She sighed and lifted her moodily smoldering cigarette to her lips, before remembering that she'd stopped smoking over a decade earlier. Annoyed now, she reached up to adjust the jaunty fedora on her head to a properly rackish angle, one that would cast an eye in an eternal shadow of sharp cynicism, and her fingers succeeded only in tugging her sock cap - once black, now pilled and ratty, a shapeless lump of deepest charcoal good only for attracting lint - down around her ears, snagging an earring in the process. A cool attempt to disentangle cheap metal from wool and hair resulted in a hopeless snarl of all three. A last irritated yank sent seed pearl and silver jump ring shrapnel flying. The sock cap dipsy-doodled off the side of her head and gave in to gravity. Her hair - flattened sweatily on top, exploding with autumnal chrysanthemum fury at the sides - balked at the attempt of her Vienna sausage fingers to go rototilling and set up an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty barrier. Her hand fell to her lap with a disgusted plop, taking half a dozen split-end strands of ketchupy hair with it.
"Fuck." It was the only response to such a ridiculous situation.
"You have hat hair." This from Gus, who never wasted time on salutations or small talk. The less syllables, the better - that was Gus's motto. Even his name had taken the shortest trajectory from point A to point B, starting out at Sven Gustophson and dead ending at Gus: hard, practical, an explosive exhale of a name which got right to the point. Gus was the living embodiment of a line of dialogue from 1984's Splash, in which a dubious security guard questions the authenticity of Tom Hanks claim to be Swedish. Gus was, indeed, dirty from the trip: brown eyed, dark haired, resembling a savage, bearlike, fur-draped, bellowing Viking in much the same way that a plate of clams casino can be mistaken for a Big Mac. What he lacked in Odinesque stature, he made up for with blunt honesty and slingshot humor. He wasn't smiling now, and she wondered if her hair really looked that bad.
"Fuckitybye." she snapped without malice, reaching for her half empty bottle of room temperature root beer. Not very noir perhaps, but less likely to screw up her regimen of antidepressant medication.
"Bad news?" His eyes indicated the phone, an antique landline that sat next to the laptop, plugged into the wall with a pigtail cord and everything. She did not own a cell phone and never would. For perhaps the third time in her life, she cursed the inability of a landline to vibrate rather than ring throughout the entire house, summoning the faithful like Quasi-fucking-Modo. She saw no point in dancing around the issue. She wasn't good at being a girl, and was - if anything - more blunt than Gus.
"Camp was breached. He's up and around."
It was Gus's turn to say fuck.
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Hence, it was decided that the easiest and most inexpensive course of action - and the one which would result in the fewest casualties - was to prevent the infiltration of outsiders. Most Threats were content to haunt their home bases and were not easily persuaded to leave. Cut off their victim supply and they went dormant, hibernating for years beneath lake waters, abandoned cabins or deserted boiler rooms. Quarantine Zones shrank with removal of bodies, relocation of residents and case studies, the noose tightening as areas of origin and preferred hunting grounds were identified and the Threats enclosed in the smallest possible areas. Better than the lion pit at the zoo, the Threats did not need to be fed or tended to and they attracted no gawkers. The fear was still too fresh and raw, the air still too innocent. Even the signs posted at the perimeters were, at first, totally unnecessary: "CAUTION: YOU ARE ENTERING A THREAT ZONE. No alcohol consumption, drug use or premarital sex OF ANY KIND permitted. Violators run the risk of severe injury, death or fines in excess of $100,000." Skeleton crews of armed guards - mostly older men with ED, hand-picked by MediCorp as they were least likely to rouse the Threats with wayward thoughts or casually discarded copies of Beaver Shot magazine - rotated shifts at checkpoints located respectable distances from Ground Zero. No one violated the rules. Very few wanted to, and those that did were considered as unbalanced as the Threats themselves and weren't very much mourned when they turned up machete'd in half and left for the insects.
By the late 90s, most of the Threats had fallen off the radar, forgotten by the world as they slept and dreamed of blood and were replaced by smaller, less intimidating Threats who were gone almost before they even arrived, deemed silly and clownish by comparison. Dolls, puppets, leprechauns...none of them had the staying power of the original Threats, and their inability to inspire any real sense of fear diminished them before a Quarantine Zone could even be discussed.
