8. LAST SUPPER (JULY 15TH, 2002)

Last Supper

July 15^th 2002

As with any group of strangers thrust together there were difficulties and minor clashes.  The six girls may have been through a shared collective experience of individual terror, but their survival had taken them to vastly different inner spaces.

            They sat around a large table in a generic family restaurant. Gwen had her back to the wall, an old-school hard-boiled paranoiac trick.  Her eyes darted about between the girls and the passers by.  She pulled a plastic tube of pills from her handbag.  Popped the top loose.  Swallowed a couple down with some water.  She played with a smoke she’d been forbidden from lighting and thought about death.

Millie scratched her head and wondered what the hell she was doing.  Scrunched up in her chair, out of place amongst the cool beauties and the tough chicks.  The youngest of the girls, she was in particular awe of Elisha.  Her Hollywood aura.  Her confidence.  The way she had spun tragedy into fortune.  Her name now an A-list buzzword.  Millie examined the movie star in her midst.  She was shocked to find a pimple on Elisha’s temple.  Such a human blemish.

            Elisha had on big don’t-look-at-me sunglasses.  The type people wear when they want to be noticed.  She wore a low-cut top.  She squeezed her tits together for maximum cleave.  A twenty-something dude sitting with his girlfriend at the next table fried his retinas on Elisha’s candy boobage.  Elisha smiled, ruffled her short, shaggy ‘do.  She wrapped her thick lips around a straw and sucked back some cola.  She saw Pumpkin shoot her some cut-eye but didn’t care.

Pumpkin was the girls’ compass.  The closer they got, the stronger Pumpkin felt the weird tugs and constrictions in her heart pulling her this way or that.  The connection between her and Jerome had been severed some, but vestiges of it remained. She had a half-drained glass of beer in front of her.  She traced lines in the frost on the glass with her black-painted fingernails.  She tried to repress a belch and was only moderately successful.  Tired already of Elisha and her bullshit, she just wanted all this to be over.

Selina sat next to Pumpkin.  She wore a black hoodie with the hood up over her head.  Trying not to draw too much attention to herself, her facial scars were nonetheless visible.   She held up her empty glass of scotch.  Jingled the ice cubes against the glass as a signal to a passing waitress for another.  Struggling to be sociable, Selina found Maggie the easiest company.  The drive in them both was a point of connection.

Maggie sat hunched over the table.  She pushed dark curls away from her eyes. She knew that by the next morning, the group would be wandering through a stretch of Southern Appalachia.  A mountainous landscape where murder ballads had thrived in immigrant communities hundreds of years before.  A place where a woman from a long line of killers birthed her own murder ballad and set it loose in the wild decades ago.

The girls finished their meals and drinks in the silence of a Last Supper.  Maggie picked up the check.  Outside, she hugged each of the girls individually.  She thought about how remarkable their coming together was.  As the catalyst of it all, she allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. 

They loaded up and, daydreaming of their monster finished, headed off towards the mountains.

THE END.

7. ALL RIPE TOGETHER: A TALE OF THE SIXTH GIRL (2008)

“I always wanted to be famous.  If it happens, I guess I will be.  I’ll get my wish.”

-- Bonnie Lee Bakely, slain wife of Robert

Blake, anticipating her own murder.

All Ripe Together

A Tale of the Sixth Girl.

February 2008

1. “WHO KNOWS UPON WHAT SOIL…”_____________________________

Alvin Grant spun the ax in his hand.  He looked his trees over and wondered what the hell one of them was becoming.  There was a sickness in it.  There was an unnaturalness about it. The cold didn’t bother it.  The snow didn’t faze it.  It was thriving.

There are seven hundred different types of soil in Missouri.  Pondery mildew, fire blight, scab and cedar apple rust dig on the climate, but none of these things were factors with this tree.  Swollen and dark and weird, it perpetually bore fruit.  Its apples were gore-dark, oddly waxen. Alvin was sickened by it for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

            For all the talk of nurturing and caring for crops, Alvin knew the truth:

            We are at war with nature.

            Early settlers of this land knew it.  Their survival hinged on their skill and ability to take from the land whatever they needed.  Food, fiber, minerals.  You fought to extract these things from the earth.  You fought long and hard.  You beat nature into submission with muscle and sweat and tools.

            Things changed over time, of course.  Manufacturing and retailing came along.  Factories were built.  Furniture factories.  Textile plants.  But mechanization, globalization and cheap overseas labor doomed these places.  The pork-processing plants, swallowed up by corporate giants, still did well but local pig farmers, like his brother Bob, struggled.

            Through all the change, the land was still the land.  Ivan still fought the fight while his town emptied out all around him.  His relationship to the land was love/hate. 

            There was just enough love to keep him going.

            He worried about the spreading of this mystery blight.  He would ensure that no more of his trees would look like this. If things were to be as they always had, the cancer in the land had to be cut out.

Sarah, his wife, had been giving out the fruit to amazed friends.  The word was spreading.  More and more requests were incoming.  More and more fruit was being both given away and sold.

            Alvin refused to eat the apples himself.  Wary of the mutant fruit, he forbade Sarah to touch it.  He knew she’d been giving it away against his wishes.  He knew she’d been sampling it against his wishes.  It pissed him off.

            Alvin tapped the can of gasoline beside him with his shoe.  He pondered his next move.  To burn the tree would be easiest.  To hack it down, more satisfying.

            He went with satisfaction.

            He approached it.  Felt his hands tremor a little.  Forced himself still.  He looked up at it.  It was:

            Black, gnarled, twisted.  Adorned with dark leaves and grey fruit.

            A leaf fell.  It grazed Alvin’s head.  He felt it like a warning.

            He said: ‘Fuck you.’

            He swung his ax.  He felt his arms jar as it bit into the trunk of the tree. 

            He pulled his ax free.  Examined the blade.  It was coated in a fluid dark and viscous.

            He looked at the ax-wound in the trunk.  It leaked the fluid.

            He thought: Blood.  The tree is bleeding.

            He smiled at the wound.  He hefted his ax back for a second swing.

            He heard footfalls crunching in the snow behind him.

            He heard a voice:

‘Don’t.’

            Sarah.

            Alvin turned.  He faced his wife.   

            He said: ‘Now, honey…’

            He stopped.  She was crying.

            She stepped towards him.  Grey strands of hair floating in the breeze.  An apron tied around her waist.  A meat tenderizer in one hand.  A piece of tainted fruit in the other.

            Sarah bit deeply into the fruit.  Her mouth was wet and slick with juice. She held it out to him, said:

            ‘Alvin, take it, try it.’

            ‘I told you I won’t.  This here tree is a perversion, Sarah.  This fruit is not fit for eating.’

            ‘You sound scared.  Why are you scared?’

            ‘Because this shouldn’t be.  None of this should be.  It’s against nature and it’s against the order of things and it’s against God.’

            ‘That’s silly.  God.  You haven’t been to church in a decade.’

            ‘That has nothing to do with anything.  Go on back to the house, now.  Warm yourself up some.  You shouldn’t be out here in this cold dressed like you are.  Fix some supper and I’ll be back when I’ve done what needs doing.’

             ‘I can’t let you kill that tree.  We all love the fruit so much’

            ‘Who does?’

‘The town.  Everybody.’

            ‘What do you mean? Just how much of this stuff have you given away?’

            Sarah dropped the tenderizer in the snow.  She walked to her husband.  Said:

            ‘Lots.  Lots and lots.  I sold even more. People love it.  They can’t get enough of it.  It’s a miracle.  You should try the fruit.  Really, you should.  It’s like nothing else ever.  It’s tangy, like citrus, crunchy like apple, juicy like melon.  Look at the fruit: so plump and ripe.  You should try it, it gives you a pep-up, really it does…it’s almost narcotic.’

            She held out the fruit to her husband once more.  Alvin took it this time.  He held it.  He sniffed the bite mark.  Juice leaked from it.  It touched his fingers.  He dropped the fruit.  Crushed it beneath his boot.

            Sarah knelt down by the ax-wound in the tree.  She touched its bloody sap.  She winced in empathy with the tree.  She looked up at her husband in anger. 

Alvin noted how sinister she looked in the gloaming. He said:

            ‘Get away from the tree, Sarah.’

            ‘I will not. You put down that ax.’

            ‘Fraid I can’t do that.’

            ‘Then you leave me no choice.’  She stood.  She nodded at something behind her husband.

            Alvin turned.  It was Merrin, one of his twin granddaughters.

            ‘Merrin?’

            ‘Hi, Gramps.’

            She smiled at him, but there was something damaged in it.  It didn’t belong to her.  It belonged to another face.  He looked on, bewildered.  Merrin was barefoot, dressed only in a slip.  Her freckled skin was goose-fleshed against the cold.

            Merrin had the tenderizer.  She swung it.  Like her sister, she was a skinny slip of a thing.  The blow had little behind it.  But it was enough.  It caught Alvin on the temple.  He fell to the snow-covered ground. 

Merrin jumped on her grandfather.  She rested her knees on his arms.  She pinned him down. 

Alvin said: ‘MERRIN.’

Merrin smiled her foreign smile.

Sarah plucked an apple from the tree.  Tossed it to Merrin.  Merrin caught it.  Merrin bit into it.  Merrin’s eyes rolled back into her head and she moaned.  She held the fruit in her teeth and vampire-sucked it.  She ran her hands down over her small breasts.  Her grandfather thrashed beneath her. He couldn’t move her.  She was suddenly so strong.

Merrin dropped the apple from her mouth into her hand.  She laughed a laugh not hers out into the night. 

Sarah came crawling on the snow.  She took the fruit from Merrin’s hand.  She bit it.  She smeared juice all over her mouth.  She lapped at it.  She forced her mouth against her husband’s.  She forced her juice-slick tongue into his mouth.  She sat up.  She wiped the juice from Merrin’s mouth with an index finger.  Sucked it clean.

 Ivan writhed on.  Disgusted, terrified and convinced he was in the presence of something satanic.  He thrashed his head from side to side.  Both his wife and his granddaughter tried to stuff the fruit into his mouth.  He clamped his jaws shut.  Merrin mashed the fruit against his locked lips.  He tasted the tang. 

Sarah grabbed his nose.  Shut it with her fingers. Ivan opened his mouth on reflex. 

Fingers and fruit forced their way into his mouth.

He chewed else he choke.  He swallowed pulp.  He savored the taste.  He licked at the fingers flicking in and out of his mouth.  He felt his fear dissipate.  He felt inhibitions dissipate.  He threw his granddaughter off of him.  He ran screaming to the tree.  He crouched by the blood-sap wound.  He lapped at it.  His family joined him.

2. AN APPLE A DAY__________________________________________

Merrin Grant worked at a small coffee shop in town.  It was boring work.  She never liked it and it showed in her service.  She also didn’t fill out her waitress uniform as well as Denise, whose pneumatic top-heaviness strained uniform buttons and landed her better tips. 

            Merrin’s anger at Denise’s ditzyness and chest-out table manner grew and grew.  It stayed with her like a baaad companion.

            Denise picked up the vibe.  Put it down to titty envy. She stopped wearing bras to work and left a middle button undone just to piss Merrin off even more.

            Merrin’s service got shittier and sloppier.  She yelled at some old timer who spilled coffee down all over the table.  She beamed serious cut-eye and telepathic death beams at Denise.  She talked to herself under her breath.  She did doodles the kind psychopaths drew on napkins.  Real Horror movie shit.

            If that wasn’t enough, customers started acting odd too.  Banging on the doors before opening and after closing.  Carving things into the tables with penknives.  Stealing into the kitchen while she served others.  Denise was surrounded by lunatics, her tips were drying up and no amount of cleavage-peek-a-boo was saving them.   

            All this fucking hoopla over the Apple Pie.

            People were SERIOUSLY freaking over it. 

            Millie arrived every day with fresh pies her and her grandma baked out on their pissy little farmhouse on the outskirts of town.  Denise never touched the stuff.  She was too concerned with her hip to waist ratio.  At 38 she was still convinced some swarthy trucker would stop in, cop a look at her fun bags, sweep her off her feet and steal her away from this armpit. 

            The local rag ran a story on the pie.  The journalist became a regular, eating a couple whole pies himself a day.  It was sickening. 

Freddie, the manager, posted the article up in the window.  Denise went to complain to him about Merrin’s attitude and work ethic after work one night.  She found him sitting on the kitchen floor eating fistfuls of cold pie and giggling.

            Denise backed herself slowly out of the kitchen.  Found Merrin leaning on a filthy counter she couldn’t be fucked wiping.  She sipped at a glass of homemade cider.  The new drink of choice in the place. 

            Denise said, ‘Merrin…’ and nodded.  Merrin sipped at her cider and moaned. 

            Merrin: ‘Got something here for you to try…’

            Denise kept moving.  ‘Well, thanks a bunch Merrin, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ve really got to go.’

            Merrin:  ‘What’s the rush?  You don’t expect me to believe that you’ve got somewhere special to go, do you, Denise?’

            Denise flushed.  Bit down on her anger.  ‘Got a date, actually.’

            Merrin laughed.  It was big and cruel.  ‘A date?  Is that a fact?  Well, come on, your unemployed furniture factory worker can wait just a bit while you sample some of this apple-peach cobbler…’

            ‘No, thanks Merrin.  Really, I’ve got to go.’

Merrin drained her glass.  ‘What’s the matter?  You don’t like pie?  You got a problem with my pie?  You got a problem with me?’

Merrin slammed the glass down on the counter so hard it shattered.

Denise jumped.  The skinny bitch had slipped over the edge.

‘No.  Not at all…I just…I don’t…I have to go.’

Denise hauled ass out the diner door.  She ran towards her beat-up old Ford, fumbling with her keys.  Her heel stuck in a sidewalk crack and she nearly went down.  Got to her feet, limped the rest of the way to her car, cursing the shoes she wore to make her gams look their best. 

Fuck it, she’d wear sneakers to work.  Fuck it, she’d just QUIT.  Too many nutjobs and freaks for minimum wage and ever-decreasing tips.

A man sat on the bonnet of her car.  Picked at his nails with a penknife.

A penknife. 

It was the freak who carved up one of the diner tables. 

He looked up at her and smiled.  Drool spilled from his mouth.

Denise kicked off her shoes and legged it.  He caught her.  She went to scream but his hand was over her mouth.

3. THE HOMECOMING__________________________________________

Welcome home, Millie. 

Welcome home to Connery County.   

Welcome back to the failed lives. Welcome back to dirty snow-slush covered streets, empty houses, empty hearts and empty minds. Welcome home to the jealous stares of those whose escape attempts failed.

Connery County.

Population: Who Cares?  But 98.72% white and ageing by the second.

Broke down, beat up buildings and people.  A booze-anaesthetized apathetic populace.  Hating themselves.  Hating their lives.  Hating the modern world.  Hating the fact that they were too lazy to bother to change.  Crashing like the town’s economy.  Welcoming the self-destruction and freedom from self-respect.

Jamie’s old truck smelled like burnt-down roaches.  He had Queens of the Stone Age on the stereo.  He dug on the riffs.

Josh Homme sang:

                        The truth it peels, Like the skin, Away.

                        What it was, I will never say.

            Millie turned it off.  Her head hurt.  It was being back that did it. 

            Jamie: ‘You okay?’

            Millie: ‘I hate this place.  I hate it.  This place, it’s doomed.  You should have left with me years ago.’

            Jamie spent more time looking at her than the road.  No matter.  The streets were empty.  Anyone they may hit may be thankful for the interruption to their day.  He smiled, turned to her and fired of a wink.  Ever the optimist. 

He missed the vanilla scent she wore. He reached over and stroked her strawberry-blond hair.  Looked her freckle-covered nose over.  Fixed on her blue eyes and said:

            ‘I’m proud that you left.  Broke my heart, but I’m proud.  What would I do if I left?  Come on.’

            ‘You don’t have to go down with the ship.’

            ‘Population went up last two years straight.  We’re booming.’ 

            ‘How old were they?’

            ‘It’s getting cold, huh?  Damn.  I’ll fire up the heat a little.’

            ‘Don’t change the subject.  Come on, Captain Statistic.  How old?’

            Jamie sighed.  ‘Well, I do believe they were in the over fifty age-bracket.’

            Millie’s turn to sigh.  She shook her head.  ‘You and my sister.  You’re the youngest people left in this place, I swear.’

            ‘I like the old-timers.  They’re feisty.’

‘You can’t spend your life in a retirement community.  What do you do at the furniture factory now all the production shipped off to China?’

            Jamie smiled at her again.  Hoped to win her over with his dimples like old times.  ‘Vietnam actually.  Whittle, mostly.  Bust out the steel string on occasion.’ 

            ‘Can you play stoner rock on that thing?’

            ‘Baby, I can play anything I want on that thing.’

            Millie stared out the window.  Her mood and her head got worse the further into town they got.

            Jamie: ‘So.  Big question.  It’s been six years.  I’ve got to assume you’re seeing someone.’

            She turned back to him.  She looked tired.  ‘Jamie…’

            ‘But I don’t spy any gold or stones on your ring finger, so I’m kind of hoping you’re not.’

            She averted his eyes.  Looked outside again.  An old man in dire need of a bath vomited into the street.  Another kicked his emaciated dog in the ribs.  A fat man and a fatter woman drunkenly argued.  The man raised his hand to her.  Millie closed her eyes.  Looked back at Jamie.  Made an attempt at levity:

            ‘How about you?  She’s a bit old for you, but I bet Denise is still throwing it about…’

            ‘You haven’t heard?’

            ‘Heard what?’

            ‘Denise is dead.  She got stabbed getting back to her car after a shift at the diner.’

            ‘Oh, God. Seriously?  That’s…awful.’

            ‘Yeah.  You picked a hell of a time to come home, Millie.  Things are getting strange, sweetheart.’

            ‘Do you hear much from my grandparents?’

            ‘Nope.  Not really.  I mean you know your great-uncle Bob and your grandfather aren’t too close, but there’s been less contact than usual even for them.  Uncle Bob, he’s got wild dogs coming for his pigs at night.  It’s fucked up.  Wild DOGS.  Boggles the mind, really.  Apparently they’re a pack of strays or something.  I don’t know.  It’s weird, alright.  Anyway, they’ve got Bob pre-occupied.  Your Grandpop hasn’t come up to visit though.  Your Grandma came up with a crate of these apples they’ve got going on.  Bob doesn’t like much fruit though.  They’re sitting in his pantry.’

‘Apples?  Really?  This time of year?’

‘Yeah, another oddity to ponder.  Town’s abuzz with it.  Place has gone fruit mad you ask me.’

‘You tried any?’

‘Of the apples?  No.  You know me, honey, I’ve got the metabolism of some long distance runner and bowel motions smooth as silk.  I get enough fiber from hamburger buns…’

Millie laughed.

Jamie said, ‘Hey.  Remember Billy Rickles?  Used to pull his pecker out at parties and do tricks with it?’

            ‘How could I forget.’

