Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Page 13

  He’d nearly convinced himself of the likelihood of these rational explanations when more noise emanated from the basement. This time it was different. What he was hearing now sounded like somebody rattling the doorknob from the other side of the door. Again, this was impossible. There was no one down there capable of doing such a thing. His wife’s corpse was wrapped up in a sheet and stashed away inside an old wooden storage trunk. He’d put her there a couple hours ago after accidentally killing her. But there was no chance he’d been mistaken about her being dead, not with the side of her skull being staved in so gruesomely. Yep, she was dead as a damn doornail, absolutely no doubt about it.

  Putting her down there in the trunk was nothing more than an act of pure panic. After it happened, his brain sort of short-circuited. He didn’t know what to do. The fact she was dead had been immediately obvious. There’d been no chance to save her. Calling 911 was the obvious thing to do. The expected legal thing. But visions of being slammed in a jail cell and left there to rot forever filled him with an icy terror. Or even worse, being sent to death row. Link didn’t want to die. That was the main thing he knew in those first moments. He hadn’t even meant to do it, goddammit.

  Carrie had been needling him mercilessly again about a wide range of things, as per usual. Household chores that needed doing. Home repairs he’d been neglecting to finish for far too long. She went on and on about all the overdue bills and how he needed to be working more overtime at the warehouse to get them caught up. On top of all that, she was pissed off because he was late refilling the prescription for his boner pills. She was horny and hadn’t gotten laid in too long, which was making her extra agitated. Agitation was Carrie’s default state, so being around her when she was extra agitated was like being in the eye of a fucking hurricane. At the end of what turned out to be her final rant, she was right up in his face, her face turning red as she screamed at him. It was too much. He couldn’t help reacting. All he did was shove her away from him. A simple act that shouldn’t have resulted in such a total goddamn disaster.

  But it had.

  She tripped over her feet as she went stumbling backward and wound up falling at just the right angle to bounce her head off a corner of the kitchen island. She dropped to the floor and didn’t move. There was a lot of blood. So much goddamned blood. A spreading pool of bright-red horror. At first Link could only gape at her unmoving form in astonished, paralyzed disbelief. When he finally did get moving, he knelt over her to check her pulse, but this was only a formality. The smashed-in shape of her head told him all he needed to know. The woman he’d been married to for fifteen years was gone. Just gone. In the blink of a fucking eye. It didn’t seem real. It didn’t feel like it could be real. Just a few moments earlier she’d been alive, a perfectly healthy human being. And now she was gone, abruptly erased from this mortal coil. Like she was nothing more significant than a bug squashed beneath someone’s shoe.

  After confirming her demise, Link spun away from the corpse and vomited profusely into the kitchen sink. When he was done heaving, he went into the hallway and grabbed some spare sheets from the linen closet. He wrapped Carrie’s body up in those sheets and carried her down to the basement, dumping her in the old crate that had once belonged to his father. There’d been nothing in it but a bunch of moldy old newspapers and nudie magazines. He pulled these things out, dumped his dead wife in the trunk, and closed the lid.

  Next he went back upstairs, locked the basement door, and set about scrubbing the floor clean in the kitchen. This involved the use of an ungodly amount of Lysol and three whole rolls of paper towels. The bloody paper towels went into a black plastic garbage bag, which he then stowed in the back of his pickup truck for later disposal.

  With these things out of the way, he set about numbing himself with booze and football on TV. The Dolphins were playing the Raiders. It was late in the third quarter and the Raiders were leading by a touchdown. Link didn’t particularly care about either of these teams, but he liked football in general and having the game on gave him something to occupy his mind, which might otherwise slide in more troubling directions.

