by Sean Platt
It was a bitch restaurant reviewer who pissed him off. Took one bite of his best dish and declared it DOA without even swallowing. It was the last review she ever wrote. Boricio wouldn’t have cared about the review itself. Fuck her. His shit was crème de la fuck-yeah, and he knew it. But she up and decided it wasn’t worth her muffin before the spoon hit the fat of her mouth. Boricio found the first part of the review funny, laughing out loud at her dumb fuckery, but then he hit the last line: “The owners of L’aigle Noir must pay handsomely for the lines that circle the block. And at $20 a plate, they can afford it.”
Fuck. Her.
Boricio waited six weeks. When he finally caught her, he made sure she swallowed. Four times in two hours. The bonus three were interest for her not taking a legitimate bite of his Chiliquelles de la Noche. It had been a long night with Miss Bitch Reviewer, but sweet enough to make the sudden move two states over worth it. It was the first time Boricio had ever gotten creative with his kills. And dammit, what was an artist such as himself without creativity?
Charlie, however, was like some kinda idiot savant when it came to creative killing, though. His first work was a goddamned masterpiece!
Boricio didn’t know everything that had gone down in the room. And Charlie had refused to answer any questions, simply letting the work speak for itself. Boricio had no idea why Dumbfuck Charlie wouldn’t want to talk about it; the fuck he knew whether the rookie was ashamed or perhaps frightened by what he’d done. If Boricio had demonstrated half the artistry the kid had on his first kill, he would’ve had the shit printed on a T-shirt and wore the fucker threadbare. Boy had a gift. Made Boricio proud, a feeling he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt for another before.
Charlie had called Boricio into the room and shut the door so only Boricio would see what he’d done. He led him to the bed where Bob’s hands and feet were tied to the black wrought iron bed posts. The man’s arms and legs had been splayed apart as far as possible so he formed a giant X. The lower half of his nude body was covered beneath a blood-soaked down comforter.
Boricio walked around the bed, not touching a thing, admiring the boy’s handiwork like an artist surveying the work of his protégé. Charlie watched the entire time, eyes on Boricio, as if waiting for a critique.
Bob’s eyes were wide open in a permanent shocked expression, which made Boricio smile. Didn’t see this coming, did ya, Bob? Bob’s cheeks had been sliced open and hung like bloody fatty flaps over the sides of his face. On the right cheek, Charlie had used a nail-gun he’d found in the room to shoot a nail into the man’s face. Since there was only one nail, Boricio figured the boy was simply experimenting and hadn’t liked the result. The man’s mouth was dark purple, puffy, and bloody, like ole Charlie had spent a fat hour hitting or cutting him in the same goddamn spot. He looked like a losing boxer at the end of the fight with a mouth full of gauze to soak up the blood.
Across Bobby’s chest were more wounds with flesh peeled back, most probably given to Bob while he was still begging. His nipple had been cut off. Long wounds stretched from the man’s wrists to his armpits where Charlie had cut him several times. Blood soaked the bed beneath him. Two pens had been jabbed into each side of the man’s ribcage and left there.
Boricio looked at the comforter and up to Charlie, “May I?”
“Yes,” Charlie said.
Boricio pulled the covers off Bob and beheld Charlie’s masterstroke, the thing of beauty that assured Boricio that Charlie was a certifiably in-the-closet, 48-karat crazy ass motherfucker.
A pulpy stump sat in the middle of Bob’s bloodied pubic forest where his cock had been.
Boricio looked up at Charlie and applauded, “Bravo, sir!”
Charlie looked like he was either about to burst out laughing or crying; Boricio wasn’t sure which. His face looked queasy.
“Where did you . . . ” Boricio had started to ask, then realized the reason that Bob’s mouth was so puffy. “Oh. Wow. You made him eat his dick! That is . . . ” Boricio said, pretending to wipe tears of joy from his eyes, “That, my boy, is a thing of fucking beauty!”
And then Charlie went and did something that shocked even Boricio; he sprayed his masterpiece with lighter fluid, lit a match, and set the fucker on fire.