            ‘Yeah, well, Billy’s animal control now.  Doing a majorly half-assed job of it too.  He’s a walking rabies-shot that boy, amount of bites he’s taken.  Anyhow, he spotted this pack of dogs, the pack Bob wants to put bullets into, in your family’s orchard.  Claims your sister was feeding them apples out there in the middle of the night.  He was too much of a chickenshit to pump some tranqs into them though.  Had some lame gun-jam excuse or some shit.  I didn’t tell Bob because I figure if he knew he’d be down there with trusty double-barrel and Merrin could kiss her vegetarian pooches goodbye.’

            ‘You know where in the orchard?’

            ‘Somewhere down along the fenceline.’

            Millie thought on it.  Panicked:

            ‘Near where we --?’

            ‘I thought we were never going to talk about that again.’

            ‘I know, but –‘

            ‘Just talk to your family, okay?  I’m sure one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.’

***  

Things were dark and quiet at the Grant place.   The night was clear and cold.  Millie’s eyes adjusted to the moonlight but the chill made them wet.  She looked out over her family’s small orchard that spread out off behind the house.  Thought she saw some movement down there through a blur of tears.  She brushed them away with the back of her hand.  

It worried her.  All this talk of dogs and murders and strange trees.  There were things hidden out there that needed to stay that way.

            Jamie stood beside her. 

            ‘Where is everybody?’

            ‘Maybe sleeping?’

            ‘It’s nine o’clock.’

‘No offence, okay, Millie, but your Grandparents aren’t so sprightly any more.  Haven’t really been since you lived here.  Your Grandpop’s a hard worker.  You know that.  Old school early to bed, early to rise mentality.’

            Millie didn’t like it: uneasiness was underlined.  Paranoid prognostications were realized.

            She scowled and said: ‘Well, I’m afraid I’ll just have to wake them then.’

            It was a beautiful old farmhouse.  It stood charming and quaint in the snow.  Surrounded by skeleton trees whose branches wore sleeves of snow.   Bathed in moonlight, it took on a bluish hue.  Children’s book innocent in the night.  Something wasn’t right though.  The flyscreen outer door swung slowly in the slight breeze.  Its hinges creaked ominously.

            The porch light went on, warm and orange.  The front door opened.  Millie’s grandmother stood behind it.  She looked out warily.  She stepped into the cold.  She closed the door and said:

            ‘That you Jamie?  Alvin says you oughtta tighten up that old fanbelt.  Squeals like the wretched.’

            Jamie stepped in front of Millie.  ‘It is me, Ma’am.’

            ‘You could’ve called first, young man.’

            Jamie smiled.  ‘Well, now, I figured the fanbelt might be enough advanced warning, Mrs Grant.’

            Millie stepped into the light, a scowl on her face.  She crossed her arms over her small chest, said:

            ‘Grandma, I’ve been trying to call you for weeks.  Nobody ever picks up.’

            Sarah Grant stared at her granddaughter suspiciously.  ‘Amelia?  Millie, is that you, girl?’

            Millie stepped up onto the porch.  Cooking smells wafted out from the house.  Millie’s Grandma gave her the once over.  Millie noted a coldness about her.  A slight glazed look in her eyes.  A slight pallor to her complexion. 

Sarah Grant took her granddaughter into her arms.  The hug was firm.

Millie caught a whiff of something fruity on her grandmother.  She pulled away.  They stared each other down in a heartbeat’s worth of surreal silence.

Jamie caught the weirdness of the moment.  He approached with Millie’s bags.  Said softly to her, ‘You okay?’

Millie broke the eye-lock. ‘Uh.  Yeah.  Sure.  You don’t want to come in?’

            ‘No.  I really should check in on your uncle, actually.  He hasn’t been to well of late.  I’m staying in that little shed he’s got out back.  I fixed it up some.  It’s nice.  You’d like it.  You should come over some time.’

            Grandma Grant: ‘You really should come in, Jamie dear, you must try the pie Merrin just baked.’

            Jamie headed back down the porch steps.  ‘Thanks, but I really should be going.  Maybe some other time though.’

            Grandma Grant frowned.  Raised her voice.  ‘Then stay there just a second.  I’ll get you some to go.  You can give it to Bob, you don’t want it.’  She disappeared inside the house.  Lights went on within.

            Millie watched her go.  ‘She’s acting a little funny.’

            Jamie hopped into his truck.  Wound down the window.  Turned the ignition. Hit the stereo.  The QOTSA CD came back:

                        Burn the witch,

                        Burn to ash and bone…

             Jamie: ‘Come see me, okay?  I want to talk more.’

            Gwen lent in through the window.  ‘Sure.’ 

            Grandma Grant came out with pie cling-film wrapped.

Jamie sped off. 

Millie looked perplexed.  Grandma Grant scowled at Jamie’s disappearing taillights.  Her face scrunched up, she said:

            ‘That boy.  The one blessing of you leaving town is that you disentangled yourself from his future of failure.  Imagine, being happy to live in your uncle’s shed.’

            Millie noted the aggression in her Grandmother’s voice. She watched her stride into the house.  She heard her gruffly say,

            ‘Well, what are you waiting for?  Come on in.’

4. EAT AND BE MERRY________________________________________

Food piled up around Millie.  Her family watched expectantly.  Her twin sister and her grandfather: sharing looks of near lasciviousness, sipping at steaming mugs of spiced cider.  Her grandmother hovering, running laps from kitchen to dining room table.  Bringing forth more food than one slip of a girl can handle.  Bringing forth more food than the family could handle.  All silent.  All eyeballing each other with anxiousness.  All overweight.

            Millie checked out the banquet before her:   

            Smoked turkey with baked apples.

            Apple and wilted lettuce salad.

            Apple blue cheese slaw.

            Apple, pesto and potato salad.

            Apple, roast beef and watercress salad with creamy horseradish.

            Spicy sesame noodles with apple and carrot.

            Curried apples and shrimp.

            Apple dessert pizza.

            Apple halibut kebobs.

            Apple meatloaf.

            Apple chips.

            Apple and cheese casserole.

            Apple rum baklava.

            Apple fennel soup.

            Stir-fried chicken and apples.

            Apple glazed barbecue chicken.

            Apple taffy.

Apple muffins.

And of course:

            Apple pie.

Millie had no idea what to say.  Her grandfather, hunched over the table, nodded encouragingly at her.  ‘Eat, eat.  You are a waif.’

Merrin stole a strip of stir-fried chicken.  She stuck it in her mouth.  She sucked the applesauce off of it.  She dropped it on her plate.  She said:

‘Oh.  Oh.  That is so good.  Millie, try it, Millie.  You must be hungry…’

Millie looked out over the mounds of food.  She said:

‘What the hell is going on here?’

Her grandmother slammed a mug of spicy cider down in front of her. ‘Drink.’

Millie looked into the mug.  Looked back up at her family.  Merrin was on the edge of her seat, biting her nails.  Ivan drummed his fingers on the small expanse of table in front of him uncovered by food.  Sarah loomed over her, sipping at her own mug.

Anxiety axed Millie’s appetite.

Merrin slurped back a stolen noodle. 

Millie said: ‘So, why has nobody been answering the phone?  I’ve been worried.  I thought maybe something…happened.’

Her family all laughed together.  It was a harsh sound, unlike them.

Alvin said, ‘Now, Millie.  We’re all fine, perfectly fine as you can see.  Frankly I’ve never felt better in my life.  You need to stop worrying so, girl.  We’ve all just been real busy, is all.  We’ve had the crop to deal with…’

‘Crop?  But it’s winter.’

Grandma Grant: ‘The Lord’s seen fit to grant us something of a boon, Millie.’

Grandpa Grant: ‘It’s more than a boon Sarah, it’s an honest-to God miracle.’

Millie pushed the mug away from her.  It clinked against a casserole dish. 

Millie:  ‘Miracle?’

Merrin: ‘A tree started bearing fruit at the start of winter.  And what fruit.  You’ve never tasted anything like it.  It’s unbelievable.’

Millie lost her appetite.  ‘In the winter?  Where, Merrin?’

Merrin:  ‘In the orchard.’

Millie: ‘Where in the orchard?’

Grandpa Grant: ‘Back corner of the orchard along the edge of the property.’

Millie buried her head in her hands.

OH NO.  OH NO.  OH NO.

Grandma Grant: ‘Such exquisite fruit.  The whole town’s going crazy for it.  Your sister’s been baking pies, making up batches of cider for the diner.’

Merrin: ‘My tips have gone way up.’

Millie’s mind went:

Murders.  Packs of killer dogs.  Townsfolk acting STRANGE.  The look in my twin sister’s eye.  The fruity musk coming off grandpa.  The back corner of the orchard. WINTER FRUIT.

Millie stood: ‘Show me.’

Grandma Grant: ‘There’s plenty of time for that, Millie.’

She rested her hands on Millie’s shoulders.  Said:

            ‘EAT.’

            ‘Please, I need to see.’

            The Grants: Alvin, Sarah, Merrin.  They exchanged odd glances.  Weird telepathy static-crackled between them.

            Sarah resumed Grandma-mode.  ‘Millie, come on.  It’s dark.  Twilight is not good for maidens.’

            Christina Rossetti.   Sarah used to read Goblin Market to the twins as children.  Sarah used to scare the girls with it.  Stop them playing in the orchard after dark.  As the twins got older, Sarah quoted the poem to gently remind them of their curfew.  Once, the quote raised soft smiles.  Not now.  Now, cruel grins were lit by the dining room’s soft light.  Odd sniggering echoed around the table. 

There was darkness in Sarah Grant’s words.  Blackness in her Grandfather’s and her sister’s reaction to it.  A private joke Millie was excluded from.

            Sarah heaped food on Millie’s plate.  Millie watched it pile up.  Looked again at her sister.  Couldn’t read her at all.  Jamie had called the connection between Merrin and her as twin shit.  The finishing of each other’s sentences.  The uncanny reading of each other’s thoughts and moods and whims.  Millie felt total psychic dislocation from the doppelganger that sat across from her. 

            Ivan ate fistfuls of pie, restraint gone.  He just dug into it, pulled out clumps of apple and pastry, stuffed it into his mouth.  It clung to his moustache, his chin.  He smiled.  Pastry blobs were wedged between his teeth.

            Millie knew:

            I have to get out of here.

            She faked a smile.  ‘Grandma.  It all looks so good, I don’t know where to start.’

            I am in some parallel world.  I am trapped in some horror show hell.  I should never have called Jamie.  I should never have got him to pick me up from the station.

            Millie poked at the piles of food on her plate with a fork.

            I should have smelled the badness in the air, turned around and got right back on a bus going wherever as long as it was FAR.  I should have stuck to my vow to never come back here. 

            A single tear rolled down her cheek.

            Merrin could take Millie’s reticence no more.  She stood.  She leaned over the table.  Said in a voice not hers:

‘EAT.’

            Millie flung her plate into the air.  It twirled as it sailed upward.  It slung steaming hot food across the table. 

            Millie was up and moving.  She went for the door.  Her grandfather’s car keys sat in a ceramic bowl on a dresser next to the front door.

Grab them, drive, get Jamie, get uncle Bob and DISAPPEAR.

            Merrin was over the table quickly.  She dove on Millie brought her down.  Millie smelled weird compost-apple-rot sweat in her sister’s pits.  She squirmed from under her somehow.  Ungracefully got to her feet.

            Merrin was up too fast.  She blocked the door.  The twins did a weird spot of pantomime, feinting this way and that.  Like identical strangers blocking a sidewalk from opposite ends. 

            Merrin smile-snarled.  Went: ‘Come on, Millie…’

            Millie felt her grandfather behind her.  She ducked under his lunging attempt at a bearhug. 

            Her grandmother screamed:

            ‘YOU CAN’T LEAVE THE TABLE DURING MEAL TIMES.  IT’S THE RULES.  IT’S THE RULES.’

            Millie darted down the hallway.  Shut herself in the cramped bathroom.  Flipped the lock shut. 

            Merrin banged on the door.  Said:  ‘COME ON OUT HERE AND EAT SOMETHING, YOU SKINNY BITCH.’

            Merrin pounded at the door.  Millie, crying madly, jumped up on top of the toilet.  She forced open the window.  She pulled herself up.  Jammed a sliver of windowsill wood deep into her palm.

            Merrin was kicking at the lock.  Alvin joined her.  Wood cracked.  The door swung open.  They Grants saw Millie’s sneaker soles disappearing as she pulled herself through.

            Millie slipped on the way down.  Hit her grandfather’s woodpile hard.  She landed on the snowy ground and tried to suck back the wind she had knocked out of herself.  Wailing now, she pulled herself up and forced herself onward.  Making horrible choking noises, she headed off towards the snow-covered skeleton trees of the orchard.  They were visible in the moonlight.  As was the giant, twisted mockery of nature in the rear back corner of the orchard.  Standing high, malignant and proud. 

            She had to go to it.  She had to see it.  She had to know if her carelessness was the cause of all this.  She kept going, through will alone.  She needed Jamie.  She reached for her cell phone.  It was inside the house.  As was everything of worth and use except for her mind. She stopped.  Turned.  Behind her:

            Flashlights.

            Her Body Snatched sister and grandfather. 

            They were coming for her.

            She picked it up.  She made it to the orchard.  She ran onward, bare trees on either side of her.  They looked black and deathly skinny in the night.

            She saw it ahead.  She slowed out of some unfounded sense of respect.  It was hideous.  She touched the trunk.  Found it warm and clammy.  She wiped her palm on her jeans, fearing infection.  She looked up at branches drooping with the weight of the fruit.  It was a Rorsharch blot of a tree.  It was thick and black and burdened with grey, waxen apples.

            She cried.  She remembered.

5. EVEN MEMORY LANE GETS DARK AT NIGHT_____________________

Jamie: What’s in the bag?

Millie: Forget about it and just dig please.

Jamie:  I am digging.   Jesus, what does it look like I’m doing.  Anyway, I can’t forget about it. 

Millie: Why not?

Jamie:  I looked.

Millie: …

Jamie: I’m sorry.  I KNOW you told me not to look, but, like, come on.  You disappear with that Clayton guy for a couple of months –

Millie: I TOLD you about him.  He was a friend.  He was trying to help me.  He took me to other friends.  GIRLfriends.  Back off.

Jamie: -- you come back.  You won’t tell me exactly where you were or what you were doing, you’ve got this BAG full of --

Millie: I was doing something that needed doing.  Look.  If you don’t want to help me, then stop digging and fuck off back home, I don’t care.  You just keep your mouth shut about what you saw in the bag.

Jamie: Who am I going to tell?  What am I going to say?  ‘Oh, Millie brought a bag full of rotten organs back home and -- ’

Millie: SHHH.  Christ.  Look, the contents of that bag are mine to guard.  They must be hidden, ok?  So don’t you go saying shit to anybody.

Jamie:  I just TOLD you I –

Millie: Dig.  Just dig.

Jamie: If you’re supposed to look after that…stuff, then why are we burying it?

Millie:  Because I want nothing to do with it. Because when things are dead we bury them.  I learned that when Mom and Dad died.  You put dead things in the ground and you move on with your life.  Merrin might want to stay here and be a waitress or something lame like that, but this place is dying and she and you, you both need to snap yourselves awake on that one.  Pretty soon, this town and the county that surrounds it will be dead.  Uncle Bob can pretend like it’s never going to happen and my Grandparents, well, they’re happy enough here, tending to this orchard, but this place, Jamie, it’s going to DIE.  And you know what I say Jamie?

Jamie:  What?

Millie:  I say good riddance, because nothing but bad shit has happened in my life since I lived here in this shithole.  It’s the home of folks busted by bad-luck.  It’s a wallowing hole of misery and inadequacy.  Well, I say it’s time for a change.  Stop.   That’s deep enough.  Look out, I’m going to empty the bag.

Jamie:  Oh, fuck….the smell.  I think I’m going to puke.

Millie:  That’s what death smells like.  That what dead, bad old pasts smell like.  I consign these bloody hunks of meat to the land of my past.  To be dumped and buried and forgott --  

Jamie:  Millie?  They’re moving.

Millie: What? 

Jamie:  The…stuff.  It’s moving.

Millie:  Cover it up, Jamie.  Shovel the dirt over it.  Bury it good and let’s get out of here.

Jamie:  There.  Shit, that was weird.

Millie: You have no idea.

Jamie:  You wanna split?  I need a drink.  You want a drink?  I need a drink.  Let’s go…

Millie:  In a minute.  Just come here for a minute first, ok?  I want you to hold me and I want you to say, ‘It’s all over now, Millie.  It’s all gone and past and dead.’

Jamie:  Millie –

Millie:  Say it.  Please.

Jamie: It’s all over now, Millie.  It’s all gone and past and dead.

6. GOOD GIRL GOES BAD.        ___________________________

She opened her eyes.  She realized she was on her knees.  She heard footsteps near and around her and realized she’d fucked up. 

            She got to her feet, looked for the flashlight orbs.  They darted about.  Feet crunched snow.  Millie heard it and was off again.  She decided to risk it.  She’d loop back to the house, she’d get the keys to the truck and she’d be gone.  She heard laughter behind her as she ran.  Merrin was nipping at her heels.  She took a split-second to look behind her. 

No flashlight.  Merrin had shut it off. 

Millie looked back around.  She ran into a tree.

            She hit the ground and looked up.  She wondered again about her stupidity.  She rubbed her face and the tree in front of her moved.

            It was no tree.  It was her grandfather. 

            How could he be so strong?

            She scrambled for traction in the snow.  Found it.  Her grandfather laughed, spat, and gave chase again. 

            Millie doubled back again.  She made it back to The Tree.  Merrin leaned against it, smiling, eating an apple.

            Millie cut off to the right, ran to the edge of the property.  She climbed through a barb wire fence.  She cut open her cheek but didn’t notice.

            Merrin was after her.  Merrin reached the fence.  She ducked between the strands of wire.  Her jeans got snagged.  She cursed and tugged.  She tore herself free and stumbled backwards into her oncoming grandfather.  They both hit the snow.  They snarled at one another.  They got to their feet.  They navigated the fence and were hot on the footprint trail in the snow.

            Millie made it back to the house.  She crept up to the front door.  She looked about once and then looked about again.  She put her hand on the knob.  Turned it slowly.  The door wasn’t locked.  It opened silently.  Millie put a foot in, tip-toe style. Millie slipped her arm.  Extended it towards the bowl with the keys.  Pain shot up her arm and she pulled her hand back. 

            Sarah Grant stood in shadow.  A kitchen knife in her hand.

            ‘You’re being very bad.  You’re being SO bad.  Your parents, may they rest in peace, would be ashamed.’

            Millie grabbed her hurt hand.  Gave it the once over.  Her Grandmother had sliced it open.  Blood ran down her forearm. 

            Millie stepped inside.  Her grandmother came again, slashing at reaching extremities.  She missed.  Millie lifted the whole bowl and swung it. 