  At the point when he started hearing the noise from the kitchen, he was deep into a state of intense denial. He would not let himself believe the tragic thing that had happened had actually happened. It was a dream. A nightmare. Had to be. Link was no saint, but he wasn’t a bad person either. Most people would call him generous and kind. Horrendous, awful things weren’t supposed to happen to good people, hence he could not really have killed his wife. He could not have made the terrible mistake a now-distant part of his mind was saying he had. Shutting that part of his brain down was easy. All he had to do was keep guzzling down the beers. Increasing inebriation made it easier to buy into the denial rationalizations. Carrie’s not dead, he told himself. She’s gone out shopping, that’s all. Probably be gone a few hours. Maybe longer. Maybe a lot longer.

  The rattling of the doorknob commenced again, louder this time.

  Link turned up the volume on the TV and popped the top on another beer, his eighth of the afternoon. Or maybe it was number nine. He was starting to lose count. This struck him as a good thing. He wanted things to get fuzzy, craved the oblivion of drunkenness. He instinctively understood this would make it even easier to buy into his denial fantasies.

  The Dolphins were driving down the field now and had entered the red zone. Looked like they might be on the verge of making this a tied-up ballgame. Link hoped so. A good, competitive game could only help with keeping his mind away from certain inconvenient and upsetting realities.

  Link guzzled beer and pumped a fist as the Dolphins’ QB lofted a pass into the corner of the endzone, where it was caught by a leaping TE. He’d drained the can of nearly half its contents when he heard a sound of splintering wood. A sharp, slapping sound followed this one. In the next instant, he realized it was the sound of the basement door flying open and slamming into the side of the refrigerator. Then came a sound of leaden, lurching footsteps slapping against kitchen tiles. From the sound of it, those footsteps were headed in this direction, toward the living room.

  Link went as still as a statue and listened intently to the approaching footsteps. He kept telling himself what he was hearing couldn’t be real. His wife’s corpse had not reanimated and busted out of the basement. Ridiculous things like that only happened in movies or in stories by crazy horror writers. They never happened in the real world because the supernatural didn’t exist. The real world was ruled by science and reason. By the laws of physics and shit like that.

  The footsteps nevertheless kept coming.

  Link let out a breath and remained where he was as he began to mutter reassurances to himself. “This isn’t happening. This shit isn’t real. I’m imagining it. Go away, you dead fucking bitch.”

  His breath stuck in his throat again when he sensed a presence looming over him. Still, he didn’t move. Getting up and running away in terror wouldn’t accomplish anything other than making him feel like a fool. He refused to acknowledge the reality of what his senses seemed to be telling him.

  Then he felt the presence behind him reach around him and place the edge of a sharp blade against his throat.

  Link sighed. “Well, shit.”

  Carrie’s reanimated corpse tore the blade of the razor-sharp butcher knife across his throat.

  Link’s last conscious thought was, Damn, I guess those crazy horror writers actually get it right sometimes.

  Dead Carrie seized a handful of the scraggly, greasy hair at the top of his head and forced him to watch the arterial spray of his blood with the last of his fading vision. When she was sure he was dead, she dragged him down to the basement and heaved him into the trunk.

  Then she climbed in after him and closed the lid.

  CHAINSAW SEX MANIACS FROM MARS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Fun story, I think. Title pretty much explains all.

  THE NEED TO PEE CAME over Tanya Logan so quickly and with such overwhel
ming force it caused her to bolt outside through the trailer’s open back door without saying a word to anyone. Her objective was the outhouse in the isolated rural lot where Yancy Malone kept his decrepit old trailer. The strains of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd shitkicker song remained audible as she awkwardly scampered across the patchy ground with a hand pressed between her legs and her thighs pressed together.

  Tanya and some of the other regulars at Duke’s Tavern had adjourned here after Duke had shut the place down at two in the morning. The local college football team won a big game earlier in the night and the whole town was in celebration mode. Nobody wanted the party to end, so when Yancy said anyone who wanted to could head on down to his trailer and keep things going there, more than a dozen drunk redneck guys and gals took him up on the offer. Now most of them were crowded in together in the cramped little trailer, but a few others were hanging around out front, swigging rancid moonshine from clear glass jugs and occasionally shooting off their guns. Now and then they howled at the moon like wolves, a sound that sent an icy tingle of dread up Tanya’s spine. A couple of those boys had been giving her creepy looks ever since Duke kicked them all out. They were guys she’d never liked. Bo Gatlin and Jim Loomis. She was thankful the rest were all people she knew well and trusted to keep her safe.