“Don’t you want to show the others?” Boricio had asked. “This is something to brag about!”
“No,” Charlie said, “You’re the only one who will know what I did here.”
The way Charlie had said it was weird, and Boricio still hadn’t figured out why the boy had shown him and nobody else. But he’d certainly earned himself a roster spot, and a top slot at that, on Team Boricio. If that meant Boricio would have to lay off Callie, then that’s just what he’d have to do, for now, at least.
But he would need to fuck something. And soon.
Boricio had driven about 10 miles when he saw the impossible. The sudden shock caused the Z8 to suddenly fishtail. He quickly regained control, with a little help from some precision German engineering, then slapped the windshield and screamed, “That’s some beer-battered bullshit!” He threw the BMW into reverse and tore back to where he’d seen the ghost.
But she was gone.
The woman.
The Christmas gift he’d killed on Oct. 14, and the very fucking one he saw at The Prophet’s compound less than a week later. She was standing on the side of the road as if waiting for someone to pick her up. If it wasn’t her, then the end of the world had just shit a Montezuma’s Revenge worth of crazy on his face.
Fuck.
Boricio didn’t like driving in the dark down Crazy Road.
But he kept driving, turning down every street and into every nearby neighborhood, searching for a trace of the woman or some clue to prove he wasn’t going loco. Sick of the shit in his head, Boricio turned on the CD player to The Mummies, a band Adam liked – catchy swamp rock with every song hosting a double entendre.
A half hour later, Boricio was bobbing his head back and forth and mouthing the words in an attempt to stay awake. He’d been feeling tired a lot lately. He wasn’t sure if he was getting bored from the changes to his lifestyle or if he was coming down with something. He rarely got sick, so the idea of catching something now didn’t bother him too much. But there was only so much you could do when you were feeling dead-ass tired.
He pulled to the side of the road, killed the engine, and stepped from the BMW, feeling like he’d walked right off the map.
Boricio had no idea when he’d lost the highway; maybe it was a mile back, maybe it was 10. He had no idea where he was, and with the pitch black surrounding him, no clue how to figure it out. The GPS wasn’t working, and there weren’t any maps in the glove box. Boricio had been back and forth across the country, from Timbuktu to Fuck Your Mother, and his sense of direction was usually dead on. But right now he was a toddler in the mall and all the mommies were looking identical below the waist.
Boricio got back in the Z8 and leaned back to catch some shut eye.
He slept for a few minutes, maybe, when the shriek of a monster woke him. Life burst back into his eyes as his hand shot for his gun on pure reflex. But the threat was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t sure if the monster was in his dreams or nearby, but he was too damned tired to stick around and find out. He revved the engine, then roared onto the road, swinging a left at the first crossroads. He had nearly a full tank of gas and would just drive until he figured out where he was or found sunlight, when it would be easier to find his way back.
Daylight apparently wasn’t too far off since Boricio crashed into it head first about an hour later, alongside an uncomfortably loud wave of déjà vu that ended in a row of houses that reminded him an awful lot of the ritzy-titsy homes up in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Boricio pulled the Z8 into a perfectly bricked horseshoe drive, and smiled. His smile grew bigger when he stepped inside the unlocked house.
The two-story house was posh, with eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, and three boat slips, t
wo occupied. Same as most of the other rich houses Boricio had seen, this one was flush with alcohol, clothes, guns, jewelry, lots of pills, pounds of weed, loads of money, and shelves lined with food.
The living room was massive, with a pile of rich bitchy furniture pushed to one side. Eight bedrolls sat in a circle, each with a large bank of pillows, several bottles of water, and a medium-sized red bucket. The buckets had what looked and smelled like vomit. The air was thick, sour and weirdly familiar.