            The ceramic bowl shattered against Sarah’s head.  Stunned, the old woman went down.  Millie saw a pottery shard sticking out of her grandmother’s forehead.  While Sarah pulled it out, Millie grabbed the keys from the floor.  She ran once more.

            Millie opened the truck door and fumbled with the keys.  She slammed the door shut behind her and stuck the key in the ignition.

            Sarah Grant came out of the house.  She whipped her knife around in a frenzy.  Her face was red and wet and dripping. 

            ‘YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW, YOUNG LADY.’

            Millie fired up the truck.

            The driver’s side window imploded.  Alvin had a hammer. 

            The gears groaned.  Millie wrenched the stick into reverse.

            She floored it.  The truck shot backwards.  Millie just kept on reversing, fast as she could.  The truck weaved its way backwards down the long drive.

            Alvin, Merrin and Sarah stood, shaking incredulously. 

            Millie found the road.  Millie found the gear.  Millie punched it and the truck was GONE.

            Sarah, face a ruined red, said through the blood that filled her mouth:

            ‘Boyfriend.  She’ll go and get the boyfriend.’

           

7. SHOOT SOME DOG._______________________________________

Bob Grant raised pigs on a farm on a property nearby his brother’s.  It was a small, quaint place.  An island of slight prosperity in a place full of grimy failure.  With the corporate pork plants putting so many friends and neighbors out of business, he considered the aura of continued success vital. 

Jamie helped keep the place neat.  Bob liked the boy and hated to think of him wasting his days in what remained of the factory screwing shelves together.  Bob fixed up his shed, made it homey and warm, gave Jamie the place for free in exchange for his labor. 

Bob sat on a cheap metal folding chair at the edge of his pigpen.  He clicked his flashlight on and off.  He looked out at his many many pigs.  He nursed his favorite double-barrel and prayed those fucking dogs showed up tonight.

He wanted to shoot some dog.

            Jamie had begged Bob to hit the sack. Jamie knew Bob was wasn’t feeling too hot these days.  He wanted the old man to rest.

            Bob wanted to shoot some dog. He told Jamie to go to bed.  He stayed up, a thermos of hot coffee by his side.  He thought of his brother’s miracle fruit.  He thought of how sure Ivan had been about it being some new strain of blight or disease.  There was a superstitiousness in Ivan that Bob didn’t share and didn’t get.

The brothers spent hours debating the subject.  Got so heated, Bob threatened to eat the fruit to prove a point.  Ivan responded by walking into his orchard alone one night later that night with an axe. 

            The deed was never done.   Bob puzzled as to why not, but mostly, he just wanted to shoot some dog.

             Bob saw headlights coming down his long winding drive.  Had a peek as the car got closer.  Recognized it as his bother’s old truck.  He smiled.  Undoubtedly his niece was inside.  Sweet Millie come back home for God only knew what reason.  Bob suspected Jamie had something to do with it.  The pair had been sweet on each other since they were little.   Torn apart by the circumstance of geography and the girl’s desire to see some more of it. 

            Millie always wanted to leave.  She fought for her independence and was rewarded for it by a run-in with some madman in 1997.  Millie and some other local kids went off on a long road/camping trip and only Millie came back.  Cops and reporters swarmed her and psychiatrists aided her. Throughout it all Millie maintained a quiet, reserved dignity.

She stayed around, justly traumatized and shaken until 2001.  Some smooth-talking black man came rolling into town seeking her and her alone.  Local yokel eyebrows were raised.  They raised further when Millie ran off with him for reasons she later swore to her grandparents had nothing to do with romance. 

            Millie returned a few months later.  Her face drained of color and her manner more than a smidge mysterious.  Still, there was renewed energy and life in the girl and she left town again shortly after.  Far as her uncle knew, the girl was getting an education somewhere way East.  From her infrequent letters and occasional calls to her parents, Bob knew the girl was on her path. 

            He thought about whether or not he should say hi, but the girl was shy.  If she were here to spend some time with Jamie, well, that was her business.  She’d earned some peace, some love and some warmth.  He’d no right to scare her off.

            He realized she was driving a mite fast. Maybe she was keen.  Was no fault in that.  He remembered driving fast himself a time or two.  Years back.  When the young daughters of local pig farmers spread their thighs in haylofts, waiting for the sound of his car door slamming shut before rolling down their panties.

            Millie screeched her uncle’s truck to a halt and jumped out.  There was no loin-burning ardor in her.  Panic.  That’s what Bob saw.  All-consuming panic.

            He stood, leaving his gun behind.  He shuffle-ran to his niece who was sobbing.  Her hand bleeding.

            ‘Millie?’

            ‘Uncle Bob.  Please, get in the truck.’

            She hit the horn, trying to alert Jamie.  She peeked in the rear-view mirror.

            ‘What’s going on, girl?’

            ‘GET INSIDE.  NOW. We don’t have much time.  They’ll be here soon.’

            ‘Who?  Millie, you been drinking?  You look like you had an accident.  That cut, we should take a look at it.  Clean it.’

            Jamie appeared, hearing the commotion.  He said:

            ‘Millie?  What’s going on?  are you okay?’

            Millie wrapped long strawberry-blonde locks of hair around her fists and tugged.  Through her tears, she said:

            ‘Jamie.  Please.  Just get in here.’

            Bob and Jamie looked at one another.

            Jamie: ‘I don’t –‘

            Millie: ‘YOU BOTH GET THE FUCK IN HERE RIGHT NOW.’

She checked herself.  Rubbed her face.  Continued:

            ‘I’m sorry.  Please.  I’m sorry just get in and let’s go.’

            Bob and Jamie looked at each other again.  Bob shrugged:

            ‘What the fuck…’

            They got in.  Millie was gone before Bob managed to close the door.  He let loose a weird squeal.  The truck turned around too fast and surged forward.

            Bob: ‘Goddamn, Millie.  GODDAMN.’

            Jamie:  ‘Millie?’

            Millie ignored him.  Tears ran down her face.  In such a weird state she hit the wiper button, speeding them up, thinking that would help.  She tore down the driveway.  Hit the road.  Her uncle and Jamie shouted over one another.  Questions that they needed answered.  Things that, Millie figured, could wait.

            She saw them.  Her family.  They stood in the road.  They shielded their eyes from her highbeams. 

Her Grandfather looked kind of hunched over.  He loped, like Quasimodo or something. 

Her grandmother patted his head, felt the scalp under the thin remnants of his grey hair. 

Merrin smiled.  Even from afar Millie noted the awful grin. 

Snow fell upon them.  They looked like some bizarro-world Christmas card.  Something lay on the driveway in front of them.  Millie squinted.  A crate.  It was a crate.

            Jamie:  ‘Millie, isn’t that -- ?’

            Bob: ‘Slow down, now, slow DOWN.’

            Millie: ‘I’m sorry.  I can’t.’

            Millie bore down on her family.  Still they didn’t move. 

            Merrin ducked down and dipped into the crate.  She lobbed something at the truck.  It splattered against the windscreen.  More followed.  Her family, like spastic chimps, lobbed apple after apple at the oncoming truck. 

            Bob made scared sounds.  Jamie repeated Millie Millie Millie Millie over and over again.

            Millie shut her eyes and kept onward.  The sound of the fruit hitting the car was awful – like an assault.  Like body blows.  Millie opened her eyes.  Through a puree-coated windscreen she saw them again and she realized:

            They aren’t moving.

            Her uncle leaned over. 

He grabbed the wheel and jerked it. 

The truck went off the driveway.  Ran downhill through scrub at over 90.  Millie had time to scream before the truck hit a tree. 

Bob mashed against the dashboard.  His head leaked red.  Pink hidden softness poked free and open. 

His busted-up lips formed words.  Bloody spit bubbles popped. A whisper:

 I just wanted to shoot some dog. 

He died.

            Millie looked up and out through a massive hole in the windshield.  Jamie face down on the dirty snow between two trees.   He seemed to be miles away.  The impact had flung him far.  His limbs twisted at odd angles. His fingers twitched in the gaze of a single working headlight.

            Merrin giggled like a madwoman at the carnage.  She stuck her face through the huge ugly hole smashed in the windshield.  Her arm wiggled in, clutching an apple.  Her nails dug into the skin.  Punctured it.  Juice bubbled up around her fingernails.  Juice popped loose.  Hot drops spattered across Millie’s face.

Merrin: ‘Just one, Millie.  Just one…’

            Millie looked deep in her twin’s eyes.  Saw a crazed mirror universe vision of herself bobbing before her on the hood of the truck.  She grabbed a fistful of windshield shards. 

She grabbed Merrin by the T-shirt collar. 

She whispered, you shouldn’t have eaten that fruit. 

She pulled her twin forward through the windshield with one hand and flung the glass into her face with the other.

            Merrin, half-in, half-out of the truck, screamed and grabbed at her eyes. 

            Millie kicked at her, forcing the Merrin back out through the hole. 

            There was a metallic wrenching sound.  Ivan at the passenger door.  He popped it open.  He flinched for a moment at his brother’s corpse. Vestiges of the man he was screamed back into consciousness.  It was a momentary relapse of humanity.  The monster he now was took over again and tossed his brother to the ground.

            Millie screamed.  She kicked open the driver’s side door.  It slammed into her oncoming grandmother.  With panic as fuel and terror as motive, Millie took off once more. Cut, beat-up and in shock, something primal took over in her.  Fright juiced her.  Pain became something for the future.  Not now.    She cut around the back of the truck just as Ivan pulled himself out through the driver’s side.  She jumped over Merrin who clawed at her wounded eyes like some animal.

            She climbed up the incline.  Headed for the road.  She would cross it and lose her family on the other side.

            Ivan clawed his way after her.  Sarah behind him.  Merrin clung to her skirt.  She would be her granddaughter’s eyes now.

8. SNAPSHOTS OF VERY BAD THINGS.­­­­­­­___________________________

Perhaps it was in the air.  Perhaps whatever toxin was in the fruit had a gradual, slow, peaking effect.  Like superhuman bad-trip E that sat, diluting at a crawl. Perhaps it was the presence of bad folk yet revealed.  Perhaps it was just time and all the anger and failure and depression in Connery County that had simmered and stewed had become an elixir that simply bubbled over.  Perhaps it was all these things, mixing weirdly and alchemically. 

Whatever the reason, things went BAD in Connery County.

            A husband chased his wife around the front yard of their house with his wood-splitting hatchet.

            A sheriff called to a domestic disturbance was shotgunned to death by a madman singing Blue Suede Shoes for no apparent reason.  His wife lay, similarly executed, at his feet.

            A young mother threw her baby from her rocketing car, laughing all the way home.

            A gas station clerk beat a paying customer to death with a ball bat his boss stashed under the counter.

            The local diner was smashed into and raided of all its apple pie by a couple of elderly churchgoing women.  The women went home.  They killed their cats and watched a woman fellate a horse on the computer the younger woman’s grandson had set up for her.

            A delivery driver named Hank was carjacked and raped by a grandfather and his son while dropping off a load of chips and pop to the town’s only convenience store.  They castrated him after and left him to bleed to death by the roadside.

            An unemployed factory worker, pissed that he never got to feel up Denise before her murder, broke down his neighbor’s door.  He made the eighty eight-year-old woman who lived there take out her false teeth and do things.  She was more than willing.  He returned the favor and together they loaded her husband’s old .22 and went sniping.

            A twelve year old boy took a penknife to Bob Grant’s farm and slit the throats of as many pigs as he could in two minutes.  Pissed he only managed eight, he redoubled his efforts and enjoyed the bucking and squealing and spurting.  He cut his own forehead.  Laughed at the getting of color.  Laughed at the fluid that dripped on his shirt in Rorsharch blots.  The blots looked like people killing each other.  He crept off into the scrub for bigger game. 

            These were only some of the acts fit for print.

           

9. EXPLODING HEAD._________________________________________

Millie hit the road literally.  She stumbled and scraped her knees.  She got back up.  She darted across, noted halfway: headlights oncoming.

            She ran toward them, flailing her arms.

            The old van the headlights belonged to slowed.

            Millie screamed STOP.

            The van swerved around her.  Accelerated.  Slowed.  Stopped.  Millie ran after it, red with blood and brake light. 

            A scruffy guy wound down the driver’s window. 

            Millie:  ‘PLEASE…PLEASE…HELP…’

            Scruffy guy smiled.  He turned and looked at someone in the back.  He said:

            ‘You sure?’

            The side of the van slid open. 

            The scruffy guy looked in his rear view.  Someone tall and gangly loped its way closer.

            Scruffy guy said, ‘I say we leave her to it, you’re not sure…’

            Inside the van, Millie saw a horrorshow:

            An old corpse-looking woman.

            A bleeding wound of a thing, swollen at the belly.

            A pretty girl dog-collared and chained to the van’s interior.

            Millie turned.  Ivan was upon them.  He screamed mad incoherent things.

            The pretty girl said, ‘It’s her.’

            Scruffy guy got out of the driver’s seat.  He held a sawed-off at his side.  Millie flinched but he pushed right past her.  Said:

            ‘Gangway, Carrie.  This old boy must like them skinny.’

            He raised the sawed-off.  He said, ‘Sorry, Pops.’

            A huge booming noise murdered the quiet of the night.  Alvin's head was gone.  It fell in clumps and mist and joined the rest of his body in the middle of the road.

            Clive swung the sawed-off round his finger. It fell and hit the road.  He grumbled.  Said:

 ‘Now THAT was how you explode a head.’

            Millie stood trembling.  Tears dripped from her unblinking eyes.  The world seemed to cruelly freeze frame on her.  Clive walked past her back to the driver’s seat.  Stopped.  Backed up.  He sucked his teeth and shoved Millie forward. 

            The skinny girl lurched forward.  The pretty girl in the chains broke her fall and helped her in.    Millie rolled over in the pretty girl’s lap.  Looked up.  Said:

            ‘Elisha?’

            Elisha smiled sadly.  Said: ‘Hi kiddo.  We’ve been looking for you.  We’re taking you home.’

10. PIVOT POINT.___________________________________________

Millie: ‘No no no no….don’t go there…we CAN’T go there….’

            Elisha: ‘Where are they, Millie?  We need to know.  Where are your monster parts?’

            Millie looked up at Elisha.  Opened her mouth.  Closed it.

            Elisha: ‘Look, this town has gone mad, Millie.  That guy who chased you?  He’s one of many.  It’s the fucking Crazies out here in the middle of nowhere.  We drove past a lot of people who needed help and a lot more who didn’t want it, Millie.  If I hadn’t spotted you…’

            Elisha let it hang for dramatic effect.  She was proud of her own genre-style exposition.  Ad-libbing with aPLOMB, she affected a grave face.  It was Oscar shit, no doubt.

            Millie bought it.  Millie believed that his was the ballsy team of misfits come to save the day.  She lay cradled in the arms of the leading lady.  She said:

            ‘I buried them in my grandfather’s orchard.  They grew and bloomed and became…Elisha, the fruit.  It’s the fruit that’s doing all this.  Don’t eat the fruit, Elisha…don’t eat the fruit.’

            Ma Mitchell loosed a dry, knowing laugh.  Said:

            ‘I knew it.  I knew it was him. I could feel it.  All those sheep my boy set free.  It’s Jerome.’

            Clive turned his head from the road to his mother.  Said, ‘Ma?’

‘All of them.  All of those people out there, acting out every violent impulse.  Every repressed taboo.  They are Jerome.’

            The van fell silent.  Ma took a belt of something hard from a grubby glass.

            ‘You doubt?  You all doubt?’

            Clive went back to the road.  Millie looked over at Joanie.  Joanie sat clutching her hugely pregnant belly and hitting her head against the side of the van.

            Elisha covered Millie’s eyes.  The girl had clearly had enough trauma for one night. 

            Ma raised herself up like the undead.  Venom on her tongue.

‘YOU DON’T THINK A MOTHER CAN RECOGNIZE HER OWN SON?  FUCK YOU.  FUCK YOU ALL.  MY BLACK PHOENIX OF A BOY HAS RISEN AGAIN INTO SOMETHING…SOMETHING…MAGICAL.  HE’S ALL AROUND US NOW, DOING THIS FAMILY’S WORK ON A SCALE THAT IS BEYOND ANY MEASUREMENT.’

            Elisha closed her eyes.  Stroked Millie’s head.  She bowed her own.  Put her lips to Millie’s ear and softly said:

            ‘We have reached the point where whatever was normal has ceased to be entirely and we are travelling down a road into the unbelievable.  This is what is called the Pivot Point.  Usually this is signified by the killer being revealed as a monster or a freak or by some fantastical twist that spirals out of the seemingly mundane.  You, Millie, have given us the devil’s elbow of Pivot Points and how we will navigate its sharpness I don’t know.  But you relax now, you rest.  You’ve maintained your innocent don’t-touch-me-there vibe.  You’re odds-on to survive wherever this pivot takes us…’

            Ma leant over and yanked on Elisha’s hair.

            ‘What are you doing, slut?  What do you think you’re doing?  If you don’t believe me, we can stop right here and let you out and you’ll see how real all this is when you’re set upon by all these…Jeromes.’

            Elisha fixed her eyes on Ma. 

            ‘Oh, I do believe you, Clementine.  I believe you completely.’

            Ma smiled horribly.  She pointed at Millie.

            ‘This girl.  She cursed this land, she cursed these people.  She cursed them with her will and she cursed her with her hate and she cursed them with my son.’

            She laughed and clapped her hands.

            ‘Isn’t it just wonderful?’

11. ENTER: THE BUZZARDS OF BOOZE!__________________________        

They hovered over him like flies.  It was apt, for barflies are what they were. 

            They were on a brief sojourn from their favorite drinking haunt. They had felt murderous thoughts pound pulse-like in their heads.  They were unable to quiet them.  They bore bloodlust in their hearts.  They were unable to quell it.  They trekked, looking for something whose life they could help lose.

            They found such a thing in Jamie.

             They whooped as they poked at him with cheapo faux-leather shoe clad feet.  They passed a bottle of cheap blackberry spirits between them.  They toasted their good fortune at coming upon this carnage. 

One of them went to the truck.  Laughed at he saw how wrapped around the tree it was.  He threw a heavy rock through what remained of the windscreen.  The others came over.  They took turns kicking the truck.  They threw shit at it.  They dented and scratched and broke it.   They sniggered at dead old Uncle Bob.  They poked his exposed brain with naked grubby fingers.  They expressed disappointment the old man had already expired. 

They regrouped about Jamie.

Jamie could see them.  One of his eyes was filled with blood, but the other worked fine.  From the ground, twisted and fucked RIGHT up, he looked at them.

All four of them, bright yellow in the headlight’s glare.  Sad and aged and hairy and dishevelled. They had the single caterpillar eyebrow of the Neanderthal. They had thick long beards by which they seemed conjoined when they huddled close.

Phrenologists would find abnormal bumps and dents in their skulls.  Doctors would find the ruddy, burst-veined noses of the alcoholic.  Social workers would find the surly demeanor of the broken.  They stank like spilled beer and stale smoke and fruit.