  Her bladder felt like it was about to bust by the time she reached the outhouse and yanked open the rickety wooden door. She pulled the door closed as she entered the outhouse and latched it from inside. The outhouse was distressingly dark inside, with the only faint illumination coming courtesy of moonlight streaming in through a hole in the tin roof. She knew Yancy always took an electric lantern with him when he came out here to do his business in the middle of the night, but she’d taken off without thinking to ask for it. Oh, well. She’d have to make the best of it.

  The moonlight was enough to ascertain the location of the toilet. It was at the back of the outhouse. A small window was a few feet above it. She wasn’t worried about anyone peeking in, though. They wouldn’t be able to see shit, it was so dark in here. There were a few rolls of TP in a basket next to the toilet. No wash basin, though. She’d have to wash her hands back in the trailer.

  Whimpering with the need to relieve herself, she hurried over to the toilet, grabbed one of the rolls of TP, lowered her flimsy denim cutoffs, and sat herself down on the toilet’s somewhat less than ideally sanitary seat. She grimaced as she felt moisture on the backs of her thighs. One of the nasty fellas she was partying with tonight had drunkenly and carelessly sprayed his piss all over the thing. More than one of them, most likely.

  Whatever, though. The damage was already done. A little icky moisture wouldn’t kill her. She’d clean it off with TP as soon as she was done doing what needed doing in here. Her bladder began the process of emptying itself, which this time took far longer than usual. The sense of relief that gripped her as that pressing need faded caused her to moan in an almost sexual way.

  She was almost finished when a light much brighter than the moon shined down from somewhere high above the outhouse, filling the little structure’s interior through the hole in the roof. Tanya turned her head up, squinting against the glare. She couldn’t fathom what could possibly be the source of anything so bright in Yancy’s little dump of a lot. There were no streetlamps out here. She wondered if maybe a helicopter was hovering around somewhere up there, shining down a spotlight. It was common knowledge that Yancy grew pot out there in the woods beyond the edge of his property. Maybe this was the DEA doing a late-night raid. Never mind that people out here never got raided for pot these days. People had stopped caring much about that sort of thing. Besides, no one would ever rat out Yancy to the law. Everybody loved the big galoot.

  Funny thing, though. She wasn’t hearing any motor or rotor noise. She’d been around helicopters a time or two. They were noisy as hell. Yet the only things she could hear were the distant sounds of music and some hooting and hollering from the party. Overall, though, the night was still enough for her to hear the buzzing of the crickets from the woods.

  Curious, she hurriedly wiped herself, pulled up her cutoffs, unlatched the door, and went outside. She took the one creaky step down to the ground, moved a few feet away from the outhouse, and turned around, putting a hand to her brow as she tilted her face toward the sky. The bright light was indeed coming from somewhere directly above her. She was still squinting, straining to make out the source, which she figured must be some sort of airborne craft. Because it was so high up there, though, the shape of it remained hard to discern. If it wasn’t a helicopter, what could it possibly be?

  There were others around her now. She sensed them without seeing them. One person was almost directly behind her. Though she couldn’t see whoever it was, she felt a fresh tingle of revulsion, she shuddered and hunched her shoulders as a creepy-crawly sensation twisted her up inside, a feeling akin to having thick, wriggly worms slithering through her guts.

  Turning her head around, she saw Bo Gatlin staring at her ass. His mouth was hanging open and he had that familiar dumb, dull-eyed look on his face. Sensing her sneering scrutiny, he looked up and smirked, but didn’t say anything. As they eyeballed each other with increasing hostility, Jim Loomis sidled up next to his creepazoid pal and smirked at her in a similarly sleazy way. She would have been nervous if not for the presence of the others. Most everybody was out back of the trailer now, staring up at the mysterious bright light in the sky.