But with the dawn of the new millenium came a new age of instant gratification, high speed internet and the hot glow of viral fame, the freakier the better. The easier it became to gain access to the forbidden and the profane, the more popular corruption became. Nothing was off-limits anymore, and the more depraved you were, the lower the depths to which you were willing to sink for attention, the more famous you became. It wasn't enough to simply Twerk anymore: you had to have your own personal YouTube channel dedicated to naked, anal-bleached midgets with Kardashian-plus sized asses rubbing up against baboons with buttered buttcheeks. Ghost hunting had given way to full contact celebrity exorcisms on a live feed with running commentary by your choice of televangelist. And legend tripping wasn't considered worth the risk unless you were willing to breach a Zone with a camcorder in hand and star in your own personal snuff film with the Threat of your choice.
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"So do I finally get to hear the story?" Gus asked, voice neutral, eyes on the road. The sky was soggy and sullen, swaying over the car like the pregnant belly of a half dead spider, ready to burst at any moment.
She sighed. She'd promised to tell him the tale on the day that necessitated its telling, thinking surely that day would never come. Now it was here, and her reluctance to share it was borne not of shame or fear, but of embarrassment. With such a harrowing tale in her past, she should have grown up to be glamorous, sophisticated and secure. But she was exactly the same: awkward, sullen, just a little taller. There was nothing for it, but she sighed again anyway.
"I was a wormgirl." she said, and the sound of her voice in the car was so banal and flat that it struck her as ridiculous.
"What the hell is a wormgirl?" he asked, still watching the road, his voice betraying nothing.
"A girl who sells worms." she said. "Some little girls had lemonade stands. I sold worms to people on their way to the lake. For fishing. Dig them up early in the morning and carry them in those little plastic buckets to the side of the road. Twenty five cents a worm, or five for a dollar. Plop them into Dixie cups and hand them over."
"Was it a lucrative career?" he asked, and the subtle lilt in his voice was audible only after years of friendship and teamwork. She cocked an eyebrow at him.
"Get stuffed." And continued her tale.
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There hadn't been any other kids to play with. Just as well. Most kids took one look at Jerusha and pretended they hadn't. Tomato-haired, whiter than bleached milk, one eye blue as Windex, its next door neighbor green as astroturf, jarring and immediately noticeable in a face so shockingly pale and unsmiling. "As pretty as a cockroach on a birthday cake" her dad had once told her with a jovial wink.
So no alarm bells had gone off when The Man had stopped to talk to her one day and had lingered. No red flags had been raised when he bought her worms and offered her an ice cream from the stand down the road. Surely a hardworking little girl deserved an ice cream break on such a hot, sunny day? Surely they were friends, out in the open, during the day, where anyone could see them? And it was only a short car ride after all. She'd be back home before the crickets started to sing. And the short car ride had turned into a long one, and the ice cream stand had faded into the background unvisited, and the worms had dried out and thrashed and lay still on the dashboard and she hadn't cried, hadn't said a word, even when The Man stopped the car deep in the trees and told her exactly what he was going to do to her. This is what happened to awkward, mismatched wormgirls with no friends and no mothers, and she realized that part of her had always been waiting for such a thing to happen someday. The world didn't cater to clumsy girls with stuffy names. She was the lame fawn left behind by the herd, the faulty transplant rejected by the host. She was about to be flushed from the worlds system like so much useless waste down the intestinal tract of life.
It was dark by the time they'd stopped, him rambling, her not hearing, silent and already calmed by the thought of her imminent death, staring at the passage of tree roots and rotting leaves beneath her sneakers. Indeed, they stopped so suddenly she almost fell over. When she didn't, he grabbed her bony shoulder and shoved her to her knees, already skinned and scabbed over and used to unkind surfaces. He was still rambling conversationally, vomiting a plethora of filth and porn that she normally might have stored away for future use back when the future still existed. That had been hours ago, when the sun had still been up and dripping blood-orange bright, clashing with her hair something awful. Now it was full dark, no stars, and no birds sang.