Their quarry lay before them smashed and broken.  Their quarry said something.  It sounded like ukkkkkkkkkkk. 

            They looked at one another.  They nodded to each other.  They spoke in a barely audible boozed-out mumble.  It sounded something like English.  But with waaaaaaay more slurring. 

            In a flurry of matching threadbare trenchcoats they moved.  They stomped Jamie like a singular thing with eight legs.  They kept it up until the cuffs of their filthy 1980’s pleated business pants were red and wet.  They kept it up until Jamie was a series of flesh-and-bone smears in the snow.

            They squatted.  They examined.  They picked at the jelly-meat like buzzards of booze.  They were satisfied.

            Then, and only then, they went to the bar.

12. LAND OF THE BAD APPLE._________________________________

The old woman made her way through the orchard.  She followed the fence line, running her fingers over rusting spiked knots of barbed wire.  She seemed not to feel the cold.  She was dressed only in an old worn black cardigan over a flimsy night-gown.  Scuffed tan cowboy boots covered her feet.  She took a final pull from a near-drained bottle of Jack Daniel’s.  She emptied it of its spittle-laced swill.  She dropped the bottle to the snow. 

She felt herself drawn onward.  A trail of horror hounds followed her.  All red-rimmed eyes, snapping fangs and mangy fur.

            She saw it in the distance.  Giant.  Misshapen.  Twisted.  Swollen.  She walked onward; old, hunched, zombie-like.  She came to it.  She stopped.  She looked up.  She smiled a gap-toothed smile.

The dogs that surrounded her scuffled over fallen fruit.  The sound of juicy crunchings came from their snouts as they feasted.  They growled as they argued over the rotting spoils.  They were a mangy scruffy battle-scarred pack of ten.  They came here every night after dark to feed heartily.  A rottweiller seemed to lead them. Some small mongrel of a thing lapped up the juice-filled spit that spilled, foamy, from its leader’s jowls. 

The pack was dangerous, unpredictable and poisoned by the fruit on which they gorged.  Yet they left the woman be.  They felt something kindred in her.  They felt somehow subservient to her. 

They recognized her for the bitch-mama she was. 

They looked up at her whilst they ate.  Protective in their glances.  The old woman scratched the rottweiller behind the ears.   It gave a grunt of satisfaction as it chewed on a core. 

She turned away from the dogs.  She looked up at the tree she was beside.  She stroked its gnarled, oddly leathery bark.  With a thumb, she removed a blemish from one of its fruit.

She said: ‘My dear dream of a boy.  Look at what you’ve become.  Your mother is so very very proud.’

She dropped to her knees in the snow.  She cracked the stiffness from her fingers.  Devil dogs came to her, licked at her.  She flapped her arms at them.  Yelled:

            ‘BEGONE.’

            The pack whined and scampered before her anger.

            She plunged her fingers into the dirt at the base of the tree.  Pulled up clumping fistfuls of dirt.  She dug and scooped dirt in a frenzy.

She barely noticed the footfalls behind her.  She turned:

Clive.  His breath steaming in the cold.  A heavy spade slung over his shoulder.  A duffle bag full of bits of his brother on his back.  Behind him: Seth.  A duffle filled with even more bits on his back.  Seth dropped his back, headed back to the cars.  This was a family moment.

Clive: ‘Ma.  I’ve got a shovel.  Stand up, for Christ’s sake…’

Clementine Mitchell stood.  She breathed fast, ragged, phlegmy steamy breaths.  She leaned against the tree that was her boy.  Dogs watched her from a distance, dropping piles of seed-filled shit as they did so.

Clive watched them, framing them in his mind in a beautiful mid-shot.  They were black archetypal shapes snuffling and defecating in the night.

Ma Mitchell caught her breath.  Clicked her tongue in frustration with her fey boy.  Said: ‘Clive.  Either dig or go back to the fucking van.  I have no patience for your fancies tonight.’ 

Clive snapped back to the task at hand.

‘Sorry, Ma.’

He began to dig near the base of the tree.  He aimed for the scratches his mother made in the earth.

‘Where is Joanie?’

‘It’s her time, Ma.  She went off somewhere to find a quiet spot to have the baby.’

Clementine pulled a scrunched-up softpack of smokes from a cardigan pocket.  Put one between her bloodless lips.  Fired up a match that made Clive see special-effect bursts behind his eyes.  Dragged deep. 

‘That child is a phantom.  Do you understand what that means, boy?’

Clive dug.  ‘Yeah, Ma.  Like Jerome.’

Ma Mitchell clicked again. Said: ‘NO, Clive, not like your brother.  Joanie wanted something else when her child was conceived, something completely unlike Jerome.’

Clive popped a sweat, rugged up as he was against the cold.  ‘I don’t understand.’

Ma sighed.  Exhaled smoke in ephemeral plumes from her nose.  Scratched the scabby head of a dog who dared return to her side.

‘I expect you don’t.  You were born of woman and man.’

There it was again. The constant reminder of his inferiority to his magical brother.

‘…but Jerome.  He’s a manifesto, a…a dream, a –‘

Clive faded his mother’s voice down.  He dug soil on auto-pilot.  He separated his mind from his body.  He went deeeeeeeeeep into thought.  He cut to:

13. CONFESSIONS OF A HOLLYWOOD DARLING.____________________

INT. The Mitchell’s beat-up van.

Elisha struggled against her chains.  The collar she wore made ugly, raw chafe marks against her skin.  She held a dog-eared copy of the book Sleazoid Express that Clive kept with him for downtime reading.   She was reading about Andy Milligan, creator of no-budget classics including:

            Fleshpot on 42^nd St.

            Bloodthirsty Butchers

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

Dragula

Torture Dungeon

Gutter Trash

The Ghastly Ones

She thought about gloriously, unbeatably lurid his titles were.  She ran an index finger along a particular passage:

“But the man ultimately loved making

movies.  They were his drug and his

reason for living.  He’d beg, borrow,

fuck women he hated, strike deals with

despicable distributors –anything to

get the money to make them.  His films

were pieces of himself, his whole world.”

            She thought about the fertile frenzy that was Clive’s mind.  She thought about the waste.  Nothing stopped Andy Milligan.  She stopped Clive.

Millie was beside her, passed out.  Seth sat in the driver’s seat.  His beloved coupe parked feet away.  He was sinking a beer and thinking of Penny. 

‘Seth?’

‘Mmm.’

‘You know Andy Milligan?’

‘Pfff.  Sure.  Made like, twenty-nine films with basically no cash, died from AIDS.  Let the wrong fucking fags fuck him in the ass.  And there were many wrong fucking fags, if you catch my drift.  Who the fuck doesn’t know Andy Milligan?’

‘Many, I would suggest.’

‘Oh, yeah?  Well, let me tell you, Miss Hollywood Darling, that many, no most have their heads firmly entrenched in their asses.  Martin Lawrence movies are a testament to that.  Andy Milligan was a genius with the work ethic of a fucking…Takashi Miike or somebody.  His life, his proclivities and his films, man, they all meshed.  He lived his films, you understand?  LIVED them.  Something you should relate to a little bit with your cinematic…effort.’

He paused.  He drank more.  He said, ‘Why did you ask?’

‘Just reading.  Seth?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘What will we do?  When all this is over?’

Seth turned to her.

‘What will we do?  Honey, I expect you won’t be doing a whole bunch since you’ll be dead.  As for the rest of us, when the wrongs you and the other girls committed against this family have been righted and John Jerome walks across the land once more with a machete in his hand and death in his heart, well, I figure that the status quo will once again be firmly in place, the world will spin at its proper speed once more, Clive and I will return to his little studio and we will begin re-writing cinematic history.’

He emptied his can.  Crushed it.  Tossed it.

‘How’s that there for an answer? No, don’t even bother to reply, because I’m sure it won’t be the right one and anyway, this conversation is over because I have to drain the fuckin’ lizard.  I once heard that your bladder can expand to the thinness of a molecule or some shit.  Don’t know if that’s true, but if it is then I do believe that mine is at that very stage.  So if you’ll excuse me…’

Seth belched.  Pushed open the driver’s side door.  Stepped out into the night to find a suitable tree against which to piss.

Elisha could make a move.  She could.  The latch through which the chain was bolted was old and rusting.  She was sure with effort she could pull free. 

The collar around her neck was old.  The leather dry and cracking.  Ma Mitchell had tons of shit lying around near her filthy deathbed which she could use to slice at it. 

Seth was lazy and sloppy.  There were handguns in the glove compartment.  She could be free.  All it would take:

Another fight for survival.  Another death.  Another escape. 

She didn’t know if she had it in her.  Her role had changed.  This time around, she was:

Demure.  Submissive.  Guilt-racked.  Drug-fucked. Patty Hearst-brainwashed. 

Lina Romay would turn in her grave.  If she were dead.

Still, Elisha could escape if she mustered up the moxie, had a final act showing of final girl grit.  But it wasn’t going to happen.  She was in the best movie of her short career.  The script was different.  It had to be followed.  It would make her, truly, a star.

14. THE ASSEMBLAGE._____________________________________________

Clive stopped digging.  He looked down at the torn up earth and what he had exposed.  He brushed more dirt off soft pulsating things.  Shined his flashlight on them.  Took a deep breath.  Said:

            ‘Holy shit.’

            Ma went, ‘What, what, what?’

            She came closer she pushed Clive aside and snatched his flashlight.  She got down on her hands and knees once again.  She stroked the fleshy masses and laughed.

            The dogs sniffed around the dufflebags.  They let out small confused yelps.

            Ma turned and shushed them.  Got back to the weird assemblage beneath her feet.

Amidst the tangle of roots: organs. 

A beating heart, pumping lungs, churning bowels, wriggling intestines.

A kidney.  A liver.  A spleen. On and on.  More and more.

All tangled up with the roots of the tree.  All seemingly grafted to it.

Organs gifted with virtual immortality had continued their work and become trans-species.  Not knowing how to quit, they had grown with the tree.  They had corrupted the tree and taken it over. 

The assemblage was as cruel a mockery of nature as Jerome was a vicious mockery of man.  A botanical monstrosity.  A bark-clad beast. 

Ma was marvelled by the metamorphosis. Robbed of his prior form, Jerome had shapeshifted into this.

Clive looked over her shoulder.  The proud mother wept tears of amazement and joy. 

‘Look at him, Clive.  Look at what he’s become.  How gifted he is.’ 

She bent further forward.  She kissed the beating heart.

Clive glanced around at the dogs that still lingered.  Little wonder they were so ragged and deranged.  They gorged on the seed of his brother.

He imagined it like a black, amygdala-subverting trip.  A baaaaaaaaaaaaad, juiced-up, roid-raging, pleasure-fest of violence. 

Part of him wanted in bad.  Part of him wanted to run worse.

For some reason he said:  ‘Do NOT take the brown acid…’

He suddenly feared the dogs.  He must have secreted the message somehow through his skin.  They started to sniff the air and growl.

His mother shushed them more forcefully this time and went back to her reverie. 

Clive wondered how many had eaten the fruit.  He wondered how bad this was going to get.  His hi-fi imagination went scorched-earth apocalypse.  Land razed in orgiastic, blood-spilling Armageddon.  Immediately, his mind went into ludicrous fiction:

Lina and me explore the post-apocalyptic nightmare that is my

brother’s world.  Drunk on his black ejaculate, his followers riot

 and rape and pillage.  Lina and I are the only hope for earth’s

 survival.  I go head to head with my brother and his acolytes

and together we hide and fight and kill.  Our love keeps us strong. 

We are triumphant.  Before the screen goes black, Lina and me repopulate the New World with our perfect spawn, ever mindful

of the tree that bears forbidden fruit: a grim symbol of the weight

            we bear as humans to never descend into base savagery.

Ma Mitchell said:  ‘Clive, hand me your knife.  The little one.  The fine one.’

Clive snapped back to reality.  He looked up at the tree.  The thick blackness of its leaves.  The snow that seemed to melt upon contact. 

He said, ‘Oh, fuck.’

And for the first time in a long time,

He was SCARED.

He pulled his pocketknife from his jeans.  He pulled the blade she wanted.  Snapped it in place.  Handed it to his waiting mother.

Ma started to operate.  With hands surprisingly sure and deft, she sliced her boy’s organs free.  One by one, she readied them for transplant.  Hands covered with sap-blood, she freed Jerome from his current shape.

Clive, flummoxed, wished he’d brought along Grey’s Anatomy.  It all just looked like a slaughterhouse pile of gristle and flesh.  All except the beating heart Ma cut loose last.  She held it in her hand.  Blood-sap spurted.  Blood-sap ran down her arm and dripped off her elbow. 

Dogs whined at the smell, wanting to get themselves some.

‘We’re ready, Clive.’

She pointed to the duffle bags.  They were moving.  Odd bulges prodded the canvas.  Lumps appeared then disappeared.  The bits inside wanted OUT. 

‘Empty those bags. Time your brother breathed again.’

15. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRL­­________________________

Seth pissed against a tree.  He tried to hurry it up.  With Clive and Ma Mitchell out in the orchard, he wasn’t supposed to leave Elisha alone.  There was an empty bottle of Pepsi Clive used at times like these but NO fucking WAY was he sticking his dick in that.

            Besides, he couldn’t piss in front of Elisha and the other chick, even if she was passed out.  There was something emasculating about it.

            Being out also meant he could steal a moment with Penny.  Time wasn’t being too good to his love.  Despite his best efforts to halt the process of erosion on her once fine frame, Seth realized he was fighting a losing battle against nature. 

            He’d caught as much of it as possible on camera.  A fitting cinematic tribute to the end of quite the love story was forthcoming.

            Seth caught some creepy giggling off in the distance somewhere.  There were trees and shit everywhere.  It was difficult to pinpoint the source.  It wasn’t coming from the direction of the vehicles.  That much he knew.  He stopped, mid-stream:

            ‘There it is again.’

            He pulled his .45 from the back of his jeans and got on with the job of urinating once more.  No way would he be bushwhacked while taking a leak.  No way.

It echoed out and around him.  Seemed to come from everywhere.  Then he heard the snapping of branches and the rustling of leaves and he knew the thing was off to his right.  He pulled a small flashlight he’d stuffed down the front of his pants.  He clicked it on.  He waved it about.  He zipped up.  He nearly caught himself in the process.

He held out the gun and tried not to panic.  He scratched at his beard growth and slowly backed towards the van.  He trained the flashlight on the source of the noise and slowly something came into view.

            It was a boy.  Maybe twelve.  He was filthy.  At least that’s how he first appeared.  His hair was all matted and coated with dirt.  His cheeks were streaked.  His clothes were stained and dark.  He held a knife.  No, it wasn’t a knife.  It was a screwdriver.  Seth’s confusion came from the fact that the object was gore-stained.  And then he got it:

            The boy wasn’t dirty.  He was blood-soaked.

            The boy loosed his girly giggle again.  It sent Seth’s spine STRAIGHT. 

            ‘Fuuuuuuucccccckkkkk me.  I just walked into Children of the Corn…’

            Seth knew what was going down.  He’d seen some kooky shit on the way through town.  He was just down the road from the others when Clive shotgunned the crazy old fart.

            The kid giggled again and charged forward, screwdriver held high.

            Seth had a moment of complete brain fart.  Then his reflexes kicked in and he unloaded on the kid.

            He prodded the corpse with a stick.  He felt a little shitty for killing someone so young.  Someone with such zeal for the kill. 

            Muffled sounds came from the van.  Elisha and the other one.

            Seth slid open the side door and machoed it up for the girls.  Elisha took the dead boy in her stride.  Millie did not.  She screamed at the sight.  Seth realized he was shining his torch on the little fella, so he quickly shut it off.  Millie screamed on.  The dead boy was inside her now.  A ghost in her brain.  Ready to haunt her along with her other dead.

            Seth cracked her one and felt even tougher as she transitioned to shocked sobs.

            ‘You should be thanking me, girl.  Thanking me.  Excuse me for waking you up from your fucking nap to save your bony ass from Kid Toolbox Murderer.  Fuck me.  Rabid little shit would’ve been all over you with that Phillipshead, sweetheart.  Why can’t you be more like Elisha here?  She may be a sly, duplicitous cunt of a thing, but she’s a fucking trooper…’

            Seth gave Elisha the once over.  Something was up.  Even in the poor interior light of the van, he could tell the blood had drained from her face.  Her eyes went wide, her jaw slack.  She was fixed on something else behind him.  Something Millie’s screaming had prevented him from hearing.

            Elisha: ‘Seth –‘

            He heard the word and knew he was FUCKED.  The word was:

            ‘Simon.’

            He turned and saw her: 

            Her long black hair sleek and flowing like something alive.

            The length of her legs as she strode towards him like death’s own supermodel. 

            Her skin as white as the snow.

Her bra-less B-movie boobs shifting under a tight black Buzzcocks tee. 

Her beestung lips peeled back in a grin.

The tip of her pointy tongue as it poked through her teeth.

Pumpkin Dwyer.  Pure zombie-noir.  Damn, she looked good. 

Pumpkin said: ‘I’ve got a beef with you, pretty boy.  It’s big and juicy.  It’s a bloody chunk of tenderloin.  It’s an inch-thick rib eye.  Baby, my beef with you is BIG. ’

She got closer and Seth noticed that she too was bloodstained.  The blood the boy had worn: Pumpkin’s.  The giggling: him doing the deed. The thing with Pumpkin: The deed could never be done. 

Seth thought:

She was watching.  She was waiting.  The little fucker jumped her and then he came for me.  And now she’s coming for me…

Seth got it together and popped his remaining shot off at her. He was so shaken it went way wide.  No matter. It wouldn’t have done much good anyhow.

He backed up against the van.  He said, ‘How --?’

She shushed him.  ‘That’s a final girl secret, Seth.  All you need to know is this: we’re here.  All of us who are left.  We’re here –‘

Pumpkin eased a slapjack from her back pocket.

‘—and it’s OUR turn to play boogeyman.’

She cracked Seth over the head with it.  He hit the snow.  He could have stayed conscious.  Seth let himself slip away, praying she would make it quick.

She wouldn’t.

Pumpkin stepped into the van. 

Elisha said, thank god.  Pumpkin slapped the words back into her mouth.

‘Don’t –‘

‘It’s not my fault…’

Pumpkin hauled off again.  Balled her hand into a fist this time.

‘I said, DON’T.’

Millie wept openly.  Confused, terrified and traumatized. 

Pumpkin continued: ‘Millie.  Get out of that squalid haunted hearse of a thing right now.’

Elisha:  ‘Pumpkin. Pumpkin.  They MADE me.  You KNOW they made me.’

Pumpkin:  ‘SHUT UP.  Just shut up.  I always knew you were a lying, fucked-up bitch, Elisha.  I always knew it.  If you think I’m even SMELLING the bullSHIT you’re vomiting –‘

Millie, sensing a new alpha female, hopped gingerly out of the van.  Pumpkin stroked her face. 

