Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Read online

  A hiss sounded as an opening appeared at the bottom of the craft and a ramp with stairs began to lower until it touched the ground. A light tinged with green emanated from inside the craft. More minutes passed with nothing else happening. Tanya and the rest of them continued to inch closer in giddy anticipation of actually seeing alien life forms.

  And then one form appeared at the top of the steps. After a moment, it began to descend step by careful step. Other similar forms appeared and began to follow the first one down. From the first moment, the fact that these were indeed creatures from another world was not in doubt. The resemblance to the so-called “grays” known to all from various popular culture depictions of aliens was amazing. Physically, they looked exactly like that. Other things about them, however, came as a great surprise.

  Daryl’s face twisted in a way that conveyed deep confusion. “What the fuck? Are those chainsaws them boys are carrying? And . . . are they wearing coveralls?”

  Yancy nodded slowly. “Yeah. You know, I’m thinking maybe we should all consider getting the fuck on out of here. This don’t look right at all. I got a bad feeling.”

  Tanya was in full agreement on that point. This was nothing at all like what she had been expecting. “Surreal” didn’t even come close to describing it. She felt like she’d slipped into some bizarro alternate cartoon dimension.

  The first alien to reach the ground plucked a toothpick from a corner of its mouth and spoke a robotic brand of English that seemed to emanate from some kind of translation device. It was nonetheless perfectly intelligible. “Yep. Reckon y’all dumb meat-sacks ’bout to get fornicated and buzzed up right nice.”

  Candy disengaged herself from Yancy and began to back away. “What did that thing say?”

  The alien made a chittery sound that might have been laughter. “Gonna blow a load of Martian spunk up yonder blondie’s poophole. Best believe.”

  Then the creature started the chainsaw, raised it above its head, and came charging at them in a lightning-fast waddling motion. The other aliens followed suit. And just like that, the spell that had held Tanya and the rest of them in place was broken as everyone dispersed and ran screaming for their lives. Tanya turned and ran straight for the trailer as the night filled with the sound of chainsaws tearing through human flesh. She didn’t know where else to go. Her car was back at Duke’s tavern. She’d ridden here in the back of Yancy’s pickup. Maybe she could find his keys and take the truck.

  Before she could reach the trailer, however, she stumbled over a rock and went crashing to the ground, banging her knees with debilitating force. She twisted her head around and saw one of the alien rednecks heading right toward her. Tears appeared in her eyes. She had no hope of getting away, not with her knees hurting like this. Then there was a blur of motion in her peripheral vision. Yancy came hurtling out of nowhere to tackle the alien and drive it to the ground. Tanya was grateful for the intercession, but she was in no condition to help her rescuer fight the creature.

  The trailer was close. She started grabbing at the ground and pulled herself under it, crawling deep into the shadows. The sounds of carnage continued. She heard screams and loud grunts that sounded like a product of carnal exertion. Telling herself not to look, she did so anyway.

  It was a panorama of horror and inter-species perversion.

  There were chain-sawed body pieces everywhere. Lots of blood on the ground. Most of the aliens had shucked off their overalls and were thrusting their surprisingly large penises into every imaginable orifice. They fucked the living and the dead. They fucked flesh holes made by the chainsaws. She saw Candy get bisected by one of the buzzing blades. Prior to cutting her into two halves, the lead alien had indeed done her up the poophole. It went on seemingly forever, until virtually all the humans out there were dead. At least one person was still alive, though. She could hear someone blubbering. At first she was unsure who might have survived, but then the aliens began heading back toward the craft at the edge of the clearing. One of them had hold of a whimpering and naked Bo Gatlin by an ankle and was dragging him toward the flying saucer. He cried out, pleading for help that would not be coming. His head thumped roughly against each of the steps on the ramp as the alien pulled him up into the craft with no concern whatsoever for his well-being.

  Once they were all back inside, the ramp retracted and the craft rose into the air again. It hovered a couple dozen feet above the ground for a moment before abruptly shooting upward and out of sight.

  Tanya stayed under the trailer until the first hints of sunlight began to tinge the sky. She did this just to be safe, in case the alien hicks came back. When she finally crawled out and got to her feet again, she spent a moment gaping at the bloody horrors arrayed around her. They were all dead. Every single one of them. Even sweet Yancy, her savior. She then went into the trailer and vomited into his kitchen sink. When she had finished voiding her stomach, she hunted around until she found his keys, then she went outside and found his truck, which she wound up ditching about a half mile away from Duke’s Tavern. She didn’t want to be seen showing up in it.

  She retrieved her car and drove home, where she took several of the strongest pills she had and passed out.

  She never told anyone about the redneck aliens.

  Who the hell would believe her?

  THE THING IN THE WOODS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Slice-of-life from days gone by interspliced with creature feature horror.

  I’M GOING TO TELL YOU about something I’ve never told anyone else. Something that happened a long time ago. Every word of this is true.

  It was a warm summer night in middle Tennessee. The sky was clear and a luminescent silver moon was shining down on us through the slanted roof beams of a house under construction. As was so often the case when we were out roaming through the neighborhood at night, we were up to no good. The house was still in the early stages of construction. The foundation had been put down and the wood frame was up. The rest of it—the drywall, the insulation, the wiring, etc.—had yet to be done. It was the perfect place for a gang of young hooligans with nothing else to do to hang out and blow off a little steam.

