up and caressed its snout with the back of his hand, brushing across the russet-colored fur.

  “My pa bagged this beauty,” he said, the pride he displayed left open to interpretation as to whether it was for his father’s courage or the bear’s majesty. “Up in the Yukon Territory. Six hundred pounds of mean. Took him down with his bare hands and a huntin’ knife. Been with the family ever since.” Munyon lowered his head in reverence, as did everyone else observing him, compelled to follow suit as if they’d walked into the middle of the wrong funeral service.

  After allowing Munyon a respectful amount of private time to reflect, Stan cleared his throat and tried to ease Munyon back from his nostalgia trek down memory lane. “Uh, Mr. Munyon…you were saying?”

  As Munyon turned, his eyes tightened into two black slits, like he had just awakened, ripped open the curtains, and was blinded by the sun streaming through his bedroom window. “Say again?”

  “You were about to tell us what happened out there,” Stan reminded him, trying to mask his growing frustration with Munyon’s drifting focus. He was like a sideshow barker who had lured them into the tent with the promise of seeing something shocking, but instead turned on a slide projector to watch pictures of his Disneyland vacation.

  Munyon mulled over his reply as if attempting to dredge up the particulars of events that happened twenty years ago, not twenty minutes ago. “Well, truth is,” he said, scratching at his scalp, “can’t be sure what it was exactly. Course, I fought ’em off best I could.”

  Of course he did, Stan thought. No doubt with a butter knife and one hand tied behind his back. Argh. This little cat-and-mouse game of his was exasperating. Munyon was nothing if not irritating, the vagaries of his explanation like some gnarly piece of bait dangled at the end of a stick that Stan had to beg for like a trained seal. Okay, I’ll play along, Stan told himself, but the game’s not over until Munyon coughs up some real answers. “’Em you said? Meaning them? Meaning…more than one?”

  Ignoring Stan’s query, Munyon dragged a chair across the floor and dropped down on the seat. He raised a leg, rolled up his pants, and tugged at the rubber boot on his foot before it budged and slid from a woolen sock, revealing a gaping hole in the area of his big toe. He lifted the galosh, peered inside, and gave it a sniff before he flipped it over and shook it like he was at a dice table on the Las Vegas Strip. Dana gasped as a checkered black-and-white snake plopped out, careened off his knee, and slithered to safety between a stack of cartons piled in the corner. Munyon was unruffled by the intrusion, as if reptiles hitching a ride in his footwear was a commonplace occurrence. “Ha! Would ya look at that? Ticklish little bugger!”

  Irv crept toward the snake’s lair, crouched down, snatched the foot-long serpent by the tail, and held it up for display.

  “Eeek, keep it away!” Dana urged as she backed off.

  “Baby garter. Harmless. Unless you’re a slug or a leech. Then you get swallowed whole,” Irv noted, like it was show-and-tell day in science class. He proceeded to the door, opened it, and bent over to release the snake.

  “Well, lookee that,” Munyon said as he curled his lips, less than impressed with Irv’s capture. “String bean here’s a tree hugger. Savin’ the planet. One of them
conservative types.”

  Stan digested Munyon’s malapropism for a moment before he offered up a chance to correct himself. “Don’t you mean conservation?” he proposed.

  “That’s what I said!” Munyon boomed, affronted that someone would dare question his mastery of the English language.

  It wasn’t difficult for Stan to ascertain that his colleagues were as weary of Munyon’s distractions and boorish behavior as he was. The furtive glances they shared spoke volumes about the level of mistrust and discontent they shared. Problem was, Munyon held all the cards—they knew it, but so did he. “So, can you be a just little more specific about what you saw, Mr. Munyon, sir, please?” Stan requested, in his most obsequious manner. Catch more flies with sugar than salt, he figured.

  “More specific?” Munyon snapped. “Mighty hard to do that when a man couldn’t see diddly. Darker than the inside of a witch’s nasty old toolbox out there, right whiner?”

  Bryce scrunched his face, galled that Munyon chose him to involve him with such a smutty reference. “I wouldn’t know,” he answered, before turning away in a huff.

  “Oh, that’s right. Pardon my French. I dun forgot. Whiner don’t do tools!” Munyon made the honking sound of a buzzer, the kind a contestant hears on a game show when he fails to provide a correct answer. Peals of laughter followed as he whooped it up, wiggled his foot back into his boot, and stood. “Smelled ’em though, I can tell you that. Rotten-like, ya know? Sons of guns surrounded me. Anyways, I just started swingin’ away with Bad D here.”

  He hoisted his three-foot splitting ax, stroked the contoured steel edge and gazed at it like a father toting his newborn son.

  “What’s the D stand for?” Keisha wondered.

  “I was hopin’ you’d ask, buttercup.” A wicked grin broke across Munyon’s face. “Death, destruction and my personal favorite,” he proclaimed, as he planted a tender kiss on the blade, “decapitation.”

  “You forgot deviant,” Bryce muttered.