Fresh noises from the scrub now.  Heavy footfalls crashing through undergrowth.  The laughter of lunatics. 

Millie: ‘Pumpkin…’

Pumpkin:  ‘I know, Millie, I know.  I’m on it.’

Elisha: ‘Pumpkin.  Help me out of here, please…Clive and Ma Mitchell…they’re in the orchard.  They’re putting JEROME BACK TOGETHER.’

Pumpkin:  ‘We’ll see.’

They were in sight.  A mob of them.  Fruit-crazed freaks with the baddest of intentions. 

Pumpkin turned to them.  Smiled.  Turned back to Millie.  Said:

‘Go through Seth’s pockets.  Dig out his keys.  That mauve monstrosity there?  That’s his car.  Go sit in the front, ok?  I’ll be there in a second.’

Millie carefully dipped into Seth’s right front pocket.  No keys.  Into his left. Fished them out. 

Millie looked at Pumpkin.  Then at Elisha.  She thought maybe she had something to say.  She opened her mouth.  Decided against it.  She ran over to Seth’s car, unlocked it, jumped in the passenger seat.

Pumpkin stepped back into the van.  Looked Elisha’s chain over.  Said: ‘I’m pretty sure that’ll hold.’

Pumpkin took her slapjack.  Belted Elisha in the thighs with it.  Five times each leg.  Elisha screamed.  The oncoming mob groaned, inflamed by the sounds of pain.

Pumpkin jumped out. 

‘That’s in case it doesn’t.’

Through her sobs, Elisha said:  ‘Please Pumpkin…’

Pumpkin dragged Seth by the legs over to the coupe.  Millie jumped out and helped Pumpkin lie him across the back seat.  Pumpkin jumped in the driver’s seat.  Millie had placed the keys in the ignition for her.  Pumpkin wound down the window.

‘You made your bed and you lay in it and you fucked the wrong people in it, Elisha.’

She fired up the car.  Said, ‘Bye bye, Hollywood.’

And punched it out of there.

16. BIRTH OF THE MONSTER part 1.___________________________

Connery County had plenty of empty houses.  Most were waiting for a sale that would never happen.  Some were just left behind like bad investments or worse memories. 

            Joanie even found one that was unlocked.  She left a bloody fingerprint on the door as she pushed against it.

            It smelled pissy, musty and damp.  It would do.

            She had a bag stuffed with dirty towels and a blanket.

            Her water broke.  She left a trail of fluid behind her as she staggered to find a comfortable spot.  She waddled into the first bedroom she could find.  She flopped down on the bare mattress within.  She stained it with the pus and clotting blood that leaked from her many self-inflicted wounds.

            Her pregnancy had lasted a mere five months.  The child inside her had grown unnaturally large in such a time.  He was ready.  He wanted to be born.

            She was ready.  She longed to hold her boy.  Conceived in the stables of the first girl.  Amidst the bodies of shotgunned horses and stabbed teens.  She thought back to that day.  How Richie and she had fucked with animal zeal, fueled with bloodlust.  She willed herself to become pregnant. 

            She remembered her husband’s disbelief when she announced the conception shortly after.  But she knew.   She had created this child.  Her desires and her mind and her womb.  Richie had provided raw genetic material. 

            Joanie provided the will.

            She grimaced and laughed as the labor pain hit.  She dug on the pain:

It was her creation announcing itself, its love for its mother and its gunned-down daddy. 

Joanie punched herself in the head, opening up yet another cut.  She tore at remaining strands of hair on her scabbed-up scalp. 

            She began to push.

 

17. UNDEAD AGAIN___________________________________________

The body parts lay on a clean sheet of powdery snow.  They were arranged in the vague approximation of a man. 

Clive breathed his brother in.  He always found something almost tactile in his brother’s odor.  He sniffed it deep.  He took in the bouquet.  In this unimaginable potpourri of scents:

Earth.  Decay.  Dampness.  Flesh.  Sweat.  Jism. 

Those possessed of the keenest olfactory receptors would detect a hint of rich compost.  Of fresh mown grass.  Of sap.  Warm smells of life amongst the rank stinking of death and undeath repeated ad nauseum.

Clive placed Jerome’s head against the thick stump of his neck.  Decapitation preparing to be undone.  Jerome’s eyes locked onto Clive’s.  So strange to see them rolling.  His thick grey lips parted, bridged by rank ropy spit.  His blue tongue lolled.  An attempt at a moan was made. 

Jerome gave a motherly shush.  His earlier fear overtaken by the inevitability of the task at hand.  By his absolute wonder of his brother. 

He stroked Jerome’s clammy skin.  His hand came away smelling like laundry left too long damp.  Part of Jerome’s cheek came away with it.  Clive peeled it from his palm.  Threw it.  It flapped like fresh peeled pigskin to the snow.

Ma smoked.  Barked out commands.  Took in the twitching severed pieces of her boy.  Spoke of the unchained havoc coming.  She rubbed Jerome’s beating heart against her face.  It left warpaint streaks of blood-sap down each cheek.  Her night-gown was butcher-smock spattered.  She hawked up phlegm and spat into the snow.

Clive hauled wobbling innards to his brothers open chest cavity.  His mind went slo-mo.  Paused on certain shots like a splatter epic.  He thought of Flower of Flesh and Blood and how it couldn’t compare.  Sadly, the impact of this scene was lessened by the fact that gore and dismemberment were hundreds of times more horrible when a female was involved.

Still, they hadn’t recovered Jerome’s genitals.  The fifth girl, Selina, held Jerome’s ropy cock and weighty balls like a trophy. 

Jerome would come back.  Trans-gendered. 

No. 

De-gendered. 

He would be Clive’s castrated, sexless sibling.  How much more dangerous would he be as a result?

Clive did his best.  He stuffed offal and gore back where he thought it should be.  It was a nasty task.  Desensitized and numbed, his stomach held strong.

He came away from the corpse.  He looked like a surgeon gone irrevocably mad under a full moon.  Drenched in grisly dark viscous fluids – an operation gone bad.

He walked backwards, cautiously, nervously.  He expected some seat-jumper like Jerome sitting up suddenly.  Innards spilling free.  Staining snow.

It didn’t happen. 

Ma Mitchell patted Clive on the back for his efforts.  It was the most affection he’d received from her in his life.  It made him think of Elisha, chained up in the van.  He stepped away from his mother’s touch.

Jerome made a sound.  Mother and son stepped closer.  Ma whooped, crone-like.

Jerome sat up.  He got awkwardly to his feet.  He stretched out.  His joints popped like gun shots.  He sucked air he didn’t need into black lungs. 

Horrid and wasted and ruined, he ran his hands over his body.  Felt his biceps tense and release.  Felt his eyes roll under closed eyelids.   Flexed his fingers.  The stiffness within them popped loose like burning kindling.  He reached down to his mass of matted dreadlocked pubes.  Felt the loss of his genitals.  Stuck an index finger in the hole that remained. 

If there was a sense of loss, he didn’t show it.   He sniffed at the finger he withdrew from his piss-hole.  Flicked at it with his tongue.  His first taste of anything since his severed head lustfully gorged on Pumpkin’s blood.

Under the moonlight his primordial aura was heightened.  He was like a mammoth mutant peat bog man unfrozen from some suspended animation.  He licked his lips and let out a retarded anguished rebirth cry.  He looked up at the moon.  His dark eyes adjusted to its whiteness.  Snowflakes caressed him softly. 

His mother came to him.  Embraced him.  She:

Tiny, hunched, shriveled.  An unwrapped mummy of a woman.

He:

Monstrous, mammoth, rancid.  A gorgon torn from myth. 

Dogs circled around them.  Dark shapes, sniffing and whining.  Aware their true master had risen.  The taste of him on their tongues.  The scent of him magnified by their magnificent noses.  His seed embedded in their droppings

Clive leaned on his shovel.  Framed the image before him in widescreen.  Strands of his mother’s silver hair hovered in the breeze.  She was lost in her monster’s arms.  He enveloped her completely. 

Pure snow came down upon them.  It made the image that much more transgressive.  Skeletal trees behind them stretched out in the distance.  The swollen leathery trunk of the tree Jerome once was just off to the side. 

It was a simultaneously ludicrous, nauseating, beautiful and iconic image.  Clive’s mind made the snowflakes glaringly white.  They flared.  They swallowed the image. 

Everything faded to white.

 

18. SLAPJACK SISTERHOOD­____________________________________

Seth stirred in the backseat.  Made some groaning sounds.  He was coming to.

Millie checked it out.  Said, ‘He’s coming to.’

Pumpkin focussd on the road.  It was covered in muddy snow-slush.  It was narrow and tree-lined.  Seth’s car handled it well, but it was slow going.  Pumpkin kept all the doors locked and a Batton-approved .38 in her lap.  The danger of a fruit-zombie car-jacking was hard to gauge.

Pumpkin slipped Millie her slapjack.  ‘Here.  Give him a couple of whacks with this.’

Millie took it.  Held it.  Felt the weight of it.  Looked at Pumpkin

Pumpkin smiled.  ‘Go on.  Do it.’

‘I don’t –‘

‘Jesus, Millie, show some teeth will you?  Look, I’m sorry about your Grandfather.  I’m sorry about your family.  I’m sorry that you’ve had to do some extraordinarily horrible things tonight and we’re not done yet.  But we’ve got a monster to stop and we’ve got a bunch of vengeance to deal out, so if you don’t mind, please get dealing because I do NOT want him waking up just yet.’

Millie leaned over the seat.  Swung her arm back. The slapjack slapped against her shoulder.  She felt the sting and bite of it.  She looked at Seth and noted how handsome he was.  How had he got mixed up with the Mitchell’s?  He looked like an unemployed Diesel model. 

Pumpkin picked up on the sympathy vibe.

‘Don’t get soft and don’t get horny.  This guy, he’s DANGEROUS, okay?  Yes, you’d have handsome babies, but you don’t want them.  They’d be torturing kittens before they could crawl.  Seth, he’s a complete sociopath at best.  He is without empathy, he is without remorse and if you really want to know how demented he is, I’ll let you take a look in the trunk.’

Seth groaned again. 

Millie struck.  Out of fear rather than duty.  Seth went quiet on the third blow.  Millie leaned back in her seat.  Violence thrummed in her.

Pumpkin picked up the vibe like a contact high.  Energized, she smiled at Millie.  Millie smiled back.  The girls laughed together. 

Confident they were now accomplices, Pumpkin told Millie her plan.

***

It was a bare spot. A deserted plot of land.  There was shack of a place, so feeble it looked like a brisk fart might take it down.  There was clumpy snow-covered earth.  There were some empty beer cans. There were dead-looking trees. 

It was perfect.

Millie was on board but it took some talking.  Even now, with the moment at hand, she couldn’t quite get her brain around it.  She said:

‘I’m still not sure why you want to do it like this.  There’s a million other ways.’

Seth conveniently kept a huge container of gasoline in the space behind the driver’s seat of his car.  Pumpkin had soaked the interior of the shack with the stuff.  There was an old kitchen table in the place.  Pumpkin had lain Seth on it and used two rolls of Seth’s own gaffer tape making sure he was stuck to it. He was going NOWHERE.

Seth was conscious now and coughing as the fumes hit his lungs.  He vomited down his front.  Rested his head against the hardwood table and sobbed.

Pumpkin: ‘Yeah, but this one hurts the most.  It’s also the scariest.  And what this fucker needs is his for his last few minutes on this planet to be balls-out terror.’

Seth whimpered.

The fumes were BAD.  Millie coughed some herself and she stood well back.  She thought she was going to puke all over herself.  She copped a mouthful of bile.  She spat it out.  Wiped her watering eyes and told herself to tough it out.  After all, she wasn’t going to be the one burning.

Pumpkin finished the job and emptied the can.  She came over to Millie, handed her the .38. 

‘Go wait in the car, okay? Sit tight and wait.’

‘Wait.  Wait.  You’re not coming?’

‘I’m coming, don’t worry.  I just want to stay here and watch it for a while.’

Seth writhed against the tape.

 ‘I want to lick the panic-sweat from his forehead.  I want to laugh at him while it happens.  I want to hold him tight and whisper words of profound hate at him and lay curses on his soul.  I want to smell him burning.’

‘Okay.’

Millie faked a smile.  Started back to the coupe.

Pumpkin watched the girl head off, turned, and turned back to Seth.  She sat herself down beside him on the edge of the table.

Seth managed to say her name.

Pumpkin shushed him gently.  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen, okay?  You are going to die right here, horribly and painfully.  Don’t worry about Penny.  I’m going to take care of her now.  I feel close to her.  I know that I wasn’t just your victim, but that’s a minor quibble.  We’re like sisters.  We’re sisters whose hearts were broken and whose lives were taken by you.’

‘…Please…’

‘Shhh.  I’m talking.  Now you might not think that dying is a big deal to me and you’d have a point.  But the fact is, what you did to me before death.  How you made me feel, the hope that you gave me.  You made me human again, Seth.  Now you were just playing a part and all that, I know.  I’m aware.  But the fact is that you did that.  You’re my Simon.  You made me feel things that I really thought I would never or could never feel ever again.  In a very real sense, you brought me back to life again.  And then you took it all away in a cruel and violent disgusting end.’

Seth strained against the tape. ‘It wasn’t…I didn’t…’

‘Yes.  Yes, you did.  And you’re looking at me with those pretty blue eyes and you’re crying real tears and perhaps you feel some semblance of remorse for maybe the first time ever in your existence.  And that’s pretty amazing if it’s real because it means that there’s actually some feelings left in you, too.  You’re not quite as soulless a creature as I’d painted you.  The problem is, the shame is, that I don’t care.  I don’t feel anything for you or your plight.  I don’t care.  This doesn’t even really feel like revenge to me.  It just is something that…is.  That’s your fault, Seth, that’s your doing.  Because once again.  I’m a monster.’

Pumpkin pulled a matchbox from her front pocket.  She drew a couple of matches slowly against the flint. She watched the minor spark.  Smelled that match smell.   She leaned down.  She kissed his cheek.

She leaned down.  She kissed his cheek.

‘But I’m your monster.’

She fired up another match and this one caught.  She dropped it and the floorboards threw up fire. 

Seth whined and rocked.  Pumpkin sat there on the table’s edge and watched him.  He wept openly.

‘Yeah, you cry.  Maybe you can cry up an ocean and put these flames out.  That would be your only real hope at this point.  Good luck with that, lover.’

Pumpkin hopped off the table.  The walls were now on fire.  The ceiling.  Flames shot out through holes in the roof.  Smoke covered all.

Pumpkin headed out.  She lingered just outside the door so she could hear Seth’s screams.  They came, inevitably -- horrible curdling shrieks.  They crescendoed then dimmed, swallowed by flame.

Pumpkin sat on the bonnet of Seth’s car and watched the shack light up the night.  It was beautiful.  The wood turning black.  The red-orange glare on the snow.  The height of the flames as they danced and celebrated for her with a joy she could not.

Millie sat inside the car, mesmerized.  She wanted to cry for this horrible thing she was complicit in.  This murder.  She found herself unable to. 

It all felt too unreal.

19. THE MISTRESS OF THE MOB._______________________________

They were almost upon her.  She was panicked beyond anything she’d ever felt since being dragged into Clive’s basement.  She braced her feet against the side of the van and PULLED at the chain. 

            The sniggering from outside grew louder.  She could hear it through the door.  Moaning.  Words slow and groaned:

            Locked.

            Window.  Try the window.

            Push.

The van started to rock.  Frustrated freaks on either side shoving and kicking. 

Elisha said: ‘It’s not your time to die.  It’s not your turn to die.’

She got back on the job.  She pulled and pulled on her chain.  No joy.

A rock came through the rear window.  Whoops and screams of delight followed.  Another came through just for the fuck of it.  A hand came in and grabbed at the remaining glass, breaking it off, shattering it and showering her with it.  The hand, now bloodied, became a full arm.  The arm reached for her.  Elisha bound her chain up in her fist and punched at the arm that flailed in front of her.  She grabbed the arm with her other hand and started to wrap the chain around it. 

The rocking continued, more violently now.  Elisha slipped and hit her head.  The freak’s arm slipped free and retreated.  Elisha, infuriated, charged the back of the van started punching anything that moved near the smash-hole.  She picked up the rocks and threw them back out.  She caught one of the freaks, a middle-aged man, right on the cheekbone.  He staggered back, wiped blood from his cheek and licked it. 

Elisha: ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, ALL OF YOU.’

            They laughed at her.  She was the height of comedy.  The front windscreen was next.  A heavy dead branch came through it.

            A woman with grey streaks in her hair hopped on the bonnet.  She dove straight through the ruined windscreen.

            Elisha went FUCK with fright and reached for one of Ma’s near-empty whiskey bottles.  The woman peeked through the Super-Friends curtain.  She tore it down. She clambered over the front seats and got hit between the eyes with the bottle.

            Elisha didn’t hesitate.  This was pure Survivalist sub-genre shit.  She didn’t mess about.  She belted the woman again and again.  Still the woman groped for her – raked her face with long fingernails that smelled like onions and blood. 

            There were booming noises from outside.  They were pelting the van with rocks and branches and maybe themselves.  The woman was still beneath Elisha.  Elisha screwed the cap off the bottle with a shaky hand and pounded back a few FAT fingers of booze.

            She shook the driver’s seat.  She screamed COME ON and went into hellcat mode.  A man was next.  He had eyes vacant of all save The Kill.  He had a dimple in his cheek.  He had a nicely trimmed moustache.  Elisha kicked him in the face with both feet.  Again.  Again.  She grabbed his head by his greying hair and put one of Ma’s lighters to his eyes.  She burnt her fingers and had to drop it. 

            The van smelled of burning hair.

            The man looked up.  One eye red, ruined and closed.  His face pink and blistered.  His eyebrows GONE.  He snarled.  Elisha just came right for him.  She looped her chain around his neck and yanked back for all she was worth.  She throttled the fucker.  His eyes bugged.  His tongue popped out.  Elisha slammed his head into the side of the van.  Over and over.  His face a red smear, he sank to the ground. 

            They were coming in through front and rear now.  An army of oldies.  Elisha strained at her collar.  The old leather was tougher than she thought.  She sat back.  Sighed.  Looked for another weapon.  There was little room to move now with the corpses about. 

            She tossed Ma’s pillow at one of them.  Prayed for some infection to instantly set in on her foe from the contact with the yellowed cotton.

            She thought:

I.

Am.

 FUCKED.

The pillow hit the freak in the face. 

He did look disgusted for a moment, but didn’t drop dead.  He came at her, moaning.

            Elisha fought the tears.  She looked the freak dead in the eyes.  Said:

            ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

            Loud noises from outside.  Booming noises.  The freak got distracted.  Elisha jumped him.  Grabbed the pillow, smothered him with it.  She felt hands on her back, clawing at her T-shirt.  With one hand pressing down on the pillow, she struck out with a pretty ineffectual elbow.  It clipped Freak 2 in the mouth. 

Outside:  voices.  Raised and angry. 