  The little ball inside the can of spray paint clutched in my right hand rattled as I gave the can a good shake. I aimed the nozzle at the plywood board in front of me and pressed down the valve button. Black paint began to hiss from the nozzle as I started adding the finishing touches to my latest piece of graffito.

  This particular graffito was the Van Halen logo. I had already perfectly (in my estimation, at least) rendered the stylized VH part of it, with the slanted H nestled up against the V. I just needed to add the little wing-like lines. There were three of them extending from each side of the logo. Each descending line was just a little shorter than the one above it. Once I had accomplished this, I stepped back to admire my handiwork and found it worthy. Eddie Van Halen would have been pleased, I was sure.

  Tom Keller stepped up next to me and squinted at it. He took a swig from a can of Budweiser and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “It’s crooked.”

  “I did it like that on purpose. An artistic touch. It’s more rock and roll that way.”

  Tom belched. “That’s a ten on the belch-o-meter. And bullshit it’s an artistic touch. It’s crooked because you’re drunk.”

  “It’s artistic because it’s slightly off-kilter. It symbolizes what rock and roll is all about. Rebellion, rejection of conformity, that kind of thing. And fuck you, by the way. Your Ozzy logo looks like a retarded monkey did it.”

  It was true. Tom had spray-painted an Ozzy logo on a section of the plywood floor. Ozzy’s logo featured crisply-defined letters with a little horizontal line through the middle of each of them. There was nothing at all precise in Tom’s rendering of it. The letters were wavy. The “O” looked more like a long oval shape. And the supposed-to-be-horizontal lines through each letter were fucking crooked. Talk about hypocritical.

  Tom shrugged. “Whatever, man. I was b
eing artistic and rebellious and shit, just like you. I gotta fuckin’ piss.”

  He wandered off to another part of the house. In moments I heard a strong stream of beer-fueled urine hitting another plywood wall panel.

  There were four of us there that night. The other guys were Shane Cunningham and Mike Harper. My name, by the way, is Trent Bates. I had turned eighteen the previous month. Mike was nineteen and had graduated high school a year earlier. He had subsequently attended Memphis State University (now called the University of Memphis for some reason) for one disastrous semester the previous fall. The other guys were still in high school.

  Shane and Mike were guzzling beers and hanging out in a part of the house that would one day be its kitchen. As I came into the room through an archway, they were arguing about Van Halen. In particular, about whether their new album sucked or ruled. The album was Diver Down and it had come out just a few months earlier. My personal opinion was that it neither sucked nor ruled. It didn’t quite kick gargantuan amounts of ass the way all their previous albums had, but it was still Van Halen, which automatically made it better than just about anything else.

  Shane crushed an empty Bud can and tossed it on the floor where it joined several of its drained aluminum companions. “The album’s got four fucking good songs on it. The rest of it’s a bunch of covers and shit. It’s too poppy and wimpy-sounding. Where’d the originality go? And what happened to the fucking heaviness?”

  Mike belched. “That was a ten.”

  Shane scowled. “That was not a ten. It was a five at best.” He glanced my way as I fished a can of Bud from the dwindling supply in the cardboard carton on the floor. It was the big kind that held twenty-four cans. There were maybe four or five brews left in it. Another, already empty suitcase had been ripped to shreds and scattered across the floor. It’s fair to say we were all somewhere in the vicinity of completely fucked up. “What do you say, Trent? That a ten or a five?”

  I peeled the ring-tab off the lukewarm can and tossed it aside. I had a thoughtful look on my face as I took a long swig from the can and pretended to mull over the issue. “It was more like a four. Maybe even a three.”

  I wasn’t busting Mike’s balls. It’d been a weak-ass little bitch belch.

  Mike gave me the finger. “Fuck you guys. Get your ears checked. And why does every Van Halen album have to sound the same? So what if Diver Down isn’t super heavy? Did every Beatles album sound the same? I think it’s good they’re trying something different, like the little synthesizer touches.”

  Shane grabbed a can of Bud from the suitcase. As he did this, I took another huge swig from my own recently opened can. I recall wanting to drain it fast and get one more can for myself before the other guys could finish off the rest. I didn’t know it then, but this was a harbinger of things to come later in life, this need to always be sure I had more than enough booze on hand to quench my prodigious thirst and then some.

  Shane opened his can and guzzled. We never sipped beer back then. Beer wasn’t for savoring. It was for getting wasted. Totally obliterated, man. “Synthesizers are for wussy bands.”

  Mike’s first response to this was another raised middle finger. “Van Halen are not a wussy band, you fucking traitor. You should be more open-minded.”

  Shane laughed. “I’m no traitor. I still love Van Halen and expect Dave and the boys to rip it up when we see them next week, but synths are for wussy new wavers. There can be no disputing this.”

  Tom staggered into the kitchen, cursing as he banged a shoulder against an archway beam. “You fucking alcoholics haven’t drank all the beer yet, have you?”