  Munyon eyeballed Bryce as though he’d just insulted his mama, but wasn’t quite sure. “What’s that fancy word supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  Bryce receded like he just pinged the biggest badass in the ninth grade with an errant spitball. “Never mind.”

  Stan jumped in before there was any chance for Munyon’s suspicions to fester any further. “Yeah, never mind. More importantly, Mr. Munyon, did you get any of…them?”

  Munyon regurgitated a gob of phlegm from his throat, sloshed it around his mouth, and drained it back down. “Well, I might’ve nailed a few of the suckers, but I wasn’t about to stick around for a body count if that’s what you mean. Got my patootie out of there pronto.” He nodded toward Bryce seated on the couch. “Should’ve seen the look on the whiner’s face—like he was going to wet his drawers!”

  Bryce girded himself as Munyon leaned over him like a mechanic checking under the hood of a car. He chuckled and pointed to Bryce’s lap. “Matter of fact, he did wet his drawers!”

  The rest of the Letter 13 team huddled around Bryce as he crossed his legs, but couldn’t hide the damp patch glaring back at them like a Rorschach test from his crotch area. They each took a fleeting glance at the unmistakable evidence before turning away, as embarrassed by their own compulsion to gawk as the mortification Bryce must have felt.

  “Looks like your radiator sprung a leak, whiner!” Munyon cackled.

  Bryce’s jaws tightened as he rose up and bulldozed past his colleagues. “Go ahead, everybody, laugh if you want. We almost died out there!” he erupted, as his eyes welled up and his body quaked.

  The anguished outburst from Bryce even dampened Munyon’s mirth, but it was the collective group of glares he absorbed from Stan, Irv, Keisha, and Dana that totally squelched his mean-spirited frivolity.

  “Actually,” Irv chimed in, as he angled toward Bryce, “the truth is—” Irv paused and turned to Bryce, who struggled to blink back tears as they exchanged brief eye contact. “Bryce was right in the middle of a whiz,” Irv continued, “when Mr. Munyon came tearing out of the woods screaming like a banshee. No time for Bryce to properly zip up. Would’ve happened to any of us.”

  Keisha made a beeline for Bryce, veering just enough to nudge Munyon aside along the way. She positioned herself behind him and kneaded the knotted muscles surrounding his neck in the soothing, comforting way a masseuse might to a client at a high-end spa. “Nobody’s laughing, Bryce, okay?” she assured him.

  Bryce nodded, sniffled, and forced a fragile smile. For Stan, another crisis

  averted. But his lead actor was just humiliated and his mojo left in shambles. As the director of Letter 13, it was Stan’s job to help him shake off the spill, get a foot in the stirrup, and climb back up onto the saddle. As much as he detested Bryce’s inflated ego, he realized his performance—like Superman without his cape—would suffer without it.

  Stan zeroed in on Bryce and Irv. “So what about you guys? Did you see anything? What do you think it was, Bryce?”

  Bryce reacted as a peasant might after being summoned to offer up his opinion to the maharajah. “Me?”

  “Absolutely you,” Stan assured him.

  “Well…weird, that’s what it was,” Bryce recalled, wiping away any remnants of moisture on his cheeks. “When it started I thought it was somebody banging on garbage can lids, you know, the metal kind, maybe just some kids goofing around making noise. But then it got worse, way worse. A lot of strange howling and these horrible groans, the kind dying things make. That’s when it got scary and I began to think we were in big trouble. Couldn’t see who it was or what it was or how many there were. It happened so fast.”

  “Uh-huh,” Irv confirmed, “the whole thing only lasted for maybe a minute before Mr. Munyon showed up and told us to start running.”

  “Right. Running.” Dana bolted for the door and clutched the handle. “Which is what we should be doing. So what are we waiting for, let’s get out of here!” she shouted, ripping the door open.

  No one budged. It was as if she’d just invited everyone to take a dip in a tank at a sewage treatment plant. “And go where exactly, Dana?” Stan asked, not surprised by his sister’s kneejerk response. It was her patented move, one he had witnessed a myriad of times before on the home front: speak first, think later. Typical Dana brain burp. “Haven’t you been listening? They—or ‘it’—is out there.”

  “Big cheese is right, missy,” Munyon vouched. “Best bet is stay right here—safety in numbers like they say.”

  The lack of a stampede for the door confirmed the group’s consensus that Munyon’s suggestion to stay put was in their best interest. Keisha gnawed on her lower lip as she surveyed her colleagues, each absorbed in their own thoughts. “So what do you think, guys, will they be coming here?”

  Before anyone could respond, Munyon reached past Dana and swatted the door shut, which resonated like the clunk of a gavel in an empty courtroom. “Only one thing I know for sure, sweet cheeks,” he said to Keisha as he breezed by her on the way to a far corner of the shack. There he latched onto a handle on the chest, tugged it across the floor to the middle of the room, and plopped his foot atop it like a novice deer hunter posing for a snapshot with his first kill. “This here box brings with it a whole heap of trouble,” he warned, his grave tone prompting Dana to lock the door as the rest of the cast and crew of Letter 13 ruminated over the chest they had found…which had, perhaps, found them.

  Chapter 15