Freak 1 writhed beneath her, shoved her off with ease.  There was yelling from outside.  At least, Elisha thought there was.  Her heart was pounding so loud it was all she heard.  The freaks were on her, pawing at her stabbing at her with their fingers. 

The van door slid open.

Elisha said, ‘CLIVE.’

Clive shot Freak 2 in the head.  Brains and bone shards sprayed. 

‘CLIVE.  ENOUGH.’  Ma.

Elisha kicked at Freak 1.

Ma pulled Clive aside.    Said: ‘Little slut, you stop kicking my boy.’

Elisha kept kicking.  Ma leaned in.  Touched Freak 1 on the shoulder.  He stopped.  He looked at her.

Ma smiled at him.  ‘You stop now.  This one, I understand.  She needs killing and needs it in the WORST way.  She’s a liar and a traitor.  She’s a thing of wanton carnality.  But she’s not yours to kill.’

Freak 1 stepped back, ducked out of the van.  Like ma spoke the truest words he’d ever heard.  She patted him on the head.

Clive ducked into the van.  Climbed over corpses.  Elisha threw herself on him, hugging him tight.  Clive didn’t return the hug. 

He didn’t push her away either.

Clive:  ‘Where’s Seth?  Where’s Millie?’

Elisha:  ‘Pumpkin came.  She’s got them both.  He’ll be dead by now…he’ll be dead.  They took off in his car, left me here for them.’

She forced out the tears – wrung those wet little fuckers out.

            Clive:  ‘Pumpkin?  Are you sure?  We buried her in pieces.  She got Seth?’

            Elisha:  ‘Selina’s with her.  She was watching.  She came looking for Pumpkin.  She must have seen us burying her.  Trust me, she’s HERE –‘

            ‘Oh, shit.’

            ‘-- Selina’s HERE.’

            ‘They hate me.  They think I betrayed them…’

            ‘Well, you DID betray them…’

            ‘You MADE me.’

            Clive laughed.  ‘Let go of me.’

            He pulled free.

            Elisha figured on how to play it.  Too weepy, Clive may well kill her.  Lina didn’t do that shit.  She went for the honesty of the moment.

            ‘I’m with you, Clive.  I’m with you.’

            She looked out.  Saw Ma mingling in the mob of freaks like a satanic Mother Teresa amongst the willing damned.  They touched her gently.  Followed her meekly.

            She thought of Ma’s ravings:

            YOU DON’T THINK A MOTHER CAN RECOGNIZE HER OWN SON?

            Clive said: ‘Jerome’s back, Elisha.  I’m not talking about these crazy people neither.  I mean the real Jerome.  He’s out there in that orchard.  So, Selina, Pumpkin, Millie Superman, Mike Tyson, Ash from Evil Dead, whoever else is with them, I say bring it on.  Between the townsfolk that ate his fruit and the man himself, we’ve got more Jerome than they can handle.’

20. BLACK FOREST SHOWDOWN____________________________

He looked up at the already withering tree that he was.  It was like some skin he’d shed.  He’d been brought back to a brain and a consciousness that that confounded him.  To thought process spiraling out like rhizome roots.  There was something tragic about it.  He realized that.  The peace he’d found had been taken away.

            The smell of his body nauseated him.  The meaty deathness of it.  The roughness of his flesh, the peeling off of his skin.  It repulsed him.

            Infected dogs sniffed cautiously near him.  Tails between their legs, subservient.  He ignored them.

            In this form he was flesh and blood but he was also something of a meme.  An urban legend, he spread through gossip and story.  For every one that he killed dozens were affected.  Dozens more heard.  The fact that his existence was officially denied only caused his name to be spread further.  Spoken in whispers and spooked tones by flashlighted faces in the dark.  Used as a tool to get young children to bed.  They were scared.  And when they were scared he was doing his job.

Constantly re-invented by the teller of his tale.  His birthplace.  His appearance.  His methods.  His body count. 

Stories made him LEGION.

Yet he was just ONE idea, if armed dangerous and homicidal.  There was only so much he could do.

As the organism he stood before, however, he was so much more.  His previous attempts at creation – his love for Pumpkin, Selina as art/offspring – had failed.  They failed because his might, his will and his effort were HUMAN traits.

As the ransacked, organ-harvested assemblage he stood before now, his mother’s genocidal urges that plagued him and formed him had become a LITERAL poison.  He had declared BIOLOGICAL warfare on humanity.  His KILL manifesto had become chemical and ripened into tumorous, poisoned fruit.  This fruit had divided the testing ground of this town into HAVES and HAVE-NOTS. 

You were HIM or you weren’t.   If you weren’t, you were finished.  It was evolutionary in its duelling complexity and simplicity.  He had lain down his machete and others had picked it up for him.

A new blade was before him now, hilt up in the ground.  A gift from his mother.

Shortsighted STUPID woman.

She had been so excited to reclaim her idea she missed the magnitude of what it had become.

Too late now.

Resignation washed over him.

Familiarity spread through him as he plucked his machete from the earth.  He hefted it, looked at it.  He noted his grandfather’s handiwork in his new Excalibur.  It was a fine weapon.  But it was just a blade.  Only a blade.

He looked at his arm.  Something had caught his eye.  He noted odd sproutings puncturing through his skin.  He plucked a tiny leaf from a knuckle with more delicacy than he’d ever shown before.  H made what could loosely be called a smile.

There was hope still yet.

                                   

         ***

The figure that moved silently through the snow-covered orchard also smiled.  It moved slowly and sleekly.  It looked behind with a feigned cautiousness.  It was clad in red.  Inappropriately dressed for the weather in a slinky sequinned dress and pumps.  At least the wig of dark hair was warm.

            Chin Chin felt like he was dreaming.  The concrete jungles of his native Tokyo and adopted L.A had given way to this.

            He felt something ancient and primordial flow through his veins.  He felt himself transmogrify from archetypal parody into something real. Beyond his role.  Beyond gender.  Beyond even time.  He felt himself becoming concept.

            His mind re-territorialized the landscape of the orchard.  It became the Black Forest of fairy tale.  A symbol-laden place of shifting subtext and complexity.

            He was a concept.  About to go head-to-head with its opposite.  In a landscape loaded with meaning:

            A place of testing and death.  A place existing outside of reason.  The home of mysteries.  A representation of the unconscious itself.

            STOP IT.  Focus…

            He was to beguile and misdirect.  He was to confuse and seduce.

            He was to use his gifts to their utmost potential.  He was to DISTRACT.

            He saw the monster.  It stood beside something that looked like a blind demon’s idea of a tree.  He willed his scent out onto the breeze.  The breeze obliged and carried it.

            Its head hung.  Its shoulders slumped.  There was something wrong with it.

            Still, it caught the scent.  It took it into its transplanted lungs.  Reborn olfactory receptors caught it.  Its brain processed it.  It turned its head towards the source.

            Chin Chin darted behind a tree.  It was a move full of coy playfulness with a hint of flirtation.  He was at play, but he felt it in him:

            This was no gangbanger.

            This was no murderer.

            This was no paedophile.

            This was something beyond any human sense or conception of weird-badness. 

            His belief in his own state as concept tremored.  He peeked out.

            The monster turned.  The dogs all stood by him, ears pricked up, teeth bared, snarling.

            They didn’t move though, These wolves of varying size but equal badness.  They were waiting for a cue, an order, something.

            The monster stepped forward.  He gave his machete a test-swing and found it good.  He kept coming.

                                                             ***

Jerome found movement easy after so long in pieces.  He did his methodical march and found that walking came naturally.  Slowly and purposefully he came at the girl in the twinkling dress.  The girl peeked out behind another skeleton of a tree and darted.

            Jerome stopped.  Felt the forced coyness in the girl’s moves.  Something snapped in his memory.  He remembered a similar trick had been played on him once before.  He stopped and waited.  Foes would reveal themselves.

            The girl came out of hiding once more.  She stood out in the open, between rows of trees.  Daringly.

            Jerome saw Chin Chin fully for the first time, smiling as the snow fell around him, and he KNEW:

            Under the clothes.  The glamour.  The perfume.  Was a MAN.  A pretty man, by their standards, but a man nonetheless.  More of a man than he was now, without his balls and prick.

            Jerome came at the little man with machete held high.  Then there were loud noises and he felt himself burn.

                ***

Batton thought:

            Too late.  We’re WAY too late.

            But he would not let get any further. He pumped shells with a payload of white phosphorous at Jerome.  He fired again and again.  The monster fell to the ground aflame. 

            Jerome, chunks missing, got back to his knees as Batton reloaded.

            The dogs, startled at first by the gunfire, had scattered.  But they regrouped.  A nasty German shepherd came at Batton snarling.  There was a popping sound as it leaped.  Its corpse bowled Batton over.

            The pack turned to the killer of their own. 

            Zoe stood.  Automatic smoking.

            Jerome got to his feet and found his back afire once again.  He turned.  The girl he had changed into a mass of scar tissue years before was in front of him.  Something nostalgic washed over him as payloads of flechette came at him.

            Hundreds of armor-piercing needles ripped through him. 

            He’d forgotten what pain was like.

            Selina screamed.  She fired and fired and her weapon was empty.

            Jerome staggered back into a tree.  Selina was on him.  She swung the butt of her shotgun up and into his jaw.  She pulled a gigantic knife from a scabbard on her back.  She stabbed it through his shoulder.  She pinned him to the tree.

            The dogs came at Zoe.  Zoe hated dogs.  HATED them.  Fucking Mitch.  She popped off a few more but it was apparent they would be on her in an instant if she held her ground.  She managed to shoot a few more before she got while the getting was good. 

            Batton yelled ZOE but the girl was gone.  A blur that was her bobbed and weaved between trees.  He started to give chase.  He caught Selina and Jerome out of the corner of his eye. Selina drove another blade through Jerome's other shoulder. 

Batton stopped.  He remembered why they were there.  He went to his lover.  He pushed her aside gently.  He pulled a .45 from a side holster.  

Jerome wrenched himself off the tree and swatted Batton aside.  He looked around for the machete he’d dropped somewhere.  Batton found it first.  Batton drove it down into the top of Jerome’s head.

Jerome staggered.  Blood poured down his face. Batton came at him again. 

Jerome scooped Batton up.  One arm around his head.  The other between his legs.  Jerome took several big strides forward.  He rammed Batton spine first into a tree.  Then he wrapped Batton around it.

Selina heard her lover’s spine snap in five places.

Jerome dropped Batton to the ground.  He looked like an unconscious Plastic Man.  Blood spurted from his nose and mouth.

Selina jumped on Jerome's back.  She went no no no no no no no and stabbed at him twenty-five times with a short bladed knife. 

Jerome peeled her from his back.  His grip was lousy.  Too much blood.  Selina slipped free and fell to the ground ass-first.

Jerome grabbed her by her long blonde hair.  Hauled her up by one hand.  He ripped a pouch from around her waist, sensing something of his inside. 

He found her talismans inside:

His genitals.

He didn’t need them.  He dropped them to the snow.

He dragged Selina, screaming, to the tree he once was.    He felt the remorse and sorrow of an artist forced to destroy his favourite piece. It hurt worse than the flechette.  Worse then the phosphorous.

            He held her out against the tree with one arm.  He took the machete embedded in his own head and pulled it out.  He drove it through Selina’s stomach.  He drove it into what remained of his old form.

            He left her there impaled.

Then, he fell down and died.

Chin Chin appeared, sobbing for the loss of his friends.  At the apocalyptic craziness that had held him petrified.

He knelt by Batton’s broken body and wept.

‘…chin chin…’

He looked up. 

Selina. 

He went to her.  He stroked her face. 

‘Oh, Selina.  Oh shit, honey…’

‘get…me…down…’

‘But I…but you…oh fuck…’

Chin Chin tugged at the machete.  He couldn’t budge it.  Selina screamed and tears ran down her face and her mind wanted her to die but her body wouldn’t let her.

‘I can’t do it.  I can’t do it.’

Chin Chin stepped back.  He stumbled over Jerome’s body and fell in the snow.

Chin Chin, on hands and knees, closed his eyes and sobbed with grief and shock.

‘…chin chin…’

‘I’m sorry Selina.  I don’t know what to do.  Tell me what to do.’

‘…run…’

Chin Chin opened his eyes.  Jerome loomed over him.

‘Shit.  Ahhhh, shit.  Shit.’

Chin Chin sank back down into the snow. 

‘You.  What kind of a creature ARE you?  You killed my friends…you KILLED my friends.’

He got to his feet.  Hauled off and punched Jerome in the face.

Jerome shoved him to the snow.  Pulled his machete out from Selina and the tree.  Selina crumpled to the ground and bled there.

Chin Chin knew that this was it.  He stood again.  Closed his eyes.  Said:

‘Do it, then.  DO IT.’

Chin Chin thought of Mikey Lumber.  Of his mustache.  Of the cute dimple in his cheek.  Of how much he loved him.

Jerome swung the machete.  He took Chin Chin’s head off.  Blood spurted from the neck stump, showering him.  Chin Chin’s body twitched and slumped to the ground.

Jerome stepped over the little man’s body.  He was ready to move on and continue his work.

This time there would be no waiting in the woods.  No more prowling in the shadows.  No more stalking and chasing and thinking and philosophizing. 

There would only be death from here on in.  And he would bring it and bring it and bring it.  He would bring it until there was nothing left for him to kill.  

21. A MILLION MITCHES CAN’T BE WRONG.______________________

They were after her.  No way near as big or bad as Mitch, but their NUMBERS…

Zoe tried to gauge how many were hot for her blood, sneaking the odd look behind.  Impossible to tell.  There were shapes.  Furry shapes.  Snarling shapes.  And lots of them. 

Zoe was fit and quick and was a cardio MONSTER.  She had a strong lead.  But it was cut by the second.  She cursed the ghost of Mitch Mitchell once more and pushed herself for extra speed. 

They’d been slowed a fraction by the barbed wire fence she leaped.  But the pack was so keen for the kill that those who couldn’t go under or over shredded themselves through.  Still, she recognized:

 Fences are my friends.   

Time to find more obstacles for bipeds only to scale.  A rooftop would be nice.  A tree, easy.  But then what?  Sit there watching the snapping jaws of doom below until rescue? 

Fuck that.  The Selina/Batton/Chin Chin triumvirate needed big-time aid.

The property that was Bob Grant’s was in reach.  Zoe thought about it, decided to haul ass dead ahead several hundred feet to the next fence line.  She hoped it wasn’t a mirage caused by exhaustion and fear.  It was high and it was wood.  Zoe thanked about a million gods.  The dogs nipped at her heels.  She hit the fence and leaped, hands catching the top.  The planks were old and splintering.  Slivers of wood spiked into her fingers and palms.  Zoe didn’t feel them.

A fuck-off nasty Rottweiller had her jeans by the cuff and refused to let go.  Pity, as Zoe was halfway over.  Zoe fumbled for her pistol.  She pulled it, put one in the dog’s head.  With visions of Mitch fueling her, she dropped over the other side, a chink of denim lost to some clamped jaws.

She ran along the fenceline.  The dogs howled at the loss of their leader.  Some of the bigger dogs.  A rabid lab and a mangy Dane tried to get over the fence.  Some smaller, cleverer dogs began to dig.  Others chased her along the other side of the fence.  Their growls and barks made scarier by their anonymity.

Zoe pumped shots through the fence at the barking.  She was rewarded by a whine and punished by an empty gun.  She dropped the automatic and pulled an ivory handled snub-nose six-shooter from her ass crack.  It was a birthday present from Batton years before.  The sweetheart.  If they all lived through this, Selina better watch out.  Zoe landed her mother’s DANGEROUS curves.  She figured Batton was man enough to drive them. 

FUCK.  There was a hole in the fence.  Of all creatures, a crazed Pommeranian squeezed through it.  It pumped it’s little legs.  It gained ground.  It bit Zoe’s right sneaker. 

Zoe went down, rolled as the puffball with the glazed yes came up at her.  She shut an eye, popped a pointed tongue out a full-lipped mouth.  She squeeeeeezed off a single shot.  Whatever passed for the Pomeranian’s brains puffed out in a mist.  Zoe was back up and running, exhaling a proliferation of profanities.

There was a splintering sound.  Some mutt of a thing had smashed through the fence headfirst.  It came at Zoe, a furry rocket and the two tumbled and rolled and slid downhill. 

The mutt snapped and bit at her.  It sunk its teeth into Zoe’s arm.   They were the center of a shower of snow.  They rolled seemingly ever onward.  One of Zoe’s shots went waaay wild.  The other just merely wild. 

There was a crazy shock.  For a moment Zoe thought she’d been shot herself.  She realized that dogs can’t shoot.  She then realised that she was breathing in water.

Girl and dog had tumbled into a stream than ran through the back of Bob Grant’s place.  Zoe hit the surface fast and sucked back a shocked gasp of air. 

The mutt had her by the thigh.  Zoe screamed, grabbed a scruffy fold of skin with one hand and fired off a cross-your-fingers shot with the other. 

The jaw-clamp slackened.  Zoe heaved the mutt up and threw it onto land.  She said, FUCKING DOGS, and started to claw herself up.  The rest of the pack came at her. 

Zoe hit the water again, going down as deep as she could.  The cold bitch-slapped her as she tried to swim.  Her coat weighted her down.  She slipped it off and kept on swimming.  Her bites stung.  Her lungs burned.  The rest of her was so numb from the cold it was almost like she didn’t exist.

Some of the dogs ran downstream.  Some ran upstream.  Some dived right in. Some just did a weird, whimpering doggy-jig by the spot she disappeared at. 

Zoe was up and out and running.  More mutts barking at her heels.  She snapped off a couple more shots.  Got lucky on one of them.  A mongrel of some sort bit it and lay dead in the snow behind her. 

Another was on her.  It went for her throat.  Zoe fended it off with an already dog-bit forearm and gun butt smashes on the snout.  Zoe stomped on the thing’s head a couple of times with her heavy boots.  That did the trick.  She was off again.  The farm in sight.  Convinced her lungs had burned away, she ran on anyway.  The pack regrouped and gave chase en masse.

Zoe went back OVER the fence, cut up to Bob Grant’s farm.  The dogs scrambled again.  Some clawed at the fence, vainly trying to scale it.  Others turned and doubled-back for the hole they busted through earlier.  Others kept running along the fence line beside her.

They all knew where she was headed.

Zoe made it to Bob’s farm.  Like anybody sane, she screamed for help, pounded on the front door.  No help came and she scrambled round the back of the house, dogs hot for her again.

She noted the pigpen and jumped in, hoping to lose herself amongst their chubby numbers.

Bob’s pigs were kept outdoors, as nature intended.  They were hardy critters and preferred the outside to corporate jail cell pens operated elsewhere in the state.  They didn’t mind the cold and they had nice run-in shelters - deep-bedded straw huts if they wanted.  Still, Bob loved his hogs and so their numbers were plenty.

Zoe dropped to her knees and shuffled amongst the squirming congregation.  They snuffled and oinked but didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other.