He was still talking when it happened, still tugging at his stubborn belt buckle when his head suddenly popped up off his neck like a feisty champagne cork and did a couple of somersaults in midair before landing with a crackling thud on the leaf-carpeted earth at her feet. She'd stared at it for a few seconds, wondering what the joke was, for it had been rather comical. She thought briefly of her Hoppity Hop, bouncing merrily down the sidewalk. His head had been rather like that for a second, spinning as cheerily as a pinwheel in the wind.
She thought of him as a man, because his presence was Alpha Male and brute force. But man wasn't the word she would have chosen if there had been a choice to be had. He was more machine; flesh and bone to be sure, but filled with a solid darkness that she knew wouldn't bleed if breached. He reeked of pond rot and algae. His boots were slick with it, black mirrors melting with smoldering tar-pit rage. He was meat wrapped tight as a butcher's pride, his drab, colorless clothes not so much concealing him as becoming one with what had once existed beneath, fusing and filling and spoiling again, an industrial cocoon stubbornly clung to. The butterfly had chosen suicide and left behind the ultimate caterpillar, monstrous with decay.
She looked up, and looked up and looked up. There was no end to him until suddenly there was, up beyond the barrier of clenched fists and crude axe, the wooden broomhandle splintered now, the iron blade still dripping fresh. Older smears and stains - how old? hours? minutes? - testified to the weapon's repeated use and imminent retirement. The chest heaved and fell in a mockery of life, and surely nothing but maggoty lake water sloshed within. The head had been downturned, watching with a child's curiosity as the last jerks and tremors subsided and the heap of bloody organ meat - once a rather prolific, if transient, serial killer - expired. It was anticlimactic, really. The worms on the dashboard had given a better performance.
His - its - face snapped up and pointed at her. She would have said that he was looking directly at her, but she saw no eyes within the deeply shadowed sockets of the mask he wore, a bone white shield nearly as white as her own face, poked through with symmetrical holes that would have allowed breath to be taken had any breath been drawn. Decorative red slashes between the eyebrows and down the cheekbones like warpaint.
"Thank you." she said. Her voice sounded as ridiculous to her own ears then as it would some 30+ years later in a car driven by a person she hadn't met yet.
There was no reply, just a few heavy seconds of silence that felt like dark revelation. Then he - it - straightened up and walked away, clomping through the mud two steps, four and five, finally stopping an inch from the bloody bouncy ball that had been a breathing, talking head just a few minutes ago. He stared down at it, head cocked, and she didn't even think twice. She wanted to see it too. He'd dropped his axe when he'd walked away, his nights work complete. She turned and clomped up beside him, dropping into a squat at his feet. The head didn't look real anymore. Its eyes were clouded over, the mouth only slightly surprised. It looked like a defective department store dummy and she stood back up, unimpressed. As she straightened, he see-sawed beside her in perfect unison, bending to dig his dirty gloved fingers into the sweaty strings of hair that steamed atop the dead mans head. The sound it made when he picked it up was like wet cellophane. The blood dripping from the ragged stump had slowed into a pancake syrup consistency, not scary at all.
He'd picked the severed head up with his left hand. His empty right hand hung at eye level, and it seemed like the only sensible thing to insert her fingers, spiderlike, into the dirty, well-worn glove, trusting the oiled suede fingers to close around hers without breaking, to lead her to safety without detour. He snapped his head in her direction, trophy still held aloft, his hand unresponsive in hers.
"What are you gonna do with it?" she asked. He looked at her for two seconds, turned back to the head, looked at her again. His arm lowered slowly back to his side and his masked face pivoted with security camera precision, pointing deep into the woods towards an unknown, unseen destination. It would be a long walk. She saw it in his shoulders, the way they sagged just slightly, the way his chin fell to point at his solar plexus.
"Is it far?" she asked, meaning his home. Because she knew there had to be one, somewhere in the dark woods. This time he did not turn in response to her voice, simply bent his knees, disengaging his fingers from hers and circling an arm around her tiny little girl butt, where it rested comfortably in the crook of his elbow. Then he was off, looking straight ahead, legs striding forward unerringly through the woods, never tripping, never straying. She didn't ask where they were going, didn't ask to be put down, didn't cry. She didn't care. She didn't even mind that he smelled like fish guts and pond scum. She knew that he knew where he was going, and whatever waited for her there couldn't possibly be any worse than what she'd left behind.
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TO BE CONTINUED.
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