Two buckets lay on their side with scabs of black vomit crusting the lacquered hardwood floor. A red and white bedroll was in the center with wooden instruments, spirit sticks burned to a nub, and a large two-liter jug of sludge, filled to the top, with an empty shot glass sitting beside it on the floor. Boricio picked up the two-liter jug and shot glass, then went upstairs, found the master bedroom, and fell into the plush oversized bed. He filled the glass to the top, put it to his lips, then spilled the entire psychedelic mess down his throat.
For a few moments, he felt nothing. Then something moved in his guts.
Seconds later, vomit spewed from his mouth, and Boricio fell over, face down on the Egyptian cotton. He smiled. He felt lighter, stronger, better. He turned over, looking up where the ceiling had been. It was replaced by colors: swirling, spinning, dancing across his mind. But the colors weren’t alone. They came loaded with memories, unpleasant ones, which started as whispers but were growing louder by the second, mixing into a chaotic mix of sound and visuals that threatened to swallow him whole.
He snarled, had to fight as thoughts piled on top of him, too many to sort, voices, images, and a million colors — fuck, the colors — as his body swayed back and forth in the waves, all the while his stomach lurching with each movement. The waves, the noise, and the colored memories rose in pitch, carrying him ever higher, impossibly high, as if into the sky above, though he could see nothing but the colors and memories. He continued to rise and felt the rising fear of the inevitable drop that would come.
A childhood fear whispered into his mind: Fall in your sleep, and hit the ground, you’ll die in both worlds, and never be found.
And then he fell.
But the fall wasn’t long. It was instant. And instead of crashing to the ground, he simply stopped moving.
He woke face up in a dark, cold, slippery pit that was wet with the putrid scent of death. The only light came from above, but seemed so dim and far away as if to be thousands of feet from where he lay. He sat up and noticed a crow next to him, pulling at something in the ground.
A worm?
Then Boricio saw it wasn’t worm, but rather the flesh from a corpse. One of thousands of tangled, naked bodies that lined every square inch of the pit around him, piled as high as he could see.
Jesus Christ.
Not one to stick around in hell-holes, Boricio grabbed a handful of corpse and started to climb towards the light. He climbed and climbed until sweat started to stew in his pores and coat his body. His muscles bulged and he felt inches from exhaustion, but after an hour, he was getting closer to the dim light above, which he could now make out as stars. As he drew closer, Boricio felt a gust of cool air and could see the grass swaying at the edges of the pit just yards away.
He continued to climb but lost his grip when three heads emerged from the grass. Then he heard a horrible scream from the sky above just as the corpses beneath him came to life, clawing, tearing, biting.
This shit is about as real as a pair of Beverly Hills tits, but fuck me in my starfish and hit me with a slap of hot yogurt if it don’t feel exactly like the here-and-now.
The fingers kept clawing at Boricio, a thousand at once. For the first time in years, Boricio nearly screamed. But he didn’t. He clawed back, kicked at limbs, and bit hands that brushed across his face, cursing and spitting out chunks of flesh as he bit them. He kept moving until he reached the lip, and clawed his way onto the soft, cold grass, hugging him like a blanket as it rolled in waves beneath the purple sky. The pit, with its corpses, moaned in defeat.
Boricio bathed in the light of the moon, so fat it filled much of the night sky, and laughed.
I’m alive!
A sharp cry from a wolf sliced through the air, followed by an echoing chorus.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Boricio. How big is your bark?
The howls were getting closer, and the fuckers sounded hungry. Boricio rolled to his feet and stood up, opened his hands like claws, and steeled himself ready for whatever was about to come.
No pack of Motel Six for fleas motherfuckers is gonna take me down, you could bet your ball sack and both balls in it.
The howls fell silent as a fog rolled in, covering earth and sky alike.
Boricio, now blinded, titled his head to better hear his surroundings. The moaning from the pit stopped, leaving him in silence except for his heartbeat. He turned in the dark fog, waiting for anything from any side, his claws at the ready.
The fog receded, and two figures emerged into view. A tall woman stood beside a dog, a Husky with large, sad eyes that looked even larger and sadder beneath the bright light of the full moon.
The woman turned to the Husky and said, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, eh, Oggy Doggy?”