Zoe headed for the shelter when the dog pack hit the pen.  Berserk, they attacked anything that moved.  They ganged up on huge sows, tore at the throats of the young, tortured the sleeping with hateful nipping. 

The pen was full of that uniquely horrid screeching a pained pig produces. Zoe scrambled her way over the squirming animals as the massacre continued.

Turned on by the mass slaughter, Zoe became an afterthought.  She slipped through the back fence. With the sound of a massacre ringing in her head, she slipped away into the night.  Three bullets left for any mutt not drunk enough on hog blood.  Her arm was bit BAD.  She was scratched up, sopping and exhausted.  She needed a place to recoup.  She heard the signs of violent mayhem coming from the centre of town, but it was quiet here on the outskirts.  She scanned the empty, run-down houses.  Chose one to take a breather.

22. BIRTH OF THE MONSTER Part 2.___________________________

Zoe:

Sopping wet.  Freezing.  Bleeding.  Dog-gnawed.

            She lurched through the open door. Alone and terrified.  Her .38 wobbled in her hand.  She fought back tears.  Sobbed out Selina.  Sobbed out Batton. 

Moonlight through cracked windows made everything blue.  She fell to the floor.  Looked at her blue hand in the light.  Noted her blood looked black.  Exhausted, she crawled along stinky mildewed carpet.  Her mind said: ROLL OVER.  LIE DOWN.  DIE.  Her body refused to submit.

            She could crawl no more.  She lay on the floor.  Face down.  Something fired in her brain and the thought hit loud:   

            SHUT THE DOOR.

            She lifted her head, twisted it.  Saw:

            The door ajar.

            That would have to do.

            Her head hit the floor.  She lay, unknowingly, in the exact death-pose of her mother.  She thought of Maggie and tried to channel some of her insane bravery.

            Her left hand stretched forward.  Rough, matted carpet under her fingers.   Then – a texture change.  Something cold, wet, soft, slimy.

            She rolled, recoiling, away from the thing.  Somehow she pulled herself up to her knees.  Both hands to her .38 she held the weapon forward, fresh tears muddling her vision.

            It lay, still, in front of her.  Rubbery.  Blue-grey in the light.  Pebble drift 6.  The color her and her mother painted her bedroom awnings.  Way back before she went teen-angst and everything went black. 

            The thing had dark sproutings of hair on its head.  Pale blue eyes open.  Small rubbery lips open.  A gummy mandible just visible.

            Zoe choked back puke.  It was a baby.  A perfect, beautiful baby.  It was dead.

            A figure stumbled out of a doorway behind.  Monstrous even in shadow.  Leaking and disfigured.  Belly, empty of child, distended.  Scarred and horrific. 

In the shadows, it appeared to have a huge dangling penis to counterpart its swollen breasts.  It was like some mutant horror comic hermaphrodite. In-between genders yet somehow transcending both.  As it moved closer, monster cock revealed itself as gnawed umbilical cord, hanging from a dripping cunt and connected to a placenta yet to be expelled. 

            Bile, white and thick shot from Zoe’s mouth.  It landed, sperm-viscous, in blobs on the carpet.

            The mother stepped forward.  It was naked, save for a soiled blanket draped over its shoulders.  It said:

            ‘Ma always said, it was a woman’s desires at the time of conception that molds the fetus into what it will be.  A woman’s desires at the TIME.’

            She lurched further forward.

            Zoe scooted backwards on her ass.  Pulled the trigger of her gun several times.  Was rewarded with the heavy Click of an empty firearm but nothing more.

            ‘At the time, I wanted family. At the time, I wanted a normal, healthy child.  A child sculpted to perfection like the pretty features of its parents.’

            The thing tee-heed.  It lolled its head, deranged.  Said:

            ‘And that is what.  I.  Got.’  Another tee-hee.  It was perverse.

            Zoe wondered just what in the fuck she’d got herself into now.  Separated from her friends.  Battling the army of Mitch.  Now Freakshow Queen Infanticide and its snuffed baby.  Nothing could be more horrific.  Nothing.

            ‘Look at me, girl.  Look at what I am.  Look at the things I did to myself.’

            She pointed at the dead baby. 

            ‘I don’t want THAT.  That belongs to a me long dead.  I want…I want…something…else.’

            She had a razor blade, snapped free from a safety razor.  She drew it across her breasts. She etched circles around her nipples.

            ‘I WANT SOMETHING ELSE.’

            Realization popped Zoe between the eyes.  Pumpkin told a tale of some scratched up, knocked up, fucked up chick. The chick strung Pumpkin up.  The chick worked Pumpkin like a heavy bag.

The chick just happened to be on Zoe’s shitlist. 

Zoe checked her tats:

JOANIE

RICHIE 

SETH

MITCH

CLIVE

CLEMENTINE

Zoe looked back up at Freakshow Queen Infanticide and said:

‘You shot my horses.’

23. THE GHOST WRITER’S EPIPHANY.___________________________

Speeding out of town, veering around crazy infected, running down snarling dogs:

            Clive, Ma and Elisha.

            Clive:  ‘Are you sure you want to leave him here, Ma?’

            Clive:  Hunched over the steering wheel squinting as bugs and pebbles and other assorted road crap flew in through the smashed windshield.  Ma:  down on her deathbed mattress, pulling at a bottle of Beam. WIPED.  Too much energy expended.  Too much emotion.  Too much effort.  She lit a smoke, forced herself upright and fought for her consciousness.  Elisha:  chained as per status quo.  Aching from her fights with the infected.   Jonesing for some dope.  Heartsick from her conflict with Pumpkin.  But, as always, planning, scheming, plotting, scripting.

            Ma: ‘We have done what we set out to do.  The dream lives again.  He will start over in GRAND form in this roach motel of a town.  He will wipe this place from the face of the planet and the scar that remains will be the annunciation of his return.  Those blessed with his vigor will spread out and continue our work on an undreamed of level.  It has been a glorious days work, Clive.  I find myself contemplating retirement.’

            Clive:  ‘Fuck.  Oh, fuck.’

            Ma sighed.   ‘What is it, Clive?’

            Clive:  ‘Joanie.  We left Joanie.’

            Ma: ‘I thought you didn’t care much for Joanie.’

            Clive: ‘Yeah, well.  I never got footage of her…she looked awesome towards the end there…Seth would’ve…awwww….Seth.’

            Ma swigged from the bottle.  Sucked back on the smoke: ‘Joanie served us well and it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye.  She played her part for us and we shall wish her well in her future endeavours.  Seth, who, while incompetent much of the time, always had the best of intentions and without him we never could have so royally FUCKED that slut Pumpkin Dwyer…’

            Elisha stifled a snort.  If anyone fucked Pumpkin it was HER.  She had devised the plan.  She had created the character for Seth to play, tailoring it so that he could pull it off.  She led the Mitchell’s everywhere.  She was responsible for putting Jerome back together.  Had she done it willingly?  Had she been forced?  WHO CARES.  What mattered was:

What thanks did she get? 

Elisha felt like a ghostwriter.  A script doctor. 

            Elisha thought about how much GOOD ghosting work she’d done here in the van.  It had started off with so many bodies rotating in and out of this space.  Mitch sitting on her, snarling.  Ma’s drunken head-fuckings.  Clive’s weird mood shifts.  She’d been shot full of drugs.  She’d been tortured.  She’d had undead sacks of zombie parts writhing around in front of her.  She’d seen Joanie go from girl-next-door serial killer groupie to leaking nightmare mother-monster from some Freudian fuck-up’s unconscious.  She’d watched Pumpkin get carved into pieces.  Pieces she helped bury.

Throughout it all she had remained.  Vital.  Creative.  ALIVE.

            And now there was just Ma, Clive and Her.

            In this van.  This tiny enclosed space. 

            She’d conquered a much bigger space before. 

            This was it:

            The Filthy Workshop II.

            There was no question this time of who had top billing.

Elisha looked at Ma, drunk and ranting.  Soon she would slip off into incoherency and nonsense.  Soon she would be at her most dangerous.

            Elisha breathed DEEP.  Tried to calm herself. 

            Ma seemed to sense something.  She threw her bottle cap at Elisha.  Said:

            ‘You’re our last piece of business, girl…

24. NEW GIRL MAKES HER BONES.______________________________

At first Joanie tee-heed uncontrollably when she put two and two together and found they equalled Zoe.  The crack about the horses had stopped her ranting.  She was focused on the snuffing of the baby she thought monstrous.  The idea that the inked-up chick in front of her sneering through her tears was the Janson girl took some time forming.

            Zoe had to help it along some.  She held up her inner forearm.  Said:

            ‘See this?  No, you probably can’t in this light.  Well, there’s a list of names here.  Lines through a couple.  There was some kind of dog-thing named Mitch.  He’s got a line through his name.  Another one too with a line.  Named Richie.  He was yours, right?  He was the father of the dead baby over there.’

            Joanie looked perplexed.  The mess of scars and scabs on her head furrowed with her confusion.  Several popped open.  Fresh trickling blood bled down her face, ink-black in the moonlight.  Zoe thought it looked like bad thoughts busting loose.

            Zoe: ‘My Mom.  She killed your fucking husband.  She blew that asshole away.’

            Joanie did her tee-heeing.  Followed it with a hissing sound. 

            ‘You didn’t have to do that to your baby.  We’re all changed because of this.  We’re all scarred because of this.  You shouldn’t have killed that baby.  He was your way out.’

            Joanie lunged forward, slicing at Zoe with her blade.  Zoe bobbed back.  The blade caught her wet T-shirt.  Sliced it.  Zoe swung the butt of her gun upward.  It caught Joanie in the mouth.  Lips split.  Teeth broke.

            Zoe tore the T-shirt off.  Wrapped it around her right arm.  Dropped the empty gun.

            Joanie spat up blood and bits of teeth. 

            Zoe felt herself calm.  Joanie was dangerous.  She had a mean streak.  She was a decent shot.  She could punch.  But she couldn’t fight.  She was a coward.  She juiced herself up on the terror of the kidnapped.  She tortured and killed the bound and helpless.  She put bullets through the skulls of the feeble and unaware.  She was completely unhinged and out of control.

            Joanie launched herself at Zoe.  She took the younger girl down and mounted her.  Joanie threw wild punches.  Zoe covered up and avoided the worst. Used her wrapped up arm to take the slices thrown.   Zoe ducked a haymaker and heard the hand break against the floor.  Zoe wriggled up.  Zoe got her thighs around Joanie’s neck.  She squeezed them as hard as she could.  She extended out the arm with the broken hand.  She squeezed broken fingers in her fist.  She raised up her free arm and drove elbows into Joanie’s face.  Joanie dropped the razor blade.  Zoe rolled over, released her grip on Joanie, and got up.

            Joanie came right at her again.  The zeal and violent passion of the crazed: beware it, Batton had said. He was right.  She drove Zoe back into a kitchen area.  They tumbled over a cheap wooden table.  Joanie popped her with her bad hand.  Zoe felt her eye swell that fast.  Joanie grooved on the crazy pain shooting up her arm.  Her eyes lit up with it.  Zoe rolled free, stood.

            Joanie:  ‘You took Richie from me.’

            ‘My Mom killed Richie, you cunt.  But don’t worry, you aren’t far behind.’

            Zoe stepped forward.  Joanie raced forward, all screams and thrashing arms.  Zoe side-stepped her, tripped her.  Joanie went down hard.  She got to her feet once more.  Zoe stepped up, fist cocked. 

            Joanie collapsed.

            Zoe spotted an old telephone on the kitchen bench.  She grabbed it.  She unwrapped the cord and pulled it free of the phone. 

            Joanie, on the belly, crawled towards her. 

            Zoe stepped over Joanie.  Put a knee in her back.  Wrapped the cord around both fists.  She slipped it over the front of Joanie’s head, positioned it against her throat.  She looped it over once again.

            And she pulled back as hard as she could.

            It took longer than she thought.

                                                                     ***

Zoe ran the bathroom faucet.  The water was copper colored at first, but soon cleared.  Zoe washed her face.  Tended her blackening eye.  Joanie really caught her.  She felt numbed by her first taste of true, premeditated killing.  Mitch had been total self-defence.  So had the other dogs.  Plus, they were dogs.  Or something.

             This had been real and nasty and bloody and prolonged.  Zoe didn’t enjoy it, but she knew she was the heir of her mother’s vendetta.  She dressed her cuts and dog-bites with her torn-up T-shirt and some anti-bacterial body lotion she found in the cabinet.  Her wounds stung.  She liked the stinging.  It made her feel alive.

She rummaged around the house for clothes.  Tapped out on any pants.  Refused to touch anything that was Joanie’s.  She found a cheesy old Christmas sweater in the bottom of a closet.  It had snowflakes and shit on it.  It was warm.  It itched her skin when she slipped it over her head.  She liked the itching.  It further enforced the feeling of being alive. 

            She found a biro in a kitchen drawer.  She rolled up her sleeve.  She updated her list, putting rough scrawlings over another name:

JOANIE

RICHIE 

SETH

MITCH

CLIVE

CLEMENTINE

     She hoped the others listed were already in the ground.  She wanted some of Seth, but doubted she had the strength now. 

She said private things to the ghost of her mother. 

She sent text messages to Pumpkin, Selina, Batton and Chin Chin.  She got no reply.  She asked her mother to watch over them.

Using one of Joanie’s soiled towels, she wrapped up the body of the baby.  She found an old hatchet out back in a scary looking Evil Dead shed out back.  She used it to dig. 

Fresh snow fell down all around her as she buried Joanie’s baby.

She wondered what it would be like to float in that poison womb.

She didn’t know any prayers to say.  She made some up.

25. BODIES IN THE SNOW­­_____________________________________

Hatchet in hand, Zoe made it back to the orchard.  She hoped for scenes of triumph.  Selina, Batton and Chin Chin dancing around the monster’s corpse.  They had arrived too late to stop his re-assembly.  Zoe realized as she came upon the bodies, that it had all been in vain.

            Zoe sunk down beside Batton’s body.  She stroked his dark hair.  She closed his open eyes.  Hot stabs of shame overwhelmed her grief.  Batton and Selina had taught her.  Trained her.  She spent months at a time with after Selina and her mother met.  She knew how to fight because of them.  How to protect herself.  How to shoot. 

            If Zoe had handled herself better back in Kansas, her mother might not be dead and none of this would be happening. 

            She hugged Batton and cried.  She said I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry over and over again.  Her shame heightened impossibly as she peeled Batton’s coat from his body.  Her first thought was to drape it over him.  Mask the ugliness of his death.  She realized she had a hot and heavy date with pneumonia coming if she didn’t get some warmth. It was ridiculous to think he wouldn’t want her to have it.  She draped over her shoulders.  Hugged herself and smelled that Batton smell on the coat.

            Chin Chin looked at peace.  His face was calm, his eyes closed.  Zoe picked up his decapitated head gently.  She straightened his wig and returned it to his body.  She did the best that she could in arranging him to look like he was sleeping.  Chin Chin would appreciate the touch.  He would hate the gruesome way he died.  The un-glamorousness of it.  Zoe said goodbye to the colorful man who had been her friend.

            She moved on to a blood-soaked patch of snow.  A trail led off from it in splotches and dribblings and drops.

SELINA.

Zoe followed the trail.  She was obviously hurt. Hurt BAD.  But she was alive.

Zoe hustled along after it.  She willed hope into her heart. 

It was all that she had left.

26. THE FILTHY WORKSHOP II_________________________________

The death van moved at serious speed.  Fast, but not as fast as the cop cars that passed opposite.  The sirens gave Clive a migraine.  He felt dehydrated and worn out.

            Focus on the road.  Focus on the road.  Focus on the road.

It was difficult.  Everywhere he looked, cars burned, people killed, things were demolished.  Clive popped a sweat.  He was living in his earlier apocalyptic movie pitch.  Travelling along the dirt roads of the wasteland.  A perversion of the all-American family in a perversion of the all-American Winnebago. 

            Stopping was impossible.  Crazies chased the van, threw projectiles at it as it passed them.  The situation was So out of hand, freaks so juiced on Armageddon, he doubted even his mother had the power to save them.  He even doubted that she would try to save them.  Her mission was accomplished.  Her goal achieved.  Jerome was back and he was undoubtedly cutting a bloody path through any uninfected he encountered.  Surely, he would make his way out, followers in tow, to continue his work.

            Clive had read about the mad cow outbreak in the UK.  How the army had to kill every single piece of livestock in ever-outwardly expanding concentric circles until the diseased were eradicated.  Seth had shown him footage of bulldozers scooping cow corpses into mass pits.  A bovine holocaust. 

            The only way to stop this plague was also with bullets.  Had the Grants got any fruit out of town?  Had others?  It seemed likely.  How far out did this infection spread?  How many concentric circles of gunfire would be needed to stop it?

            It was all so clear and sharp in his mind – the imagery of it.  Silhouettes of heavy moving equipment scooping the dead into huge open flaming crematoriums.  All against the backdrop of a blood-red sunset.  Smoke washing across the scene, unreal, dreamy and ethereal. 

            Despite the grimness of the situation, Clive was happy.  He felt himself returning to his old self.  He felt himself shedding the bullshit tough-guy vengeance-seeking persona he’d been forced to adopt.  He felt his mind quicken.  His imagination flex. 

            And then, he looked in the rear-view mirror.

            His mother was up.  She slapped Elisha around with far more strength than she should rightly have.  She had Joanie’s old metal nail file from back before her transformation.  She dragged the sharp end of it down Elisha’s cheek.

            Elisha screamed and pushed at her, but Clementine Mitchell held on tight.

            Clive went FUCK and hit the brakes.  The van skidded, slid off the road, came to a bumpy stop. 

Clive pulled a tight shiny little .38 from the glove compartment.  Leapt over the front seat. Thinking:

This is BAD.

            It had been brewing and brewing, this fight.  Two potent minds locked up together for miles and miles of road.  It was inevitable.

            Ma said: ‘SHOOT THIS BITCH, CLIVE.  SHOOT HER NOW.’

            Clive pointed the gun at Elisha.  He wanted to.  Part of him at least.  He wanted to blow the front of her head out through the back and throw her corpse to the crazies outside.

He told himself that she was NOT Lina Romay.  That she was NOT his cinematic crush.  That she was NOT his muse.  She was Elisha Maher.  She was just a girl.  A crazy, crazy girl.

Still.  He hesitated:

‘I want to get her HOME, Ma.  I want to get her back to the basement.  I wanted to do it THERE… I have PLANS…’

Ma shot major cut eye at Clive. 

‘FUCK your plans.  This bitch says that you will not kill her and I will see her proved WRONG.  She led us on a mad trail around this country.  She laid seeds in your mind.  She showed you skin and you allowed yourself to be seduced by it.  You kill her, Clive.  You kill her NOW.’

Elisha wound some chain around her fist.  She popped Clementine in the mouth for all she was worth.  She wasn’t worth much, but it was enough.  Clementine's head rocked back and Elisha was on her.  Her hands around the hag’s throat.