  Catching sight of Yancy and Daryl Monroe, his best friend going back to middle school days, Tanya headed over there, away from the creeps. She felt their loathsome gazes on her every step of the way.

  Yancy had his head tilted up to the sky, but glanced Tanya’s way as she approached. He grinned and waggled an index finger upward. “Hey, girl. What do you reckon that is?”

  She smiled and shrugged. “Don’t know, Yance. Was thinking DEA maybe, but don’t hear no rotors.”

  Yancy snorted laughter. “Ain’t drug enforcement. I’m too low-level to warrant their attention. Air Force base ain’t that far away. Could be some kind of experimental aircraft.”

  Daryl Monroe gulped Miller High Life from a can. “Or maybe a weather balloon.”

  Candy Hopkins had joined them by then. She was another of the regular girls from Duke’s Tavern. Candy and Tanya could almost be twins, going on looks alone. Both were bottle-blondes and tonight they were each wearing denim shorts cut down nearly to the size of bikini bottoms along with bright-colored skimpy halter tops. Candy was a little younger, though, and maybe a teeny smidge cuter. Tanya hated her. The fucking slut. Bitch was always trying to get with any man she showed any interest in.

  Candy pressed herself up against Yancy and put an arm around his back. She looked up at the sky and said, “Guys, that’s not a weather balloon. That’s a UFO.”

  Yancy glanced down at her, eyeing her with genuine perplexity etched in his features. “You mean like a flying saucer? Really?”

  She nodded. “Gotta be. Them are aliens up there. You can tell by how there ain’t any sound.”

  Tanya rolled her eyes, but she had to admit Candy had a point. That lack of engine noise had puzzled her from the start. Debate continued along the same lines among the crowd gathered behind Yancy’s trailer for several minutes, with the light hovering in that same fixed point high above the clearing the whole time.

  Just as some among them began to lose interest and head back to the trailer for more beer, the object in the sky began to descend at a rapid rate, triggering a collective gasp from the gathering. Those who had started back toward the trailer stopped in their tracks and turned around.

  Daryl’s Miller High Life slipped from his fingers and thumped on the ground. “Goddamn. It IS a flying saucer.”

  Now that it had descended so drastically, Tanya could see that the craft was indeed saucer-shaped. As it neared the ground, landing gear appeared in the form of four metallic legs. Tanya was overcome with a profound sense of astonishment as the craft
touched down in a spot out there beyond the outhouse. The look of the thing was like something out of a black-and-white sci-fi movie from the 1950s. Her head began to feel swimmy as she contemplated this, the result of a combination of all the cheap beer she’d consumed and the surreal nature of what she was seeing.

  Minutes passed and nothing happened. As time ticked by, people began to edge closer to the eerily quiet craft, drawn forward by equal measures of sheer awe and curiosity. Everyone had heard stories about flying saucers. The tales had been handed down through the decades ever since that incident out there in Roswell. There were believers and non-believers. The non-believers scoffed and poked fun at the UFO nuts. Any concrete evidence either didn’t exist or was locked up so tight no normal person would ever lay eyes on it. And now here they all were, confronted with indisputable proof that flying saucers were real. Tanya knew she should be afraid. The beings inside this craft might have hostile intent. They might be capable of anything. The sensible thing for all of them would be to take off running and get as far away as possible.

  Only one person gave in to the flight instinct. A big guy named Nick Bolton let out a yelp and took off running. Moments later, they all heard the sound of his pickup truck’s engine roaring to life and then speeding away. The rest of them stayed right where they were. Tanya didn’t know about anybody else, but she felt an almost spiritual sense of privilege at being able to witness this amazing thing. They were all present for something momentous, possibly something that could alter the course of human history itself.