  Mike snickered. “Who you calling an alcoholic, you goddamn lush?”

  I was about to chime in with something undoubtedly witty in the extreme when we detected the sound of a slow-moving car in the street outside the house. The house we were in that night was one of several under construction in Weakley Hills at the time. Weakley Hills was the name of our neighborhood, just to spell things out for you again. It was at a corner of a loop encircling the top of a very steep hill. There were other, already occupied houses not too distant. I assume one of the upstanding adult homeowners somehow became aware of our nefarious activities and called the police.

  We all fell silent as we heard the car pull to a stop outside and, as quietly as we could manage, shuffled deeper into the shadows at the back of the house, in hopes that the darkness would shield us from sight. At that point, we were not yet aware that this was the police. There was no streetlight and we could only dimly perceive the outline of the car from our vantage point. That changed when the spotlight mounted on the side of the cruiser popped up and lit up the interior of the house like a movie set. An amplified voice squawked at us from the cruiser. The words themselves didn’t matter. In the midst of our fright, they were unintelligible. The tone was what mattered. It was authoritarian and angry. We heard the cruiser’s doors pop open. Someone was getting out, maybe multiple someones.

  They were coming to get us.

  Someone among us—it could have been me or any of my friends, I honestly don’t remember—shouted, “Run!”

  We dropped our beers and abandoned our cans of spray paint as we vaulted out of the house at the rear. I stumbled and fell when I hit the rocky, debris-strewn ground behind the house. It would not be the last time I lost my footing over the next several minutes. There were shouts behind us, stentorian voices drawing closer by the second, flashlight beams waving in the night. The area that would one day be the property’s backyard bordered a line of trees, the beginning of that big expanse of woods that stood between the top of the hill and the part of the neighborhood where my parents’ house was located. My booze-fogged brain was reeling at the prospect of arrest. Arrest would be bad enough, but facing my parents later would be worse. It may well have been that thought that got me off the ground so quickly and got me moving again.

  My friends were already gone, swallowed by the dark woods. I started running and plunged through the tree line after them, heedless of the shouts behind me. The cops were screaming at me to stop. By now I could tell there were at least two of them. Looking back, I think much of the increasing agitation in their voices came from an almost instant recognition that they would not be able to catch up to me. Though I was no athlete, I was young and fit and could really move when I was motivated to do so, which I certainly was on this occasion. The steep downward slope also helped me build speed.

  I knew I was putting some distance between myself and the cops, but escape was by no means a given. My pursuers seemed determined to get me, at least initially, pursuing me deeper into the woods. Their curses and pounding footsteps propelled me onward, made me strive to go even faster. My greatest adversary at that point was the deep darkness of the woods. I couldn’t see for shit. I kept banging into—and bouncing off of—trees. Low-hanging branches snapped against my face. On at least two more occasions I stumbled and fell. Each time I bounced right back up and kept moving. There was pain each time I fell, but one time it was especially pronounced. I’d hit something on the ground, something hard—a rock, I guess—and when I got up again I felt wetness and cool air against bare skin. That rock, or whatever it was, had ripped open my jeans and opened a big gash in my flesh. That wetness was blood sliding down my leg, but I wouldn’t be fully cognizant of that until the next day, largely thanks to what was about to happen.

  I got up and got moving yet again. By then the sounds of pursuit had ceased. There were no more shouts, no pounding footsteps, and no more flashlight beams dancing in the darkness. I was aware of this on some dim level, but I didn’t allow that recognition to slow me down. The cops would be returning to their car and soon they would be circling the neighborhood, searching for wayward delinquents with their goddamn spotlight. I needed to get out of the woods and back inside my house before they could reach my part of the neighborhood.

  Soon I began to perceive the glow of a streetlight through the fast-approaching line of
trees. I slowed down a little at that point, knowing it would be dangerous to come bursting out of the woods at full speed. There was a vacant lot just beyond that line of trees. It stood between the edge of the woods and my parents’ house. In the center of the lot was a deep, foliage-obscured depression. You could almost call it a pit. In fact, we had called it that back when we were little kids and used to play war games in the lot. Years earlier, back when the very first houses in the neighborhood were being built, a number of large slabs of rock were excavated from the ground there, thus forming the pit. These rock slabs were then moved via heavy machinery to the property owned by my parents, where they were arranged in a kind of border along the side of the property. When we were kids, we thought of the rock border as a kind of castle wall, though it wasn’t very tall. It was a perfect place to pretend you were lying in wait for enemy soldiers. For a long time, it was one of the neighborhood’s most distinctive landmarks.

  It’s gone now.

  Anyway, I stumbled and fell yet again when I slowed to a jog. My foot had snagged on a vine and there was no way to prevent another painful rendezvous with the ground. I braced my hands on the brambly ground to push myself up again, but I stopped cold when I sensed someone or something behind me. I didn’t know who or what it was, just that I was pretty sure it wasn’t a cop. At first I hoped I was imagining things. I told myself there was nothing behind me. But then I heard that deep and rumbling exhalation of breath. I didn’t yet know what was behind me, but I began to have a strong sense that it was not human. In fact, it sounded more like some kind of . . . beast.

  A thing.