Elisha looked up at Clive.  Her full lips parted in a grimace.  Her arching black slash eyebrows raised.  Her eyes defiant, daring.

Ma said:  ‘Clive…Clive…’ 

Clive closed his eyes.

Elisha said: ‘LOOK AT ME.  LOOK AT ME. ‘This is the climax of our story, Clive.  Don’t hide your eyes like some girl.  WATCH.’

Clive rubbed his eyes.  He looked again.  Everything went widescreen.  Spots like cigarette burns popped behind his eyes.  Things went grainy like deteriorating film.  He raised his gun.  He realised what he was truly dealing with. 

Famous through her movie.  Fetishised through her swimsuit spreads.  Through shots of nipple-slips on video steaming sites.  Spreading her power through film school lectures.  Tonight show appearances.  Convention interviews.  Hobnobbing with celebrities. 

She was SUPERCHARGED. 

He was powerless before her. 

He’d strung her out on dope.  Stripped her of her dignity.  Chained her like a beast.  Forced her to commit evil against friends.

It just bound him to her all the more.  She used it and took it and manipulated it ALL.

He watched.  He watched her script play itself out.

Elisha punched and hit and scratched Clementine.  Smacking sounds echoed around the van.

Ma went still.  Trembling, Elisha climbed off her.  She looked at her bloody hands and collapsed against the side of the van.  She plucked the nail file from Clementine’s hand and tried to cut her way through her collar.

Clive went to his mother’s side.  He looked down at her.  He was amazed to find himself relieved. 

Clementine opened her eyes.  Betrayed, she looked deeply at Clive.  Breathing her last breaths, she said:

‘You were the son of a girl my father captured and inseminated.  You gestated in that bitch’s belly and you were born in the basement.  I never wanted to let you out.  I knew you were weak.  But our father wanted a boy like MINE.  He had plans for you.  He me raise you as my own.  Like JEROME.  You were a failure.’

She coughed up blood and forced out more words.

‘I curse you with this knowledge, brother, that you are one of them.  And with this betrayal, you will die like one of them.’

Clementine Mitchell laughed.  And died.

                                                                                 ***

Sitting beside Clive, Elisha rubbed her dog-collar chafing.  Just in case of a seat-jumper, she checked Clementine:

            Still dead.

            They smoked cigarettes by the side of the road.  Waited for some sort of cue.

            Clive broke the silence.

            ‘They’re going to be looking for us.  Shit, I know they’re already looking for you.  What we’re going to do is –‘

            ‘Clive. This isn’t Badlands, okay? I’m not going anywhere with you.  We’re done.  I thought you were a far more interesting monster than Jerome.  But look at you.  You’ve been diluted into something generic and boring. You’re just a another loser with a gun and a camera.  You’re just another killer.  Look at you, with your puppy dog eyes.  Your nervous glances…you’re a JOKE.’

            Clive turned to her.  He grabbed her by the hair.

‘I made you.’

            Elisha laughed.  ‘Yeah.  Yeah you did. And I unmade you. You remember what you said to me?  That last day in the basement?   You said that my life was now the opening few minutes of Friday the 13^th Part II.  You said nobody had ever heard of Lina Romay and nobody had EVER heard of me and that there was no way I’d survive when you came for me.  Well, guess what, I’m Elisha Maher.  Who the fuck ever heard of Clive Mitchell?  You’re a character with a different name played by and actor who looked nothing like you in a movie I made.’

            Clive’s grip relaxed.  He pulled away. 

            ‘I hate you.  I hate you so much.’

            Clive cocked his .38.  Put it to Elisha’s forehead.   ‘FUCK YOU.  I’ll fucking chain you back up.  I’ll gag that fucking mouth…I’ll take you back to my fucking basement and film your death.’

            ‘You can’t kill me.  What happens to you when I’m gone, huh?  What happens?  Do you actually even LIVE outside of your obsession for me?  Is there anything MORE to you than that now?’

            Clive stammered something.  His gun hand got shaky.

            Elisha leaned in close.  She pouted up her movie star lips.  Squeezed together her movie star tits. 

            ‘Don’t worry, Clive.  I’ll make you famous.’

            She kissed him.

            He started to fight it.  Her tongue flicked at the crack between his lips and he gave in. 

            She sucked at his bottom lip.  He felt the heat of her breath.  He felt a sharp pain and his mouth filled with blood.

            He pulled back.  Blood poured out of his mouth.  Shocked, he tried to speak but he couldn’t move his tongue.  He dropped the gun and grabbed under his chin.

            Elisha laughed. 

            The nail file went right up through up under his chin and into his mouth.

            Clive went muuu muuu muuuuuuuuuuu as he tried to pull it out. 

‘Come get me again, Clive.  There’s so much more we could do…’

            Elisha grabbed the gun, got out of the van and ran. 

            Her laughter a soundtrack to a cycle of new films screening in her head.

27. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TEAM WEAKLING.­­­­­­­­­­­__________________

Pumpkin and Millie:

            Hauling ass and smelling like campfire.

            Millie:  ‘Now what?’

            Pumpkin: ‘Now we make our great escape and get out of here.’

            Millie: ‘What about the others?’

            Pumpkin: ‘They can take care of themselves. It’s okay, Millie.  We’re going to a cool little hotel in Kansas City.  You can take a nice hot bath and have a well-earned rest and our posse will be back together again by the time you hit the continental breakfast.  The Mitchells split up – we split up.  Don’t stress.  You’d actually be better off with the others.  I can’t fight, Millie.  I got jumped by a twelve–year-old kid in the bushes, for God’s sake.  You and I, we’re Team Weakling.  Team Kick-Ass needs to worry about us.’

            ‘Okay.’

            ‘Alright.  Now, I think I saw some beers in the back.  Why don’t you take a look and see.’

            ‘Okay.’

            ‘Alright.’

            Millie leaned in the back.  Rummaged around through all of Seth’s crap.

            ‘There’s cameras back here.  Digital ones.’

            ‘Is that right?  Pass me one…’

            Millie grabbed a sweet little digital camera and passed it to Pumpkin. 

            Pumpkin wound down her window and tossed it.  Heard it smash against the road.  Smiled with satisfaction.

            Millie came back with beers.  ‘What are you doing?’

            ‘You don’t want to know what’s on those.’

            ‘You could have erased it.’

            ‘I just did.’

            Pumpkin popped the top of her can.  ‘Cheers, Millie.  To devils dismembered, demons purged and a clean getaway.’

            Pumpkin got Millie to hurl the rest of the cameras hard as she could at the road.  Millie tried to sneak a peek at the footage on one.  Pumpkin snatched it from her. 

With visions of herself being butchered and bagged, Pumpkin cursed and pitched it at the road with all her might.

She glanced at Millie and smiled.

Millie, focused on the road, said, ‘Shit.’

Pumpkin turned back to the road.  She said, ‘Shit.’

Dead ahead: 

Crazies and cops at WAR.  Buildings on fire. 

Cars overturned.  Dead in the streets. 

Smoke and tear gas in the air.  Gunshots and muzzle flares in the night. 

Bottles breaking on riot shields.  Lunatic cries for blood.  Megaphone-amplified cries for calm.

A woman wheeled a shopping cart full of dead children, cackling as she ran.

Two men kicked a dead riot cop – they snatched his shield and pounded him with it.  They took his helmet and lobbed it into the blockade of reeling cops.

Pumpkin hit the breaks.  ‘How could it have got this bad?’

Millie: ‘What do we do?  What do we do?’

Pumpkin put the coupe in reverse.  Punched it.  Tires chirped and rubber burned and Pumpkin checked the rear-view.

Fuck.

They had amassed behind her, spilling from looted shops and restaurants.  They threatened to surround the car. 

Pumpkin put it in first and punched it again.

‘We drive to the cops.’

‘There’s overturned cars in the way.’

‘We go as far as we can, then we run for it.’

They were a good few hundred feet in front of her.  Readying projectiles.  They lobbed them, pelting the oncoming coupe with bottles, rubble, bricks, cans of dog food, severed limbs.  They shot at the car.  The windscreen was hit and went spider-web.  A tire blew out.

Someone set a trail of gasoline spilling from an overturned car alight.  With a mammoth whoosh everything went orange.  Pumpkin swerved and drove the coupe into a lamppost. 

They were close.  Cops were near.  Pumpkin looked at and saw a couple of helmeted heroes coming for them.  She heard Millie scream.  The crazies were on her.  They smashed the window.  Clawed at her.  Dragged her. 

Pumpkin grabbed at Millie.  It was a bizarre tug of war. 

Pumpkin screamed no no no no no no no no.  There were too many.  They came at her, too.  Grabbing and groping. 

Millie was torn free.  A man she recognized as Evan Hawarth, a kindly old-timer who sold used books out of his living room, jumped on her.  He had a pair of scissors held aloft for the stabbing. 

Other faces surrounded her, tore at her clothes.  She felt a kick in the stomach and the wind left her.  She opened her eyes.  The world was spinning.  Faces leered and stared.  She felt breath on her face.  Instinctively turned towards it.  The face before her was her own.  A vision of things to come.  Ghost of Millie future. 

Merrin. 

Grandma Sarah was beside her.

Millie screamed LET ME GOOOOOOOOOOO.

There was laughter.

            Grandma Sarah, in a weird deeeeeeep halting drunken-sounding voice

            ‘Alllllll…riiiiiiiipe…togethhhheeerrr…’

            The fruit, soft, bruised, overripe was stuffed into her mouth.  Merrin giggled as she force-fed her sister.  Other crazies, jonseing for the fruit, licked Merrin’s fingers dry as Millie choked.  Merrin leaned forward, kissed Millie full on the mouth.  A wet, juice-laced saliva kiss.

            The crowd, sensing their victim was now one of them, turned to the other victim.

            Pumpkin was pulled free, kicking and screaming.  They swamped her.  Pumpkin turned on the Jerome in them.  They licked her.  Ripped off her shirt.  Tore at her jeans.

Shots were fired.  Crazies went down.  A cop smashed his riot shield into a couple of crazies.  He grabbed Pumpkin under the arms.  Dragged her as his partner laid down some covering fire.

Pumpkin fought her way free of him. 

‘Fuck.  OFF.  My friend’s still in there.’

Pumpkin looked into the crowd.  Millie sat beside a paler, slightly chubbier version of herself and an old woman.  The other version of Millie took an apple from her pocket.  Forced it into Millie’s mouth.  Tears ran down Millie’s face. 

The cop grabbed Pumpkin and shoved her towards safety.  Said:

‘Excuse my insensitivity, Miss, but your friend, I’m afraid, is FUCKED.’

            ‘But I can get her.  I can save her.’

            ‘That would be suicide.’

            Pumpkin freaked:

            ‘I can DO suicide.  I’m GOOD at it.  I can’t stay dead…I’m a zombie…’

            The cop said, ‘Miss.  I’m taking you to the paramedics.’

28. NOT DEAD YET___________________________________________

Jerome looked out.  He surveyed his handiwork.  He saw that it was not just good, it was fan-FUCKING-tastic. 

He went and joined the mortal versions of himself.  He passed their victims.  He passed their carnage.  He followed their trail of joyous destruction.  Their unmaking of their world.

            They stopped as he passed through them like a zombie messiah.  They touched him.  Stroked him.  They sniffed at him.  Plucked the sprouts that grew from him.  They recognized him as the source of their freedom. 

They licked his skin and savored the citrus tang of his sweat, his blood-sap.  They dropped to their knees and begged for more of it.  He was a hotshot of their drug and he sizzled on their tongues like amphetamine sherbet.

The barflies appeared, matted beards blood-soaked.  They flanked him like good acolytes.  One of them took his machete-filled fist and held it.  Another took his empty hand and held it.  One walked ahead, scattering fellow crazies with flailing arms and bizarre shrieks.  One walked behind, protecting the rear from riffraff and normals.

        The silence was freaky.  Cops stood behind their barricades, watching the bizarre procession in front of them in awe.  Soundtracked by the crackle of flames, the crunching of glass underfoot, the moans of the dying.

          Jerome was home.

          All of a sudden he was thankful for the return of his eyes so he could witness this.  It was perfect.  It was the vision he tried so hard to carve into Selina.  But the words had escaped him.  Even in his own private swirling alphabet, he could not do his imagination justice.  But this, THIS, was it.  A world where death was queen, Where he sat by her right hand.  Tears welled in his eyes.  He took it all in as Clive would, in Technicolor cinematic beauty. 

        He felt a warm spray against his shoulders, the back of his head. 

        He turned.  His rear acolyte was missing his head.  The body fell to the ground. 

       His head landed at Jerome’s feet.

       Selina stood, a trail of dead crazies behind her.  She held her guts in with one hand.  A mammoth sashimi blade in the other.  She was some sword and sorcery warrior-bitch displaced in time.  She gave the drones around her pause through violent aura alone.            

       They sensed their master’s hand on her flesh, weird talismans that confused them.  They hung back.

       Selina said: ‘Not dead yet.’

29. MAENADS GONE ZOMBIE.___________________________________

A paramedic bewildered by her beauty and her bizarre vital signs attended to pumpkin in the back of an ambulance.  The cops were abuzz with talk of a seven-foot monster, which meant that Jerome was going public.

       Great.

        Pumpkin pondered her options:

n  Pick up a gun, charge the bastard and hope for the best.

n  Steal a car and try and find the others, dead or alive.

n  Curl up into a ball and weep until she passed out.

       She went for Option 3 when she heard:

       ‘My fucking friend is out there with her guts hanging out and if YOU’RE not going to do anything about it, let me go, pass me a fucking shotgun and get out of my way.’

       Pumpkin sat up.  She shoved the paramedic aside and jumped out of the ambulance.  The paramedic said some stuff about getting to a hospital.  Pumpkin slammed the door shut and searched for the voice.

She saw her: bundled up in a coat much too big, thrashing against the grip of a cop with a buzzcut and a Mikey Lumber Mo.

       The cop said something about a secure perimeter and evacuation. 

       Pumpkin pushed her way through the crowd towards her.

       Zoe stuck a finger in the cop’s face.  Said:

       ‘Don’t make me kick your ass…’

       Pumpkin: ‘ZOE.’

       Zoe picked Pumpkin out of the crowd.  Watched as she shoved her through, scowling.

       Zoe wrenched herself free from the cop with a tug of her arm and a hearty FUCK OFF.

       The girls ran to each other and hugged.  Zoe wept instantly.  Pumpkin held her.  Hushed her gently.

       Zoe:  ‘Batton’s dead.  Chin Chin’s dead.  I got separated from them…I was trying to find Selina….I lost her trail…I couldn’t find her... She’s in THERE.  With HIM.  With Jerome…’

       Pumpkin said, ‘Come on.’

       They fought their way through to the front of the barricade.  Cops eyeballed them.  Restrained them.

       Zoe said, ‘Fuck, at least let me SEE…’

       They were shunted away into a small herd of shocked survivors being ferried to hospitals.  Ambulances came and went and cops arrived in droves.  Pumpkin and Zoe held each other and willed Selina on.

                                                               ***

Jerome shook his hands free from the barflies.  He lashed out with the machete.  Selina ducked it.  Whipped her own blade through the air. 

       Blood-sap spurted.   It coated the circling crazies.  They licked themselves clean and felt the RUSH anew.

       Jerome’s hand fell, severed,  to the snow.  At the feet of one the barflies.  He stooped.  He plucked the machete from its grip.  He sniffed at the leaking stump.  His tongue flicked at it.  He felt the narcotic pull of the blood-sap.  He sucked at the stump, drank greedily.  He bit at the skin and tore through the flesh.  He pulled loose a sinewy strip and chewed it back.  Another of the barflies smelled it in the air.  He snapped off a finger.  Gnawed on it. 

       Selina slashed out again and cut through Jerome’s throat.  Blood-sap spattered again, further this time.          Moans rose from the crowd of crazies at the nectar in the air.

       Jerome put his hand to his throat.  Blood flowed over and through his fingers and dripped to the ground.

       The barflies were beneath him, handfuls of bloodstained snow were stuffed into their mouths. 

       The mob at large caught whiffs of the fruit.  They sensed the fruit on Jerome.  IN Jerome.  Its perfume was in the air.  Its nectar was spilled on the ground. 

       They needed it.  They were obsessed with it.  They loved it. They were junkies for it.  They scrambled for scattered drops and sucked them from the snow.

       They looked up at the source of it.  Saw it flowing dark and free from his wounds. 

       Mouths watering, they starved for more.  They descended drunkenly upon him: Maenads of myth gone zombie.

       They shoved Selina aside.  She fell to the ground.  She raised her head, bewildered at what she saw.

       They jumped him, tore at him.  They stripped off bits of his flesh and chewed greedily.  More and more joined in.  He was torn open and devoured. 

Bleeding her last in the snow, Selina watched as they fought over the scraps that remained like famished dogs.    One of the barflies sat beside her, oblivious to her presence.  He chewed through a length of intestine.  Selina saw Millie and her sister, stripping the flesh off a rib, licking the bone clean.  Groups of people, hunched and squatting like cavemen, gnawed and ripped at hunks of flesh.  They licked their palms.  Sucked juice from each other’s lips.  They stood and howled and threw bones at shield-bearing cops.

Selina caught blurring movements.  She closed her eyes.  She heard fresh gunfire.  Helicopters buzzed overhead.  Then all sound seemed to fade out like an audio effect and she slipped away.

30. THE FINAL GIRLS._______________________________________

Pumpkin and Zoe boosted a small little Mazda and drove, far from triumphant, into the new day sun.  They avoided oncoming news crews and law enforcement officials.  They headed back in the real world in silence.

            At a rest stop, they cleaned themselves up.  Pumpkin wore a dead woman’s shirt.  She found a First Aid kit in the glove compartment and dressed Zoe’s wounds. 

            Pumpkin wanted to say something to the girl, but had no words of peace in her heart.  She showed Zoe love through her nursing instead. 

            Fifteen miles back, the final girls had come across the death van on the side of the road.  They pulled over behind it.  Zoe was out before Pumpkin had stopped the car.  She stood staring into the open side door as Pumpkin joined her. 

Pumpkin lay a cautious hand on Zoe's shoulder.  Pushed her undead body in front of the girl protectively.

            Ma Mitchell lay on the floor of the van.  Her eyes bugging out.

            Clive lay near her, blood pooling around his body.

            Pumpkin checked to make sure they were dead.  They were.

            Zoe opened the passenger door and rummaged around the glove compartment.  She pulled out a pen and pocketed it.

            In the rest stop bathroom, Pumpkin caught a look at Zoe’s tattooed arm.

            The names were all crossed out, either by the tattooist’s ink or by biro.

JOANIE

RICHIE 

SETH

MITCH

CLIVE

 CLEMENTINE

            But the shitlist wasn’t complete.

            In a tiny space of pale skin before the crossed out names hit her other tatts, Zoe had written:

                                                                   ELISHA