The Husky ignored the woman, but turned to Boricio and spoke, “Well fuck a duck, son, it looks like you just screwed the pooch!”
Boricio stared, knowing this was a bad trip and not sure how in the hell to respond.
Before he could speak, someone else appeared behind the pair. A small boy with big eyes. The boy studied Boricio, looking him over from head to toe, eyes narrowed in study. Finally he said, “Who are you, mister? Are you one of the voices?”
“I’m Boricio,” he said. “Now, you wanna tell me what the hell you’re doing out here smack dab in the middle of Fuck-All?”
“I’m lost,” he said. “But I came from over there.”
The boy pointed at the horizon, then down at the pit. “That’s the middle.”
Another voice, one deeper than the child’s, chimed in, seemingly from the child’s mouth, “The Center of Fuck-All.”
“Where you from, you know, besides your mama’s furbox?”
“Las Orillas.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Everyone is gone.”
The woman put her arm around the boy as the Husky lay down at his feet. The boy suddenly seemed to grow in a matter of seconds, shooting from a small boy to one old enough to have a few hairs on his balls.
Boricio stumbled backwards, then righted himself and returned forward. “None of this is real, right?”
The boy shook his head. “Everything is real, Mr. Boricio,” he said.
The woman and dog nodded in agreement.
The woman then whispered something in the Husky’s ear. He raised his snout in the air, stole a glance at the moon, then fell into a loud, 30-second howl. When he was finished, he winked, then fell back to a sleeping position at the boy’s feet.
“Everything’s real, Mr. Boricio,” the boy repeated. He looked at the moon, and then the woman. She nodded and the boy said, “Sorry, Mr. Boricio, but I have to get going now.”
“Wait,” Boricio growled, “Who in the fuck are you?”
The boy smiled, now growing to around Charlie’s age. In a grown man’s voice, he said, “Sorry,” he said, “My name is Luca. I’ve got to tell you something.”
Another fog rolled in, and Boricio braced for the unknown, whether it be wolf, woman, dog, or child.
When the fog retreated, they were gone.
All of them, the corpses in the pit, too. The moon hung in the air another moment, but only long enough to widen and blanket the sky in the brightest white, bright enough to bleed beneath Boricio’s closed lids.
Boricio opened his eyes and found himself in the forest, not too far off the highway, the BMW Z8 about 100 yards away.
Well, that was some beer-battered bullshit if ever I’ve tasted any.
Boricio got in the Z8
and keyed the ignition. As he found his way back to the familiar, and was heading home, he wondered what the hell Luca, real or not, was trying to tell him.
Sixteen
Desmond Armstrong
Kingsland, Alabama
The Sanctuary
March 23
9:06 a.m.
Desmond added another freshly-measured and cut two-by-four to the pile, wiped his brow, took a long gulp of icy water, then picked up another board. He rolled the tape measure to the appropriate spot and marked a wooden check with his pencil before placing the board into the path of the circular saw, paying just enough attention to the task at hand so as not to cut off a finger.
It had been four days since they arrived at The Sanctuary; each day of Desmond’s newfound “freedom” had put him in a different part of the compound. Today, he was in the wood shop, helping with tasks for the construction of the new church. Though Desmond was decent enough with his hands, so far he had yet to be assigned a single task that a decent reward and a focused gorilla couldn’t manage.
That was fine. He promised Will and Mary that he’d play nice, and he had. No reason not to see things out, so long as he kept his eyes and ears on full alert.
Luca seemed to love the place. That wasn’t too surprising since everyone doted on him, at least in their weird, far-off way. It was as if everyone at the church all took the same personality-draining pills, which turned them into Stepford Wife-like clones. Plus, Luca was allowed to stay with the other children for learning time, despite his size. The Prophet didn’t seem too shocked to learn that Luca would be celebrating his ninth birthday in another few weeks. Desmond figured that John had told The Prophet, whose real name nobody seemed to know, everything that had happened back at the Drury Inn.
